Rental Cars, Three Sisters and Ace of Base

Being unemployed (temporarily, may I remind you-I start my teaching job in a week) ...being unemployed, I am naturally keeping my eyes open for any opportunity to make cash. On Wednesday, my good friend and fellow Columbia playwright, Erin Browne, called me with just such an opportunity. Erin works as a casting director for a production company which creates documentary programs for television networks like Discovery and the History Channel. One of the producers was working on a pilot for the History Channel that involved exploring the oil industry from the inside out...I'll explain a little later. At any rate--they needed me to pick up a car at a rental place in Midtown, drive it to a gas station in Brooklyn and then be filmed as I pumped gas, pulled in and out of the gas station, paid for the gas and then--here is the inside out explaining part--they filmed me from inside a mock gas pump doing the same things....meaning: I had to take the gas pump and pull it in out of these holes that were cut in a fake chipboard gas pump while the camera was watching me through the holes....good times, huh?
So I got paid and drove the car back to Midtown...
I guess this kind of qualifies as an acting gig, right? I should have taken pictures, but it got me thinking I should post some pictures from a couple acting/writing opportunities over the past year.

The first few pictures are from the production of Chekhov's "Three Sisters" I worked on with fellow Columbian, Nadia Foskolou, a 3rd director. Nadia directed my play "Mission" in our first year and the first production of my 10 minute "Naked Fish" at Columbia a year ago. Nadia and I cut and adapted "Three Sisters" and I ended up playing the part of Kulygin.

I've posted a pic of dear sweet Nadia and one she took of me brushing my teeth at a production meeting...

The last picutres are also from a project Nadia and I collaborated on. We affectionately called it "the Bergman project" or "the Ikea/Sweddish Pop project".
It occupied our lives from December last year until it went up in March. It was an adaptation of Ingmar Bergman's novel "The Best Intentions" for the stage.



It is based on the courtship and marriage of his parents in the first decades of the 20th century in Sweden.


Nadia and I set it in an Ikea store in Elizabeth, New Jersey and used live acoustic arrangments of pop songs by Swedish bands like Roxette, ABBA, Ace of Base and the Corrigans to tell the story....you kinda had to be there, BUT here are the pictures--they might give you an idea!I played the role of Ernst Akerblom, Anna Akerblom's (Bergman's mother) brother who introduces Anna to her future husband, Henrik Bergman....(confused? Good.)
It was a lot of work and fun...in the end, I think both Nadia and I learned alot and felt proud of our work as well as the work of our actors.