Mac Rogers - playwright, and me - that guy

Hey folks,

The world of Joe Mathers has seen some interesting developments in the past few months. To start, for the few of you that are Facebook friends, you'll already know that a show I was in back in November of 2011 "The Runner Stumbles" will be making it's way off Broadway. If that doesn't seem like much, know that it means I'm taking the next step towards being a full time actor instead of a full time stagehand by joining Actors Equity Association. I've made the vast amount of my income in the last year from being a freelance carpenter/electrician/stagehand in NYC. That's good work, and it's fun and exciting, but yeah - I still love performing too much to walk away. Plus I've been booking more fight work too, and since this is a blog about fight choreography I want to talk about a particular trilogy of plays I've been involved with by a favorite writer of mine, Mac Rogers.

Mac is a guy, a guy like any other except for a few things. He's a singularly gifted writer, and lately he's been working on a series of plays called the Honeycomb Trilogy. In short, and without spoiling anything, these plays center around the family of a retired astronaut named Bill Cooke who returns from the first manned mission to Mars with a little something extra - the dying hopes of an alien race of very large... bugs. The first play in the trilogy is called Advance Man which was produced in January. I had the good fortune to do a little of the fight work for the play, which amounted to a bit of gunplay.

I like Mac's work because he focuses on characters and the violence involved is driven by the choices hey've made, and is grounded in who they are. In Advance Man, a teenage girl gets her hands on a pistol and in an effort to forestall the inevitable invasion of Earth takes a shot at a woman intent on triggering the device that will hatch millions of these aliens worldwide. Guess what? A pistol is hard to use if you don't know how to use it, and so... she misses. The very next line of dialogue in the play after the weapon fires is "You have to hold it with both hands."

I loved that.

The next play, "Blast Radius" features a fight between two very pregnant women. As in 8 months pregnant. They are fighting each other with 5 foot polearms, and just last night I had three hours to work with the combatants and director on the choregraphy. Three hours isn't much, but it's a great start and is sadly far more than I usually get to work on something this intense. At speed the fight should clock in under a minute - which is really long for a fight. Needless to say, I'm sooooo excited about this sequence. I can't really talk too much about it without giving plot elements away, but I can say that I'm very lucky to have two actors with miles of guts, patience, and skill. The initial rehearsal and mapping went spectacularly well, I think. A few tweaks here and there and we'll have a fight that should have the audience on the edge of their seats.

Because one of the characters is a little um... different... there are some special circumstances that come into play (on top of them both being pregnant). I can't stand fights that drag on where characters are taking hit after hit and somehow functioning cleanly once they've been cut, punched kicked, etc. So I have choreographed something more realistic - they don't miss, they don't unrealistically absorb wounds that would incapacitate a human. They are just viciously going for it. All out, with intent to kill. And when the kill does happen, it isn't cool. It isn't clean. It's brutal. In a departure from my usual work, it's big and brutal.

So. If you are interested in seeing an outstanding standalone play that continues the story of Advance Man, with a badass fight in it, I recommend you come see "Blast Radius" at the Secret Theater in Long Island City, opening on March 30th, through April 14. You can pick up your tickets here...

Oh and... I'm also in it. I play a guy named Jimmy, I get to make out with my fiancee on stage. Hot.

Then I'm going to go build a bunch of scenery and then get back on stage in Retro Production "The Runner Stumbles." This means I'll also be listening to lot of Nightranger's Sister Christian for comedy's sake. There's a quick fight in that show - which I'm proud of, but it's way different than Blast Radius. Wheeeeeeee!

I'm also coming up on 1 year free of the much hated office gig and I haven't looked at Expedia.com's website once. It's been an awesome year.