Grinder's Grumblings

Grinder 2019:  Five years seems like a lifetime ago. First off, let's get the orange elephant in the room out of the way - most of what follows was written before November 5th. I don't know if that makes any difference or not, but I feel like I should mention it, for the sake of transparency. I don't know if you've been following the news lately, but there are two or three wars going on right now. An election is underway for our friends in the Land of the Free, and it looks increasingly likely that the Fascists are going to prevail. In our own country an election is also on the horizon, through it's anybody's guess as to when, with a choice between bad and terrible (I'll leave it to you to decide which is which). The planet continues to burn, unabated, as the self-interest of a few damns the future of billions. And art-making, that thing I love to do that sustains me more than oxygen, is still being defined by others, who do not make much art, in nothing but...

  Good People. Photo courtesy Bill Longshaw As so it was. With the last performance of "Good People" at the Just Play open stage showcase on September 29th the curtain finally came down on the Grinder 2024 season. While it's not unheard of for me to pick up additional projects between Thanksgiving and the end of the year, at this point it would have to be something pretty special for me to take on another show in 2024. As any regular readers of this blog know, this has been an especially brutal year.  Despite the challenges, I'm really happy with the theatre that we managed to make. I certainly hadn't planned to do any acting this year, but playing alongside Jules in Pride and Prejudice was definitely something special. Our week 1 Ennotville show, "Benches and Couches" was a chance for me to try out a bunch of things that I've been needing to try out for a long time now, not the least of which was seeing if I could distill the essence of a show - Ben...

When I was about seven or eight we had a Swan come and stay on our pond one summer - it just showed up one day in June, and walked out the driveway one day in September and we never saw it again. But it was enough to make it the Summer of the Swan.   When I was just re-booting Grinder Productions in 2017 we had a pesky raccoon that insisted on disrupting rehearsals - that was the summer of the raccoon.  This summer, well... let's just say that much of the food for the barn cats that we've dished out has been inhaled by this thing, having now taken up permanent residency under the deck: This is the summer of the skunk. I have hated this summer. Not for the sake of anything that I've put on stage - my evaluation of that will be much more nuanced, and will come much later, when there's snow on the ground once again. No, I have hated this summer because of the weather.  It has rained, interminably. The hay crop is ruined for the second year in a row. In between the rain ...

Frequent readers of this blog (both of you...) may recall a post I wrote a couple of months back called "Four Big Things," detailing my adventures in a few of the larger projects that were then overwhelming my consciousness. It proved to be a useful tool to organize my thoughts, so I've decided to do it again, this time to talk about four "little" things - the plays and other events that I'm doing this summer. Here they are, in chronological order: Is it a Cench, or is it a Bouch? This is the play that we've been rehearsing for several weeks now, and it's proven to be a blast to work on. Along the way we've overcome hurricane-force winds, torrential deafening downpours on a tin roof, stifling heat, cats sitting on the prompt script, and even a recalcitrant skunk blocking the door, but through it all the cast has continued to not only persevere, but thrive, and the play has grown from a mere collection of sketches into a cohesive narrative with a ...

If you remember my last post, I mentioned the dozen disasters that stalk me. I thought I had outsmarted them all, for the moment. Perhaps I did. But there was one more disaster.  First, the good news - rehearsals for Benches and Couches are going well. Personally, I started off slowly, and it took a couple of nights before I really got my directorial feet back under me, but now that post-rehearsal rush is back, and stronger than it's been in a long time, and that's a very empowering thing to work with. We've come together quickly as an ensemble, and already the play has taken on new dimensions, thanks to everyone's enthusiastic input. We've added, discarded and rewritten scenes, and have wrested a plausible narrative out of a series of what seemed at first just a random jumble of sketches. We're all having a lot of fun.  But of course this is Grinder, so for every high it seems there must always be a low. Just as we were on the cusp of starting rehearsals for th...

 It's been well over a month since my last post. A lot has happened. A couple of my "Four Big Things" have come and gone. Huge changes at work - new possibilities and new responsibilities. Lots of birth and death on the farm. We finally bought a bull calf. He's a bit small, but eager to get to work. In keeping with our tradition of naming herd sires alphabetically, since this is our first bull Jules has decided to call him Angus: Got some surprising good news - my script "Good People" was "good enough" to be accepted into the 10 minute play competition at the Grand River Arts Festival, taking place in Brantford this September. We were accepted based on the script alone, but the competition itself is all about productions - 15 short plays are in the running for bragging rights and cash prizes. I've never done anything like this before, and I think it's going to be a lot of fun. Thanks to our workshop production of this play in Ennotville las...

I have four big things going on right now, and I need some help to get the word out about all of them. Any and all assistance would be graciously appreciated, and not just by me. Here they are, in no particular order: First up, I'm doing a play!  Not me personally, but as part of a large and talented ensemble. That I'm doing a play might not be that surprising, but what is surprising is that it's not with my theatre company, but with my old friend Deb Stanson and Elora Community Theatre.  Our production of Jane Austen's  Pride and Prejudice opens on Friday, May 3rd, and runs until Sunday, May 12th. I play, perhaps a bit ironically, the rich, handsome, young, "catch-of-the-county" Mr. Bingley. It's a great show with a great cast, and we've had a lot of fun rehearsing it. I hope you can check it out.  Learn more and buy tickets Second, I'm hosting a Symposium! Again not me personally, but as a proud board member of Reseau SPARC Network - Supporting ...

TS Eliot wrote "April is the cruelest month." It's also turning out to be one of the busiest. As I careen ever-less-gracefully into middle age I'm finding that spring is the most hectic time of my year. Some of that is due to the weather, and the myriad of things that start to grow (or start to be born) at this time of year. Some of it is due to the cyclical nature of the day job, with spring and fall being natural times for major projects to come to fruition: spring tours free of weather cancelation worries, end-of-year dance recitals, etc. And some of it is simply due to the frustration of being too busy to get time to work on my summer shows!  I still don't have much work done on my upcoming shows,  not as much as I had hoped, anyways. I still don't have pictures of set pieces to show you. I did get the boxes done though, so I suppose that's something: And I have made some progress on the shows. Maid of Stone has a few set pieces built, a partial cast (...

 It doesn't feel like winter tonight, but I know it still is - at least it certainly felt like it yesterday. I know it's still winter, but I know we're coming to the end of it. I'm running out of time.  I had hoped to fill this month's blog posts with images of half-built set pieces, the beginnings of something amazing emerging from the darkness of the shop, and maybe even a few glimpses of what I hope will be a transformational year in the visual design of our Ennotville productions. But alas, as always, my plans are thwarted by reality.  The reality is that I've been too busy. Weather notwithstanding (I don't feel very creative when I'm freezing cold) there just haven't been the minutes to get stuff built. Yes, I'm still plugging away on the boxes, as those of you who read my last post will likely recall, but they're still not done, and it will take a huge effort to get them done this month. To say nothing else of the half a dozen other thi...

One of my projects this winter (I have way too many winter projects) is to clean up our tiny basement, turning it from a low-ceiling dumping ground for rubber boots, unnecessary counter top appliances and other assorted kitsch into a true scholar’s bastion. As an avowed minimalist there’s not much in the way of “stuff” that I attach much meaning to, and I’m unlikely to ever be any sort of collector, but one of the things I do value is my aging collection of printed literary material. As you might imagine I do have a fair number of plays, but I also have some works of fiction, philosophy, poetry, and a collection of non-fiction works on topics like woodworking, agriculture, and of course stagecraft. As a theatre-maker, writer, farmer, and carpenter I actually do make frequent use of these materials, and organizing them has become increasingly difficult, especially as life has gotten in the way, and the basement has become ever more crowded with stuff we really don't need or want. So...

Happy New Year from Grinder Productions!  It’s a new year, and that means that it’s time to announce our new season. After a whirlwind of activity in 2023, where the company put on eleven plays over four productions, this year will be less about the number of scripts that we stage, and more about how we stage them. This is a year to focus on the process.   Our theme this season is Healing, Health, and Hope. Let's face it - the world has got some problems: war, sickness, greed, hate, and greenhouse gases all had a banner year in 2023. Hunger, poverty, homelessness, and inflation all competed, alongside many others in a macabre beauty pageant, vying to be crowned "Preventable Problem of the Year." Political machinations at home and abroad (and especially in our Screaming Cheeto-endowed neighbours to the south) have impeded the boring, necessary work of sane and sober people to move the needle on many pressing issues. Most alarmingly, we've seen a rise in people talking ...