Just in time for dear St. Pats I played a Leprechaun in my most recent Manhattan Project performance. I also got to play the role with my dear friend Ron Rothschiller, who, as you can see by his last name, is a fine Irishman. Except that he played Cupid.
Rob Daniels was our playwright, joining a coterie of fine playwrights including Eric Coble, Renee Schilling, and Michael Pullman.
Accent
It took a bit for me to get the accent correct. I spent quite a bit of time learning the keys to Irish speaking, including pronouncing my “i” sounds a “oi” sounds (oil), and “e” sounds as “long a” sounds, dropping the “g” off all “ing” endings, and changing “my” to “me”, etc. “Oi’ll bay havin’ me drink now.”
Quite fun, as the Manhattan Project always is. A fine, long-running experiment by my dear friend Peter Roth, whose balls are getting bigger every day.
I went to Sachsenheim Hall on Tuesday night to observe the rehearsal of my dear friend Peter’s play The Gyntish Self.
One rendition of the play was produced at Carnegie Mellon as Peter’s thesis play a few years back, and I had the opportunity to see it. While it has changed with re-writes and a newly emerging production, the play has lost none of its comedic bite.
Peter’s play is based on the Ibsen play Peer Gynt, which is based on the Norwegian fairy tale Per Gynt. Apparently at the time Ibsen wrote it there was a hullabaloo about the thing, with a bunch of pissed off Norwegians, and I’m sure they’d all be even more incensed by what Peter does with it. However, just like the Ibsen play, Peter’s creation moves seemlessly between the world of today and the deranged lunacy that is Peer Gynt’s mind. Of spontaneous interest to me was that Edvard Grieg wrote
In the Hall of the Mountain King for the play and when I was visiting Mike Geither last Friday night for his birthday his son was playing that very song on the piano.
