4 Adverbs

Word for Word's production of Daniel Handler's (Lemony Snicket, for those who live on Mars) 4 Adverbs was quite the event, especially press night last Friday, which packed Project Artaud Theater.

One of the things I like about Word for Word is that their audiences, save for press night, are almost complete strangers to me. Usually, at most theatres, I see a couple of civilians amongst the geeks, but at Word for Word I hardly see any geeks. Except the literary ones. I especially saw the literary geeks at 4 Adverbs, where they could get a sneak peek at Handler's forthcoming novel, Adverbs, which isn't coming out until like May. I heard that the cast had to sign papers saying they wouldn't show the scripts to anyone.

It was a perfectly lovely evening: smart, witty, fun. The evening was rather oddly structured, though, with three adverbs, intermission, one adverb. But the adverb before intermission, featuring the wonderfully genuine Beth Wilmurt, was appropriate before an intermission, for no other reason than it struck a nice tone. I'm afraid I didn't connect at all with the last adverb, and so the evening, which started strong, kinda peetered out for me.

But there was a lovely reception afterward, where I chatted with a local dancer/artist and another fairly well-known local fiction writer, who was quite taken with what Word for Word does with text, so much so that he actually expressed the notion of handing them some of his stuff and saying, Can you do this with my work? One of my old creative writing professors asked me if playwrights had more fun (than say novelists or poets). Perhaps they do.