The ghostly human embodiment of Poe's Raven shows up as a depressed writer is attempting suicide and extolls the virtues of life, art, and also calls her an idiot.

I went to a theatre production tonight. My friend wrote this play, and tonight was the second showing of it as part of Indy’s Fringe Festival, an event that offers more than 270 live theatre performances in 10 days, plus fine arts, film festival, street performers, and a ton of other awesome stuff.

The play is titled “Nevermore,” and consists of a confrontation between a hopelessly depressed and suicidal writer and the human-formed ghost of Poe’s Raven from the famous poem. It was kind of scary in a this-is-some-deep-and-real-shit kind of way, but there was some dark humor thrown in for good measure, and I do like the dark humor. I appreciated the examination of how pain can both inhibit and help the creative process, and the idea that both bad feelings and good ones come from the same place, and you can’t expect to have one without the other, that if there is despair, well, there has to be joy coming along at some point. At least that’s what I got out of it. Above you can see the Raven giving our poor writer some sage, dark views on life, death, and creativity. I’ll not spoil the end for you, as it’s still playing the rest of this week. Strong stuff, though!

It was a pretty awesome way to spend an hour. I’d emailed her several times about it in the past few weeks, and she’d been hard at work on it. It was great seeing someone’s efforts come to fruition, especially a play where it’s all live and you have to literally throw your whole self into it as people have their concentration focused on you – that’s pretty cool stuff. I was genuinely happy and envious for her to have realized her goal.

On the photo side, this was a tough shoot. I was very glad they allowed me to take pictures, as it was a cool subject, but the lighting, of course, was pretty crummy, and I had to dial the film speed way up, and still I could only shoot at about an 1/8 of a second. To stop much motion you really need to shoot at 1/60 of a second, so I was shooting very slowly. It was hard to get shots, and I missed many dramatic ones, because the actors were moving when this happened. I couldn’t even stop the motion of an eyeblink at this slow of a shutter speed. Still, I think I pulled out a few okay photos. Nice bit of practice.

I would have liked to have been involved in this somehow. These things are going on around me, and aside from watching some of my friends partake in them, these art events, I don’t have any personal involvement. It’s frustrating. I don’t know how or what to do to become a part of something like this. Maybe next year. Maybe then I’ll have something of my own to present for the visual arts portion of the show.