SLAP-HAPPY JOYS OF BACKSTAGE CHATTER >>>

Gene Siskel used to say the mark of a bad movie was when you'd rather watch its actors sitting around the craft services table chatting than the movie itself. I'm blogging to you almost-live today from Olympia Little Theater, where we'll be spending the bulk of our Fourth of July holiday tech-rehearsing Oleanna. This play is incredibly difficult for actors, and it's cost us considerable time away from our families, other friends and paying jobs. We're exhausted, one and all. You've heard theater companies form instant families, but it might be in large part because we have no other options remaining.

Think of this a Blu-ray extra feature for Theater Artists Olympia's production of David Mamet's Oleanna, the content of which inspires disrespectful badinage on a scale seldom heard in ordinary workplace conversation. We'll take you behind the scenes, where actors Deya Ozburn and Christian Carvajal, director John Munn, and stage manager Eric Mark have been bandying such vital world topics as:

*   how to establish one is doing a Sarah Palin impression with only a single word: "maverick"

*   whether Joe Johnston, the director of The Rocketeer, might've made a decent movie out of Captain America

*   pubic topiary

*   whether the purchase of a white iPhone 4 betokens unstated racism

*   the relative gayness of Ke$ha's "Blow" video, which is gayer than two naked barbershop quartets watching Richard Simmons videos in a Savannah bathhouse filled with lavender scented candles and organic potpourri

*   the vicissitudes of political correctness, and their sad, ongoing marginalization of the usefully dismissive adjective "gay"

*   whether Carv read J.W. Rinzler's The Making of Star Wars: The Empire Strikes Back, which, for chrissake, he most certainly has

*   childhood euphemisms for "vulva"

*   where the hell to buy glow tape in Olympia (the answer, it seems, is Music 6000)

*   words we hoped we'd never say on stage, including my penultimate word in this production

*   religious safety brochures including "Help, I'm Developing Stigmata!" and "Ten Signs Your Child Might Be a Bodhisattva"

*   lucid dreaming vignettes including the plaintive line, "Look, Mummy, there's a fornicator up in the sky"

It's a measure of my confidence in our production of Oleanna that despite all that, we'd still give the late Mr. Siskel his money's worth.