"Of Love" project...

I've been meaning to tell you about this for a while, little sweetheart. How to begin? Well, over the last year or so, independent of each other, several people - my lit agent, my filmmaker friend (Heather Winters), a few other colleagues- have encouraged me to conceive a "theatrical" (for lack of a much much better word) adaptation of Of Love and Loss, that would somehow bring the very intimate kind of experience it is hearing us play the song cycle to a slightly larger audience, with some added component, possibly, of theatre arts. I wasn't completely adverse to the idea but I didn't want it to be stupid. Elaine (my lit agent) had a program in mind that required no script, only a proposal and although we didn't ultimately get selected, it made me articulate something initially.

A few months later, little sweetheart, I met up with this woman, Nina Keneally, a theatre producer, who I've been in touch with sporadically over several years. She once wrote a really beautiful letter (back in the days when people did such things) to my previous agent about my play District of Columbia and we finally met up a few months ago so I could give her "Collected Plays". She was very moved by our story, my love, and interested to hear the music, so I gave her Of Love and Loss and happened to mention the adaptation idea. She went home and listened to the album and got very interested in the idea.

She immediately started thinking of venues and possible opportunities to work on it. She asked if I could just for a start write out all the lyrics and maybe some very simple line or two linking the songs.

I had a different idea - it's kind of hard to describe- but I wrote something. It's not really a play. It's certainly not a musical.

Some of the things I describe happening - with the band at its center and the audience close - are essentially realistic, a man and woman sitting in the space with us looking at the night sky together, her watching over him as he sleeps or he sensing her invisible (to him) presence talking to her looking in entirely the wrong direction but with utter conviction. Other descriptions are more illusory - an enormous reproduction of "Mediterraneo" (the Of Love and Loss cover) appearing brushstroke by brushstroke and at its completion, the woman emerging from the painting and the man going to her under the waves.

I don't know how we do this exactly and my thought is that it shouldn't even be in a theatre but in some found space or art gallery or a church. But Nina - whose producing credits include both the world of Broadway ("Good Vibrations", "Driving Miss Daisy", "Last Night at Ballyhoo") and the experimental music lab at American Rep Theatre, is committed to the idea. Things go wrong and people forget but at the moment this nice.

Our first foray into this is a kind of "concert performance" in Brooklyn on Oct 29. A woman in Bushwick runs this salon series of new works - art exhibits, concerts, film screenings - in an artists loft once a month. Nina knows her. We won't try to stage it at all. Jason and I will play and a friend of ours, Kim Donovan (your dad met her once, little sweetheart - she's from here but she's been working for Pixar out in NorCal since about the time you and I met) will read all we would see. Like a radio play version. Like a female narrator.

We hope it begins to give people an idea of what this might become - an evocation and testament of love and faith - in a way, while not yet staged, more powerful and intimate than listening to the album and reading the "script" at home. We hope.

Anyway, like everything, it's for you, my love. So I'm glad we're talking about it. Stay close to me, now, won't you? Don't go too far away. We're in this together, right? For now, between invisible worlds. And soon, forever, inseparable. With all my love...