While “Between the Sheets” is, like, totally misleading, this one needs to go into heavy rotation at the Poppy.

It’s a gorgeous review from the Virginia Beach Public Library - “The prose is beautiful, dense, a bit theatrical, sometimes brutal, nuanced, something to be savored and re-read carefully” – but the sweetest insight by far is this one:

“Rupert and Istvan’s love is the heart of this story. The relationship is not of two men in love but two people who love each other and are also both men. Koja sets their love story in a less tolerating era and presents a more mature, emotionally powerful, and intense relationship that is still prone to human weakness, misunderstandings, and jealousies, with both men recognizing that love motivates but does not conquer all.”

Which is the human condition. Thank you greatly, Tracy at the VBPL, for seeing the gentlemen as they are.

Boing Boing give props to the Poppy, too – a tip of the Doctorow hat and an inclusion in this year’s Gift Guide. That awesome thing you were looking for but just couldn’t. . . quite . . .  find? It’s here.

And in the pop-up performance arena, a shout-out to players-in-arms Empty Boat Theatre Company – if you’re in Boise, go and see this stat. A different way to have fun in the dark . . .

Guest posting on Small Beer Press’ Not A Journal on “Love Is A Puppet.” Diane Cheklich’s video of the performance will be available very soon!

Now, we put our heads together (flesh and wood) to plan the next Under the Poppy event, coming February 2012, wherein the pleasure of performance and the performance of pleasure are enacted for your pleasure, at a very stately venue in Detroit.  More details as we may share them . . . Stay tuned.

Very happy to announce that Under the Poppy has won the 2011 Gaylactic Spectrum Award for Best Novel:

“If Charles Dickens had written an alternate reality novel about war, love, sex, death and very strange puppets you would have this year’s Gaylactic Spectrum Award winner, Under the Poppy, an amazing novel by Kathe Koja. The novel offers a rich, evocative alternate reality that is close but not quite our world, an exploration of the demimonde of the theatre and the brothel, and the tale of two lovers, Rupert and Istvan, and their tortured relationship.”

Here’s a GaylacticSpectrumAward2011handout of the award’s shortlist: the Poppy is in very good company. Thank you, GSAF, les mecs salute you!

Of course you have to see the film before any judgment is rightly passed, but that soundtrack detail makes one sigh, or this one, anyway. Cue Jonathan Shopsine! But “L’Apollonide” looks both sumptuous and somber, and I’ll gladly have a look when it sashays this way.

When we presented “The Company We Keep” earlier this year at the People’s Art Festival, for six shows total, some people were pleased that it would be an event created to come and go; others were surprised that, since it was successful, we chose not to repeat it in another venue. Ditto and even more so for “Love is A Puppet,” since this was a one-night only, one-performance only event: intense, ephemeral, and gone.

Which is exactly our narrative: the actor, the puppeteer, playing his way along the road, his true destination lying elsewhere and ahead. As an immersive event, Under the Poppy begins long before the doors swing open at the final venue, had begun, in fact, at Motor City Pride last summer, when we first hung our curtains and opened the floozy jewel box. Under the Poppy is not a product we hope to keep selling: it’s an experience we hope its patrons will be ravished by, and remember.

And so we were cheered to see this from another pop-up partisan. What makes it last is you.

“For can there ever be an actor more suitable for the vagaries of desire? to perform the most amazing feats, turn inside out and die a thousand times? Only to live again on the morrow, refreshed and ready for more abuse: just like the heart!” The road of desire took the Poppy partisans – those watching in the secluded backroom booth, tucked in the midst of Victorian Opulence, or peering down from the stairs – into deeper shadows than before. If love is a puppet that passes through many hands, whose fingers ply the strings becomes all-important. And a young man who sees a handsome traveler may be deceived by his own eyes.It was a performance as brief and intense as great pleasure – or pain – itself, and, like all performances on the road, a one-night-only appearance.  Istvan continues on his way, toward his absolute destination, for “Love’s always a show, and always with a hero at its heart.” Journey with us on this road that leads Under the Poppy . . . Its next venue might surprise you! [Photos by Rick Lieder.]

More event photos of the opulencce can be seen here.

If you will join us at the Victorian Opulence event at District VII Detroit this Saturday, you’ll see partygoers in their top hat finery, you’ll see swags and drapes and bunting, exquisitely fragile tea cups, the glitter of light refracted from a salvaged chandelier … such lights shine all the brighter for having once gone dim, you’ll no doubt agree. And come a certain time in the evening, you’ll tease aside black curtains to see the space we’re dressing now become an enclosure for an evening’s brief performance, two young men sharing the space of desire.

For Istvan, you see, is still on the road, journeying toward Rupert, his heart’s real home. But the nights are long, and when a kind of solace beckons – a fellow who sees, or thinks he sees, a kindred spirit in this one-night-stand performer, this lonely and desirous puppeteer – why, it is so easy to say yes, to step beside a stranger into that space of desire, to let the body’s heat masquerade for a moment as the warmth of true love.

This moment lives between the lines of the novel Under the Poppy, not on the page, yet surely in the story. Istvan gets where he’s going, certainly, and with a flourish (just ask Pearl!); still it takes him time to arrive . . . Our players will present to you this episode, this on-the-road moment, if you will pull aside the curtain, and step into the shadows past the reborn chandelier.

If you haven’t yet gotten your tickets, Victorian Opulence awaits you and we await you, too. Your cravats and top hats, your button-down beauty, your lace and saucy furbelows – because dressing up makes it more of an evening, doesn’t it? Myself, I have ruched the tulle and located the ribbon . . .

Under the Poppy will also be present in book form, for those of you who would like to buy a copy for that hard-to-please Victorian enthusiast in your life, and I’ll be delighted to inscribe it if you do. I’ll be present throughout the evening, to chat with friends of the novel, talk about the full immersive show to come, and entertain any random puppets inhabiting our Poppy space, when it’s not been commandeered by several young gentlemen seeking their own private fun . . . Boys will be boys. And you can watch them, should you choose to, and watch Istvan advance in his perambulation down the road of desire.  All roads lead to the Poppy for him, and perhaps for you as well.