A Strange Interlude

Manna-Hata: How It May Begin....

2011-09-16T10:51:00.002-04:00

I'm writing the script for our next large-scale promenade performance, Manna-Hata, and it's been very slow-going: 400 years of NYC history in one event that (I hope) will be less than 2 hours long ain't easy. I have lots of material written but nothing that's been jazzing me in terms of how to approach the story.... until now. I think I've got something that may work. There's a dialogue scene that follows this stage direction but I'm still working on that. I'm interested to hear what others think: intriguing, confusing, something else? Let me know....

As the audience enters, THE BAND is playing: perhaps something fast and percussive in a classic NY jazz style. As the music ends, the lights fade slowly out. Silence.

Lights up suddenly on a street corner in Manhattan. The ensemble are all frozen in place, as though they have been captured mid-stride by a photograph; in the middle of it all stands the SETTLER. At the same time, a musical cue suddenly sets the scene into motion and the ensemble begins to perform the Pedestrian Street Ballet (1): they travel along a grid pattern as though they are navigating sidewalks in an intricate, fast-paced dance. As they do, the SETTLER stands still in the middle of them while the Ballet takes place around her. Occasionally, she will watch an individual or an encounter between people but, for the most part, she is merely looking all around, blissfully trying to absorb the entire scene.

After the ballet has been going for a while, the NATIVE enters. She expertly navigates the Street Ballet until she reaches the spot where the SETTLER is standing. At this moment, however, the SETTLER decides to leave her spot and interrupts the flow of the Ballet directly in front of the NATIVE. She attempts to sidestep but moves in exactly the same direction as the NATIVE; she tries again and they continue to block each other. After a few back-and-forths, their movement modifies into a partner dance/movement. The SETTLER is awkward with the dance but the NATIVE is patient and guides her through the steps.

During their scene, the Street Ballet continues with various members of the ensemble occasionally tossing interjections into the dialogue.

The Street Ballet is a recurring theme I hope to use in the piece—something that can be modified to indicate time/place, if needed.
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(1) "Under the seeming disorder of the old city, wherever the old city is working successfully, is a marvelous order for maintaining the safety of the streets and the freedom of the city. It is a complex order. Its essence is intricacy of sidewalk use, bringing with it a constant succession of eyes. This order is all composed of movement and change, and although it is life, not art, we may fancifully call it the art form of the city and liken it to the dance — not to a simple-minded precision dance with everyone kicking up at the same time, twirling in unison and bowing off en masse, but to an intricate ballet in which the individual dancers and ensembles all have distinctive parts which miraculously reinforce each other and compose an orderly whole. The ballet of the good city sidewalk never repeats itself from place to place, and in any once place is always replete with new improvisations." —Jane Jacobs

Our Live Arts Festival/Philly Fringe Weekend

2011-09-10T13:45:00.000-04:00

At some point during our Labor Day weekend in Philadelphia, Catherine and I tried to remember when we first came to the Live Arts Festival/Philly Fringe. As best we can remember, it was in 2000 when the performance that blew us away was Mark Lord’s promenade performance through the Old City, Across. For me, that piece is indicative of all of our best experiences with this festival: it was epic, imaginative and remarkably daring. I haven’t loved everything I’ve ever seen here but I’ve never been completely disappointed, either, especially with the curated Live Arts events. And almost every festival has at least one production that particularly has inspired and invigorated me, artistically.

This year, all nine of the shows we saw are remarkably strong and several of them are absolutely fantastic. Four in particular are among the best work I’ve seen this year: Method Gun, Twelfth Night, Elephant Room and WHaLE OPTICS. All four productions feature outstanding performances and are imaginatively directed and designed. They are all challenging works: physically demanding of the actors and intellectually stimulating for the audience. With the exception of the Pig Iron show, they all employed modern technology to some degree but their most effective elements are actually fairly low- or old-tech: an overhead projector, the fly system of a theater, traditional sleight of hand, repurposing fabric to create the continent of Antarctica (complete with the Transantarctic mountain range). These productions that remind you of what live performance offers that television and film can't: the incredible energy and emotional impact of being present in the moment with artists at work. Of these, no piece embodies it better than the Rude Mechs' Method Gun (pictured, right): what might easily have been a simple satire about a theatrical guru transforms in the end into an astonishing illustration of the power of actors onstage and the potential danger into which they continually put themselves.

Other highlights this year:

• Mary Tuomanen and Genevieve Perrier, who give delightful (and vocally strong) performances in A Paper Garden. It's a charming, cleverly-constructed little production in a lovely garden. I especially admired their cross-gender casting choice—it's a tricky thing to make work and Ms. Tuomanen and director Aaron Cromie succeeded very well.
• James Sugg in Twelfth Night (pictured, left). Fantastic: I don't need to see anyone else play Sir Toby Belch for a long time. As far as I'm concerned, we can put this play on a shelf and leave it there a while.
• Rosie Langabeer's music for Twelfth Night: it creates the perfect mood for Pig Iron's show. Plus, since she and her musicians perform it all live and take on several roles, they are a big part of the metatheatrical success of the production.
• David Disbrown and Christina Zani in Headlong Dance Theater's Red Rovers. It's a clever piece but uneven structurally: it works because both performers are engaging and do a great job with the occasionally unusual choreography.
• The pumping station space where Zon-Mai (pictured, right) is presented. The installation, videos and choreography in the piece are all excellent but it was hard to walk into that space and not imagine how it will look once it becomes the new festival headquarters.
• Brian Osborne's channeling of Carl Sagan in WHaLE OPTICS. Not an impersonation, really: just the distilling of the essence of him into his own character. Most memorable.

• Trey Lyford's carefully-crafted performance in Elephant Room. The whole piece is over the top from the beginning but it also has several exceptional moments where the three magicians demonstrate their skills as actors (and all three are very skilled). We're a little prejudiced, of course, but Catherine and I thought Trey's revelatory speech was absolutely beautiful.

By going the first weekend, there are shows that weren't playing yet that we would have liked to see. In particular, Improbable Theatre's The Devil and Mister Punch, New Paradise Laboratory's Extremely Public Displays of Privacy (although we have been seeing the preliminary parts of it on their website) and John Jasperse's Canyon (we have the option to see it at BAM, fortunately) and Play by Sidi Larbi Cherkaoui and Shantala Shivalingappa. But that's always the problem with having only one weekend for this festival—you kind of have to be a resident of Philadelphia to really get everything it has to offer.

Photos (top to bottom): Kathi Kacinski (Method Gun), Jason Frank Rothenberg (Twelfth Night), Awatef Chengal (Zon-Mai).

Philadelphia Live Arts Festival: Day 3

2011-09-04T11:09:00.000-04:00

A full day yesterday and not a bad show in the bunch—I'm almost afraid that the other shoe might drop today. That seems highly unlikely, however, given the two productions we've saved for our last day.

Sunday, September 4

WHaLE OPTICS: Lucidity Suitcase Intercontinental, 1pm. An enormous production (and long—almost 3 hours) but when your set is the ocean and your piece is about a composer collecting whale songs from around the world, it would be a lot harder to create in a little black box (but if he wanted to do it that way, I think director Thaddeus Phillips is just the guy to make that tiny production work). I expect magic and I don’t think I’ll be disappointed.

Elephant Room: Dennis Diamond, Louie Magic and Daryl Hannah, 6pm. We saw a workshop of this show at HERE arts center a few years ago—at that point, it was little more than sketches of the characters and their magic tricks, really. Now it’s finished and I can't wait to see where they've gone—it should be the perfect way for us to end the festival this year!

Hope to get down all of my thoughts on everything we saw on the train back home tonight.... assuming SEPTA has the tracks cleared outside of Trenton from the post-Irene flooding. If they haven't, we're taking Amtrak and that's only a 90-minute ride: not enough time to finish before we hit Penn Station.

Philadelphia Live Arts Festival: Day 2

2011-09-03T10:58:00.001-04:00

I'm looking forward to writing about the shows we saw last night but there's no time: we have four to see today. I'll just say for now that they were both every bit as excellent as I expected.

Saturday, September 3:

A Paper Garden: Aaron Cromie, Mary Tuomanen, and Genevieve Perrier, 1pm. It appears to be a site-specific performance in a garden. And it's only 33 minutes long. We're there.

Zon-Mai: A performed installation, 2pm. This is an enormous multimedia installation by choreographer Sidi Larbi Cherkauoi and filmmaker Gilles Delmas in which they have recorded dancers from around the world performing in their own homes. It’s being presented in a former pumping station near the new Race Street Pier park (which is also the space that will be the future home of the Live Arts Festival).

Red Rovers: Headlong Dance Theater and Chris Doyle, 4pm. Another artistic hybrid of dance and installation, this one was inspired by the Mars rovers, silent films and vintage Donkey Kong. Wouldn’t miss it for this or any other world!

Max Frisch’s The Arsonist (The Firebugs): The Idopathic Ridiculopathy Consortium, 7:30pm. If I’m reading this right, it’s a play performed as a silent movie based on a 1958 animated film. It might be brilliant, it might just be a good idea… Only one way to find out….

And then: we have 35 minutes to cover 14 blocks. We should be able to walk it… assuming that the 7:30 show starts on time and is 80 minutes long, as it is advertised. Otherwise, we’re taking a cab…

The Speed of Surprise: The Groundswell Players, 9:30pm. The main attraction of this play for us is that it is directed by Charlotte Ford—an artist whose work we’ve long been interested in seeing but always seem to miss (the problem with having to do the entire festival in one weekend—not everything we want to see is playing). The description of this piece begins, "Four intergalactic assassins zoom through the void." If the rest of the evening lives up to that sentence, I think we'll have a good time.

Philadelphia Live Arts Festival 2011

2011-09-02T17:11:00.001-04:00

We're back in Philadelphia for the Live Arts Festival. This year, we're here for the first weekend of the festival: today through Sunday, September 4. As we did in 2009, we've crammed as many shows as we possibly can into our three days; we originally bought tickets for 10 shows but the last one we were planning to see on Sunday has since been canceled and we haven't decided if we're going to try to replace it or just head back to NYC a little earlier. I think we've chosen a pretty nice mix of theater, performance, dance and installation and I'm really looking forward to the weekend.

TONIGHT: Friday, September 2:

Twelfth Night: Pig Iron Theatre, 7pm. I don't think we've ever missed Pig Iron in the Live Arts Festival—the performances are always amazing and the production is usually one of our favorites. While I wasn't wild about their take on Measure for Measure in 2007, I have high expectations for this show... and, frankly, only Pig Iron could get me to break my moratorium on productions of Twelfth Night!

The Method Gun: Rude Mechanicals, 10pm. Another company whose work we've enjoyed many times in the past—their Lipstick Traces is still among the best shows I've seen. This purports to be another "non-fiction" work based on the disappearance of a 1960s era acting guru and her dangerous Approach method of acting. I don't care whether a word of it is true or not—I missed it when it was here in NYC and I get to see it now!

I had intended to put forward our entire agenda but after a miserable trip down on the train (the first less than stellar time in over a dozen years of taking the regional rails down here—and all Hurricane Irene-related), I ran out of time. Will post the rest of the weekend tomorrow or later tonight and my impressions of the shows when I get back to NYC (unless I get a wild hair....).

Was it Worth It?

2011-04-21T22:51:00.011-04:00

I received a comment on my previous post that Sleep No More is worth every penny and I have to agree—it was every bit as excellent as the show in Boston. It's well-performed and beautifully designed and directed. As I'd hoped I would, I even managed to find some scenes I'd missed the first time.

While Catherine and I were able to stay together throughout the Boston event, we were immediately separated here: we were split up into different groups by playing cards that we drew at the beginning of the evening and my group entered before hers. As in Boston, we were given masks that we had to wear throughout the event. By accident, the elevator dropped me off very near to the Ball Room—a central location for the big scenes in the production—so I was able to associate the other spaces on that floor in relation to it; as anyone who has seen the show will tell you, that information is incredibly useful. The first scene that I saw was Duncan in his chamber, preparing for bed—a scene I'd thoroughly enjoyed in Boston. I didn't experience the incredible tension in the scene that I had before—and not just because I knew what was coming: I'd known that then, of course. More likely, I think it took me a little while to stop comparing this production to the previous one and allow myself to be immersed in what was happening around me.

The installations on the upper floors of the space (there are five) are amazingly well-designed and the more labyrinthine space in Chelsea makes the exploration of the rooms more complicated which actually makes it more enjoyable (the architecture of the Boston school building defined that event as each floor was, essentially, a series of rooms off a central hallway). The audience on the night we attended were incredibly bold—I saw many more people rummaging through drawers and closests and leafing through the documents left on desktops. The performers all do an excellent job—I was especially glad I got to be in the room with the witches as they prophesied to Macbeth his coming triumphs and his ultimate fate: it was a frenzy of strobe lighting, athletic dancing and terrifyingly erotic imagery. I'm pretty sure it was in this place that I got hit with the drop of blood I found on my mask at the end of the evening.

We had gone to see the show with a group of our theater friends, none of whom had the seen the show before. The discussions in the restaurant afterward were among the more enthusiastic and excited that I've had in a long time. We'd all seen the same show and yet so many of our descriptions were interrupted by a disappointed cry of, "Oh, I missed that!" from one of the others.

The show has been extended through June 25 so if you have the opportunity (and the scratch), I'd definitely recommend seeing it.

Photo: Yaniv Schulman

Sleep No More NYC: April 8 at 7pm

2011-03-26T16:52:00.017-04:00

I was flattered to see that the press page for Sleep No More has a link to the Interlude. I don't think they're going to link to this post, however, because I'm going to complain a little bit: I had a hard time biting the bullet and spending $75 each for our tickets. Obviously, Catherine and I decided that it's ultimately worth the price because we ponied up to see a show that, in essence, we've already seen. Now, this is a commercial production—unlike the one in Boston, presented by American Repertory Theater—and I recognize that the producers, Emursive Productions, are not in business to lose money. They clearly believe this to be a reasonable price because, unlike many Broadway and commercial Off Broadway shows, I have yet to see any offer for discounted tickets; and based on the number of sold out shows on their ticketing page, they aren't wrong.

To be fair, I have no idea what the costs for the show are—I know they're enormous because it's a huge production and nothing comes cheap in Manhattan. Even with donated materials for some of the installation, the producers said in this New York Times article that their expenses are "in the millions of dollars." However, a lot of my friends in the theater and performance community, who would gladly have paid $30-$50 for tickets, ultimately decided that $75 was just too rich for them. That's a shame because a company as innovative and adventurous as Punchdrunk shouldn't be financially inaccessible to New York's artists. I hope that success with this production will entice one of the larger non-profits to bring the company back with something a little more affordable to more people.

Photo by Thom Kaine

Puttin' on a Show in Philly

2011-01-24T10:24:00.018-05:00

If you're a self-starting producer (or a director or writer or actor who can get yourself hooked up with a unique individual like that) and can spend some time in Philadelphia this September, you're in luck: the Philadelphia Fringe is taking applications. This is the non-adjudicated part of my favorite arts festival:

In the tradition of the Edinburgh Festival Fringe, we ask that you challenge yourself to be an artistic pioneer by taking your work to new levels of artistic innovation and presentation.

If you want into the Live Arts Festival, you gotta get on festival director Nick Stuccio's radar... which means you've gotta have a track record. And what better way to get that record started than with a production in the Philadelphia Fringe?

To apply, all you need is a $95 application fee (a modest sum, really), a venue (the Philadelphia Theatre Alliance has a handy list here, complete with contact information), and a project that you're just dying to mount (dance, theater, music, performance, visual art or any hybrid thereof). Once you're in, it's just about fund raising the money for your production costs. And your personnel expenses. And their transportation. And their room and board. And marketing your show.

Like my dad always says: if it was easy, everybody'd be doing it.

2011 Begins in Art (3 of 3 posts)

2011-01-16T11:02:00.037-05:00

I was intrigued when I first read the description of the Collectif « Ildi ! Eldi » offering in Under the Radar, Vice Versa:

John Bull is a decent guy, a rugbyman, and has suddenly discovered a strange looking gash growing behind his knee. Seeking help from his doctor Alan Margoulis and his charming secretary, Bull enters an absurd and sensual journey with his strange new appendage. Freely adapted from the novel of Will Self, the enfant terrible of British literature, Vice Versa is a surreal and comedic look at the confusions of the sexes, its ambiguities and pitfalls.

And, for the most part, it's an accurate description of the production that the three company members—Sophie Cattani, Antoine Oppenheim, François Sabourin—presented on the stage at Dixon Place. Surreal: definitely. An absurd journey: without question. Freely adapted: I can only imagine, not having read the novel (which is actually two stories combined into one book, Cock and Bull), but the repetition of a key scene several times, each time allowing the characters to reveal more and more of their inner monologues seems to be more a theatrical device than a novelistic one. A comedic look at the confusions of the sexes: well, mostly... it's definitely funny, it's kind of confusing and sex is definitely a big part of the confusion.

It might be their dialects: the artists' English is perfect but still accented so there were parts of the piece where I had trouble understanding some of what was being said. My friend, Anne Jensen, who speaks fluent French, suggested that the nature of their mother tongue may be impacting their performances: she feels that French speakers don't emphasize words the same way we do in English, and that led to a more monotone performance. She may very well be right but I also think that this performance style is one often employed in avant garde work and sometimes it's very effective... and sometimes less so. The rhythm of the piece may also be a factor, as each section of the piece has a tendency to achieve a regularity of volume and cadence that's rather lulling—I found my attention occasionally wandering during the repeated scene.

These might seem like significant problems for the production but they really aren't: they're more minor quibbles. I enjoyed Vice Versa: Collectif « Ildi ! Eldi » are all engaging performers, they made good use of their simple production design (two chairs, a table and light bulb on a bungee cord), and their adaptation of the novel has intrigued me to check out the original source material. And, as it turns out, I'll have another opportunity to sample their work next month: they're collaborating with Witness Relocation and playwright Charles L. Mee on a new work at La MaMa.

It's also possible that a trip to Lyons is in order soon....

I must say that I was completely surprised by Your Brother. Remember?, writer/performer Zachary Oberzan's mash-up of live performance, pop music, excerpts from the films Kickboxer and Faces of Death, and the recreations of those films that he, his brother, Gator, and their kid sister, Jenny, made in 1989 and then revisited in 2009. His Rambo Solo with Nature Theatre of Oklahoma was an extraordinary exercise in which Oberzan used ear prompters to allow him to match up his live performance with prerecorded video of himself telling the story of the novel, First Blood, that was being projected on the wall above him, but I found myself more intrigued by how it was created than the content of the piece. Here, however, his deep passion for his subject comes across in all aspects of the performance. It's a loving tribute to the joys and exuberance of youth and its fragile innocence. To watch these young boys playing in front of the camera, and then to contrast it with the men on the cusp of middle age struggling to revisit that experience, is both painful and inspirational: I wonder how many of us would throw ourselves so fearlessly into a project as potentially embarrassing as this one? And yet Gator, an ex-convict who is not a performer, did it with abandon and enthusiasm. In this and in video interviews from 2009, Gator's obvious love for his brother and pride Zachary's artistic accomplishments are powerful. And yet the production never stoops to sentimentality: Oberzan allows the emotions to exist almost without commentary. It's rare for experimental work to explore feelings and pathos in this manner; Your Brother. Remember? artfully and entertainingly offers a very personal and genuine insight into the human experience.

Ellen Stewart: 1919 - 2011

2011-01-15T12:19:00.052-05:00

It must have been through a subscription I had to Playbill magazine that I wound up receiving Vanity Fair for a brief time in 1983; I certainly didn't order it. It was, however, a fortuitous mistake because one of the first issues I received (and the only one I remember) had an article about this woman who'd been running a theater in New York for over 20 years. I'd never heard of her or her theater but the article talked about all these plays she'd produced by famous playwrights like Sam Shepard, Lanford Wilson and Robert Patrick... and one by some guy named Tom Eyen called The White Whore and the Bit Player (and I wish I could find the production photo that was in the article—it was just as provocative as its title!). Anyway, the more I read, the more I came to believe that La MaMa ETC sounded like an absolutely wonderful place and Ellen Stewart, the artistic director, must be an amazing and incredible person.

I did not look up La MaMa as soon as I moved to New York. I wish I had. I saw a lot of shows there over the years—some of which were truly great—and got to know many of the people who work at La MaMa. But I'd actually been in the downtown theater community for over 15 years before I finally met Ellen Stewart. When Peculiar Works was developing the East Village half of our OFF Stage extravaganza, we knew that the focus of the event was going to be Ellen—because, really: when you're talking about the birth of Off Off Broadway in the East Village, you're talking about La MaMa. Part of our development process for the event was interviewing people who had worked in downtown theater in the '60s to get their help with ideas and material we could use for content in our tour. We'd heard over the years that Ellen could be... prickly... and we'd seen firsthand that she could be downright mean: we'd been at a panel discussion where she mercilessly berated someone for presuming to speak for La MaMa (the moderator insisted that she'd been invited to be on the panel but hadn't responded so they'd asked the other person). To say that we were intimidated by the idea of talking to her about our plan to celebrate her and the legacy of Off Off Broadway—who were we to presume?—was an understatement: we were all petrified.

In the winter of 2006, we finally asked Chris Kapp to help us set up a meeting with Ellen (and Chris told us that Ellen had heard about our project and had wondered what was taking us so long to come see her). It will come as no surprise to any artist who has ever worked with Ellen that she was beyond generous and helpful to us. She spent about an hour with us in her apartment above the theater and told us all about how she came to start the theater and all of the trials and tribulations she faced over the years. I remember being amazed at how well she remembered the tiniest details: shows that were in each space (there were three Cafe La MaMa's before the present spaces on East 4th Street), dates of particular productions and who was involved. At the end of our interview, Ellen emphasized that she wanted to help us however she could and that we should be sure to ask her when we needed something.

During the production in June of 2007, La MaMa provided us with a floor of the Great Jones rehearsal studios to use for dressing rooms and storage—an amazing and unexpected gift. They also allowed us to perform the finale—a short excerpt from Megan Terry and Maryann de Pury's Viet Rock—in the lobby of the Annex (now the Ellen Stewart Theater) on East 4th, while Ellen's own production of Romeo and Juliet was performing in the theater upstairs.

One thing we didn't share with Ellen was our decision to make her a character in our event; frankly, we were afraid she might not let us do it and we all knew it gave the East Village tour a perfect context. The text, which we adapted into a prologue and epilogue, was taken from Ellen's reminiscences about the early days of La MaMa; it was beautifully performed by Jacq Gregg, who heroically agreed to be at the event for four hours every night in order to begin and end all four tours. One night, early in the run, I happened to be in the Annex lobby just before Viet Rock began when the elevator doors opened and Ellen was wheeled out. The audience was already filing in and she told everyone that she wanted to stay and watch—we were busted. The Viet Rock scene went exceptionally well, and then Jacq entered, ringing a handbell (Ellen had opened every show in the early days of La MaMa by ringing a cowbell) as she spoke:

Art is a God-given resource for all humankind to draw upon—many times there is little else. A world without poverty or illiteracy would be wonderful, but without artistic expression it would be barren.

My coffeehouse struggled to survive against a background of Kafkaesque harassment which resulted in two evictions, a union imbroglio and innumerable trips to the pawnshop. The people in the building didn’t want me there because I’m a negress. They kept lodging complaints, and then a man comes to me with a warrant for my arrest for prostitution! I'm not a prostitute, I'm running a theater! I want to do plays that a black person can play in where they don’t have a needle in their arm, or their mother was washing clothes, or their father was in jail, or their mother was a prostitute.

I never had self-doubt. I was always taught by my mama that I'm on an island and there's not a soul on the island but me. And so whatever gets done, I have to do it. That's the way I was brought up. So I never thought about self-doubt. But anything that I've wanted to do, I always believed that somehow—I believe in the somehow —that I could find a way to do it.

Good night.

As the audience applause was dying down, we all heard Ellen's mellifluous voice call out, "That was me!" Far from being angry, it was clear that she'd enjoyed our homage. She spent another dozen or so minutes chatting with Jacq, me and the audience and gave us all a few more stories about those early days. We were also fortunate that our most excellent press representative, Jim Baldassare, was there and captured the moment in photos (below). As she was leaving, Ellen said again to let her know if we needed anything.

The last time I saw Ellen was during one of Chris Kapp's Coffeehouse Chronicles in 2007 or 2008; I think it was Robert Heide, Robert Dahdah and John Gilman talking about their work at La MaMa. At one point, they couldn't remember the name of someone who'd worked on a project; the person had had a small role in the piece and it was over 40 years before, after all. We were all surprised when that familiar voice rang out to fill in the blank for them: Ellen had quietly entered and was listening in the back. For a half hour or so, she stayed there and listened to their discussion (and corrected their mistakes) until someone with her insisted that she needed to leave. It was a remarkable display of her mental acuity; I only hope I have half that capacity in my late 80s!

I know that it's going to be tough in the new few weeks and months at La MaMa; even though her abilities had been significantly diminished over the past year or so, I heard that she was still being kept updated on what was happening and participated as best she could in the operations. They are fortunate to have had so much time with their MaMa, and for those years to have been so fruitful. We all feel their loss and lament with them but I'm certain that there are only many more great things to come from La MaMa. Ellen did her best to prepare everyone for this transition and, while it may not all go smoothly, I believe that the institution she built is much bigger than the individual. But for her family, the staff and for all her many friends and the artists that she nurtured for 50 years, it will never be the same again.

"Sleep No More" in NYC

2011-01-14T11:55:00.014-05:00

One of the best site-specific performance/installations Catherine and I have ever seen is coming to New York: Punchdrunk Theatre's Sleep No More. The location this time is the former McKittrick Hotel on the West Side. There are no details on the site yet but here's a link to buy tickets. If you dig immersive art and you're in NYC in March, I'd encourage you to go. You better believe Catherine and I will be there: we gotta try to see at least some of the parts we missed last time (and I'll bet there'll be some brand new stuff, too!).

If you're into funky, interactive websites, check out Punchdrunk's. Navigating is somewhat similar to attending Sleep No More: all of the clues for getting around are there but no one has spelled anything out for you (unless you find the cheat menu they've supplied, of course).

2011 Begins in Art (2 of 3 posts)

2011-01-09T18:28:00.027-05:00

Watt by Samuel Beckett is actor Barry McGovern's adaptation of Beckett's second novel*—a remarkably coherent distillation of the 250 page text into a taut 60-minute performance. McGovern serves as narrator—masterfully bringing the poetically repetitive language to life ("And if I could begin it all over again a hundred times, knowing each time a little more than the time before, the result would always be the same, and the hundredth life as the first, and the hundred lives as one.")—and populates his tale with dozens of colorful characters that the enigmatic Watt encounters in his position as manservant to his reclusive master, Mr. Knott. With the help of his director, Tom Creed, McGovern has skillfully adapted the piece for the Public's Newman Theater (it was originally created for the Gate Theatre in Dublin) and establish a variety of locations using only two chairs and a coat rack. They've also mined a great deal of humor—both physical and verbal—from the piece, as I believe there should always be with Beckett (please, God, never make me sit through another one of those overly earnest productions that miss all the jokes). It's an exceptional and exceptionally simple production

I wish that I could say the same for Freedom Club, New Paradise Laboratory and Riot Group's production playing at the Connelly Theater. Catherine and I have enjoyed the NPL shows we've seen before this, starting with 2003's Rrose Selavy Takes a Lover in Philadelphia; and playwright Adriano Shaplin's Hell Meets Henry Halfway is still one of our favorite Pig Iron productions. The combination of these two groups must surely yield theatrical gold, right? And yet, somehow, it just doesn't. The script is by far the weakest element in the piece: the comparison of John Wilkes Booth's journey to becoming a presidential assassin in 1865 to that of a group of left-wing radicals in 2015 doesn't yield any significant results. I agree that the lunatic fringe on either end of the political spectrum might be just one pissed-0ff incident away from violence but I don't feel that Shaplin has much to say beyond that. And the juvenile sexual content in the 1865 scenes added nothing to piece—it wasn't funny and it didn't illuminate anything about the characters or the situation. The actors all seem capable but director Whit MacLaughlin often has them standing stiffly downstage and delivering most of their lines directly to the audience instead of to one another; the intention is clearly to mimic the 19th century acting technique but it's stylization for the sake of being stylized—there's just no pay off. I certainly believe that there's great potential in a collaboration between these companies; I hope that next time they're able to realize it better.

Still to come: Vice Versa and Your Brother. Remember?

*My googling of Watt turned up this odd little blog in which an Irish gentleman performs a serialized reading of the novel—kinda fun!

2011 Begins in Art (1 of 2 articles)

2011-01-09T13:05:00.022-05:00

Just over a week into the new year and Catherine and I have already seen one video installation, three performances in the Under the Radar festival and we're seeing another two tonight. I would love to report that it's been an auspicious beginning, heralding great things to come in 2011; sadly, I can't quite say that. But if the worst of what we saw is the worst of what we'll see, I'll consider the year a resounding success.

We began the year with Leonardo's Last Supper: a Vision by Peter Greenaway, a remarkable installation at the Park Avenue Armory.
The title is slightly misleading: while the centerpiece of the event is Da Vinci's famous mural, Ultima Cena, it actually begins with a spectacular video collage of Italian cities and ends with an extensive examination of Veronese's The Wedding at Cana. Throughout the 45 minute production, filmmaker and artist, Peter Greenaway, literally immerses the audience in thousands of projected videos and images—both long shots and extreme close-ups that offer details that are obviously impossible at the actual location. Structurally, it's an uneven piece: while the Da Vinci section is the central and longest of the event, the Wedding at Cana almost overshadows it—in part, because it's the only section that contains narration. Greenaway refers to the Italian cities videos as the "Prologue" and the Veronese as the "Epilogue," but that was also misleading because the visual narratives are only very subtly linked; they felt, to me, more akin to movements in a symphonic work. These are, ultimately, minor quibbles: the environment that Greenaway has created—especially in his installation and recreation of the monastery of Santa Maria delle Grazie's dining hall for Da Vinci's masterpiece—and the way in which his videos highlights all of the remarkable details in the artworks are absolutely beautiful and inspiring (I've never wanted to go to Milan so much in my life!).

Our first Under the Radar production was Phobophilia at HERE. The audience is led from the box office down to the basement in small groups and briefly blindfolded as they're taken into the performance space; I know the intention here is to give a sensation of being taken prisoner but the captors are so polite and so reassuring to everyone that it's more of an intellectual experience than a visceral one. Once inside, we discover a hooded character (an overt reference to the infamous Abu Ghraib photo), in the midst of being interrogated, who then "escapes" into a dreamlike world of video images projected onto various surfaces and tiny sets hidden like a pop-up book inside a trunk. The performance is an intriguing combination of soundscape, video and object theater. The style of the filmmaking is a cross between German Expressionism and French surrealism, with minimal elements and yet visually striking. The artists, 2boys.tv, have created a unique, if rather thin, theatrical experience—the ending is rather unsatisfying, considering how creatively they've manipulated the imagery up to that point—but it is, nevertheless, a visually engaging and cleverly constructed work.

(In the next post: Watt by Samuel Beckett, Freedom Club, Vice Versa and Your Brother. Remember?)

Funny Fruit

2010-12-26T11:42:00.007-05:00

I've long been a fan of British humor—Monty Python, in particular, but also several of the series like Yes, Minister and To the Manor Born—but I never really got hooked on The Two Ronnies. Perhaps I was just too young at the time: although the show ran in the U.K. into the 1980s, it was only on in Fort Worth for a brief time in the mid-'70s, when I was a 12 or 13. In more recent years, I have acquired a book of 20th century British sketch comedy—from bits written for the musical halls through the golden age of radio in the 1950s and, finally, into television—and it including many by Ronny Corbett and Ronny Barker and their writers that I have enjoyed reading (and rereading them) immensely. Their humor very language-based and, most often, heavily-laden with puns. Ronny Barker died a few years ago but Ronny Corbett is still working—most recently creating this very funny sketch for a Christmas special on the BBC.

On Poland (By Way of Austin)

2010-11-30T00:07:00.012-05:00

In the Times yesterday, there was an article about Poland and the divisive cultural environment that is now thriving there. What struck me most about it was this quote:

“Poles always feel they need to have an enemy,” Urszula Slawinska, 38, said one day as she walked along a sidewalk in Warsaw, an average citizen, headed home, uninvolved in politics, yet keenly aware of what was happening around her. “Because of our history we define ourselves, to be Polish meant to protect our country. So now that we don’t have to protect ourselves, we still need to find an enemy.”

In reading this, I was reminded of Dr. Oscar Brockett, my theater history and criticism professor at the University of Texas, who died a few weeks ago. That may seem like an incredible leap of logic—how does a story about European politics relate to theater history?—but I think Dr. Brockett would have appreciated how I made that connection and why.

In one of the lectures in his Contemporary Theater History class, Dr. Brockett told us about Jerzy Grotowski's 1962 production of Akropolis by Stanisław Wyspiański. In the original play, written in 1904, figures from the stained glass windows in the Krakow Cathedral come to life on the night before Easter and reenact Biblical and mythical stories; in the end, the Christ figure (as Apollo) is resurrected and destroys the cathedral in order "to free the Polish mind from the shackles of its own culture."¹ The play was a source of national pride for many people (although, as this writer notes, its nationalism can be read with an ironic perspective that may well have been intended by Wyspiański) that Grotowski twisted into a wicked commentary on Polish society. He set the action in a concentration camp barracks and had the prisoners play the different parts; the characters were ultimately "freed" by a headless Christ-figure they constructed from the detritus on the set which "led them" into the gas chambers. I see Grotowski's interpretation of the play as a corollary to the statement that Slawinska gave to the reporter: he is saying—in a very graphic and, I imagine, extremely powerful fashion*—that the Poles are, essentially, their own worst enemy.

I've been lucky to have many great teachers—while I was a student and in the decades since—but Dr. Brockett influenced me more than any other. His History of the Theatre is, without a doubt, the definitive theater history textbook. It was so thorough that his classes could easily have been just a rehashing of its contents (as, indeed, my undergraduate theater history class had been). Instead, he brought to his lectures a wealth of stories and images (he lectured without notes, as I recall, and had the most amazing slides—as in carousel, not Powerpoint—of influential productions to illustrate his points) that made it obvious that his book could have easily been a multi-volume encyclopedia.

What really made him unusual as a history teacher, however, is that he was just as concerned—perhaps even more concerned—with the current state of theater. Since it first appeared in 1968, Dr. Brockett made sure that the History was always current: the 10th and last edition just came out in 2007. At the end of his Contemporary Theater History class, he was telling us about influential Off Broadway productions that were only a few years old or that were playing in New York at that moment—Richard Foreman's Film is Evil, Radio is Good, Eric Bogosian's Talk Radio and The Wooster Group's LSD (...Just the High Points...). He also provided me with the adage that I still hold true (and repeat often) to this day: there is no such thing as presenting "the play as written;" the act of staging a play is the act of interpretation.†

I think it's telling that, although I had gone to UT to get an MFA in acting, more of my graduate credits are in theater history and criticism. In my very first class with Dr. Brockett, his syllabus required us to write a number of papers by the end of the semester. Concerned that I'd be trying to write a bunch of papers in the last week of class (my M.O. as an undergraduate), I decided to get a jump on them and wrote the first one before the second week of class. Unfortunately, I hadn't read his instructions very carefully and I hadn't proofread my work before I turned it in: what was supposed to be 7-10 pages was less than 5 and riddled with typos. Dr. Brockett corrected all of my mistakes (he also believed, as I said in my previous post, that spelling counts... also punctuation and grammar) and wrote at the end that four-and-a-half pages was woefully short of the assignment but "assuming that you misunderstood: B-." Reading that, I imagined him thinking, "Well, he's an actor; what should I expect?" Whether that was in his mind or not, I made certain from that point on that it would never be a question again.

In my last exchange with Dr. Brockett, a few days before I moved to New York in 1987, he told me how concerned he was that I might never finish my degree (he was right) and that I didn't need to write the remaining three papers I owed him for one of his courses. A few minutes later, I heard a knock on my office door and he poked his head in and sheepishly said maybe I should do them, after all (I'd already told him that I would, in spite of his earlier protests). Thousands of times over the years, I've thought about writing to tell him how much he and his classes meant to me. Most of the amazing productions I've seen since graduate school—certainly all of my favorite productions‡—and every piece that I've ever created, connect back to something I learned from him. But I never did that; I waited too long. Not that he needed to hear it from me: I could tell from the comments on his obituaries that he had plenty of students who kept in contact with him and with whom he had close relationships. It would have meant a lot to me, though; maybe just to make sure he knew I wasn't the doofus actor that I imagined he thought me.

By way of returning this post to Poland, from whence it sprang, I leave you with this short excerpt from Peter Brook's video of Grotowski's Akropolis. The video sucks but it's at least a little taste of what must have been an incredible production.

¹ Relations Between Cultures by George F. McLean, John Kromkowski.
* For an excellent description of the production, with illustrations, check out Theater: a Way of Seeing by Milly S. Barranger.
† He's also responsible for my favorite smart-ass comment that, strictly following the Aristotelian belief that the purpose of drama is "to teach and to please," the lesson of Othello is that women should look after their linens; for the t.v. series, Miami Vice (this was 1987, after all), it was "don't get caught" because the criminals all lead incredible lives until the cops catch up with them.
‡Including The Wooster Group's 2005 piece, Poor Theater, which incorporated Grotowski's Akropolis into the production.

Moron Writing

2010-11-26T11:12:00.039-05:00

More accurately, of course, the title of this post is "More on Writing." It's not a particularly good pun (is it a pun?), I'll grant you, but it was prompted by something in this article in today's Times about the Royal Spanish Academy's "simplifying" of the Spanish alphabet. The Academy has decided that the letters "ch" (pronounced* "che") and "ll" ("ell-yay") are superfluous and will be omitted, bringing the total number of letters in the alphabet to 27—the additional letter being "ñ" ("en-yay"). It doesn't really change all that much: the ordinary Spanish-speaker will continue to put "c" and "h" together to make the "ch" sound—as we do in English—it just won't be part of the official alphabet.

What inspired me to write about this story is not that I have a problem with the removal of these two letters but this quote from Gabriel García Márquez:

At the first international congress of the Spanish language in Zacatecas, Mexico, in 1997... Márquez declared, “Let’s retire spelling, the terror of all beings from the cradle.” But he admitted that his pleas were little more than “bottles flung to the sea in the hope that they would one day come to the god of all words.”

My first thought was: how beautiful—that man really is an amazing wordsmith! But his reference to spelling being "the terror of all beings" got me thinking about George Bernard Shaw's somewhat quixotic attempts to change English spelling to match the way words are pronounced (i.e., "ruf" instead of "rough") and, ultimately, to abandon the English alphabet entirely in favor of a purely phonetic one. I say it was only somewhat quixotic because his spelling reforms were merely 50 or so years ahead of their time: today, we call that texting. The phonetic alphabet, on the hand, seems destined to remain an amusing curiosity for those few people who are even familiar with it.

However much I admire these men, I must, respectfully, disagree with them. Perhaps, as my mother often says, it's because my first and second grade teachers in Odessa, TX, used phonics to teach us spelling—this was in 1969-70, over a decade before "Hooked on Phonics" exploded in the '80s—but I'm a pretty good speller. Of course, I have to look up words all the time—dictionary.com and thesaurus.com are always open when I'm writing—and the spell check corrects me much more often than I'd like, but most of my mistakes are due to my laziness as a proofreader: I'll get to typing fast and put down a homophone (most often, the ubiquitous "it's" for "its") and don't read over it again very carefully when I'm done. But one of the things I enjoy about writing is using the right word and spelling it correctly: for me, there's something intensely satisfying about knowing when to use "stationary" or "stationery," and "though" is simply more aesthetically pleasing than "tho."

Returning to the title of this post: no, I don't think that poor spellers are morons. There are plenty of times when I will opt for a phonetic spelling, especially when writing a play—there, how a word sounds and what it conveys are paramount and I will often write phonetically because I hope that gives the actor more information about the character or my intention for a line. It's important to know when and why to break the rules (Finnegan's Wake springs to mind as a good example of this and I know there are plenty of others) but that presumes that the author knows the rules. This really just reinforces my belief that spelling counts.

*If you're really interested in these pronunciations, there's a handy little website that has a child pronouncing the alphabet for you. You'll notice that the website also includes "rr" ("air-ray" with a rolled "r"), which is commonly included in the alphabet, but is not recognized by the Academy.

(Re)Writing

2010-11-07T10:10:00.028-05:00

Too much has been happening since my last post in August. When I haven't been in rehearsals and performances for Wake, an exceptional new play by Bryn Manion, I've been trying to keep up with the deluge of survival work (at the moment, it pays so badly that it's actually barely-survival work) and keeping up with the absolute minimum of my PWP work (Catherine, Ralph and I have been teaching our workshop for Trinity/LaMaMa and doing photo research for our video project that we must finish soon). The Interlude may have appeared fallow but I've actually created dozens of blog posts every day over the past few months... it's just that they only exist in my mind and come to me at times that I can't write them down: like when I wake up at 4am and am struggling to get back to sleep. Regardless, I hope I'll be able to be more diligent about getting something down here in the coming days, weeks and months.

For a few weeks now, I've had an idea for a multi-tasking post. First, it would announce my return to acting for the first time in 17 years (see above)... which also just happens to be the first opportunity my lovely wife, Catherine, and I have ever had to perform together (in over 25 years as friends and almost 21 years as a couple). Second, it would get the word out about the upcoming production of Immortal: the Gilgamesh Variations by The Forge in January, of which I'm very pleased to be a part. But foremost, it would provide a little snapshot into the process of writing by focusing on how I have contributed to Immortal by adapting Tablet 11 of the Gilgamesh epic.

A quick overview: Gabriel Shanks and Kay Mitchell asked eleven playwrights to each adapt one of the tablets into a 10-minute play, the idea being that this would reflect the surviving fragments of the story that have been discovered so far which were pretty much all written by different authors at different times. Tablet 11, in addition to being the end of the story (and so requiring me to "wrap it all up" for the audience) is also quite dense: there's a full account of the Sumerian version of The Flood, Gilgamesh is given a 7-day test by Utnapishtim (the equivalent of Noah) and another task to perform once he fails that test, and finally he travels back to his home in Uruk (retracing an outgoing journey that required the three prior tablets to accomplish).

In 10 minutes. Right...

So I thought I would post my various drafts of the script, along with a few short notes on the changes I made. Some of the rewrites were in response to the length of the piece (my first full draft clocked in at over 15 minutes), some were in response to work that other writers had done that I could reference in my tablet, and some were based on dramaturgical suggestions from Gabriel and Kay as the project leaders. There were a few minor drafts in between each of these but I've decided to focus on the more significant rewrites (in the interest of time and... well, interest: I don't know if it's entertaining for the layman but I think it's somewhat intriguing for those of us who write).

My first draft was fairly faithful: I tried to cram it all in. Like I said, this one was WAY too long. Let the rewrites begin.
The next version was the result of several drafts that whittled away more of the details from the original and focused on the bigger picture items: the Flood, the realization by Gilgamesh that immortality is not possible and the journey home. It's significantly shorter. I had the idea to begin it with Gilgamesh having reverted almost to the state of an animal and then rebuilding himself into a human being over the course of the tablet. I've also removed the supernatural beings almost entirely: this is in part due to the fact that there were just too damned many Sumerian gods and we all decided that the audience would never be able to keep track of who they were and what they did, but also because we all felt that one aspect of Gilgamesh's journey is that he discovers that his destiny relies more on his personal actions than on divine intervention. I also added a hymn to Uruk that I thought captured the last lines of the tablet pretty well and an epilogue: at the time, I didn't know who was going to speak it but I've tried it a couple of different ways since this draft.
By August, several of the elements had begun to be set in the script: the beginning has changed very little but the ending is still not working. I tried splitting up the Epilogue to all of the actors and the flood story is dramatically shorter. However, by the next month, the bathing ritual has been moved to later in the play (over a series of rewrites to follow, it would be removed entirely and then ultimately returned to a few different places to see if it could be salvaged). I made an attempt to bring Enkidu back into the story (he had died several tablet earlier and the rule was—essentially—that "dead is dead" and he couldn't be brought back into the story) by having Gilgamesh see his statue come to life in a vision: that didn't fly.
A new year, a new draft. The changes are smaller except that I tried to merge Enkidu with the snake in the vision and make the scene a duet with the people of Uruk in which they admonish Gilgamesh to return home (an interesting idea, but it was not to be). The bathing ritual has been integrated into the homecoming at Uruk, which I really like and hope it will stay here. Ishtar has the epilogue now in an attempt to bookend the production (Juanita Rockwell's Tablet 1 begins with Ishtar addressing the audience); I didn't love it and neither did anyone else.
The current draft. The vision is gone entirely; now it is very much the way it is in the source material: a snake steals the last hope of immortality from Gilgamesh—period. The journey home has been dramatically truncated and the epilogue has been returned to Gilgamesh. I am, for the most part, pleased with where it is now.

There will be more changes but I think they'll be more tweaks than rewrites.

Interesting Headlines I Can't Really Read

2010-08-21T11:11:00.004-04:00

elpais.es: Un gran toro humano en Bilbao contra las corridas
In this instance, a picture is worth a thousand words.

The story is here in English.
photo: Luis Alberto García

ELO vs. The Supremes

2010-08-16T19:52:00.006-04:00

There are a number of great mash-ups on the Go Home Productions website. I'd already heard the exceptional collision of Blondie's Rapture and The Doors' Riders on the Storm. But Catherine stumbled across this one a little while ago and while it may be called Supreme Evil, it's actually sublime (and there's even a cameo appearance from another fine artist in the middle).

Smells Like Rockin' Robin, however, is more than a little disturbing to me...

Defying Gravity

2010-08-07T15:03:00.002-04:00

I came across this photo, a collaboration between the artists Philippe Halsman and Salvadore Dalí, in an article on Flavorwire, Go Ahead and Jump: Philippe Halsman’s Iconic Photos. The text on the first page would lead one to believe that this photo, like the others in the series, are merely the artist taking advantage of what a camera does best: capturing a split second of action, freezing an instant too brief to really be appreciated by the human eye in real time. That would be utterly incorrect, of course: the photo is actually a masterpiece of planning and, ultimately, retouching. To see how it was done, take a look at the unretouched image on Wikipedia.

Red Over Red

2010-07-31T09:33:00.020-04:00

Considering that the piece explores airline disasters and phobias, I was surprised that I didn't find 31 Down's Red Over Red more disturbing. That's just an observation, mind you, not a criticism: it's an excellent production, aurally and visually engaging with finely-crafted understated performances by all four of the actors.

Oh, don't get me wrong: it's an unsettling piece. The already highly-fragmented story is fractured even further, especially in the first third of the performance as director Shannon Sindelar and lighting designer Jon Luton reveal characters and action by punctuating periods of blackness with intensely short bursts of sculpted light. The experience is made all the more disconcerting by the fact that Ryan Holsopple's layered soundscape—which has at its base the distorted roar of jet engines, naturally—is a constant throughout: the stage may be totally dark for extended intervals but it is almost never silent. The script by Sindelar and Holsopple is sparse—most of the dialogue comes in a series of short, two-hand scenes, 10-12 lines in all, in which the characters speak in single sentences—and yet it illuminates the individuals as precisely as the lighting effects: we don't learn much about the people but what we do identifies them and their place in the story quite specifically. Live feed video projected onto a long strip of a screen suspended over the stage—duet scenes of a pilot and flight attendant (DJ Mendel and Shauna Kelly) in an airliner bathroom, transcripts of dialogue between the pilot's wife and an air traffic controller (Caitlin McDonough-Thayer and Holsopple), and a cleverly-engineered panning shot of a miniature jet in flight—enhance the disconnection between the reality on stage and the stage reality: we're constantly aware of all of the theatrical devices and how they are being used.

All of these elements combine to form a unique whole: theatrically piecemeal and yet the overall experience is completely immersive; from beginning to end, there's never an empty moment. The performances are all strong and are well-supported by the direction and design. Red Over Red is a skillfully-crafted work that ably illustrates the kind of challenging and engaging, yet still accessible, sort of theater that 31 Down is creating: get down to the Incubator at St. Marks' and check it out.

photo by Sue Kessler

What We'd Be Seeing in Philadelphia...

2010-07-25T12:41:00.031-04:00

...if Catherine and I were going to the Live Arts Festival this year. Unfortunately, it's not looking good for us right now. Nevertheless, I've decided go ahead and pick out the shows that we'd probably attend if we went down the first weekend—September 3-5. It may seem a little like a pointless and ultimately frustrating task but this year's festival looks especially good and I really enjoy the planning of this trip. And, of course, if our financial situation changes, we'll actually have a plan ready to implement.

Friday, September 3
7:00 pm: Cankerblossom by Pig Iron Theatre Company
10:00 pm: Freedom Club by New Paradise Laboratories and The Riot Group
This, for Catherine and me, is the quintessential Philadelphia theater night: two of our favorite companies that we first discovered in the Live Arts Festival almost a decade ago and that we rarely get to see outside of Philly (we've been to a couple of Pig Iron shows here in NYC). A great way to start the festival!

Saturday, September 4
4:00 pm: Sanctuary by Brian Sanders/JUNK. We really liked last year's Urban Scuba, which was performed in an abandoned swimming pool; this time around, the stage is a 14 x 120 foot wall... how could we possibly miss that?

Then we have a dilemma:
7:00 pm: Chicken by Charlotte Ford is directed by our friend, Geoff Sobelle (he and Charlotte also appeared in Pig Iron's excellent Welcome to Yuba City in 2009). I have no doubt that it's going to be a fantastic performance. However...
7:00 pm: Peter Weiss' ...Marat/Sade..." by EgoPo is being performed at The Rotunda—one of the most interesting spaces in Philadelphia and a great location for this play—and I've heard many wonderful things about the company. Plus, while I've never seen the play, Catherine was in a transformative production in Dallas shortly before she moved to New York so I know she'd love to see how this one is done.

But wait: there are two more conflicts!
9:00 pm: TAKES by Nichole Canuso Dance Company. I've never seen the company but the description of this dance/video installation/film production—it's viewable from 360º and the audience is invited to wander about during the performance—makes me really want to see it.
10:00 pm: Portmanteau by Applied Mechanics. While the description of the piece doesn't really excite me (it sounds a little improvisatory, which can be either excellent or deadly... more often, I find it's deadly), the novelty of a show that's in a different space for every performance is intriguing. If it just started 30 minutes later, I'd probably take a chance on it; as it is, I'd probably lean toward TAKES instead.

Sunday, September 5
11:00 am: AFOOT!:Northern Liberties by Brothers Cromie. There's a lot of opportunity in the walking tour production... and a lot of opportunity for disaster (if it's tightly scripted and rehearsed, it can be amazing; if it's too improvised it can just be a mess). I'd give this one a try...
12:00-2:30 pm: TAKES Daytime Installation. This one is negotiable for me: it would probably depend on whether or not we liked the show the night before.
3:00 pm: Samuel Beckett's First Love performed by Gare St Lazare Players/Conor Lovett. I don't know that I need to explain much about this one: it just sounds like a fantastic production and performance.

Sadly, there are several performances that we'd still be missing. Lucinda Childs' Dance is only the second weekend, as is Nature Theater of Oklahoma's take on Romeo and Juliet, which Catherine and I missed here in NYC. Elevator Repair Service's The Sun Also Rises (The Select) based on the novel by Ernest Hemingway is only the final weekend but that will be coming to New York Theatre Workshop some time in the future, so I'll have another shot at that one; I'll also have more opportunities to see Stew and the Negro Problem with Heidi Rodewald. Judith/Dresses/Joe by Parade Ground Unit is an intriguing idea that I'd probably see if was playing the first weekend; I think I'm probably as drawn to Depravity Productions' Fugue State by the fact that it's in The Rotunda as by its description but I might give it a try if I got better information; and Insectinside by Grounded Aerial also looks like great fun.

Here's a map for the shows above:

View Philly Fringe 2010 in a larger map

Now if only we can just save up our pennies over the next month.... Time will tell...

Upcoming Theater: 31 Down

2010-07-16T19:33:00.007-04:00

I've written here before about 31 Down and how much I admire their aesthetic. If you haven't yet had a chance to experience one of their shows, now's your chance: they're performing their latest, Red Over Red, in the Incubator Arts Project from July 22 - August 7th. Ordinarily, I would avoid any play that the artists describe as a "loud meditation on paranoia and premonition surrounding plane crashes" like the plague—I don't mind the loud part (I might be disappointed if a 31 Down production wasn't loud) but I already hate air travel and the idea of seeing a play that's actually about plane crashes is definitely not on my list of fun ways to spend an evening; it's how I've managed to make it over a decade without seeing Charlie Victor Romeo even though it's supposed to be an excellent show... and why I'm okay with that. Regardless, for 31 Down, I'm going to suck it up and go; I'm sure it'll be worth the anxiety I'll have whenever I fly from now on...

It's Important to Know When

2010-07-15T09:49:00.011-04:00

I think all of us struggle with this question, some of us daily: we believe we know the proper course of action in a given situation but there's always that nagging doubt that prevents us from executing our plans. Fortunately, Blame It On The Voices has devised a handy little flow chart to guide us through the most challenging decision: when to whip it:

Thanks to my friend, Dawn Stoppiello, for posting this to her Facebook page!

Yes, folks: I'm finally back... between my broken ankle, day job, and some video and theater projects, I just haven't felt that I could devote the time I'd like to posts. I'll try to do much better going forward.

Objectivism Redux (Pardon Me: I Just Threw Up in My Mouth)

2010-04-01T21:30:00.018-04:00

Twenty-odd years ago, I had a quintessential NYC transit experience riding on a crowded subway. I looked up from my book and saw an attractive woman a ways down the car from me who was reading the same book, same edition: the Signet paperback of Ayn Rand's Atlas Shrugged. Had I been bolder in my youth (as I am today... yeah, right...), I would have made my across the car and attempted to strike up a conversation with the young lady. Sadly, I was especially shy when it came to meeting women and, when her stop came, she exited without my ever speaking to her. As Mr. Bernstein says so eloquently in Citizen Kane, "I only saw her for one second. She didn't see me at all, but I'll bet a month hasn't gone by since that I haven't thought of that girl."

I say this not with regret (I couldn't ask for a better outcome in my life, romantically-speaking, as anyone who knows Catherine and me can attest) but because I was reminded of this event today when I spied this article in Locus Online. To be quite honest, I didn't actually care much for Atlas Shrugged—as a philosopher, I respectfully think that Ms. Rand is full of it; as a writer, I think The Fountainhead is a better story—but if there IS going to be an authorized sequel, I'd be interested to read it, even it is more likely literary rubbernecking.

Fine Jewelry from a Friend You Can Trust

2010-03-22T15:11:00.009-04:00

While my budget does not allow for much in the way of luxury purchases—if Catherine and I are going to splurge, it's usually going to be on travel—I do appreciate the finer things in life.

One of our good friends and a long-time Peculiar Works supporter, Dale Fournier, has built a very nice business as a purveyor of new and antique fine jewelry. Since my only shirt that requires cuff links is a tuxedo shirt (which I have worn exactly once, to the wedding for which I bought it) and I'm not big on wearing rings, I'm particularly drawn to the antique wristwatches on her site—I have always preferred the look of the square and asymmetrical-shaped watches and a leather band. I'm no judge of women's jewelry—although I think know Catherine's tastes pretty well, I'd still be reticent to buy anything for her without her guidance—but there are some quite lovely pieces for the ladies, too.

The Return of "The Gonzalez Cantata"

2010-03-21T09:38:00.013-04:00

Since we saw it in the Philadelphia Fringe last September, I've been hoping that this piece would make its way to New York. I wish I could go to the concert at Bard College—I broke my ankle on February 10th so my ability to travel is severely limited for the next couple of months; as much as I enjoyed the experience in the Rotunda, I'm sure the acoustics in a concert hall will showcase Melissa Dunphy's music and libretto even better. I keep checking periodically to see if I'll haven an opportunity to hear it again (or perhaps even something new); I can think of one or two great venues here in the City for the piece. Regardless, if you're a fan of classical music or if you just appreciate good political commentary with a wicked sense of humor, don't miss this opportunity.

Is This The Opposite of Queen?

2010-03-13T18:33:00.009-05:00

Maybe, but it's still fun, especially if you compare it to the original video. Catherine found this on Flavorwire: enjoy!

Top Secret: The Battle for the Pentagon Papers

2010-03-07T12:58:00.015-05:00

Was it mere synchronicity that Catherine and I stayed up late a few nights ago watching the last half of All the President's Men again for the I-don't-know-how-many-th time? Of course, but I think it may also have affected our experience a bit at the New York Theatre Workshop's production of Top Secret: The Battle for the Pentagon Papers. Not that the play isn't enjoyable—it is; but the text here, by Geoffrey Cowan and Leroy Aarons, doesn't have the sense of immediacy that make Alan J. Pakula's film so timeless. While the personal stakes for the staff of The Washington Post and owner Katherine Graham in their publication of the Pentagon Papers were incredibly high and the history is absolutely fascinating—I knew The New York Times' role in the events but almost nothing about the Post's—the two-dimensional quality to this production keep it from being entirely successful.

To be fair, this lack of dimension is entirely intentional: Top Secret is a radio play performed live, with actors onstage creating foley sound effects. And a very good radio play it is, too: the original sound design by Lindsay Jones serves the conceit exceptionally well. But this device also allows us to distance ourselves from the characters and events that we are watching: we're supposed to see the actors as actors, reading into microphones from scripts they hold in their hands (although, to everyone's credit, a lot of the key dialogue is clearly memorized). No matter how strong the performances—and the performances are all uniformly strong—there is an inherent disconnect that makes the piece more like a documentary than events that we are witnessing unfold before us.

The script may also suffer from so much of it having been taken from personal memoirs, or at least frequently sounding as though it was. Some of Katherine Graham's narrations, especially, do little more than provide a writer-ly device to bridge the gaps between dialogue scenes. It's a shame, to0, because we get occasional hints at her personal "coming of age in the newspaper industry" story that might have been a wonderful framing device for the piece; instead, she merely offers us a "looking back on it all now" perspective that is less powerful and reinforces our detachment from what we are watching. I must say, however, that Kathryn Meisle has created a fully-realized and incredibly engaging character, in spite of these limitations.

Peter Strauss gives an excellent performance as Post editor Ben Bradlee, completely and naturally capturing Bradlee's mannerisms, style of speaking and humor. Larry Bryggman, James Gleason and Matt McGrath have a wonderful scene as the three reporters who are given less than a day to pour through the 4,000 pages of reports to find a story for the Post to publish (the Times had 3 months to come up with their series). And Jack Gilpin does a very nice job as the paper's defense attorney, Bryan Kelly. Director John Rubinstein keeps the pace moving pretty well; I wish it could have been a 90-minute, no intermission production (in fact, I wish every production I see could be that), but I think that would require text editing more than anything else.

The play is at it's most engaging in the trial scene that dominates Act II. The authors have done a very good job of editing down the transcripts from the hearing where Kelly defends the Post against the government's charges that publishing the texts runs counter to our national security interests into a series of swiftly moving and tightly constructed scenes. If the rest of the piece matched that energy and tension, it might have been a powerful drama. Instead, it's a really nice, big spoonful of sugar that helps the history lesson go down.

Philadelphia Live Arts 2010: Coming Attractions

2010-03-02T17:55:00.018-05:00

The Philadelphia Live Arts Festival has announced the centerpiece of this year's festival: Dance by Lucinda Childs with music by Philip Glass and film by Sol LeWitt. Coincidentally, Catherine and I just saw the film by itself last year at the Whitney. This is big coup for the festival—they've had big name artists before but these are huge names! I'm really hoping we'll get to go this September: I've never seen Lucinda Childs' choreography performed live and I'd really like to see how all of these elements will integrate onstage this September. Plus, everyone knows how much Catherine and I love our Philly getaways!

Photo by Stephanie Berger.

Sampling or Stealing?

2010-02-28T12:33:00.030-05:00

Lionel Trilling famously said, "Immature artists imitate. Mature artists steal."

Not so in Germany this week—17-year-old writer Helene Hegemann has admitted that she lifted entire passages from a young Berliner's blog about his hedonistic life in the techno club scene for her debut novel, Axolotl Roadkill. I first read the story earlier this week in Spiegel Online (the English edition, I don't read German). In today's Times, I found another article that attempted to put the story into a broader context with opinions from a variety of industry professionals.

I know that plenty of my writer friends will disagree with me on this, but I'm not a purist when it comes to copyright laws and fair use. The majority of the changes that have been made to these laws in the past half century were done to protect corporate copyrights, not artists: The Walt Disney Company couldn't have cared less that George Bernard Shaw's plays were due to become public domain this year but they couldn't let that happen to Mickey Mouse! Nevertheless, I firmly believe that an artist should control how and in what context their work is presented and that no one should be allowed to profit from the fruits of someone else's labors.

I've used appropriated texts on a number of occasions in my plays. In my first one, Before I Wake, a doctor offers the audience several facts about the blood and circulation (the play is an adaptation of Dracula); the speeches are all reworked from a book I found on the subject. While I believe my changes to the original text are significant, I would never dream of publishing the play without getting permission or approval from the copyright holder; and even if the original material was in the public domain, I would still offer some sort of attribution or acknowledgment of the source material—it's not like I could have done the job without that contribution!

I don't think that any use of copyrighted material in the creation of a new work is evil or bad—unless it's being done without permission or with the intention of deceiving others about the actual authorship. Danger Mouse's The Grey Album, for example, fails the first test (even if you believe that he had not intended for the album to reach the public, he did do all of the work without permission) but passes the second—the entire point of the album was that the songs were recognizable as remixes of work created by others. Helene Hegemann, on the other hand, fails on both counts; sure, she and her publisher are "attributing" her appropriated text—now that they've been caught—but if they truly felt all along that she had done nothing wrong, why not have that attribution in place in the first edition? It seems pretty clear that Hegemann, at the very least, is more than a tad disingenuous when she says, "I can't understand what all the fuss is about."

There are Bad Times Just Around The Corner

2010-02-12T21:05:00.034-05:00

I've long wondered why "relationship plays" are so popular. If you're not familiar with this category in theater, let me enlighten you: a central character—usually a woman, but occasionally a man—in a long-term, monogamous relationship has some unexpected experience that ignites a spark of doubt about that relationship and in the choices s/he has made in life. Very often, it's meeting someone of the opposite sex (or of the same sex, in a few instances) who arouses dormant feelings that this character had suppressed or thought were being met by their partner or by their career or family or what-have-y0u. Our hero/ine attempts to ignore these feelings but eventually the recognition that life is not as fulfilling as s/he once believed it would be is overwhelming and a dramatic, perhaps even drastic, event occurs that changes the character forever. The details may differ but I find the basic plot points to be fairly consistent.

As a rule, Catherine and I are not fans of these sorts of plays. The central characters in them tend to be whiners of the "I can't believe my life turned out like this" variety (read: annoying). The spouse/partner is usually completely—even blissfully—unaware of the other's disaffection, which only makes the whiner more whiney (even when the partner is actually nothing to complain about, unless you're really nit-picking... or trying to find something to complain about). There's a whole family of stock characters that go into these works: the male friend (usually heterosexual) who is boorish and uses hateful, sexist remarks to mask his deep, personal insecurities; the male friend (usually homosexual—and usually partnerless, to make him "safe" for mainstream audiences) who is witty and clever and always ready with a shoulder to cry on; the female friend who is the foil to the boorish hetero—urbane and sophisticated with a wicked sense of humor but who is also dissatisfied with her life.

I just don't know why anyone writes these plays—is it therapeutic for them? Do they actually like this sort of thing? More to the point, I don't know why people want to see anything like this (for Catherine and me, it's usually an assignment or a friend in the cast). And I'd say I don't know why anyone produces them but, actually, I do: because audiences turn out for them.

In the past month, Catherine and I saw two plays that, I think, qualify as relationship plays: one that reinforced my dislike of them and another that made me realize, "No: it can be done well!"

The reinforcer was Lucinda Coxton's Happy Now? at Primary Stages. Ironically, there are many things I liked about this production and even about Coxton's writing: the dialogue is well-crafted and the characters are quite funny; I might not have cared for this particular play but I would be interested to see something else by her. The cast is all quite good and, in many instances, I felt that their characterizations glossed over some of the weaknesses in the script; I especially liked Mary Bacon in the lead role (she brought a quirkiness and energy to the character that made the whininess bearable, for the most part) and C.J. Wilson as the middle-aged, schlubby pick-up artist who sets the action of the play into motion—the most conventionally pathetic individual onstage, Wilson brought out the character's unexpected sagacity and charm that Coxton's script requires. While director Liz Diamond did a good job with the staging and using the minimal set pieces to create a variety of different locations in the play, the pace was quite slow—the production came in at two and half hours and I think it could easily be 15-20 minutes shorter. I was a little surprised by this because Diamond brilliantly directed one of my favorite productions of all time—Suzan-Lori Parks' The Death of the Last Black Man in the Whole Entire World at Yale Rep; her ability to realize the fantastic imagery, beautiful poetry and frenetic energy of that play absolutely blew me away. Ultimately, Happy Now? is one of those plays that inspires me to offer the pretty obvious response to its title: no, not really.

Kneehigh Theatre's Brief Encounter, by contrast, proved that it is possible to do a play about people second-guessing their lives and the choices they've made without falling into the cliches of the contemporary relationship play. To be fair, it helps to start with a script adapted from Noël Coward's 1945 film classic (which was itself expanded from his short play, Still Life). It also helps to have Emma Rice, Kneehigh's exceptionally talented artistic director, adapting Coward and manning the production; I've made no secret of the fact that I'm a huge fan of her and her company. Here, they've artfully blended theater, live music and film into an unconventional and highly theatrical performance. Why does Brief Encounter work better than other relationship plays? Perhaps it's the emotional heights the cast is able to scale—their performances are that 1940s-style movie naturalism/melodrama exaggerated to operatic levels. Perhaps it's the theatricality of the production in which the cast of 10 actors play a number of roles, supply the musical underscoring on various instruments throughout the performance, as well as the spontaneous breaks into classic Coward songs* between scenes—an homage to Tonight at 8:30, the evening of one-acts in which Still Life premiered. Or perhaps it's because the tragedy in this play is that most people will never experience the kind of intense passion and romance that the central characters do, let alone have an opportunity to bemoan its unfortunate timing. They may be sadder by play's end but they're also wiser: an old-fashioned conceit, to be sure, but it felt to me like a breath of fresh air.

Kneehigh Theatre's Brief Encounter photo by Steve Tanner.

*Although not the one from which this post takes its title

Now You See It...

2010-01-28T22:08:00.024-05:00

I read today that the Institute for Contemporary Arts in London may close this spring. Obviously, since I don't live in London (or even visit it more than once a decade), the direct impact of this news on me personally isn't all that dramatic. But both times we were in London, the ICA gave Catherine and me two of our best theater experiences on those trips.

We discovered the ICA by accident. On our honeymoon, in 1993, we poured over Time Out and What's On (which seems to be defunct now) to find as many different kinds of theatre experiences as we could cram into 7 days. One production that was highly recommended in both publications was by a company out of Sheffield, Forced Entertainment, performing at the ICA. The minute we arrived, we could tell that the ICA was our kind of arts venue: it had galleries, spaces for performances, film screening rooms, extensive arts education programs, and a nice big bar that was absolutely packed the night we attended (which I think was a Wednesday—not an evening that most joints are jumpin'). On top of that, the production we saw, Club of No Regrets, was absolutely fantastic: an incredibly savage and brutal play in which a kidnapper forces her captives to perform for her enjoyment. The acting was so simple and yet so raw—sometimes forcing me to lean forward to try to understand the almost mumbled poetry before exploding again in vicious attack after vicious attack; the imagery that the director, Tim Etchells, and the ensemble created was so original, so vivid, so beautifully horrible: it still ranks among my all-time favorite theater experiences.

Our second ICA experience, in 2004, was ATC's production, Jeff Koons. Rainald Goetz's play is not about the artist: it's about the art... or at least the process involved in making the art. Using very koosely-connected vignettes, he offers brief glimpses into the creative process from inspiration to execution. It was an ambitious project that wasn't always successful—the threads between the storylines were occasionally too strained—but Gordon Anderson and designer Becs Andrew created a stunning environment for the work that visually complemented the script. Nevertheless, Catherine and I both thoroughly enjoyed the production and, to this day, we can't go into a New York deli without being reminded of one of the primary images: an enormous Koonsian recreation of a Kinder Surprise.

Needless to say, I don't want to see any arts venue disappear forever. I've got a special fondness for the ICA; I'd hate it if, on our next visit, it was no longer there.

Downtown Local Making All Stops: Eagle Nebulae Next

2010-01-22T17:48:00.007-05:00

If you want the Orion Nebulae, get back off and go across the platform for the uptown.

Seriously, I think this is a great illustration of our Milky Way galaxy. The two posts—on Flavorpill and Gizmodo—that led me to Samuel Arbesman's original posting felt it necessary to treat the reader like an moron and point out where our solar system is on the map. I give readers of the Interlude much more credit and assume you all know how to find us. If you don't know, though, I've just told you where to find the answer... and you're not a moron: it just so happens that that was literally the first thing we learned in my college astronomy class.

The Interlude Becomes Less Egalitarian

2010-01-13T23:28:00.006-05:00

I had to start moderating comments: some spammer posted a comment with multiple links to an Asian porn site. I prefer the unfiltered commentary—and will endeavor to keep it absolutely open, even if someone wants to say something I might personally dislike—but I don't want to allow those bastards even a few seconds of success on my nickle. I'll try to make sure that comments are posted as quickly as possible... unless you're a spammer/porn merchant, of course.

NYC Theatre Companies: How NOT to Discount Tickets

2010-01-11T23:40:00.005-05:00

Because Catherine and I go to see so many plays and concerts, we have to plan our schedules pretty carefully. This month, there's a lot for us to juggle with the Under the Radar, Coil and Culturemart festivals, in addition to seeing productions by or featuring our friends. Since the performance times for many of these festival shows are irregular, it's made advance planning even more critical. So, last week, we sat down with our calendars and tried to figure out which shows we'd see on which nights. Once we'd gotten it all worked out, we went ahead and bought tickets online for many of them.

Imagine our consternation when we received e-mails a few days later offering discounted tickets to two of those productions.

Now, I don't have any problem with a company offering discounted tickets: I use discount codes all the time that I get from my friends and I'm a member of Goldstar which offers a lot of excellent deals for theatre, dance, comedy and music performances. But most often, the discount offers I get are to encourage early purchases: the pitch is usually, "buy your ticket by X date and it's only $10" or something. New Georges is especially good at rewarding their regular patrons this way, as is Flux Theatre Ensemble. The e-mails I received last week, however, made me feel like a chump: I could have waited until the last minute to commit to seeing these shows and saved a fairly significant amount of money. I mean, neither show was sold out, so it's not like I wouldn't have gotten a seat: after all, that's why the discounts were offered.

As a producer, I know the value of a full house. Sure, we need the money from admissions to help cover our costs but as important to me is that I'm making the art to be seen: empty seats are missed opportunities. I'd rather have someone pay even a percentage of the full price than have them stay at home. But I also don't want my loyal patrons to be penalized: in fact, I'd like to reward them for being loyal. This is what New Georges and several other NYC companies do with their e-mail discounts and pay-what-you-can nights throughout the run.

Am I done buying my tickets in advance? No, because for every instance that I get burned like this there'll be another when I would not have gotten to see the show otherwise. But there are a few companies that may not know I'm coming until the last possible minute... maybe even when I show up unexpectedly at the box office.

Thangyew—thangyew vurrymuch!

2010-01-08T16:32:00.006-05:00

Elvis would have been 75 today. The onine music mag, NME, has collected 75 factoids about The King that I found... well, some of them are a little disturbing; others are just kinda stupid. My favorite Internet radio station has been playing some of his best songs all day long (as well as some by David Bowie, who turned 63 today... and somehow still looks a helluvalot better than I ever will...); I have decided to offer one of my personal faves:

Suspicious Minds - Elvis Presl...

Elvis may have left the building but his music still fills the hall.

Sleep No More

2009-12-14T00:09:00.019-05:00

Alfred Hitchcock famously explained the difference between surprise and suspense by describing a scene in which two men are seated at a table, talking about sports. If a bomb hidden under the table suddenly explodes during their conversation, that’s a surprise: a few shocking seconds and it’s over. If the audience is shown the device at the beginning of the scene and then watches the discussion intercut with shots of the ticking timer, that’s suspense; it makes a relatively benign episode feel richer and more complex as every moment becomes more highly charged.

That was very much the sensation I felt standing in an enormous, regally-appointed bedroom watching the Scottish king, Duncan, prepare himself for bed in Punchdrunk Theatre’s Sleep No More: I couldn’t see the ticking bomb but I knew there was an explosion coming. Suddenly, a man sitting down in a chair to take off his shoes and socks, pulling back the bed covers and climbing between the sheets was riveting. Knowing what was coming next didn’t change the sense of anticipation I felt in the long moments after he had settled himself in and drifted off to sleep… until finally a door opened and someone entered from the hallway. Duncan’s host, Macbeth, made his way stealthily through the two dozen or so audience members, crawled slowly up onto the bed, raised himself up over the sleeping king, picked up one of the nearby pillows and… realized his vaulting ambition.

About an hour later, in another room on the opposite end of the Old Lincoln School’s second floor, I felt the tension again. Following an intensely passionate and physically violent dance duet, Macbeth had left his wife alone in their bedroom. For several long minutes, the room was filled with nervous energy as Lady Macbeth moved anxiously among the crowd like a caged animal, starting at every sound from the hallway. It was only after her husband returned, his hands and clothes bloodied, and she had stripped him down, bathed him in the claw-footed tub in the middle of the room and settled him into their bed with her that the tension began to dissipate somewhat… until we heard the cry of alarum down the hall that King Duncan had just been murdered in his bed.

This is one of the many joys of Sleep No More: if you’re a lucky audience member, you get to be in two places at the same time, metaphorically speaking. And if you miss an event, there’s a pretty good chance you’ll get another opportunity to see it later.

I think the production is best described as a performed installation: you’re allowed to wander wherever you wish through the dozens of rooms on four floors of the school building that have been meticulously designed and decorated. Some have been converted into libraries, bedrooms, dining rooms and studies like you might find in an English manor house; some seem to be more institutional, like the large room turned into a hospital ward or the one next to it with rows of bathtubs along the walls; still others are more abstract or idiosyncratic creations, like the one with the maze of sheets that leads to a statue of a howling dog or the one filled floor-to-ceiling shelves of taxidermied animals. Along the way, you encounter a variety of characters that you may follow, if you like; stay with any one long enough and you’ll eventually encounter more characters and, ultimately, wind up in the great auditorium that serves as banquet hall and Birnam Wood (complete with mobile trees). Most of the performances involve only one or two characters and since many of them occur simultaneously in different rooms, you’re not going to see everything and it’s okay: you’re not supposed to.

What Sleep No More is not is a production of Macbeth, so if you go expecting that, you may be disappointed. Yes, many of the plot points and characters are here but not a word of dialogue, Shakespearean or otherwise: it’s as much a dance piece as theater. It’s also been mashed-up with elements from the classic Hitchcock film, Rebecca: Mrs. Danvers and the Second Mrs. DeWinter are featured prominently in a few instances (sadly, Catherine and I caught only a couple of them). The two sources actually provide a nice counterpoint to one another—two stories that display the opposite extremes of ambition presented in a single, gloomy (and more than a little surreal) environment. I don’t think you have to know Macbeth well to be able to enjoy the piece but reading a summary of the plot in advance is a good idea: it'll make it a lot more fun and much easier to recognize the bombs.

The performances are all uniformly strong. Eric Jackson-Bradley and Tori Sparks’s frenetic and sadistic duet as the Macbeths was amazing, if somewhat frightening: they darted among the audience, tossed one another around, slammed into walls and leapt onto furniture with an abandon that would have been discomfiting even in if they hadn’t been inches away from us. The soundscape, designed by Stephen Dobbie, plays like a soundtrack throughout the event (and, in fact, incorporates several musical motifs and excerpts from Rebecca and Psycho); it’s also how the actors receive their cues for all of their individual and group scenes (as far as I could tell, there is never a moment when anyone is “off stage”).

Catherine and I had been wanting to see a Punchdrunk performance for many years now; I’m happy to say that Sleep No More lived up to and even surpassed many of our expectations. The production more than compensated for the lousy trip we had getting to Boston (the almost two hour delay caused by a defective locomotive on our train sorely tested my love of rail travel). I have to applaud Diane Paulus for bringing their work to the U.S.; it’s an auspicious beginning to her tenure at A.R.T.

Photos by Stephen Dobbie and Lindsay Nolin.

Rings Running 'Round the Earth

2009-12-10T16:01:00.007-05:00

Kottke.org has pulled a screenshot from the video of the rings as they might appear from Manhattan, too.

Interesting Headlines I Can't Really Read

2009-11-20T16:26:00.019-05:00

liberation.fr: Agnès Varda sur la route des Oscars
I include this not because it's funny but because Catherine and I really loved this film, Les Plages d'Agnés (The Beaches of Agnés). It was the first of her films we'd seen although, completely coincidentally, we'd just seen The Umbrellas of Cherbourg a few weeks earlier (it was directed by her late husband, Jacques Demy). The Beaches of Agnés deserves to be in the running for an Academy Award: it's a beautifully shot, simply told and compelling film autobiography—I don't think it's out on DVD yet but I plan to get a copy when it is. That said, I should 'fess up that we've actually had another of her films, La Pointe Courte, sitting next to our DVD player from Netflix since August 17... I'm sure we'll get around to watching it... eventually...

lemonde.fr: Sexe et mort au "Vieux Carré"
Again, I don't have a joke here because this is something I'd very much like to see: The Wooster Group's take on Tennessee Williams' most autobiographical play. Yet another reason I wish that I was in Paris (like I need any more reasons!). There's no indication on their websites as to when it will be in NYC but I expect that Catherine and I will be there if we can.

elmundo.es: Oprah Winfrey: 'Dejo el programa porque ya me siento satisfecha'.
As long as Oprah feels satisfied, I'm satisfied. Otis Redding, on the other hand, still can't get no.

Wooster Group photo by Edward Mac Keaney

Europe Becomes More Fabulous

2009-11-14T08:53:00.039-05:00

My friend, Modern Fabulousity, leaves Monday on a European adventure, with stops in London, Bulgaria and Romania. It's a swift trip—he's in Bulgaria and Romania for just a few days on theater business* and he's got a scant 24 hours in London. I'm selfishly hoping that he won't tucker himself out every day so that he can share with us some highlights of the sights, sounds and smells he encounters in his travels.

In his post announcing the trip, he asked for suggestions of non-touristy things to do and see in London. Being an inveterate coffee overachiever, I ignored the fact that he's only in town for a day and that he's already got tickets for a play (and, based on the website banner alone, ModFab was destined to be at this performance); I spat out a list of theaters and museums that I most want to revisit the next time I'm in London. Fortunately, he's got Fabbers galore there who can give him more appropriate advice on what he can do in less than a day (I imagine that even ModFab would be slightly less Fab—but no less Mod—if he goes 24 hours without sleep after a 7-hour plane ride... however, he might very well surprise me).

So now that I've calmed myself down and cut back to just one cup a day, my mind is clear enough to answer: where would I go in London if I had only one day?

In every city we visit, Catherine and I wind up in a museum (and often in two or three, when we can). London's Tate Modern has a fantastic collection of modern art (our preference) and the repurposed power station that houses it is, by itself, a spectacular experience; however, it's not a short visit: we generally limit ourselves to three hours at a museum—otherwise, we'd never get to see anything else—but this was one of a couple of times we could easily have gone much longer. On our last trip, we loved The Dalí Universe (a much smaller and, obviously, more specific collection) and were able to breeze through The British Library's rare books and manuscripts exhibits and sample a few of the audio recordings by famous Britons in about 90 minutes.

London, like New York, is a theatre-lovers paradise: both times we've visited, we saw a performance every single day. The artists' collective, Shunt, is a current favorite and, coincidentally, they have a piece running now. When we saw their production, Tropicana, they were performing in the vaults of the London Bridge; their latest project, Money, is being presented in a 3-story tobacco warehouse nearby and sounds like it's as awe-inspiring as the show we saw. We've also seen a couple of excellent productions at the ICA on The Mall; based on their website, they appear to be focusing more on music and film than theatre at the moment. While I might go for a concert if I'm only in a town for a day, I doubt I'd make the time for a movie, even one I might not be able to see on a big screen here in the U.S., but I might go for a nightcap at their bar.

In terms of food and drink, I'm afraid I can make better recommendations for Philadelphia than I can for London. I'm not referring to the old saw that English food sucks (I don't personally find it to be true) but to the fact that we visit Philly pretty regularly and have only been to London twice. Our friend, Andrew, and his partner, Pano, took us to a place near their home on Drury Lane that, according to Google maps, is called My Old Dutch but I don't think that's what it was in 2004. Most of the restaurants we've frequented in London have either been pubs or, on our last visit, chain restaurants. However, that was also the trip that we stumbled into the Punch Tavern on Fleet Street, where we were served a hot meal and a tasty pint or two that compensated pretty well for the cold and rainy afternoon outside. A local might certainly know the better kept secrets in the neighborhood but after pushing past one Pizza Express or Pret a Manger after another, it was absolutely perfect for us.

One of the joys of London, or any other large metropolis, is that just walking around the city is entertaining. Not only is it an inexpensive way to take in the sites but it's a great opportunity to see how people go about their daily lives; it's sort of the reverse of what I do in New York as I walk around and watch tourists enjoying my city. I'm not a shopper, so going into stores doesn't much interest me; but I always enjoy looking in windows, seeing what things cost and what makes it into a shop display. The one exception to this rule would be book stores, which I dearly love—especially used books. Unfortunately, the many book sellers that once populated Charing Cross Road have begun disappearing in recent years; still, there are enough specialty and antique stores remaining to make it worth an hour out of the day to wander the few short blocks between Charing Cross station and Leicester Square.

Those are my highlights for a day in London. Given a little more prep time and the proper guide book, I could probably come up with dozens more and better options; these are the ones that occur to me immediately. Perhaps I can convince my more widely-traveled friend, Caroline, to contribute her thoughts on this and other cities.

*I hope, of course, that he'll get to spend more of his time meeting other artists and actually watching performances than listening to panel discussions about theater. I find, invariably, that the person who gets to say the least on a panel is the one whose opinion I find most interesting. And don't get me started on the audience members: I dread the moment when the moderator "opens it up for questions:" this is code for "whoever gets the floor may now force us all to hear why they could have been on this panel, too."

Now you know why I made this a footnote: I can go on and on about why I'm not a fan of theater panel discussions.

Why I'm a Railfan

2009-11-08T10:30:00.022-05:00

While some of the people in this Times article clearly have a passion for rail travel that far eclipses mine—at the very least, many of them have an enthusiasm for documenting trains that I understand but don't share—I would still say that I qualify as a railfan. Catherine and I far prefer taking the train over any other mode of transportation; fortunately, since the Northeast Corridor is both the most active and well-serviced passenger service in the U.S., we're able to indulge our preference.

In 2004, we celebrated our 10th anniversary with a vacation to Paris, Cornwall (where the Navy had posted Catherine's brother, Brooke, and his family for three years) and London. The key to the trip was, of course, planning and scheduling our train connections—a somewhat daunting proposition since I didn't know anything at all about how the system worked in Europe. I wouldn't say that visiting the Eurail website did a lot to alleviate my apprehensions—there are many ways to use the system and a variety of package offerings at different price levels. And since we'd be taking the Eurostar from Paris to London, I wasn't certain if that would be included in any of the passes I was considering (I suspected—correctly as it turns out—that it wouldn't).

After several visits to the site, I'd narrowed it down to a couple of options that I thought might be right for us and called Eurail: oh, what a difference a phone call made! After I explained our goals to the very helpful sales associate, she steered us to the perfect option: a pass that gave us four trips over two months (we only used three, including the train we took to Gatwick Airport to come home, but it was still cheaper than individual tickets) that also allowed us to purchase our one-way Eurostar ticket at the lowest price. I think it wound up being about $300 each so renting a car would probably have been cheaper but it would also have been far less relaxing—at the time, I found the prospect of deciphering maps, trying to figure out exits and entrance ramps to highways, and the inevitable "we're going the wrong way" moments too irritating to even consider. As it was, apart from the somewhat harried taxi ride from Waterloo Station (the Eurostar terminus at the time) to Paddington, we couldn't have asked for an easier journey (there were other trains leaving shortly after our target, if we'd missed it, but they all had more stops and would have gotten us to Cornwall well after dinnertime).

Riding the Eurostar was a particular joy: Paris to London in just over 3 hours can't be beat.* It was an easy taxi ride to Gare du Nord, we sailed rather quickly through customs and were comfortably in our seats less than an hour after we left our hotel in the 7th arrondissement. Catherine had worried that she might get motion sick on the high-speed train but the route through northern France, where the speeds were greatest, was almost entirely over flat farmland—the ride was so smooth and she could see such great distances out the window that she never even felt queasy.

Coincidentally, while I wrote this post, Catherine has booked us train tickets to Boston. Amtrak is offering a special price: $49 each way on their regular service (which is fine with us: Acela shaves, on average, less than an hour off the four-ish hour trip but it costs more than three times as much). So for our 16th anniversary, we'll be seeing the Punchdrunk adaptation of Macbeth, Sleep No More. It's a whirlwind trip—we leave Penn Station at 10am on December 12th and come back the following evening at 5pm—but for just over four hours both days, all we have to do is sit back and enjoy the ride.

*Actually, it can now: in 2007, they finished upgrading the tracks in England and changed the London terminus to St. Pancras; the train now arrives a mere 2 hours and 15 minutes after it leaves Gare du Nord

Eurostar photo: Lauritz B., 300km-h.net

Recent Theater

2009-11-03T17:28:00.029-05:00

For some reason, I had envisioned writing many blog posts in October... why I expected this, I have no idea. Sure, I went part-time at my day job (at least for the first two weeks of October; after that, we had a big job come in that kept me there pretty much all day during the last two weeks). And Peculiar Works was not technically in production this month (there's the master class we teach for Trinity/LaMaMa, of course, and the ghost tours we helped organize and cast for the Merchant's House Museum—but those don't really count). And, yes, I had rewriting to do on my play, Floydada, for the NYFA Fellows application that was due yesterday. And plays to see—there are always loads of plays to see, of course. But apart from that, what did I do with free time?

I'm such a slacker.

Anyway, here are a few thoughts some of the theater we saw in the second half of October:

The Playboy of the Western World
At some point early in The Pearl Theatre's very good revival of this most famous of J.M. Synge's plays, it occurred to me that I don't much care for The Playboy. I'm not entirely sure what brought me to this realization: the acting is fine to pretty good; the sets, lights and costumes are well-executed; and director J.R. Sullivan has a very light touch that complements Synge's humor well. But for some reason, the story just wasn't engaging me; I was interested in what was going on... but only mildly interested. It's not that the plot isn't intriguing: a mysterious stranger, on the run for murdering his father, shows up in a rural tavern just before closing and begs a room and a job of the lonely woman who runs it; almost immediately the entire village is abuzz about the man and he becomes something of a celebrity; then his father—who was not quite dead, you see—shows up, having tracked down his son so that he can be punished for his crime. It sounds like pretty compelling stuff, really. And yet, I was often distracted by ancillary activities on stage. For instance, I found myself thinking at one point: "They've pouring porter from a pitcher. Well, that makes sense, in a mid-nineteenth century, rural town in Ireland; I can see where they wouldn't have a tap. I wonder how long before porter would go flat in a pitcher? They can't have made it in that pitcher, of course; they'd make it in barrels and then tap the porter into the pitcher. Would they make their own porter or buy it from someone? If Synge were writing this play today, they'd probably be drinking stout. Which is a kind of porter. Is stout harder to make than porter? Maybe stout wouldn't work as well in a pitcher." I had similar thought processes about women running around barefoot while men wore jackets; suspender buttons on a pair of pants that worked as belt loops; and how, as technically well-appointed as the Pearl's new digs are in the basement at City Center, the play might have fit better in their old Theatre 80 St. Marks proscenium. The irony of all this is that I really do think it's a good revival. I just don't imagine I'll be going to see The Playboy again any time soon.

The Assember Dilator
31 Down Radio Theater has one of the more original aesthetics of any company working downtown. The Assember Dilator (which recently closed at PS 122) combines intriguing set design and imagery, an extremely rich aural soundscape, and a deceptively simple performance style to create a fascinating and disturbing science fiction thriller. It follows two characters: a scientist who is consumed with testing his new x-ray vision drug on himself and his assistant who obsessively joins him in the twisted medical trial. It's a familiar story about the nature of addiction and the loss of humanity it ultimately brings about, but the 31 Down artists have pared away all of the non-essential elements and have exaggerated and amplified (sometimes literally) what remains into a unique performance: you don't just watch this production, you experience it completely.

My only complaint about the evening was completely beyond the artists' control: PS 122 isn't giving out programs in an effort to be more green. I don't mind sharing or even giving back a simple one-page cast list at the end of the night but it's a disservice to the artists to ask the audience to visit your website if we want to know who's in the play—especially since some of us will have to wait until we get home to do it (not everyone has a iPhone).

Made in Heaven

There might be the kernel a good idea somewhere in this mess but Jay Bernzweig hasn't found it. That didn't seem to bother the sizable audience at the Soho Playhouse on the night we saw this very dumb play in which one conjoined twin comes out to his brother just moments before they are to propose to their girlfriend: they were all laughing uproariously at the most banal jokes and sight gags virtually from the first minute. Catherine said it reminded her a little of the silly British sex farces that were so popular 20 or so years ago; I think that's being kind to this piece (or slighting the comic genius of Natalie Needs a Nightie). Ninety-nine percent of the dialogue is ham-handed double-entendres and sophomoric references to sexual practices and physiology (the guys have three testicles but share a penis—that got a big laugh every time it came up*); the remaining percent was one actually funny joke that really isn't all that funny out of context (I've tried a few times to write it out here and it just takes too long to explain—you had to be there, as they say... not that I'm recommending that). The actors do the best they can with what they've got—for the most part, they just schtick it up; the rest of the audience thought they were absolutely hilarious so who am I to argue? The direction is... well, I guess it's better than the script; it's certainly no worse.

*Believe it or not, that's as good a joke as any we heard all night... and I wasn't actually trying to make it.

Malheureux Vélib' !*

2009-10-31T11:59:00.022-04:00

In general, I'm a big fan of bicycles—unlike cars, they're economical, they emit no noxious odors or gasses, parking them takes almost no space and they're a great form of exercise. Catherine and I had a brief visit with friends staying on Fire Island this summer where the only means of transportation allowed, other than walking, is bicycles. We had a lovely, relaxing ride one morning through a couple of the townships there (it's not as far as it sounds since the towns butt right up against one another—less than two or three miles, I'd guess). In fact, we had such a good time that I've found myself pausing frequently to look at the price tags at Busy Bee Bikes, a couple of doors down from our building.

At the same time, I find many (but not all) bicyclists to be obnoxious: they speed (if you're passing taxis in New York, you're going too fast), they sail through intersections against the light while they weave perilously between pedestrians in the crosswalks, ride on the sidewalks, park their bicycles wherever and however they like (especially problematic at night when they aren't always easy to see—Catherine hurt herself pretty badly earlier this year trying to get past a clump of them on our block), and have no qualms about taking up precious sidewalk space. Busy Bee is especially bad about this last point because their wares are parked every day in two rows with only a narrow pathway between them—and that is frequently blocked by someone who has stopped to talk with one of the repair people. The air of sanctimony these particular cyclists give off doesn't do them any favors either: why they believe they're more environmentally-conscious than me, the pedestrian, is positively baffling.

In spite of my divided nature (or perhaps because of it), I've been an avid follower of stories about the Vélib' program in Paris. I love the idea of renting a bicycle for those short trips (the time limit per rental is 30 minutes); at €1 per day, it's even cheaper than a one-way subway fare.** So I was greatly disappointed to read that 80% of the bicycles in the program are missing or unusable these days. The cause is not surprising: they're stolen to be sold on the black market in emerging nations or taken by teenagers who either destroy them performing stunts or just vandalize them as a form of social protest.

It would be easy to say that it just isn't worthwhile to continue the program since the expenses are still greater than the advertising revenue that is supposed to support it. To their credit, the company running the program, JCDecaux, hasn't given up yet: they're continuing to explore ways to deter the thieves. I've no doubt they'll never be more than partially successful—as my father likes to say, locks are made to keep honest people honest—but I do hope that they'll find a way to make stealing the bikes difficult enough so that it's less worthwhile.

The joy-riding teenagers, on the other hand, are a more difficult problem. While I obviously don't condone their behavior, I don't believe they should be dismissed as mere hoodlums who are ruining it for everyone: it's disingenuous and it ignores the reality that, over the last 40 or more years, central Paris has become the domain of the wealthy and the comfortably middle-class, beyond the means—financially and geographically—of the poor and immigrant peoples. I don't believe that it was intentional racism or classism on the part of the urban planners who created the peripheral cities (banlieues) where these people must live (at least not by all of the planners), but it's not surprising that the inhabitants see it that way. Is it any surprise that these young men have no respect for this easy target, a symbol of bourgeois society they will probably never be able to enjoy? Simply making it more difficult to steal the bikes probably won't be enough of a deterrent to these underemployed and disenfranchised youths.

I hadn't intended for this to become a social commentary (except for my criticism of scofflaw bicyclists). More than anything, I hope that Decaux can find a way to make the Vélib' system work. As much as I loved riding the Métro, I'm curious to see if it will enhance one of my favorite cities in the world to navigate its winding streets on two wheels; I suspect that it will just make me appreciate more how relaxing it is to explore Paris on foot.

*Unfortunate [or Poor] Vélib'!
**Currently $2.25, unless you're on a pass; since I often walk to and from my work and since 90% of what Catherine and I do is less than a 30-minute walk from our home, I don't ride enough to make a pass worthwhile.

When Facts and Numbers Collide

2009-10-14T10:27:00.013-04:00

Apparently, an accounting firm hired by a lobbying firm issued a report on the Senate's Health Reform bill that said exactly what the industry that the lobbying firm represents wanted the report to say. Then afterward, when other people began to look at those numbers and say, "Hey, wait a minute...", the accounting firm had to make a big ol' public statement so that everyone would know they had opted not to pursue any of the annoying little math problems that would disprove their client's position.

You gotta respect their doing this because, really: an accounting firm whose number crunching doesn't have even a shred of credibility isn't much of an accounting firm, is it?

Does this mean the Academy Awards aren't on the level?

The [Redacted] Word of God

2009-10-09T20:48:00.005-04:00

I suppose it says something about me that I remembered this story as being Stephen's "The Craziest F***ing Thing I've Ever Heard" segment until I looked it up.

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For the record, TCFTIEH segment this week was actually this story; it also says something about me that the story about expurgating the known liberal bias from the Bible seems crazier to me than using part of a tooth to restore vision.

Of course, what the Conservative Bible Project is actually talking about is creating a new version of the Bible. Instead of using the NIV or the KJV or whichever one you currently use, you'd have an alternative version in which Christ does not ask God to "forgive them for they know not what they do" as he is being crucified because that verse was inserted later (you think I'm kidding about this?). Apparently, the CBP will go back to what I'll call the original source material—the ancient Greek and Latin texts—to see what may have been "lost in translation" (my quotes). I can live with that—that involves something in the realm of scholarship: you have to at least be able to read ancient Greek or Latin, I would assume. What actually frightens me is the people who will, when they can't find a way to change something in the Bible to suit their desires, will announce that they've "prayed about it" and God told them what changes to make. I don't mock prayer: I decry those who make a mockery of it, as I believe that would do.

The Slacktivist, as usual, has an excellent, well-articulated post on the subject.

Recent Theater

2009-10-07T16:05:00.018-04:00

A Boy and His Soul
Autobiographical theater—an author/performer telling an audience the story of her/his life—is challenging. Very often, these shows are about the artist's journey: growing up, finding an artistic voice or vision, discovering racial or sexual identity, overcoming adversity, or some other form of self-realization/actualization. Since the story is usually intensely personal, I think it's difficult for it to transcend the individual and become universal: it's important to the artist but not as vital to the rest of us. I've had the good fortune to seem some exceptional autobiographical works by Peggy Shaw, Lorenzo Pisoni and several others; one of the best in recent years was Stew's Passing Strange (soon to be a major motion picture, as they say).

Colman Domingo has followed up his excellent performance in that play on Broadway with his own, A Boy and His Soul, now at the Vineyard Theater. In this one-person show, Domingo chronicles his life growing up in Philadelphia and how particular songs, albums and singers impacted key moments for him. He is assisted in this with several crates of classic soul LPs that he plays on a '70s hi-fi console in a facsimile of his parents' basement (which has quite a few nice surprises hidden in its upstage wall). While his story is not entirely unusual—a black man coming-of-age and coming to terms with his homosexuality—I was struck by how much love plays a part in it all: his love for his family and theirs for him. That's not to say that there isn't tension or heartache between him, his siblings, his mother and stepfather—there is; but even their significant differences are tempered with a genuine affection for one another.

Domingo demonstrates that he is not only a gifted singer and actor but a strong writer, too: his script is well-structured and his language has a gentle poetry that still manages to feel entirely conversational. Director Tony Kelly has done a good job shaping the production simply in a manner that supports the actor and his text well—the performance feels fresh and natural even though it's clearly been meticulously planned and rehearsed. The music—well, it's the greatest soul hits of the '70s: of course it's fantastic and it's been incredibly well-designed and integrated by Tom Morse.

It's an odd choice for the Vineyard—I've heard rumors that they were hoping for another Wig Out—and the night we saw the show, the majority of the audience was several years older than us and significantly squarer (it's a rare thing, indeed, when I'm among the hipper people in an NYC crowd). I'm not sure what the subscribers (and they were so definitely subscribers) made of the show—they certainly didn't laugh as much as we did and I'm pretty sure they had almost no frame of reference for the inspired recreation of an Earth, Wind and Fire concert. But even if I can imagine other venues that might seem more appropriate—HERE, PS 122, and the Public Theater immediately come to mind—the Vineyard is giving the show a first-rate production and it's been extended through November 1. When other companies are playing it safe, they took a risk; I respect that and I'm glad that it paid off.

Killers and Other Family
As well-written, well-directed and well-acted as the production of Lucy Thurber's Killers and Other Family is at Rattlestick Playwrights Theater, it's still a difficult play to watch. Within a few minutes after the play begins, Lizzie (Samantha Soule) is already in trouble when her brother, Jeff (Dashielle Eaves), and his friend, Danny (Shane McRae), drop in—unannounced and uninvited—from their hometown in Western Massachusetts. While Jeff pathetically pleads for her help to escape the serious trouble he's in, Danny launches into a charming but menacing seduction that ends with her eagerly surrendering to his horrible sexual violation—a sort of consensual rape.

End of scene one.

Ironically, for a play in which the tension mounts so swiftly and each act of violence is followed almost immediately by another, Thurber unfolds the characters' histories very slowly and carefully. It's a halfway through the play before we know the truth about Jeff's trouble (although there are hints earlier). The details of the twisted bond between Danny and Lizzie are revealed slowly, in brief flashes, over the course of the 90 minutes. And even after Lizzie's unwitting girlfriend, Claire (Aya Cash), arrives—the perfect device for dialogue full of back story since she doesn't know the other two at all—Thurber continues to very deliberately dole out information. It's effective because it balances our intellectual desire to understand these people with our revulsion at their animalistic behavior: as they are to one another, we're drawn to and repulsed by them.

The actors are all exceptional, especially McRae: his Danny is rawly sensual but emotionally damaged, deeply misogynistic and yet capable of offering Lizzie a perverse tenderness—it's easy to see why she can't entirely escape him. Director Caitriona McLaughlin has staged the piece effectively, like a good roller coaster: the slower-paced moments give the audience just enough time to catch their breaths before they crest the next hill and begin the frenetic race downward all over again. It's a finely-crafted, if deeply disturbing, production; Rattlestick picked the perfect piece to start their 15th season with a bang.

The Royal Family
George S. Kaufman and Edna Ferber's 1927 roman à clef about the Barrymores, The Royal Family, is a damned funny play; I mean, I was actually surprised at how laugh-out-loud funny it is. It helps that Doug Hughes has crafted a production for Manhattan Theater Club that is swift, manic and sharply focused: with three full acts and running just under three hours, it has to be. It's also the most sumptuous production I've seen in a very long time—I detest entrance applause but even I was tempted to put 'em together with everyone when the enormous red drape revealed John Lee Beatty's remarkable recreation of the Cavendish's two-story Upper East Side apartment. The cast is phenomenal with impeccable comic timing: Rosemary Harris as the ancient matriarch of the clan, who is making plans for her comeback tour; John Glover as her vapid brother, Herbert Dean, pestering everyone to help him find the vehicle that will resuscitate his foundering career; Tony Roberts as a faithful, long-suffering manager to the clan; Kelli Barrett as the youngest member of the family, about to make her Broadway debut; and the wildly flamboyant Reg Rogers as the prodigal son, Tony, who has escaped Hollywood just steps ahead of a breach of promise suit. The key to the show and by far the strongest performance in the production is Jan Maxwell as Julie Cavendish—the steady and (by the standards of this family) stable professional, the glue that binds them all to one another; her gradual meltdown and eventual explosion at the end of Act II is a joy to behold.

John Barrymore, the Playbill states, quite enjoyed the way he was portrayed in the play; Ethel was not amused and Lionel was silent on the subject. I think they'd all approve of how they come off in this production. Kaufman and Ferber may have originally intended audience to think of the Deans and Cavendishes as "those wacky artist-types" but Hughes is able to show us that there is an overwhelming passion for craft and art that makes the family seem crazy to the outside observer. In one scene, near the end of the evening, Tony regales the family with the blueprints for a little play he bought in Europe which uses constructivist scenery and contemporary performance style ("You don't enter or exit in the ordinary sense—you just slide, or else let down by wires"); it may have originally been mocking but here the family's enthusiasm reveals their complete and utter love for their profession—it's one of my favorite moments in a play filled with wonderful moments.

The day after we saw The Royal Family, Tony Roberts had a seizure just as the play was beginning and the matinee had to be canceled. He appears to be recovering now and I hope he'll be able to return to the show: Catherine and I both agreed that he was fantastic in the role of the successful personal manager who still relies heavily on his street-wise, kid-from-the-Bronx instincts. It's a very nuanced performance and one that should be seen again.

BTW: it's actually just a remarkable coincidence that all three of the plays we saw this past weekend were all about families.

Recent Theater

2009-09-30T12:17:00.014-04:00

In spite of its title, Conni's Avant Garde Restaurant is not avant garde at all. It's a whole lot of fun, exceedingly well-performed, cleverly conceived and it comes with a good meal and copious amounts of wine... but for those of you who shun the abstract, the experimental—the weird—set your minds to rest: this is the Marx Brothers, not Marcel Duchamp. The evening is a sort of performance grab bag with short skits—some of which are loosely connected to a through line about a pregnancy—silly songs and dances, and bits of schtick in which the performers bring audience members into their act. Unless you're hopelessly confused by Saturday Night Live, you won't have any problems keeping up with anything here.

We received a few brief instructions from the cast in the form of a song—which, at the Ohio Theater, began with the performers singing and playing instruments across Wooster Street while we watched them from the loading dock doors. Among other things, they informed us that the performers are not waiters, that there are no substitutions on the menu and that everyone must share with their table mates. We were then ushered into the dining room/theater where tables were lined up on what would ordinarily be the stage and performances spaces had been created on either end of the space. At each table were bottles of wine (pretty decent stuff, too), baguettes and a plate of hors d'oeuvres that we all shared. There were four dinner courses: a cold pear soup (delicious), a salad (pretty good), an entree (chopped pork sandwich for omnivores or mushroom for vegetarians, also pretty good) and an old fashioned banana pudding for dessert (with 'Nilla wafers—impossible screw that up!).

The cast is all wildly funny and their performances are all well-crafted. I suppose one might say that the avant garde part of this work is the characters that the actors have created: most of them would probably fit in just fine with the fine folks of Twin Peaks. The program only offers names and bios of their onstage personae so I can't give a shout out to an actor but I will say that the all of central characters have powerful singing voices and exceptional comic timing. If you missed this latest installment, they're coming to Joe's Pub October 12 (the meal will not be made by the performers, sadly, but I'm sure it'll still be loads of fun).

Catherine was telling me that Conni's Avante Garde Restaurant is one of the seven recipients of support from The Field's Economic Revitalization for Performing Artists program, which is helping the artists find ways to make their work more self-sustaining (read: less reliant on grants and giving, a laudable goal). Conni's definitely has that potential: the four-course dinner (including wine) and tickets is $50 which, in NYC, is a pretty good deal. Our friend, Kristin, said they were looking into ways of franchising the performance and I think that would be a great idea: I could see this being the kind of resource for these artists that Too Much Light Makes the Baby Go Blind seems to have been for the Neofuturists.

Arial versus Helvetica

2009-09-30T12:15:00.000-04:00

Every weekday, I get the Daily Dose from Flavorwire—the art and cultural news digest from Flavorpill—in my inbox. Each issue features about a half dozen stories: one or two about an upcoming visual art, music or performance work; an interview with an artist (both up-and-coming and established); the occasional review of an arts event; and perhaps a piece about some pop culture or fashion trend that the editors feel is important (or at least of interest to their readers). Earlier this summer, I was pleased to see them review a piece by my friend, Yanira Castro, that she choreographed in the bathrooms at the Gershwin Hotel. Flavorwire favors the hip and stylish crowd, I often feel, but there's usually at least one item that piques my curiosity enough to actually click through and read more—almost always something quirky or offbeat like this link last week:

Infographic: Arial versus Helvetica

Which led me to this image:
Swiss Miss picked up the graphic from Raynor's ragbag blog and, as I have done, gave him his due credit.

I found the table interesting... and, yeah: incredibly geeky—I'm sure that's why it interests me. But it also put me in mind of a song (warning: non-sequitur coming) by my favorite geeky band:

Apparently, they haven't been inspired by the differences between Arial and Helvetica... yet...*

*For any band that writes about incredibly obscure subject matter—as they did in "Meet James Ensor" and "James K. Polk"—a song about typography is almost like selling out.

Inside Out

2009-09-24T19:24:00.000-04:00

I've been working a survival job in the Flatiron District for almost a dozen years now and the emerald island of Madison Square Park is a particular pleasure. Whenever I walk to or from work, I do my best to always take a stroll through its newly-restored paths part of the journey. The park hosts concerts every Wednesday evening during the summer and a couple of times a year they bring in a site-specific art work: one of my favorites was a series of bare trees of stainless steel that were installed during the winter, which contrasted very nicely with the black, leafless trees around them. In many ways, it's one of my favorite parks in New York.

So imagine my disappointment on Tuesday, when I saw this as I walked around the northern reflecting pool:

Now, I don't necessarily have a problem with corporations setting up booths in the park; it happens a few times a year in Madison Square. One of the better corporate events in the past has been during the U.S. Open when American Express has set up a large projection screen television (well-branded, of course) and bleachers so that people can hang out in the park during the day to watch the matches; I always think it would be, in some ways, better than going to the Open in Flushing Meadows since here you're actually sitting outside in a beautiful park instead of in a stadium (I know it's not at all better, of course!).

But what is this? The tent on the right has a play area with toys and games on the floor and it has a ol' big plasma television on the wall—a wall, mind you—that completely obscures any view of the park. What was Huggies thinking? Put this thing in a mall, outside a shopping center, inside Macys, even in a poorer neighborhood where this sort of play area would be a novelty (yeah, they're gonna do that!). But what moron marketing executive thought, "You know what affluent people really want when they go to the park with their kids? To find an enclosed play area just like the one they left at home!"

More disappointing to me, though, is the number of people who parked their kids inside this monstrosity on Tuesday and Wednesday (it was gone today). I understand that children are naturally attracted to television—hey: most of us are, whether we like or not*. How many times have I been in a bar and found myself checking the score on a game every few minutes... and I never watch sports at home. But the weather was beautiful both days and right across the reflecting pool from Huggies' tents is one of the coolest play areas in the city:

When I was a kid, I would have loved to have had access to a playground like this one! How hard can it be to say to little Jimmy or Sarah, "Why don't we go swing or climb or play on the merry-go-round instead? We can watch t.v. at home..."? Maybe, not being a parent, I'm missing something... because I really don't get it.

*My favorite quote on the subject is from the great Orson Welles: "I hate television; I hate it as much as I hate peanuts. But I can't stop eating peanuts."

Recent Theater and Art

2009-09-19T09:43:00.031-04:00

Aftermath

As a rule, I'm not a fan of documentary productions that are performed entirely by actors addressing the audience directly. In these works, we almost always "play" the role of the interviewer... and yet we don't, since the creators really expect us to just sit there, listening in silence, not participating or interacting with the performers. Often the author inserts little lines into the edited transcripts that are, in theory, a touch of "realism" for the piece but are actually a lazy way of including the interviewer's question: "Hmmm? What did I want when I first got here? Well, I'd hoped..." or something like that. These types of productions are also, invariably, agit-prop and the audience all arrive knowing how they're supposed to feel about the topic at hand—the death penalty, the Iraq war, the 2000 presidential election—and almost certainly already agree with the points being made; they get everyone all worked up and then give them a call to action, usually to make a donation to whatever organization is on the front lines supporting/fighting the issue. And finally, they're the epitome of "tell, don't show" theater: we're not witnessing or experiencing events, we're being told stories about them.

There are, of course, always productions that meet all of these criteria and yet still manage to be an excellent theatrical experience: Jessica Blank and Erik Jensen's Aftermath is, for me, one of those pieces. Honestly, I didn't go into the New York Theatre Workshop thinking I'd be engaged so, at least in my case, the creators had their work cut out for them. Last year, Blank and Jensen traveled to Jordan to interview refugees of the Iraqi war living in exile: some fled the war and insurgency, some had became political targets of one religious faction or another, and one imam had spent many months in Abu Ghraib because his moderate religious teachings ran afoul of the U.S. military. While much of the performance is direct-address, the artists have also given us an invaluable character: their Iraqi translator, who gives the onstage subjects someone with which to interact, bridges the transitions between the vignettes with short anecdotes and jokes, and ultimately adds his own story into the mix (I'd never considered that a translator is the most necessary and least trusted of all the participants in these situations—how does anyone know he/she is being accurate or even truthful?). The stories Blank and Jensen have included are all compelling, and their script presents a dozen very diverse and vividly rendered characters—like the cocksure dermatologist who constantly leaves the interview for "five minutes" because he's seeing patients, and the theater director who flamboyantly reaches out to the visiting American artists while his painter wife requires more coaxing to participate in the discussion. Ultimately, though, the success of Aftermath can be attributed to Blank's simple yet concise staging and the extraordinary performances of the talented ensemble: they are able to use the silences, the characters' unspoken thoughts, to provide brief glimpses into greater depths that these individuals chose to leave unexpressed; their work injects the humanity into a production that could easily have been just another political screed.

New Island Festival

As part of the NY400, the Government of the Kingdom of the Netherlands' celebration of "400 years of enduring friendship between the Netherlands and the United States," the New Island Festival has installed a variety of works by Dutch visual and performing artists around the former military base on Governor's Island. Catherine and I attended on Thursday—a day that began cloudy but transitioned very nicely into a breezy, clear fall-like afternoon. As the sun began to set, we were treated to an incredibly beautiful sunset over New York harbor:
The orange was actually much more vivid than this: my photo really doesn't do it justice.

We began the afternoon with a panel discussion on site-specific performance; the participating artists were interesting but their discussion was more philosophical than practical, which was disappointing—Catherine and I were more interested to hear how people work than in why they do it. Fortunately, there was an incredible array of art, installation, dance, theater and music events to see that day—so many that it was absolutely impossible to hit them all—so we got to spend the rest of our day with the artists' work (and seeing good art is always more fulfilling than talking about it anyway).

Our first stop that afternoon was the exhibit The Archaeological Dig, which told us the history of the recently rediscovered remains of a civilian settlement on Governor's Island, Goverthing, abandoned in 1954 and ultimately covered over by military contractors. The displays include the most extraordinary photographs, maps, items excavated from the site by Dutch contractors, who have meticulously researched this unbelievable settlement that we're told can be traced back to a member of Henry Hudson's Half Moon crew. Even more remarkable than the exhibition, though, is the dig itself where visitors are actually encouraged to touch and manipulate the incredible remnants of this strange community. It's going be on display through October 11 (the rest of the festival ended today), tickets are only $5, and the ferry ride from the Battery Maritime Building is free: you'll regret it if you don't check it out.

At sunset, we were treated to one of the more unusual site-specific performances I've seen in recent years: Braakland (Wasteland). The central "stage" in director Lotte van den Berg's massive work, inspired by the writings of South African novelist, John Coetzee, was an abandoned tennis court but the action took place anywhere an actor entered our field of vision: in many instances, they were 40-50 yards away from the audience. The characters inhabited a bleak environment, perhaps in a post-apocalyptic world or just one that has fallen victim to urban decay (the piece was performed without dialogue which is how van den Berg is able to use the enormous distances, of course) and they regard one another alternately with indifference and hostility. The ensemble all do a great job and this is a challenging piece for an actor: it's very physical and with such vast distances between them for much of the piece, cueing one another must be extremely difficult. Without giving too much away, I have to give a particular shout out to the guy who had to lie on the cold tennis court for almost the entire performance: I was chilly and I was wearing a jacket and jeans! I hope we'll have other opportunities to see van den Berg's work: she has an intriguing aesthetic and is creating work on an amazing scale; even when Braakland dragged a little (much of the traveling is done at a natural pace and I think they might have walked a bit faster occasionally and we'd still have had to wait for them to cover the distances), it was absolutely fascinating.

Our final event of the day (not counting the silent disco, which was pretty damned cool!) was a musical performance, Orfeo, which included a wonderful Mediterranean dinner by chef André Amaro. The work is very loosely adapted by the music theater ensemble De Veenfbriek from the Monteverdi opera and is sung by Jeroen Willems, accompanied by a musical group called Track. The musicians are all incredible and they create amazing and unorthodox sounds—every hear anyone play a xylophone with a bow?—and Willems has a wonderful voice and charismatic presence onstage. I was less intrigued by the libretto (mostly in English but some of it is, I think, Dutch and maybe Italian?), which I assume comes from the Monteverdi: there's an additional story line that follows Orpheus back to the human world after he loses Eurydice for the last time in the underworld that felt anticlimactic. However, as Catherine pointed out, if we didn't think of it as a story to be followed, it was a really great musical concert. And Amaro's entree, which we were allowed to see him create throughout the performance in an kitchen area at one end of the space, was a delicious yet very simple pasta dish of spaghetti, olive oil, parmesan and garlic tossed together with fresh arugula. A sample of the performance (and the dinner) can be seen here on YouTube.

The Confidence Man

Woodshed Collective has picked an amazing place to stage Paul Cohen's theatrical work inspired by the Melville novel of the same title: the Lilac, a decommissioned Coast Guard vessel what is now docked at Pier 40 along the Hudson River. The work has been divided up into four tracks and within each track there are some vignettes that are more closely associated with the source material and others that are updated variations on the theme of deception (in Track 1, which I followed, a con was perpetrated using an online chat). The scale of this performance is vast: it takes place in every conceivable space, of every size, onboard the ship (one stateroom was incapable of holding everyone in our tour), on all four decks, simultaneously. Each track had its own director (Lauren Keating, who's worked with Peculiar Works in the past, had the one we followed), stage manager and cast; from a producing standpoint, it's remarkable. Unfortunately, it was difficult to move very quickly through the ship—our tour group was by far the largest of the four tracks and there were a few people who had trouble navigating the narrow stairs and passageways... and I invariable wound up behind them, so I frequently arrived well after a scene had begun. The actors were difficult to hear many times: I think the intimacy they could enjoy with audience members standing closest to them made them forget that there were a lot of people who needed them to project their voices, just as they would in a theater, and especially when they were turned away from part of the group. Lighting designer Zack Brown has done an excellent job augmenting the instruments that were already in place; in many places, it's difficult to distinguish what he has brought in from the existing equipment. I heard so little of Cohen's script—both because of volume and tardiness issues—that I didn't take much away from it; he seems basically to be saying that there are now, and have been in the past, a lot of ways for dishonest people to take advantage of honest ones. That's true, of course, but not especially earth-shattering. Perhaps if the plot lines were simpler and clearer it might be more satisfying: I wasn't sure I was expected to follow every detail in a vignette or story line and yet I didn't feel I'd been given permission to let go of story and plot altogether. Still, there are magical moments in the evening—a scene in the mess in which Ben Beckley tells an excellent joke about an argument between two mathematicians in a restaurant is particularly well done—the Lilac is a pretty near perfect setting for a performance and the price is right (free). Tickets may be hard to get now but I'd say give it a try: just try to stay close to your guide and you'll probably have a much better time.

Stop It

2009-09-17T00:07:00.005-04:00

My brother-in-law, Jim, sent me the link to this video and I now share it with all of you. While it was pretty obvious to me where the sketch was going from the moment Bob Newhart set it up, I still laughed out loud.

Philadelphia Live Arts: Days 2 and 3

2009-09-07T09:45:00.025-04:00

By the time we got back to our room Saturday night, It was too late and the end of too long a day to post so this will be a longer than usual post. That, or my reviews of the shows will be shorter: I haven’t decided yet…

Day 2
We actually began our day, at the strenuous suggestion of our friend Wayne-O, at the Philadelphia Museum of Art to see the exhibit on the construction of Marcel Duchamp’s final work, Étant Donnés.* Catherine and I had been to the museum about 10 years ago and had seen the installation then; while I still remembered it pretty vividly, I didn’t know any of the story behind the piece. The exhibit, which includes many of the materials and documents that Duchamp used to create the work over about 20 years, as well as the manual he left behind after his death with instructions for how to reassemble the installation, give an incredible insight into the creative process of an amazing artist. Unfortunately, we had less than an hour in all at the museum—time to see the exhibit but not enough to cast more than a glance at some of the great artworks in their collection as we sped past.

Our first performance on Saturday, Urban Scuba, is a fantastic dance piece performed in an abandoned swimming pool at the Gershman Y. The risers for the audience seating have been built in the shallow end of the (mostly empty) pool so that the performance can take place in the deep part. Brian Sanders’s choreography is muscular and athletic, employs quite a bit of wire and bungee work, and has a vocabulary that I found to be whimsical in some movements and extremely visceral in others. He’s accompanied here by three very skilled and very brave dancers: not only do they leap over and into the abyss many times but they dive with seeming abandon into waters that can best be described as murky. Each new dance in the piece offers the audience a fresh discovery in the architecture of the space and another exploration of the relationship of human beings to water—at one point even taking us back to our exit from the primordial ooze. It’s an exceptional work and one of the highlights of this year’s festival.

SCRAP Performance Group’s TIDE, by contrast, has problems. It’s a shame, too, because the opening moment, in which the sea goddess-mother nurses and then murders her human offspring is stunning; after that, those moments of divine inspiration appear only haphazardly and fleetingly. It’s not that the creators, Myra Bazell and Madison Cario, suffer from a lack of ideas but that they had far too many: the themes are unfocused, the text is generic and the movement vocabulary feels like well-considered phrases that never manage to connect to a larger whole. The performers all move well but they’re not strong actors and are often difficult to hear. The large expanse of the Ice Box just seems to swallow the piece and the design choice of making the stage as absolutely white as possible—to the point of creating white boxes to cover the floor-mounted lighting instruments—only emphasizes how little of the space is used. Artistically, the stronger moments in the piece point to great potential; a little more clarity in the artists' thinking might have yielded some impressive results.

I wasn’t sure what to expect from daDAda: it’s an artistic movement that we’ve researched pretty thoroughly and I was curious to see how other artists would interpret it for a modern audience. For Anthology Project, it’s a joyous and slightly silly movement that seeks to spread the gospel of randomness and absurdity; it’s certainly not the confrontational, anti-art movement of many of its original practitioners. That’s not to say that I think what Thomas Choinacky and Chrissie Harms are doing isn’t dada—dada was truly different in every city, at various times and for every group of artists; why couldn’t the 21st century Philly version be a child-like game? I might wish the duo had spent a little more time planning some of the elements and that there’d been a little more literary heft to their texts… but, gosh, they’re both so cute and they did a great job of getting the audience involved! This is a mere trifle but it’s a fun 40 minutes of play time: not a bad way to spend the gap between weightier fare.

What happened in New Paradise Laboratories’ FATEBOOK: Avoiding Catastrophe One Party at a Time? Were we solving a mystery? Were we participating in a commentary on life in the age of “social networking?” Were we players in some sort of interactive game? What’s great about this performed installation is that the answer to what happened is probably different for every single person in the room, in spite of the numerous repetitions of the brief stories in the piece. Anyway, if you spend too much time trying to “figure it all out,” you’ll miss out on the experience, which is quite engaging and smart. The planning of all the many videos is exceptional and the use of dozens of screens to sculpt the environment into a maze of rooms is well-executed—there were quite a few times when I could glean several bits of information in a couple of different story lines by standing in one place. I haven’t spent any time on their show website yet (although I’ve received many entreaties to do so on Facebook over the past few weeks), but I understand it enhances the experience in some way… not that I think it’s really necessary: I personally liked the one I had Saturday night just fine.

Day 3
Before this weekend, I could probably have counted on one hand—perhaps even on one finger—the number of times a show has ended and I’ve thought to myself, “It’s over? I’m not ready for it to be over yet!” I can add another finger now because that’s exactly how I felt during the curtain call for STORE: Kate Watson-Wallace absolutely followed the showbiz adage to always leave 'em wanting more. Installed in an abandoned pharmacy, it’s so simple a production as to be almost old fashioned from a design standpoint, with video shown on a dozen or so television monitors, a stage in the center of the room strewn with old clothes and lighting done almost entirely with cliplights (there were four ceiling-mounted video projectors, too, but they were used pretty sparingly). As a commentary on our societal addiction to consumption and how we measure the worth of things, it’s unsubtle; fortunately, Watson-Wallace's strong choreography and the joyful and energetic performances by the very talented dancers more than compensate. I especially enjoyed a sort of duet in which a young woman delighted as another dancer dressed her in layer after layer of clothing until she resembled the hapless Randy in the movie, A Christmas Story. STORE is, hands down, my favorite of the pieces we saw in the festival.

There's not much that I can say about Mike Daisey's How Theater Failed America that hasn't been said already, and much better, by reviewers and bloggers around the country. I expected it to be thought- and discussion-provoking, and it was; Catherine and I were still talking about it on the train home last night. I expected it to be funny and it was very much so. What I didn't expect was for it to be so literate: Daisey doesn't just tell a good story, he writes a good story that still feels conversational; in listening to him, I was impressed by how clearly-stated his talking points are laid out, and yet the monologue never feels like someone is reading me an essay. I thought it might be more confrontational—the title would certainly suggest more of a diatribe than a reasoned observation, but it's definitely the latter (I'd never considered the notion that, according to the process we all follow as theater artists, you can fully realize any play ever written in just three and a half weeks of rehearsal!). But the biggest thing I took away from the performance is how inspirational it is to spend time with someone who truly loves the theater, as Daisey makes very clear: it's only that person or thing that we respect the most that can disappoint us this dramatically.

Our last event of the weekend was Steve Cuiffo's Digital Effects at the Painted Bride. It was presented as part of Lucidity Suitcase International's Off the Grid festival which is powered entirely be renewable energy: the electricity for the (rather dim) lighting came from solar panels on the roof and Cuiffo powered the sound with a foot pump generator. The real digital effects in the piece were performed by Cuiffo's fingers: a series of amazing card tricks that he warned us at the very beginning of the evening would all be familiar to us. True, but it's alway impressive and entertaining to see them executed by a master—even when you sort of know how it's being done, you can't but help wonder, "How'd he do that?"

*The complete title is actually Étant donnés: 1. La chute d’eau, 2. Le gaz d’éclairage (Given: 1. The Waterfall, 2. The Illuminating Gas).

Philadelphia Live Arts: Day 1

2009-09-05T00:48:00.006-04:00

You have to worry when the first two of nine shows you're going to see in a festival are both spectacular: disappointment surely awaits you somewhere down line. I'm happy to say, though, that both The Gonzales Cantata and Welcome to Yuba City are extraordinary—and extraordinarily different—productions. I can't imagine a better way to begin our weekend.

Melissa Dunphy's The Gonzales Cantata is an amazing and amusing mash-up of classical music and C-SPAN delivered with an absolutely perfect deadpan: if someone didn't understand the joke coming in, there's a good chance they'd be mystified by these musicians' impeccable performances. The joke, of course, is that all of the libretto here has been taken from former Attorney General Alberto Gonzales' testimony before Congress about the firings of U.S. Attorneys in 2007. In the reality of the hearings, all of the participants were male except Diane Feinstein (D, CA); Dunphy has reversed the genders and given all the plumb male roles to sopranos—the standouts being Jessica Lennick as Patrick Leahy (D, VT) and a brilliant performance, vocally and as an actor, by Mary Thorne as the beleaguered and befuddled Gonzales. Musically, Dunphy has taken the work quite seriously which is what really makes it hilarious: it's beautiful, soaring music in which Gonzales sings, "I don't recall" 72 times in one two-minute aria (as he actually did in a single session before the Senate committee). It's only natural to compare this piece to Handel—without question the master of the oratorio—but Dunphy's music is not parody: it references the baroque but seems to me to be as strongly connected to contemporary classical music. The work is scored for string octet, harpsichord and a chorus, all of whom perform spectacularly, and it sounds amazing in The Rotunda (although I was grateful for the projected libretto so that I could follow along with the bouncing ball, as it were). There are only two more performances and there are still seats available: if you're a music lover with a wicked sense of humor (or if you just have a wicked sense of humor) and you're in Philadelphia this weekend, you must go see this piece.

Pig Iron Theater's Welcome to Yuba City, by contrast, makes no pretext of being high art: the dozens of bizarre characters who inhabit a roadside cafe in this quintessential western town appear in a series of vignettes that are closer to the classic Merrie Melodies cartoons than even to What's Opera, Doc? That's not to say that it isn't absolutely artful: the grace, skill and precision of this wildly physical production is truly remarkable. But what this group of very talented artists have created is a Whitman's Sampler of performances: perfect, bite-sized little confections to briefly savor before moving on to another. The cavernous space in which they've installed this piece is as perfect a matching of production to environment as I can imagine: you can't really capture the mythos of the contemporary west without distance, openness, space; the Festival Hub space is incredibly vast and director Quinn Bauriedel and choreographer Christina Zani have both used it to its full advantage. In fact, it's the enormity of the space that makes the athletic performances of the cast even more astonishing: the workout they're all getting just from running around backstage, rushing from one side of the building to another, making one of their many costume changes on top of what we're actually seeing them do onstage is staggering. And they're all hilariously funny. There's a little more time to see this one—it runs through the end of the festival—but I promise you it's going to sell out; buy your tickets now because you've really got to see it to believe it.

Recent Theater: Fringenyc

2009-08-31T12:12:00.006-04:00

More fringenyc productions this week...

Would I have gone to see a satirical musical not-too-loosely based on the Tate/LaBianca murders if my friend, Trav S.D., hadn't written and composed the music for it? Unlikely. However, I'm pleased to report that Willy Nilly: A Musical Exploitation of the Most Far-Out Cult Murders of the Psychedelic Era, in addition to having the longest subtitle in recent memory, is a lot of fun and hits quite a bit more than it misses. The show is billed as "being tastefully presented to coincide with the 40th anniversary" of the murders; to call this piece tasteful would be a bit of a stretch but at least the targets of its black humor are not the innocent victims (for the most part). Most of the skewering is reserved for the ultra-pompous true crime stories, especially Bugliosi's Helter Skelter. Trav's script offers history virtually unmodified (although, as the narrator, he informs us that "the names have been changed to amuse the author") but filters it through the prism of Rowan & Martin's Laugh-In, the prototypical counterculture vaudeville—a genre that Trav has explored fully in print and onstage.

The key to satire is accuracy, of course: we have to immediately recognize what's being parodied or it isn't funny. Trav's songs hit a bull's-eye almost every time—the title song is a dead-on lampoon of The Beatles' Helter Skelter; so good, it immediately put me in mind of the music from the classic Beatles's spoof, The Rutles. Credit for this success should also be given to the onstage band, The Four Hoarses: they do a fantastic job with the many different musical styles in the production. I can't say that it's well-acted—by design, the acting style is absurdly broad and the characters are all basically stereotypes and stock characters—but it's never dull and I enjoyed watching everyone work, especially Avery Pearson as Willy.

My only complaint, really, is that Willy Nilly is too faithful to the Manson story: several plot points could be cut from the piece to make it a lean, mean 90-minute performance (time-constraints in the fringe prevented them taking an intermission, but the piece is a solid two hours at present). Still, you gotta have balls to write a satirical musical about an infamous mass murderer—there are times when this one pushes the limits of good taste almost to the breaking point. I don't think anyone will argue that Trav S.D. has proven that he's the proud possessor of a pair of Class A cojones.

May - December with the Nose & Clammy is a cute little romantic comedy that has potential. Like Trav S.D., the first thing that playwrights Jonas Cohen and Naomi McDougall Jones must do is cut: in particular the plot line that led them to that title, which would then allow them to change the title because it doesn't give you any idea of what you're actually going to see. Then they can expand the framing device they've created in which a young woman (nicely played by Jones) brings her neurotic, older fiance (Craig Waletzko, in a delightful performance) to a theater so that they can reenact their relationship for an audience to get our opinion about whether or not they should proceed with their wedding; the meta-theatrics of that device would have provided them with a lot more opportunity for commentary and character development than the super hero metaphor they're currently using (especially since half of the metaphor is introduced early in the piece and the other half only finally appears in the next-to-last scene). Ava Geffen's direction is disappointing: there are far too many painfully long "blackouts" (in quotes because they're actually scene changes under blue lighting and we can still see the actors moving around onstage; you've given us this context of a couple performing for us so use that, make it part of the concept—it's actually in the script) and the staging is awkward, especially the couple of short scenes performed in silhouette behind a screen. I hope the authors will go back and work more on this play: the dialogue is often quite clever, the relationship between the characters is interesting and the actors are both engaging. With the right dramaturgical help, I could see this piece working very well.

We ended our fringenyc experience with Richard Caliban's MoM — A Rock Concert Musical at CSV. It chronicles the rise of the rock band, Mom, formed by five suburban midwest housewives, from their first gig in a high school gymnasium to super stardom and back again in eight short years (or two hours of audience time, with intermission). All of the scenes occur during concerts at various points in Mom's career so we're told most of the key stories of their lives through their song set-ups to the audience. It's an interesting approach and it might work better if the ladies weren't just so darned willing to share extremely intimate details with hundreds (and, eventually, thousands) of strangers; their confessions are so frank and direct that there's no subtext. It's too bad because I think it'd be much more effective if the characters were allowed to draw us in and inadvertently reveal their turmoil. The songs are all pretty good: many of the lyrics evoke the sorts of issues that you'd imagine would be on the minds of a forty-something, middle class woman ("Single Mom," "Life is Sweet") and, later, a successful but conflicted rock star ("Runnin' Wild," "A Long Way from Home"); musically, Caliban draws from a lot of different influences—mostly '80s rock, which makes sense, given the ages of the women—and everything is executed well. The cast is musically impressive—they all play multiple instruments, have strong voices and seem to be skilled musicians—and they have a nice rapport with one another. I think they're all good actors, too, but the script doesn't really give them much opportunity to shine except when they perform "scenes" from their lives for their audiences; intellectually, I could justify them doing these but the piece is really too naturalistic for the device to work very well. Overall, as a concert MoM's got a lot going for it; as a theater piece, I think Caliban could rearrange the elements he has here and find ways to break out of the concert format occasionally to let us discover more about the characters: a little less strip and more tease in their stories would become these ladies a great deal.

Interesting Headlines I Can't Really Read

2009-08-24T20:03:00.004-04:00

elpais.com: Dan Brown, Roth y Pamuk, novedades del otoño
"One of these things is not like the others; one of these things just isn't the same." Apart from this sentence, which acknowledges the fact that they all have new books coming out this fall, Brown should never be linked with the other two authors in any way—in any language—ever again.*

elmundo.es: Tarantino se practica el harakiri
According to the tweet I received yesterday afternoon, my good friend ModFab disagrees. Here's hoping he'll tell us about it on his blog.

liberation.fr: Splendeur et misère d'Annie Leibovitz, enfant gâtée de New York
I had to use a translation site to understand what is actually the key to that sentence: enfant gâtée = spoiled child. Ouch!

lemonde.fr: Les surfeurs du sofa
I dunno: I enjoy staying with my friends who have guest rooms (or at least sofa sleepers) and I love the idea of getting to know new people who actually live in the place I'm visiting, but I think I've passed the age where surfing strangers' couches is an acceptable means of keeping my traveling expenses down.

morgenposte.de: Politische Dekolletés
I first learned about this political ad a few weeks ago on the BBC. It seems the Berliner Morgenposte decided the story needed further augmentation and created a slide show to look back at die busen durch geschichte.

morgenposte.de: Quiz: Sein oder nicht sein? Das ist eine echte Frage
I should have recognized Hamlet's most famous line without freetranslation.com (which spat out "Be or not are? That is a real question"). I took the quiz for fun and, considering I know Shakespeare very well and German not at all, I got about 14 out of 25 right (I would have gotten the last question if I'd realized that pfund was pound).

lesoir.be: Les pigeons belges victimes de la mafia chinoise ?
Are Belgian pigeons victims of the Chinese mafia? No.

*To be fair, Brown will sell the most books of the three—probably more than the other two combined.

Recent Theater

2009-08-22T16:02:00.012-04:00

We've only been to two plays so far this month, which is unusual. It's all the more surprising because August is the month of fringenyc, which boasts more than 200 shows on its website this year. For whatever reason, we've received surprisingly few invitations to shows, fringe or otherwise, this month: we're seeing our friend Trav S.D.'s musical this afternoon, Eric C. Bailey in a show at the Brick on Tuesday and Richard Caliban's new project on the 30th but those are the only shows in my calendar until we go to Philadelphia. To be sure, Catherine looked through the fringenyc program guide and found other productions by people we know, so it's possible that more postcards may be winging their way to our mailbox. However, they haven't arrived yet and if someone doesn't actually invite us to see their work, I feel less obligation to attend.

Josh Koenigsberg's Al's Business Cards begins with a fairly benign event: Al Gurvis, a decent, hard-working gaffer living in NJ is mistakenly given someone else's business cards by his printer. It's the kind of thing that could happen in real life to anyone, at any time, anywhere: no big deal, really. Somehow, this innocuous mistake begets another simple mistake, which begets a misunderstanding, which begets a misinterpretation, all of which eventually leaves Al totally... begotten. It's a very funny play and Koenigsberg does an excellent job of allowing each of these errors to build in such a way that you think it could all be resolved once a key piece of information reaches the right character... but that never quite seems to happen. The dialogue and situation are very natural without being predictable and the production is simply and smoothly directed by Lauren Keating. The actors all give fine performances, especially Azhar Khan as Al and Bobby Moreno as Al's goofy (if somewhat racist) co-worker.

Inferno: the New Rock Musical, on the other hand, is just a mess. If Rick Merino had just been satisfied with writing all of the songs and playing the narrator, Dante, it might have worked; his music is slightly derivative—mostly metal, sometimes grunge-ish, with the occasional alt-rock number tossed in from time to time—but it's engaging and well-performed by the six band members and three actors. Unfortunately, Merino also tried to direct the production: this is almost never a good choice. The ensemble—Leslie Segan, Adam Poslunszny and Buzz Cartier—have been given the task of playing everyone except Dante and the underworld guide, Virgil (Sean Jeans), by donning dozens of different masks, wigs and costume pieces that make the piece feel like an ad for Halloween Adventure;* as their masks are all generic monsters and not at all specific to the cantos in which they appear, it's impossible to know how their characters differ from one circle of Hell to the next (I haven't read The Inferno but I have to think that's an important progression in the book). The hard-working trio also spend as much time rushing to and from the dressing room stage right to change clothes as they do onstage performing; I was exhausted just watching them. There's a good piece in here somewhere, I think: if it had been performed as a concert, without the half-hearted attempts at staging, it would be much more enjoyable. Instead, it comes off as under-rehearsed, ill-considered and amateurish.

*Actually, since he clearly spent a lot of money at the store, Merino should approach the owners about a product placement deal for his show. I could envision a series of music videos to show all of these costumes in action...

The Vendor or the Client: A Rorshach Test

2009-08-21T10:53:00.008-04:00

This video came to me from my account manager at Update Graphics, a temporary staffing agency for graphics professionals. If your business involves working with clients at all, as my day job does, you've been here. As an artist, though, and especially as a director of a company that's always operating on a tight budget, I think I may have made many of these arguments—or ones very similar to them—over the past 16 years.

Labor Day Weekend in Philly

2009-08-14T13:10:00.037-04:00

It's time for Catherine and I to make our (somewhat) annual trek down to Philadelphia for the Live Arts Festival/Philly Fringe. This year, we've opted to attend the opening weekend so we can also enjoy a little of the First Friday gallery crawl. In the past, we've tended to go down for the second of the three weekends so that our trip coincides more with Catherine's birthday on the 9th but we thought we'd take advantage of the long holiday weekend for a change.

Philly is one of our favorite getaways: it's inexpensive to get there (just over $30 round-trip if you take NJ Transit to SEPTA), the Live Arts festival is extremely well-curated and well-organized, and there are several Philadelphia-based companies and artists whose work we especially enjoy. Finding an affordable place to stay is a challenge, especially since we won't have a car and have to stay somewhere in the Center City; fortunately, Club Quarters offered an exceptional room rate (cheaper even than the festival's package deals) and is conveniently located for us.

We always schedule a lot of shows... and I really mean a lot of shows: seven performances in a weekend was our record high in 2007. Being the coffee overachievers that we are, Catherine and I have tickets for nine—count 'em, 9—productions in just over 48 hours. It's entirely possible that we may have hit the limit of what can reasonably be done in a single weekend. Saturday night is the one that's giving me the most consternation: we left ourselves a mere 15 minutes to get between two productions: Google maps says we can walk it in 8 minutes... assuming the first one starts on time... and really is only 43 minutes long... and we don't need to use the bathroom between the two shows.

Still, Catherine and I are excited about our 2009 Live Arts/Philly Fringe festival:

Friday, 9/4
7pm The Gonzales Cantata
9pm Welcome to Yuba City (in photo)

The Gonzales Cantata is, for us, the bigger risk of these two: Pig Iron almost always hits a bull's eye these days (the only recent exception being their 2007 take on Measure for Measure—set in a morgue and performed almost entirely in the nude—which was, without question, the bravest production I've seen in years but not entirely successful). Two things persuaded us to take a chance on Melissa Dunphy's music piece: first, we've only been to The Rotunda (a former Christian Science sanctuary) once—for a Headlong Dance piece in '07—and I'm curious to find out how well it works for a primarily aural work; and second, a libretto based on Alberto Gonzales' testimony before Congress? If it's done right, that's gotta be slam-dunk funny!

Saturday, 9/5
2pm Urban Scuba
4pm TIDE
7pm daDAda
8pm FATEBOOK: Avoiding Catastrophe One Party at a Time (in photo)

New Paradise Laboratories is the only of these companies we've seen before; we've been fans since we saw their 2003 Rose Selavy Takes a Lover in Philadelphia. The two afternoon shows are both modern dance and just sounded interesting to us. As for Anthology Project's piece: c'mon! It's Dada... of course we're going!

Sunday, 9/6
1pm STORE
3pm How Theater Failed America
7pm DIGITAL EFFECTS (in photo)

Catherine pressed to see Mike Daisey's monologue; while I'm interested in his work, he performs regularly in NYC so I was willing to give him a miss this time, but I'm glad we're going. We've both been wanting to see Kate Watson-Wallace's work for a few years, especially last year's Car (sadly, we didn't make it down to the festival last year). Steve Cuiffo is an actor/magician we've seen onstage frequently, most recently in a piece he's developing with Geoff Sobelle and Trey Lyford; the joke of the title is that there's no technology involved: it's a solo show of him doing card tricks at the Painted Bride, one of our favorite venues in the Old City.

View Philly Fringe 2009 in a larger map

Above is the map I plotted for the festival; on my screen, two of our destinations are too far west to appear on the map in the default view, so you may have to zoom out one click).

The really scary thing is that we seriously considered going to see a tenth piece at 9pm on Sunday but finally decided that catching an 11:30pm train that got us back into Manhattan at 2:50am Monday morning was probably not a very good idea. You gotta know your limits....

Brave Combo

2009-08-10T15:44:00.017-04:00

When I started college in 1981 at what was then North Texas State University in Denton, the telephone poles and bulletin boards were always covered with hundreds of xeroxed, hand-drawn flyers for bands playing the local bars. I don't know if this one band was playing a lot more often than any of the others in town but the flyers that stood out the most to me were the ones for Brave Combo: I remember thinking, "what a great name!" I had absolutely no idea what kind of music they played—as a poor theater major who was always going to a rehearsal somewhere, I didn't get out to bars all that much—but their announcements always registered somewhere in the recesses of my brain and I was intrigued by the band.

In 1984, I moved back to Fort Worth to finish up my undergrad at TCU. Across University Drive from the campus, in a small strip of retail stores, was the kind of old-fashioned record store we may never see again: Record Town (remarkably, I've just learned from Google maps, it's still there). One day, when I was in there riffling through the bins to see if anything struck my fancy, I stumbled across Brave Combo's World Dance Music. I've never been a big one for buying records—to this day, I still purchase fewer than a dozen albums a year—but, for whatever reason, I remembered the band's name and thought, "what the heck?"*

From the very first song on the album, a ska cover of Skokiaan, Brave Combo had me hooked: something about their jazz-influenced Tejano polkas spoke to me unlike any jazz-influenced Tejano polkas I'd yet heard. The album was eclectic (polka, rock, ska, pop, reggae, mambo—clearly, Carl Finch never met a musical style he didn't like); it had a wonderful sense of humor (The Doors' People Are Strange as a psychodelic hora? Now that's funny!); incredible musicianship (if you can blow through it, Jeffrey Barnes can play it); and you could dance to it all night long: what's not to like?

Every summer, Brave Combo plays a gig in NYC and Catherine and I always do our best to be there for it. For many years, they'd be at The Bottom Line in the Village—for my money, the best music club in the City—until it closed in 2004; since then, they've been in various venues around town. This year, they're at The Bell House in Brooklyn on August 17th; unfortunately, Catherine and I will be on Fire Island with friends (it's only unfortunate in that we won't be able to see the show: I'm looking forward to spending time with our friends). If you're a New Yorker and have never had the Brave Combo experience, I encourage you to check 'em out: not only will they put on a fan-damn-tastic show for you but they'll let you dance your way around the world without a TSA pat-down (unless you want one: in which case, I'm sure one of the band members will accommodate you).

*At the same time, I also bought an LP by another Denton band, Schwantz Lefantz, because I'd recently seen them at The HOP on Berry Street. I haven't listened to the album in years, of course, but it had a very '80s new wave sound, as I recall. Now I've piqued my own curiousity... I may have to dust off the old turntable...

Click Clack Moo

2009-07-29T22:32:00.024-04:00

Catherine and I don't often see theater for young audiences (or, as it used to be called, children's theater). Because we don't have children and aren't around them very often, we don't really have any perspective of what's appropriate for a kid or what they appreciate; it's why we thought the David Byrne/Maira Kalman book, Stay Up Late (adapted from the most excellent Talking Heads song) was a good Christmas gift for our niece, Rebekah, when she was 2*. So the TYA productions we see usually have a bit of an edge to them, like Kneehigh Theatre's Rapunzel at the New Victory in 2008 or Pomegranate Arts' Shockheaded Peter when it was last here in 2005.

Now, I've known about Theatreworks USA since I first moved to New York. As an actor, it's a great gig: an Equity production (read: you get paid a decent wage) of quality theater for children and teens. Unfortunately, most all of their productions are musicals and since I don't dance at all, I never even bothered to go to their open calls (which, even if you do sing and dance, are a crap shoot at best if you don't have an agent: you're competing against actors who do have representation... for me, the odds against my being cast were just too ludicrously long). I'm not sure how I've managed to live in NYC for over twenty years and never see anything by Theatreworks (surely someone I know must have been in one of the couple of dozen shows they have on their roster each season) but, somehow, the current production of Click Clack Moo at the Lucille Lortel was my first.

The play is based on the book by Doreen Cronin and illustrated by Betsy Lewin, and the adapters—Billy Aronson (book), Kevin Del Aguila (lyrics) and Brad Alexander (music)—have created a rather sweet, silly little musical that's a lot more fun than I expected. On their website, Theatreworks describes the piece as being appropriate for 5- to 8-years-old (K-4th grade); however, in the tradition of the classic cartoons I watched in my youth, there are as many jokes that only the adults can really appreciate as there are puns and pratfalls for the kiddies.

The plot involves a cow revolt on Brown's Farm over unfair working conditions: their barn is too cold at night and they want blankets. Unfortunately, Farmer Brown doesn't understand their moos so they can't communicate their dissatisfaction to him. The situation turns to their advantage when Farmer Brown leaves a laptop and printer in the barn; seconds after they discover it, the cows master not only the ability to type on the keyboard without fingers but also the English language (don't think about it: just accept it and move on). As the conflict escalates, Brown's stubborn refusal to negotiate with his livestock alienates his grandaughter and he runs the risk losing his farm altogether.

The actors are all endearingly sweet, appropriately broad in their performances and have strong musical theater voices, which work very well for the songs. As is usually the case with musicals these days, a panoply of contemporary styles are represented in the score; it's not all that imaginative but it's never boring (which is, I realize, the most important criterion where kids this age are concerned). The director, John Rando, keeps the action swift (I know it's to keep the little ones' attentions from wandering but I appreciated it immensely, too) and Wendy Seyb's choreography is simple yet effective.

At the matinee we attended, the audience was clearly enjoying the performance: one little boy, probably no more than 4 or 5, couldn't resist getting up in the aisle and dancing along with all of the songs. His enthusiasm was infectious and it reminded me that there are times when going to the theater is actually fun.

*My sister, Kelly, was very nice about it but I'm sure she thought we were just too weird for words (she was right). Actually, since Rebekah turns 19 next month and is starting college next week, it would be much more appropriate for her on this birthday... but I'm thinking she probably doesn't need two copies of the book.

50 East 7th Street, 3rd Floor

2009-07-17T12:49:00.006-04:00

One of the joys of doing site-responsive performance is that we're often in a position to discover things that most people never get to see. Case in point: this strange little installation that Catherine spied on the window sill of a building next door to Middle Collegiate Church where Peculiar Works held a staged reading this past Monday.

This Week in Theater

2009-07-14T13:55:00.016-04:00

I considered including in this post a review of the film that Catherine and I saw this weekend but, really, The Taking of Pelham 1 2 3 is the spiritual equivalent of baked potato chips: a little bit of that sort of thing isn't bad for you but it has no nutritional/cultural value whatsoever... unlike the original film, which is a classic and should be rented immediately.

The Tin Pan Alley Rag, on the other hand, lands somewhere between Baked Lays and a nice big salad that's been a little over-dressed: strong performances—especially by Michael Boatman and Michael Therriault as Scott Joplin and Irving Berlin—and great renditions of the music by both composers pretty much compensate for the workman-like script by Mark Saltzman. The play imagines an all-night meeting between the two composers in Berlin's music publishing office; Joplin, now several years past his prime, has come to persuade the younger composer to publish his ragtime opera, Treemonisha. The conceit is not original, of course: a fictional meeting between two geniuses, one with his best work behind him, the other at the beginning of his career. And it's a difficult device to use effectively, I think, because how much biographical information can you cram into dialogue before it begins to sound a little like a student report? Saltzman's script, for the most part, avoids the awkwardness inherent in the bio-play with humor: lots of wisecracks by Berlin, a few instances where we as the audience know more than the characters onstage (as when Berlin says he has a new song that's gonna be a big hit: I Love a Piano) and one especially funny scene in which the two men are interrupted by a Tin Pan Alley wannabe who assumes that Joplin is the "colored composer" who was rumored to be the real author of Berlin's songs. But, ultimately, the device requires the two main characters to spend a good portion of the evening telling each other "The Story of My Life:" it's always interesting but I found myself thinking it could all have been done more artfully.

The very next day, Jessica Dickey went and proved me right. Her one-person play, The Amish Project, is also a fictionalization of history: in this case, the murders of five girls in an Amish schoolhouse near Nickle Mines, PA. Dickey is very careful to point out that her play is entirely a work of fiction: she interviewed no one and only added true details that she felt would "strengthen the texture of the play." It's an incredibly powerful piece, beautifully acted by Dickey, deftly directed by Sarah Cameron Sunde. We are given only glimpses of each of the characters in the story—including the gunman's widow, an Amish teenager and her younger sister, a specialist on Amish culture, a pregnant Latino checker, and even a few cryptic words from the gunman himself. These brief flashes are not complete character studies but each captures the essence of the individual as they attempt to reestablish some semblance of order to their lives in the aftermath of the tragedy. We never learn why any of this has happened—Dickey wisely and very cleverly steers clear of offering any explanation. Instead, we're allowed to consider the nature of forgiveness (the Amish families responded immediately to the horror by publicly forgiving their children's murderer) in a surprising and truly beautiful script. The run at Rattlestick has ended now but I'm sure this piece is just getting started: it's a taut and powerful production that ought to have great success touring to international festivals and theaters around the U.S.

Upper Class British Twit(ter)

2009-07-10T14:16:00.006-04:00

The Queen of England has sent her first tweet:

How can we make our innermost feelings known to our people if we only have 140 characters with which to communicate them? How utterly ridicu

Okay, I made that up and I'm pretty sure she's not personally sending any messages, but if you're just dying to get up-to-the-minute propaganda and links to videos ops by the British Monarchy, here's the link.

The followers of celebrity Twitterers, I must confess, mystify me. I'm interested in my friends' tweets (well, most of them) because I have a personal connection: by and large, I genuinely care about what's going on in their lives. And almost none of the people I follow have abused the service: I think I've noticed their Facebook statuses (stati?) changing more frequently. I'm not interested in Ashton Kutcher when he's in a movie or on television saying lines written by a professional; why would I care that he really wants to go to Iran ("Every one that I meet that goes there says it's amazing.").

Can someone help me out on this one? What am I missing?

Recent Performances in NYC

2009-06-24T12:33:00.012-04:00

This is the first of at least two blog posts on what Catherine and I've been seeing lately. I've been writing on this for days but still haven't been able to finish it! It seems that the only entertainment genres we've missed lately are an opera and a rock concert... and if we can catch this company's next gig, we'll remedy both of those omissions in one event.

June 11th took us out to The Brooklyn Lyceum for The Nerve Tank's A Gathering by Chance D. Muehleck, directed by Melanie Armer. The text mixes naturalistic dialogue and poetic imagery in an intriguing fashion; the mash-up of the recognizable and the surreal in the work is a little unnerving—almost like lightning flashes that briefly illuminate within the dark, meandering soundscape of voices and industrial-ish white noise that occasionally flare up into a almost deafening roar. Melanie has done a great job making the piece fill the entire raw environment of the Lyceum so that the three actors use almost every inch of the enormous playing area: the balcony along the back wall, the stairs on both sides that lead up to it, the huge space behind the audience (the seating takes up only a fraction of the enormous room) and even a surprising niche in one wall. The lighting is entirely done with fluorescent strips (some placed beneath the four pew-like benches scattered around center stage) and the overhead fluorescent lighting in the space (which all began slowly flickering to life over the last few minutes of the piece). The actors the night we attended (there is a rotating cast as the episodes have been presented in installments since February) were Craig Dolezel, Stacia French, Irene Hsi and they all did a good job: they moved very well and had a nice handle on the dense language (volume was sometimes a problem but it's a big ol' cavern of a space so I cut them some slack on that one). If I have any complaint about the piece, it's that there's almost too much happening to be able to take it all in: just when I felt I had a handle on a character or a situation, something would change and I'd have to reassess (I know this was done intentionally by the artists but it was frustrating, nonetheless). The Nerve Tank is in residence at the Lyceum throughout 2009 and they'll be presenting a new work there in a much smaller space this fall; I look forward to seeing how it compares to the vast canvas they've used for A Gathering.

On Saturday, June 13th we journeyed north to the Triad on the Upper West Side for Huxley Vertical's Brave New Kabarett. We'd never been to the Triad and found it to be a pretty good place to hear music: a well-designed, intimate little proscenium theater with a pretty good sound system. Price-wise, it's a lot like The Duplex in the West Village (a $10 cover plus a two-drink minimum—$8+ for beer/wine/cocktails, $7 for non-alcoholic drinks) but there's a little more breathing room between the tables so it doesn't feel as crowded. The show was a lot of fun: basically a variety show emceed by Huxley Vertical's bandleader, Seth Bedford. The evening kicked off with a couple of ragtime selections from guest artist Brent Weldon Reno and musical theater selections sung by Patty Bruce, then a couple of very funny numbers each from Bobby Blue and songwriter Ben Lerman, and a few songs from Dutch singer Sabina Petra; interspersed throughout the set were the Weimar-inspired selections by Huxley Vertical. Our friends, Caroline and Jeff, joined us for dinner and the show which made the entire experience even more enjoyable: they are as excellent as dinner companions as they are travelers.

I was a little surprised when I heard earlier this year that Eugene Ionesco's Exit the King, with Geoffrey Rush in the lead role, was coming to Broadway. It's a classic of the genre that Martin Esslin dubbed the Theater of the Absurd and I just couldn't see how it could possibly have enough commercial appeal for even a limited engagement—with or without a Hollywood star. Nonetheless, Catherine and I'd been hearing for weeks that the production—and especially Rush's performance—was amazing and that we'd be fools to miss it; we finally got tickets for the closing performance on June 14th and I'm happy to say that the reports did not exaggerate. The story is a rather obvious allegory on aging and mortality: King Berenger I learns in the first few minutes that he'll be dead by the end of the play and that he must prepare himself for this inevitability. While this might sound like a better recipe for tragedy than comedy, Ionesco's script is insanely funny and was beautifully executed by director Neil Armfield and his exceptional cast, which also included Susan Sarandon, Lauren Ambrose, Andrea Martin, William Sadler and Brian Hutchinson. But Geoffrey Rush's performance was the primary reason to see this show: his Berenger was full of life and energy, a man who absolutely refused to give into death until the last possible moment. Even from the back row of the balcony (which, fortunately, is not really very high up or at all far back from the stage of the Ethel Barrymore theater), the final instant of the piece—a sudden gasp of air from the incapacitated Berenger—was the most chilling experience I've had in a theater in recent memory. I don't know how Exit the King fared financially but I'd love to think that, between the critical success of this and the Roundabout's Waiting for Godot, commercial producers may begin to realize the enormous potential in some of these 20th century classics.

Still to come: Martha Wainwright singing Piaf at Dixon Place, The New York City Ballet performs Ballanchine's A Midsummer Night's Dream at Lincoln Center and Concrete Temple's The Bird Machine... which means that I've got to get writing soon before I head back to Dixon Place on Friday to see South, followed by machines, machines, machines at HERE Arts Center later that night!

Equality in Marriage

2009-06-21T10:03:00.004-04:00

ModFab reports on an article he found on Towleroad about the marriage bill that currently needs to be brought to the floor of the New York state senate (S. 4401). I was amazed to see the name of my representative, Daniel Squadron, on the list of senators that Towleroad believes should especially be prodded into action on the bill. Of course, I wrote an e-mail immediately. If you live in New York and you haven't written your senator on this issue, whether she/he is on the list or not, do it now.

Bloomsday

2009-06-16T12:04:00.017-04:00

The primary significance for me of June 16th it that is my nephew, Jacob Weed's, birthday. He's nine years old and when I spoke to him earlier this morning, he was excavating tyrannosaur bones from a brick of plaster. My sister, Heather, said his birthday celebration already began on Saturday with a party: since Catherine believes that birthdays are supposed to last a whole week (if not the entire month), then he still has at least four more days to enjoy.

Today is also, of course, the day in which all of the events in James Joyce's novel, Ulysses, take place. I have begun reading the novel three times over the years: each time I try, I get a little further along but still have yet to slog through more than a hundred pages or so before I put it down again. Here in NYC, there are readings from the novel at Symphony Space by famous actors; Catherine and I tell ourselves every year that next year we're going... but somehow we never manage to get it together (to be fair, this year we've been given tickets to see A Midsummer Night's Dream at the New York City Ballet because our friends, Eric and Anne, were appalled that neither of us has ever seen any classical ballet performed live).

While I won't be able to hear them spoken (and I would love to hear Barbara Feldon's take—in addition to having had a big ol' crush on Agent 99 in my youth, I think she's still got one of the sexiest voices in the business), I would like to share the last few lines of Molly Bloom's famous soliloquy that ends the novel. The entire text of the speech can be found here and the online version of the novel is here.

O and the sea the sea crimson sometimes like fire and the glorious sunsets and the figtrees in the Alameda gardens yes and all the queer little streets and the pink and blue and yellow houses and the rosegardens and the jessamine and geraniums and cactuses and Gibraltar as a girl where I was a Flower of the mountain yes when I put the rose in my hair like the Andalusian girls used or shall I wear a red yes and how he kissed me under the Moorish wall and I thought well as well him as another and then I asked him with my eyes to ask again yes and then he asked me would I yes to say yes my mountain flower and first I put my arms around him yes and drew him down to me so he could feel my breasts all perfume yes and his heart was going like mad and yes I said yes I will Yes.

Happiest People Ever

2009-06-11T12:12:00.008-04:00

My friend, Nomi, sent me the link to this photo blog today. It's a very silly website but I had to laugh out loud when I saw that the guy sitting in the middle of this picture from the site (which you will find, suitable for captioning, in the June 10th entry) is ~~our friend and Nomi's former roommate, Randy Lake~~ wearing a burgundy shirt.

Last Week in Theater

2009-06-08T12:13:00.049-04:00

Last week was filled with performances for Catherine and me to attend—so many, in fact, that we weren't able to see them all. I was particularly disappointed that we had to miss The Centrifuge's Fresh Ground Pepper on Parade Friday night: unfortunately, it was raining that evening and we already had tickets for another show at 9:30—if I'd just been going home afterward, the idea of a 3-hour traveling adventure through the East Village, even in the cold and damp, might have been fun.

On Thursday night, we were on the Upper West Side for Zakiyyah Alexander's 10 Things to Do Before I Die at Second Stage's McGinn/Cazale Theater. The play shifts back and forth between the lives of two sisters: Vida, the older one, is a high school English teacher who has a knack for getting into relationships with men who can't or won't commit to her; Nina, a novelist struggling with her second book, is in the enviable position of having the perfect boyfriend who would like nothing more than to get married and take care of her. After years of not speaking to one another—Nina included personal observations about her sister's sexual relationships in her first novel—they are forced together again when they receive ten boxes of their late father's personal effects and must comb through their "inheritance". While there are no surprises in the piece—I felt pretty certain well before the act break that all of the plot points would have a satisfying resolution—it's a clever, funny and very sweet script: it might easily have fallen into a Lifetime movie-of-the-week formula but didn't. I can see this play doing incredibly well in regional theater—smart writing, an engaging story and really plum acting roles for two women and three men. This production is nicely staged by Jackson Gay although many of the transitions between scenes took a little too much time and made the evening feel longer than it actually was. All of the actors, without exception, give strong performances but especially Natalie Venetia Belcon and Tracie Thoms as Vida and Nina and Francois Battiste as Nina's boyfriend, Jason.

Catherine and I had seen a previous incarnation last year of The Bang Group's ShowDown at Joe's Pub but we try to never miss their performances here in NYC; as ususal, they didn't disappoint. Choreographer David Parker has an incredible gift for infusing his modern and ballet vocabulary with popular musical theater styles—usually tap dance—into which he subtly hints at relationships between his dancers' characters. Most often, this is manifested by one dancer attempting to reach out or connect to another only to meet resistance—but never outright rejection—from the partner. The drama in Parker's dance comes from the tension within a relationship and how the characters modify, ignore or employ the tension in order to gain control over a situation. In ShowDown, Parker has choreographed to the film score from Irving Berlin's Annie Get Your Gun—a show tailor-made for his humorous explorations of power struggles within relationships. I'd actually love to see the piece in another venue at some point: the stage at Joe's Pub is relatively small and while the dancers do a remarkable job of fitting the choreography to the venue, I can imagine that a little more distance would augment the tension better. The company—Nic Petry, Amber Sloan and my very good friend and personal hero, Jeffrey Kazin—are incredibly gifted performers and make what is clearly very difficult and strenuous choreography appear effortless; they're a joy to watch. Bookending the show on Friday were short comic duets by Deborah Lohse and Monica Bill Barnes (to the accompaniment of recordings from one of Johnny Cash's prison concerts) as a pair of vaudevillian deputies in long red underwear and leather vests (our friend Nomi referred to them as "the rodeo clowns," which I thought was an apt description).

Saturday night took us out to The Chocolate Factory for an evening of lab works from director David Herskovitz and his Target Margin Theater, The Theater of Tomorrow. All of the productions in the lab were non-naturalistic plays written during the first half of the 20th century. David adapted and directed Gertrude Stein's A Family of Perhaps Three for three women—Chinasa Ogbuagu, Allison Schubert and Indika Senanayake. In the original work, a third-person narrator tells us about a family of at least a mother and two daughters—the narrator is either unsure of the details or is having trouble remembering them. It's a piece about the connection of family and how those relationships change over time. Of course, it's Stein's use of language, not plot, that drives the piece—how she modifies a phrase, then contradicts the modification, then splices both phrases together to give the text an entirely new meaning. By dividing the text between the three women, Herskovitz has introduced different voices, spatial relationships and vocal inflection into Stein's poetry; I wouldn't say it makes the text any clearer but it definitely provides the audience with a point of entry and a context for her words. In what may have been one of the most arresting images I've seen onstage this year, the show begins with Ogbuagu sitting silently, looking out at all of us in the audience; after a very long moment, she opens her mouth ever so slightly as if she is going to speak... and then quickly shuts it and sits looking out at us again for another long moment: a brilliant opening that established the self-correction and textual contradictions that will follow. The actors all do a great job; I especially enjoyed the contribution of "Sound Demon" Caroline Kaplan, who sits upstage center running sound cues from a computer and contributing vocally from time to time during the piece: she has a pinpoint focus on the other characters whenever possible that complemented the linguistic gymnastics very well.

Later that same evening, we returned to the Chocolate Factory for two more short pieces: E. E. Cummings' Tom, adapted for puppet theater by Kathleen Kennedy Tobin; and Edna St. Vincent Millay's Aria da Capo, adapted by Asta Bennie Hostetter and Julia Jarcho. The Cummings piece is from a ballet based on Uncle Tom's Cabin; I enjoyed Tobin's puppet work—which runs the gamut from naturalistic representations of characters to dramatic abstractions—but the text itself really didn't engage me. For the Millay, the adaptation is extremely silly—often a bit too silly, I thought—but it is visually engaging and the three performers (Hostetter, Jarcho and Julia Sirna-First) have a lot of enthusiasm and energy that held my attention throughout the piece.

Finally, on Sunday, we saw Naomi Wallace's Things of Dry Hours at New York Theatre Workshop. It's a very smart and beautifully written play about a Depression-era African-American Sunday School teacher and Communist organizer, Tice Hogan, in Alabama. He and his daughter, Cali, must take a mysterious young Caucasian man, Corbin Teel, into their home; neither Tice nor Cali completely trust Corbin Teel (they invariably call him by his full name, making the words seem like an accusation or a curse), but he threatens to turn them into the authorities for Tice's organizing if they don't allow him to stay. Wallace's very poetic, but still naturalistic, dialogue prolongs some scenes a bit too much—especially when Tice must explain The Communist Manifesto to the uneducated Corbin Teel—but, for the most part, her use of heightened language is able to ramp up the tension, as well. The play is exceptionally well-served by the actors Delroy Lindo and Roslyn Ruff: they are both powerful performers and are able to make Wallace's words seem competely natural. Garret Dillahunt, as Corbin Teel, manages to walk the thin line between presenting himself as someone honestly in need of Tice and Cali's help and a sly villain awaiting his opportunity to strike at them. The play is at its most alive in the scenes between Dillahunt and Ruff in which the sexual tension between their characters is counterbalanced by Cali's deep distrust of this intruder into the safe haven she has created for herself. Ruben Santiago-Hudson's direction of the actors serves the script well; I'm not a big fan of blackouts between every scene—especially in this production, it slows the pace too much—but I know I'm in the minority on that point: almost every performance I see these days leaves me sitting in the dark more than I would like. Still, it's a good production of an outstanding play with three very talented actors: head on down to East 4th Street and check it out.

Next Fall

2009-06-03T10:50:00.005-04:00

Having grown up Southern Baptist, I know a little about the concept of "once saved, always saved." Contrary to how it may sound, it's not a license to kill: a Christian who has accepted Christ doesn't get a free ride to Heaven, regardless of the heinous deeds committed on Earth. If this nefarious individual is truly repentant and asks for forgiveness, the belief is that he/she will receive it; but there are Christians who unrepentantly commit such horrendously un-Christian crimes that I feel certain can, if Hell exists, look forward to an eternity consigned to it. As I understand it, "once saved, always saved" assumes that the "Christian" is actually striving to follow the teachings of Christ, so a mere public profession of faith is not enough: if Christ is truly in one's heart, that person will resist temptation and evil desires.*

In his play, Next Fall, Geoffrey Nauffts has given the defense of "once saved, always saved" to Luke, a young gay actor who is in a long-term relationship with an older writer/teacher, Adam. Adam has no religious beliefs while Luke is a conservative Christian who considers their relationship to be a sin that must be forgiven by God; this causes a fair amount of tension between them. Unfortunately, Luke is unequal to the challenge of actually defending his faith: when asked why a gay non-Christian would go to Hell while the murderers of Matthew Shepard, should they be Christian, would go to Heaven, his response is, essentially, "That's just the way it works." Of course, this is unacceptable to Adam (in addition to being wrong): who would worship a God as unjust as this? I had a momentary impulse at this point to stand up and politely disagree (fortunately, I was able to suppress the impulse).

As the play opens, Luke has been critically injured in an accident; his divorced parents have flown to New York from Florida, his friends have gathered at the hospital and Adam has quickly returned from a high school reunion. Luke's parents don't know that he is gay, let alone that he and Adam have been partners for five years. The lines of tension in this situation—who is considered family for visitation, who will make the life-and-death decisions, who knows best Luke's wishes—are immediately apparent. It will come as no surprise to anyone in the audience that this story cannot end happily.

The Naked Angels production is well-acted, capably directed and has a cleverly designed set by Wilson Chin that allows for the play's multiple locations to be revealed from within a single hospital waiting room. The script has loads of funny lines, most of them smartly delivered by Patrick Breen as the sardonic Adam; I'm actually, though, getting a little tired of the character who uses a wicked sense of humor to avoid coming to terms with love, death, relationships, sexuality, religion or any of the other realities of life—it's in danger of becoming a cliché. Nauffts has, for the most part, sidestepped the potentially deadly melodrama inherent in his script; even the inevitable hospital room confrontation between Adam and Luke's father, Butch—while highly charged, emotionally—is relatively restrained.

Ultimately, I found Next Fall to be engaging but not satisfying. Luke (Patrick Heusinger) isn't given the ability to maintain his side of the dialectic with Adam; Butch (Cotter Smith) isn't given the opportunity (in fact, any credibility Butch might have in the play is completely undercut by his homophobia and his racism—a superfluous addition, in my opinion: we already get that he's narrow-minded and hypocritical). The one other person of deep faith, a long-time friend of Luke's who is also gay, suffers from a more extreme version of Luke's self-loathing: he doesn't provide any new perspective on homosexuality and Christianity, so his big scene in Act II isn't really necessary (the actor, Seth Dugan, however, does a good job with this slim role). And because Adam is always the one to bring up the issue of faith and is able to present his side of the argument so much more adeptly, his continuous revisiting of the topic makes him seem to be the source of most of the tension in their relationship, not Luke. It's unfortunate that Nauffts chose not to explore in this direction: it might have made a much stronger piece.

*I found an excellent article on this website that discusses whether or not "once saved, always saved" is actually a cornerstone of the Baptist faith. The author makes an excellent argument that it isn't but that many Baptists believe that it is.

Interesting Headlines I Can't Really Read

2009-06-02T10:40:00.015-04:00

elpais.com: Salinger demanda al autor de una pretendida secuela de 'El guardián entre el centeno'
I actually heard this story on NY1 this morning. I don't know much about copyright laws but I do know that I wrote a play loosely adapted from a novel and the only request I received from the copyright holder was to change the character names—which seems to be the primary element that John David California (yeah, that's his real name, right) has actually used from the original novel. I was also intrigued by this article because I always like seeing how a title is translated into another language. The Guardian of the Rye?

elmundo.es: ¿AC/DC cambió su vida?
Did AC/DC change my life? You betcha.

lemonde.fr: Grandeur et décadence du producteur de musique pop Phil Spector
Grandeur and decadence: isn't that the reason most people want to be famous? Without the murdering a young woman in cold blood aspect, of course. Incidentally, you can tell Phil's taking his situation seriously now: this is the first wig he's worn that doesn't look like someone Photoshopped it—badly—onto his head.

hola.com: Este verano... cita con el teatro clásico en Mérida
I don't have anything smart-alecky to say about this: I just thought the photo of the amphitheater looked cool. I'm not a fan of huge crowds but I would love to see a play performed in a space like this one. On the Mérida Theater Festival's website, I notice that one of the productions this summer is Titus Andronicus: how groovy would it be to watch the Elizabethan Texas Chain Saw Massacre on this stage?

morgenpost.de: Wie realistisch ist die Physik in "Star Trek" ?
The Berlin Morgenpost: asking the burning questions of 1967... today!

lesoir.be: McCartney s’essaie à la guitare virtuelle pour la Xbox 360
This story actually made quite a few international newspapers today. Apparently, there's a new title being added to the Rock Band game portfolio on 09/09/09: The Beatles Rock Band. It makes sense that McCartney is playing a virtual guitar now: he's only been virtually writing songs for decades.

Divine Imagination

2009-05-28T14:09:00.008-04:00

I don't know what bothers me more about this BBC story: that someone felt the need to look at the inside of the marmite jar lid or that she felt the need to save said lid as a sign that God is thinking about her... and yet continue to feed the jar's contents to her family (I assume marmite jars have lids for a reason*). It's not that I have a problem with people believing that God has a personal interest in their lives—if you pray, there's an assumption that God has some degree of interest in you—but I would hope that we can all agree that leaving abstract images made from smears of food (where, really, they should never be seen at all) is not quite on par with a burning bush, symbolically speaking.

How slow a news day must it have been for the BBC to even cover a story like this?

The best thing to come out of all this is that I now know what marmite is.

*As it turns out, the jar has a lid to prevent the marmite from getting dried out and unspreadable after it has been opened. Should this happen to your marmite, however, it will still be "edible."

13th and Fifth Avenue

2009-05-25T12:04:00.007-04:00

The photo on the right is one that I took yesterday of the corner that, when I first moved to NYC in 1987, looked more like the photo on the left. The Lone Star Cafe closed in 1989 but I did go there once shortly after I arrived—by myself, as I recall, although I'm not sure why: I've never been one to go alone to a bar very often and I didn't go to hear music. I don't think I was homesick, per se, but I may have just liked the idea of going to a Texas-style bar and drinking beer that I wouldn't have crossed the street to get back home (I'll drink a Lone Star if it's available in an NYC restaurant, like Marfa, but it's not a very good beer). The iguana stayed on the roof for a number of years until the building was converted to a deli in the '90s (I used to go there occasionally when I worked at a place down 13th Street a few doors) but it's been empty for four or five years. Now it's gone and I'm disappointed: it was a cool old building that will almost certainly be replaced by a high-rise luxury condo.

This Week in Theater

2009-05-23T19:42:00.018-04:00

Thursday, Catherine and I took the L train out to Brooklyn to see The Bushwhack Series at The Bushwick Starr. We'd never been to the performance space but, now that we have, we'll definitely go again: it's a got a nice big stage, high ceilings, good lighting and sound systems, a large patio that allows folks to take the air on a warm summer night during intermission (with a nice view of Manhattan, even) and they did a great job programming this performance festival—it was a nice balance of theater, performance, film and trapeze (yes, trapeze: how could that possibly be a typo?). As is often the case, we'd gone to see work by our friends—this time, it was Ryan Holsopple's 31 Down Radio Theater and Jake Hooker, both of whom showed excerpts from larger projects they're developing. While 31 Down calls themselves a radio theater, their performance, Assember Dilator, in an arresting combination of live performers, recorded voices and a sound installation that literally had all of the seats shaking (and yet, somehow, it was not at all deafening—I'll have to follow up with Ryan to see how they accomplished that feat... if it's not a secret, of course). Aesthetically, it reminded me very much of the Shunt performance, Tropicana, that Catherine and I saw in the London Bridge vaults in '04: a little creepy, a little disturbing but absolutely enthralling. Jake's piece, a reworking of a Swedish tragicomedy from 1910 called Deluge, made use of technology in some interesting ways: they had slides and video on an LCD monitor with which the actors interacted—once as a bartender, several times as a telephone; live feed video that was projected onto a scrim hanging directly in front of the actors performing in the video—it made for an odd sort of disconnect since we were looking through the projected video and watching the actors as they played to the camera; and a soundtrack in which most of the dialogue was pre-recorded, but occasionally the actors would speak a few words or a line along with the recording. It was hard to tell from the excerpt what Jake's intention is for this piece but it's clearly still in an early developmental stage: all of the elements he's using to create the performance are strong and I'll be interested to see where he's going to take the work.

On Friday, we saw Chiori Miyagawa's I Have Been to Hiroshima Mon Amour, a co-production of her company, Crossing Jamaica Avenue, and Voice and Vision at the Ohio Theater. The play is part of a larger event, The Hiroshma Project, that includes a reading series of plays by Japanese writers, a documentary film and symposia after the performances. The website calls the piece a poetic response to the 1959 French film, Hiroshima Mon Amour; I haven't yet seen the film (it's actually now number 3 in my Netflix queue) but it's not at all necessary in order to appreciate the play. The scenes shift back and forth between three stories: a Japanese man whose fiance died in the atomic blast while he was a prisoner of war; that same man in 1959, when he has a brief affair with the lead actress in the French film; and a contemporary trio of hipsters discussing the film. I liked the script a lot: the dialogue is intelligently poetic and yet still accessible, the stories are compelling and the characters are all clearly defined (the same three actors—Sue Jean Kim, Juliana Francis-Kelly and Joel de la Fuenta—do a great job playing all of the roles). Miyagawa has created a tender, expressionistic piece about memory, entitlement and cultural differences that avoids the pitfall of didacticism (except in the hipsters' dialogue, but that's actually the point in those scenes). Director Jean Wagner creates some incredibly vivid and beautiful stage pictures with the actors but the rhythm of the dialogue becomes a little too regular early in this production; I found this to be at odds with Miyagawa's script and, as a result, a lot of the humor in the piece was diminished. Still, the writing and acting are very good, the design elements very well executed (I especially liked the four rotating projection screens and how they were used to reshape the stage throughout the performance) and it's a swift 75 minutes; if, like me, you prefer a more challenging theater experience, I'd definitely recommend it.

Making Magic in Bars

2009-05-20T16:44:00.011-04:00

I've had an idea for a while to create a performance piece based on plays/stories/novels that take place in bars or drinking/drunken speeches or scenes in which drinking plays a large role (which describes just about any play by Noël Coward, really). I'm going to develop a script for a site-specific work for me to direct that can be performed in bars (here in NYC, I'm especially interested in Jimmy's No. 43, of course, or The Bourgeois Pig, pictured at right). I'm asking everyone I know to send me titles/authors of works that fit this bill. Here's what I have so far:

Arthur: Ten Nights in a Barroom (the book, not the play)
O'Neill: The Iceman Cometh
Masteroff, Kander and Ebb: Cabaret (although I'd like to stay away from musicals at this point but I guess I could look at Isherwood's Berlin Stories or Van Druten's I am a Camera)
Chase: Harvey
Patrick: Kennedy's Children
Williams: In the Bar of a Tokyo Hotel
Albee: Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?
Saroyan: The Time of Your Life
Shakespeare: I Henry IV (haven't figured out how this one might work but Act II, Sc. 4)
Shakespeare: Macbeth (the Porter's speech after the murder of Duncan)
Miller: The Days of Wine and Roses

Of course, the beauty of the piece is that it could be performed in any bar, anywhere in the world—The White Elephant in Fort Worth, the Elk's lodge in Joplin or Au Lapin Agile in Paris (guess which of these tops my list...). I'm not sure yet how the piece will work: obviously, much of this material is copyrighted so I won't be using it outright. But I thought I'd start with how other writers have approached drinking and bars and see where it leads me. So all you amateur dramaturgs out there, drop me a line with your suggestions, tout de suite!

Live Blogging the Obies

2009-05-19T11:11:00.007-04:00

These would have been better if they had actually been sent last night when I was typing them... unfortunately, I had typed in the mail-to-blogger address wrong on my Blackberry and nothing happened. So, here, in digest form, is my "live blogging" of The Village Voice Obie awards for excellence Off and Off-Off Broadway. Where I couldn't understand or hear a name, I have filled in the blanks in [brackets].

7:56pm: In a crush of people @ Webster Hall. Drinks almost impossible to get because the bar is too crowded. Aaron Beall is telling me about his one man Hamlet on a pedicab...as soon as he raises the money for the pedicab ($2000 down, $2000 to go).

8:02pm: Heading upstairs for the awards. And we're walking, we're walking...

8:05pm: $3 per coat to check. Not tipping when we pick up, I guess...

8:08pm: Martha Plimpton, co-host. She's talking but I can't hear her. Sound here by the bar is all about the bar.

8:11pm: First award: Casey Tyler something for Ruined (will Google her later) [Quincy Tyler Bernstine]

8:16pm: Next award: Another for Ruined... Ms. Edwards? It's hard to hear... [Saidah Arrika Ekulona]

8:19pm: John Gilman was flirting with Catherine so I missed the name of the next award. [Russell Gebert Jones won the award, another for Ruined.]

8:23pm: Another for Ruined. Ralph's fault: asking me the name of an actor we worked with in '91. Who remembers that? [Almost certainly this is when Lynn Nottage got her award for Best New American Play... but at the bar, I couldn't tell]

8:26pm: Lifeime achievement to Earl Hyman: well deserved!

8:42pm: More Obies. Earl Hyman made a great speech in support of public libraries and theater. I remember that the bad thing about the Obies at Webster Hall is the loud people at the bar (where I am, unable to hear) and the good thing is the bar (where we can get drinks during the long, long show). John Shea is going to present 4 awards now.

Stephen Sondheim gets one for Road Show. My musical theater hero.

8:54pm: Katie Mitchell for [directing] The Waves. Our Town (an amazing production) director David Cromer. Catherine at the bar with Kristin Marting (deja vu). This is hard to do on a Blackberry. Sara Benson and Louisa Thompson for a title I missed at Soho Rep (too much screaming); duh: it's Sara Kane's Blasted.

8:59pm: We continue... Everyone talking: missed this woman's name and why she won. She's cute. [most likely it was Birgit Huppuch for Telephone]

9:01pm: Have a seat now, away from the bar. Let's see if it's better. Sustained excellence award to Kevin T. Carroll.

9:11pm: Much better sitting! Francois Battiste for The Good Negro. Then the star of Fela! whose name I couldn't hear [Sahr Ngaujah] but I agree: he was amazing.

9:15pm: And on we go... James Sugg for Chekhov\Lizardbrain (another fantastic production), so well deserved! He gave a shout out to Robert and Soho Think Tank. Lorenzo Pisoni's phenomenal performance just won (another well earned award).

9:25pm: Too fast to keep up... Costumer Toni-Leslie James for sustained achievement. Sponsor thanks to Macys, Virgin America, Metro PCS, Sierra Nevada, Fragoli, Harlequin Books, Likeme.net...blah blah blah. The moment of silence for the recently departed from Michael Feingold.

9:38pm: Back again. Ross Wetzsteon Award to HERE Arts Center (yeah Kristin)! Theater grants to Classical Theater of Harlem (another well deserved); The Chocolate Factory (a very well deserved award); Lark Play Development Center.

9:57pm: Are we there yet, Obies? We should be winding down now, rounding the clubhouse turn...

There's some loud music beneath us somewhere.

David Korins for sustained excellence in set design. Hamlet director David Esbjornsen and actor (missed the name) [Christian Camargo]. Director of Telephone (yelling everywhere around me way too loud to hear name) [Ken Rus Schmoll]. Aaron Monaghan for acting in The Cripple of Inishmaan. John Douglas Thompson in Othello (a very good performance; for my money, Chair was a better production). Missed a name but I saw him in the Craig Lucas play at Playwrights' [Jonathan Groff; I think I should have recognized him...].

9:59pm: Daniel Breaker and Martha Plimpton are still talking but it's over!

The Kid Stays in the Picture

2009-05-18T17:33:00.008-04:00

On Friday, I volunteered to help out at the Drama League awards luncheon. The job I got turned out to be a lot of fun: I was the valet to one of the Co-Chairs for the benefit, Tovah Feldshuh (the star of Irena's Vow, which I saw earlier in the year). The job was pretty easy: I had to greet Ms. Feldshuh, shepherd her and a rep from the Broadway production to the press room for photos and interviews, then take her to the Drama League members cocktail reception so that she could schmooze them up a bit (if there had been time, which there wasn't), and finally take her to the VIP reception where she and the other nominees who were to be seated on the dais could pose for a group photo and then line-up to enter the luncheon. It was a pretty cushy job, really.

In the press room, I waited along the back wall for Ms. Feldshuh and watched the stars stream past me. The opposite me was where everyone posed for photos in front of the Drama League logo backdrop but, occasionally, a photographer would turn around and take a picture of a celebrity as they were being interviewed. I was watching Marcia Gay Harden chat merrily with an interviewer when Stockard Channing, who was the next person in line, finished with her conversation and moved forward. They greeted one another and the sudden attraction of two stars in such close proximity was just too much for about 8 or 10 photographers, who turned around quickly and started taking pictures of the two together. I got out of the way as quickly as I could (no, really: I did!) but not quite quickly enough:

As cool as my assignment was, Catherine's was even cooler: she was the valet to Geoffrey Rush and it was pretty much just her and Mr. Rush going through the event together! But that's a story for Catherine to tell...