Puzzlewit

Started the New Year in rehearsal

2012-01-26T17:00:00.000-05:00

"UNDERWEAR!" We've all been there as a kid on Christmas. Laura Natusch, Andreas Halidis, and Nathan Pupillo

With Christmas just two days behind us, I and six actors began rehearsals for NAUGHTY - a dark as coal new comedy by Michael R. McGuire about a string of bad Christmasses spanning four decades with me at the helm as director and co-producer. Two weeks and two days later we put the play up in the pub at The O'Neill Theater Center in Waterford. It was an amazing, rigorous whirlwind that resulted in a sold-out 4 performance run.

Whoo. It was exhausting and invigorating all at the same time.

Santa drinks for free. Andreas Halidis and Jacob Kaeser

Because we are not a theater company per se, we had to do things the simple way. The playwright made the copies of the script on his printer, we rehearsed in my basement, and the actors provided much of their own costumes. We got a break on the cost of the space from The O'Neill, but had to sink several hundred bucks into insurance which we arranged with the help of Fractured Atlas.

Christmas bell ringers and a giant old cell-phone = comedy gold. Felia Williams and Nathan Pupillo

We rehearsed 4 hours a day, 6 days a week. In the end we made enough money to give some to the actors and the crew. That was cool. We are planning the rest of 2012 - and hope to be pulling together at least two more workshop productions like this one, and a whole bunch of readings of new work.

Santa as therapist. Nathan Pupillo and Jacob Kaeser

Here's to making more art happen in 2012!

WISH PLAY - a staged reading in Bridgeport

2011-10-12T14:14:00.001-04:00

by Kato McNickle
directed by Bryna Kearney

Presented as a Staged Reading by
Slant of Light Theater Company

Wednesday, October 26
7:00 PM
$5 at the door

Slant of Light Theater Company
1042 Broad Street
(entrance on John Street)
Bridgeport, CT 06604
7:00pm
Refreshments will be served

Wish Play begins with the jottings of an unfulfilled woman. The problem is she’s spilling these secrets across the pages of a magic book; a book so compelling and lovely that she stole it from a young man on a tropical island. By mistaking the book for a diary, she sets in motion a series of events that will lead to her death and the ensnarement of her closest friends and family as the book changes hands by hook or by crook–call all who touch it to make an entry within its pages.

But the juju of the book demands more. After tantalizing a person to write down a secret wish, it then compels the composer to return and tell the story of the fulfillment of that wish. Failure to write the rest of the story leads people to a single, sleepless, omnipresent obsession: to find the book and tell the story. To what lengths will people go to possess the book and finish their stories? The power of the written word and the needs of secret desire unravel this group mourning the loss of their friend. Can the spell of the book be broken?

(P.S. It’s a comedy…)

WISH PLAY
Written by Kato McNickle
Directed by Bryna Kearney

Featuring:
CAROL- Kit Novotny
JUNE- Ayo Oneke Cummings
DARLA- Shannon Riccio
PATTY- Victoria Myers
TODD- Robert Sciglimpaglia
DANNY- Brad DeBiase

In 3-D

2011-07-29T14:16:00.001-04:00

I just read a blog that quotes film director Ridley Scott, who is now filming an ALIEN prequel in 3-D, as stating that he will never direct in any other format from now on.

As a person who loves film, but does not want to see many films in 3-D I hope he changes his mind.

I can see the appeal of directing in 3-D, of solving the 3-dimensional space issues, of the exciting mental challenge that this format presents. I direct in 3-D all of the time. Know why? Because, Sir Ridley, I direct for theater.

The spacial relationships of the actor, the sets, and the audience are the stuff that plays are made on.

My advice to Sir Ridley and the other Hollywood martinets who have gone ga-ga for 3-D-- I say start slumming in the theater world from time to time and see if you can hack it.

Kah-ching!

2010-12-16T11:48:00.000-05:00

The tally for my 2010 year's playwriting revenue is:

$1,725.00 or somewhere thereabouts.

Yeah.

Man, I gotta get published.

Definite CHANCE OF RAIN in Missouri this fall

2010-09-16T15:57:00.000-04:00

Chance of Rain: A Noah Riff by Kato McNickle, directed by John Wilson is winner of the National Playwriting for Youth Award and will be presented by the University of Central Missouri October 29 & 30. Tickets available through the Performing Arts Series - 660-543-8888.

Antigone in the Americas

2010-09-07T18:24:00.008-04:00

PHOTO: Teresa Ralli performing her solo-show Antigona

and now
as in ancient times I see the sorrows of the house,
the living heirs of the old ancestral kings,
piling on the sorrows of the dead
and one generation cannot free the next—
some god will bring them crashing down,
the race finds no release.
And now the light, the hope
springing up from the late last root
in the house of Oedipus, that hope’s cut down in turn
by the long, bloody knife swung by the gods of death
by a senseless word
by fury at the heart.

-- The Chorus
Antigone by Sophocles
441 BCE

A girl defies the order of her uncle the king and remains resolute in her convictions even unto death. This is the central action of the tragedy of Antigone, as she faces down the tyrant Creon for denying burial to her brother who died a traitor to their city. This story began its stage iteration twenty-five centuries ago in Athens, the creation of the master tragic poet Sophocles early in his career. But even for Sophocles’ audience, the story was an old one, the final act of a multi-generational epic from the age of heroes, a remote quasi-historical past depicting events that shaped the contemporary culture of classical Athens. Portions of the story were altered by Sophocles to strengthen his theatrical allegory of public law verses family duty, as exemplified by his invention of the king’s son Haemon as suitor to Antigone (in other versions of the myth this son is a victim of the Sphinx that is defeated by Oedipus long before the events depicted in Antigone.)

Just as Sophocles reworked aspects of the mythic story of the death of a family, many twentieth & twenty-first century theater artists have reworked and retold this dire struggle of a young girl’s defiance. Three such works being investigated here are Antigona Furiosa (1985) by Argentine playwright Griselda Gambaro, the mono-drama Antigona (2000) by Peruvian performance artist Teresa Ralli, and Antigone Arkhe (2004) by American Latina playwright Caridad Svich. In Sophocles’ Antigone the cultural significance of a girl as the instigating force to the ancient Greek observer is explained by Helene P. Foley in her essay Antigone as Moral Agent, “When tragic poets choose to allow an entire action to turn on the moral decision of a woman or to show women taking or urging significant moral positions in a public context, they apparently make at least a partial break from a cultural ideal and use female characters to explore ambiguous and often dangerous moral frontiers.” While all three new plays reference the primary character in their titles, and all borrow elements from the Sophoclean version, all depict radical reinterpretations of the story elements and depart from the original political intent of the source material. What is gained by reiterating this story? How does reanimating Antigone in these new and varied contexts alter our understanding of her, and reveal our modern assumptions about this ancient story? Why repeat this story now?

Antigona Furiosa

The living are the great sepulcre of the dead!
—Antigona

Antigona Furiosa begins after the end. Antigona is dead, hanged by her own belt, her body dangles over scores of other dead bodies—earlier victims of larger story’s actions—all trapped in a cage. Outside the cage two men drink coffee, seated at a café table. Nearby sits the empty hulk of Creon’s armor. Antigona revives herself, wakes herself from the dead, and loosens the belt she had used to kill herself—moments, hours, centuries, eons ago? The House of Oedipus is already extinct, a recollection that reawakens no matter what efforts are made to erase or belittle the family’s significance and legacy. Antigona rouses herself to address the world that would rather put her away and forget. Just as Antigona’s final actions in life were in defiance of an unjust man-made law, her actions after death are in defiance of forgetfulness and neglect on the part of surviving witnesses to the horrors. Antigona’s attacks are not only against the two men who mock her actions, but also to the audience that watches her. Audience members witnessing the play must also question their own complicity in atrocities, specifically the cycle of violence associated with Argentina’s “Dirty War”. In Argentina between 1976 and 1980 anywhere from eleven to fifteen thousand people were murdered by government and other official agents. The “Dirty War” continued into the early 1980’s, and Gambaro’s play is a very early response to the collective trauma.

Antigona Furiosa is not a veiled critique or questioning, it is direct and explicit in its connections of the ancient story to the current events of the nation. The play presents a dual structure of a synthetic fragment, where all times are present at once, and a circle or loop, where actions are repeating, perhaps endlessly. The synthetic fragment structure allows the character of Antigone to be the young woman from Thebes condemned for trying to bury her brother at the same time as the two men speaking to her can be drinking coffee at a café as it also always all time in between these two disparate events to be possibilities as well. The circle or loop structure becomes apparent when the play’s actions conclude with Antigona hanging herself—the action that is followed by the beginning of the play we have just witnessed.

What this hybrid structure underscores is the difference between the Sophocles rendition and Gambaro’s intent—where Sophocles’ Antigone is traditionally a victim of fate who marks the end of an epic cycle, Gambaro’s Antigona is forever trapped in a cycle of doom. Gambaro chooses to display a simple version of the story, the girl driven by familial obligation to bury her brother in defiance of the law set by her uncle the king. Nowhere is it mentioned that the brother Antigona longs to bury was potentially as ruthless a tyrant as her uncle. The greater political implications of the story are ignored or set aside. What Gambaro emphasizes is disabling grief and feminine powerlessness in the face of masculine political might. These lines from then end of the play display this dynamic:

ANTIGONA: I still want to bury Polynices. I will always want to bury Polynices. Though I a thousand times will live, and he a thousand times will die.
ANTINOUS: Then Creon will always punish you.
CORYPHAEUS: And a thousand times you will die. You don’t have to call death, my girl. She comes on her own. (smiles) Pressuring her is fatal.
ANTIGONA: Will there never be an end to this mockery? Brother, I cannot endure these walls I cannot see, this air that seals me in like stone. […] I was born to share love, not hate. (long pause) But hate rules. (furious) The rest is silence! (She kills herself, with fury.)

A compelling transition occurs with the ‘fury” of Antigona. The circle of the play is drawn in two ways, the way the audience sees it happen with Antigona’s suicide, and the way the reader of the play sees the final word—which returns us to the title of the play. The key is to convey this circle through an action and the thing that is felt by the audience at the end.

But something else happens too. Antigona is transformed in this play, or perhaps by this play—she is no longer the girl from Sophocles’ play, or the character from myth—she becomes a “fury,” an ancient female being responsible for blood justice. Antigona is distorted by fury. That is the trap. That is the cycle. Can the ancient power be claimed and not be turned to vengeance? Antigona Furiosa is a raw display of grief, of witnessing, and of seeing the devastation wrought by continuing to remain the woman in the trap.

Antigona

I want all the dead to have a funeral
and then,
after that,
forgetfulness.
I’m caught in your snare guard. My death begins.
Remember my name—
one day I’ll be known as the sister who never forsook
her brother:
My name is Antigone
--Antigona

Teresa Ralli, in developing her one-woman production of Antigona, began with an image. A photograph of a woman walking beneath the midday sun and her companion shadow impressed the artist as Antigone returning across the centuries. This image was among an exhibition featuring black and white photographs of soldiers in training, spattered with the blood of dogs they had killed as an exercise. Another image pulled Ralli to it—the image of the woman in the arcade of the Plaza de Armas—that became central to creating her performance piece. Ralli describes the effect of the photo in Fragments of Memory as “an obsession, a recurring image, always waiting for the right moment to emerge and turn into something real.” The image evolved into a girl with short hair seated in a chair, waiting for a verdict, dressed in a white petticoat called a fustan. The theater piece she intended to create based on these images would be used to express the complicated responses of the survivors of a decade-long repressive and violent political regime.

To begin to make Antigone “real”, Ralli and her director, Miguel Rabio, studied the text by Sophocles. She describes the process as “gathering strength to enter the studio, which waits for us, completely empty.” In a strange way, the team collaborates with Sophocles by immersing themselves in his text as though it had been written for them, to express that very moment. Ralli describes the experience, “Discovering the music in each syllable, the importance of one word and not another, the structure of a thought put into words, the inner world the characters expressed in each speech.”

Ralli’s Antigona becomes the story of the witness, told by the surviving sister Ismene. In the story from the Greek, Ismene’s mythology ends with the death of her sister. Ralli has pulled Ismene from obscurity and places her role as central to the survival of the tale. By collecting interviews from surviving family members of disappeared citizens in her native Peru, Ralli resolved to infuse them into this Antigone:

That’s how another image of Antigone was born. Not the strong Antigone that has appeared throughout the history of Antigones. There have been warrior Antigones, furious Antigones. […] Antigone, it’s believed, is strong: she will stand firm until the end. My Antigone is fragile; even her voice breaks, a soft voice not used to confronting others or making demands. Out of this fragility (which she’ll never lose), a limitless strength and determination emerge.

But Ralli’s work presents the memory of Antigone and all of the rest of the characters. She embodies them all, wearing a tunic over pants, she forms herself into the assemblage of characters: Antigone, Creon, Heamon, Tiresias, the messenger, and Ismene, all in an empty space save for herself and a chair. In the end it is revealed that our narrator has been Ismene, the survivor of the tragedy, alive because she did not act with her sister, Ismene leaves us with her final expression of grief and regret:

[A]sk Polynices to forgive me for not performing this task at the proper time.
was frightened by the scowling face of the king. And tell him
how great my punishment is:
to remember every day – a torture
and shame for me.

Ralli’s performance frames the survivor as the storyteller, as the house of memory. The survivor dedicates herself to the survival of the story, and through the story her sister lives. Unlike Gambaro’s Antigona, who is caught in an endless trap of recurring violence that is literally caged, Ralli’s work is fluid, emphasizing the voice as the primary tool, the body as the container of the story that is endlessly transferable as long as the voice is willing to let the story out and as long as the mind remembers.

Antigone Arkhe

Accuse me of being Death’s bride, and I will accuse you for centuries of going against the laws of heaven, which are beyond time.
--Historical Antigone

As the center and longest piece in the five-part Antigone Project, Antigone Arke by Caridad Svich is also the most technically elaborate. The project was conceived by two initiators, Chiori Miyagawa and Sabrina Peck, in the aftermath of 9-11 to address multiple aspects of world conflict that has marked the twenty-first century. The works were performed in 2004 in co-production between the Women’s Project and Crossing Jamaica Avenue at the Julia Miles Theatre in New York. Antigone Arke (Arke from ancient Greek philosophy as the beginning or first principle of the world) is organized as a synthetic fragment, with multiple temporal possibilities coexisting—or co-performing— all in the same time-space continuum.

An archivist explains the basic functions of the archive and the artifacts on exhibit in this location, which may be a museum, or perhaps the actual location of the historical event being described, or perhaps someplace else. A narration persists, made up from pieces of what could otherwise be interpreted as stage directions, complete with notation in italics throughout, and perhaps these words are intended to scroll across a screen, ala CNN. A digital version of Antigone exists, perhaps exclusively on a screen, perhaps not, the script is not explicit on this point. There is also Historical Antigone existing alongside Digital Antigone. Sometimes the two speak together.

The action of the play is the resifting, rehashing. retelling, the story of the girl sealed in the cave. Artifacts from the event, like her sash and bits of bone, are preserved and on display. Words on screens, a digital character, an archivist—an ancient story told in a new way. The tension in the telling lies not in the story itself, but in the actual telling of the story. When presented as “history” complete with artifacts, a museum, a body, and a gift shop—the story becomes removed from “truth.” This play reveals the greater truth alive in the myth shaped as story rather than fact. As history, Antigone has no blood in it—as myth and tragedy Antigone breathes and speaks.

In the final lines of the play, Svich returns to the archivist who has led us through many of the proceedings:

ARCHIVIST: Antigone’s body has been preserved forever. Her entire body including her brain has been preserved. Some recordings have also been found recently, and while the quality is not good, you can hear Antigone’s voice in a special room next to the gift shop as you leave. You can also visit the archeological museum, and delight in a prehistoric collection, a sculpture collection, a vase collection and a bronze collection from various sites and ancient cemeteries. The taking of photographs is strictly prohibited. A new extension to the museum is being planned, pending financial support. We welcome your contribution.
SCROLL: THE DOORS OF THE PALACE ARE OPENED.
THE CORPSE OF ANTIGONE IS DISCLOSED.

What do we really need to know about this story? Do we need evidence, or material things? This play pits the storied myth, a name and an action that survives, against proof through tangible objects. Which is more potent? In the end, the story is the true thing, not history or fact.

In her introduction to the collection of plays inspired by ancient Greek works Divine Fire, contributing playwright and editor of the collection, Svich describes the need for current reiterations of ancient works:

The Information Age has changed the way we view the past, and in part unleashed a desire to retrieve knowledge that has been seemingly buried in the great quest for progress. The turn of the millennium has also caused Western society to try to imagine Web link upon Web link what our origins must have been like. Easy access to information nd the multiplicity of it has made us a curious and “curiouser” breed, to paraphrase Lewis Carroll. We have become enraptured by the possibilities available to us and the immediacy with which we can conjure ancient Greece, Rome, or Egypt. This imaginative act of conjuring, aided by technology, has affected how we interpret our world. Histories whirl in bits and bytes and bleeps, and as artists and citizens we try to keep up by taking time to remember. We seek myth because it is our inheritance. In it, we look for origins. […] Theatre, ancient and already called “dead” many times over, has been finding ways to speak to its past for many years. Each generation “kills” what has come before it, and resurrects it at the same time. Art is made through active renewal and reinterpretation.

With Antigone Arke Svich explores the relationship of technology and myth, of modern and ancient. Later in the introduction, Svich cites several 20^th century reinventions of the Antigone story:

In times of war, and extreme global conflict and division, Greek dramas rise to the fore on the world’s stages. During World War II Jean Anouilh’s Antigone, a version of Sophocles classical drama, became a worldwide hit, because of its thinly disguised attack on the Nazis and the Vichy government. Bertotl Brecht’s 1948 Antigone achieved international recognition due to its uncompromising attack on tyranny, while Sophocles’ play also served as the centerpiece of Athol Fugard’s acclaimed South African protest drama, The Island. During the Vietnam War and it aftermath, powerful adaptations of the Greeks were presented in New York by the Living Theatre, and Andrei Serban at La Mama.

The Antigone Project offered Svich an opportunity and a political reason to add her exploration to the Antigone canon.

Why Antigones?

Creon, who [after the deaths of Eteoclos and Polyneices] then succeeded to the Theban throne, caused the bodies of the Argive dead to be thrown out unburied, issued a proclamation that nobody should bury them, and posted guards. But Antigone, one of the daughters of Oedipus, stole the body of Polyneices and gave it secret burial; and when she was caught in the act, she was buried alive in the grave by Creon himself.
--Apollodorus

For the second century BCE author Apollodorus, the two sentences noted above are the entire story regarding the actions of Antigone and her subsequent fate. She is a minor historical character—but the mythology that binds itself to her name and her final actions continues to inspire investigation and expression. In his Forward to the collection of Greek-inspired plays Divine Fire, playwright and historian Charles Mee writes:

One of the great pleasures in a work of art that knows it comes from the culture is that, inevitably, inherently, it contains a tension between the past and the present, the given and the possible, the enduring and the ephemeral. This tension between what is made and what is re-made lives in the very essence of the work—so that our common human project of making life on earth, making a society, making a bearable or wonderful civilization, is alive in every particle of the work. And so we have, in these works, intrinsically, as great a human drama as we get.

In all three Antigones examined here (and Sophocles’ Antigone as well), this tension between the ancient past and the present reiteration of the ancient story is apparent. Additionally, the tension between a recent past and the plays is also present—in the form of atrocities or war—there is an immediate social relevance associated with re-imagining Antigone in each of these plays.

In a lecture given at Trinity College in London in 2000, theater director Peter Hall describes the continued relevance of the Greek epic stories over millennia:

The form – the invocation – is intended to take us up to a level where mighty emotions and mighty conflicts can be expressed. The stuff of these epics became, many centuries later, the raw material for the first great period of drama that survives: the Greek. The myths were interpreted, reinterpreted, and contradicted. And they have gone on being reinterpreted for nearly three thousand years. A myth cannot be ancient: it lives and is still potent – it speaks to us. In that sense, it remains modern by definition; otherwise it would not be audible. It would not have survived. Theatre and myth helps us to understand the mysteries of life – birth and desire, love and death, revenge and forgiveness. And the Greek theatre began the task of representing them. They always have been and always will be the stuff of theatre – the stuff of the actor’s art. And every age must reexamine them because of our desperate need to understand.

And so, Antigone is not an ancient myth, she is vital. All three authors have found her story to be a foundation from which to build a new dialogue.

The act of tragedy is to compel the observer to engage in an individual relationship to a shared public event. The story becomes ours as a community, and ours as a personal experience, all at once. Modern theater theorist Bert O. States calls upon this unique attribute of tragedy’s potential in his book Great Reckonings in Little Rooms:

We often say that comedy arouses laughter and tragedy tears. The fact is, it is melodrama that arouses tears: tragedy arouses silence. The point of the distinction is that tragedy is a noncollaborative form, as usually performed. Tragedy creates an empathic experience wherein we are dissolved in what could be called a magnificent loneliness, felt most deeply in the absolute stillness of the auditorium when tragic characters say such things as “Thou shalt come no more.” What the audience shares in such moments, and in the play at large, is less important than what isolates each spectator vicariously in the experience.

Both Gambaro and Ralli utilize this mechanism inherent in the tragic form. Both plays ask their audiences to question their level of collaboration beyond the world of the play – what part is their collaboration with the world? What sort of collaboration has been played in the face of atrocity? Svich, on the other hand, works to thwart tragic associations, and in its place asks the viewer to consider why this tragic story is not tragic when viewed in this manner.

These Antigones, reborn and re-dying over and over again, are revived and revitalized to rattle the observer just as these Antigones are born and reborn to rail against Creon. Creon himself rarely appears in these plays—he is a name or an empty shell or a minor physical presence. Antigone is the center of these play-worlds, and it is through her that the question of public versus private duty is explored—strong—or fragile—or digital.

This ancient Greek story, elegantly told by Sophocles, continues to inspire. In a panel discussion led by Ken Urban on Contemporary American Playwriting, The Issue of Legacy, Svich elaborates on American playwrights interest in investigating aspects of tragedy, and by extension, our relationship to the Greek plays and provides the perfect observation on which to end:

It is also about trying to remember in a world that is constantly forgetting. Going back to the classics is one way to do that. I wouldn’t use the word “sincerity,” but “purity.” It is an impulse to look back to something pure.

Girls Like Boys: The theatrical role of boyish-women

2010-09-06T19:10:00.008-04:00

ANYBODYS: Buddy boys!

ACTION: Ah! Go wear a skirt.

ANYBODYS: I got scabby knees.

---West Side Story

There is a type of female character who serves the theatrical function of representing a tough outsider. She is the boyish-woman. In the popular musical West Side Story Anybodys is described in the stage directions as “a scrawny teen-age girl, dressed in an outfit that is a pathetic attempt to imitate that of the Jets (the all-male, Anglo-American street-gang)”. The character-type embodied by personas like Anybodys often stands in opposition to other female representations present in the play who are conventionally feminine. While the feminine-female-types may populate the world of play in groups, the boyish-woman appears alone. Often categorized as a tomboy, she is readily dismissed by the characters around her as an anomaly, as with the dismissal of Anybodys by Action in the exchange noted above. In the world of West Side Story Anybodys is a wannabe; and what she wants to be is a guy in the gang. In the decades that have followed the premiere of West Side Story the figure of the boyish-woman has appeared many times, occasionally claiming a central role in the narrative. Two plays that explore variations on the tough boyish-woman type are Cherrie Moraga’s The Hungry Woman: A Mexican Medea, and Luis Alfaro’s Electricidad. What is the relevance of the boyish-woman, and how does she function as a theatrical device?

The Hungry Woman: A Mexican Medea

Medea comes with a lot of baggage. Her name epitomizes tragic female vengeance: a mother pushed aside for a younger woman by the husband she had saved and brought to power. Variations on the Medea story explore the lengths to which she will go to gain vengeance by accentuating the volatile relationships between herself, her hero husband, and her (usually male) children. Playwright Cherrie Moraga’s riff on the ancient tale imagines Medea in a world created and enacted by a cast of women and one boy (portaying Chac-Mool). The traditional Medea is often presented as having two sons, but Moraga consolidates the two boys into the single heir Chac-Mool. She also invents Luna, a woman significantly younger than Medea who is described in the character list as “Medea’s lover of seven years, a stone mason and clay sculptor.” It is clear before the play begins that Moraga’s Medea will diverge from the standard Greek template, not because of the infusion of additional mythic traditions, but because of the queer aspects she introduces to the Greek story.

Because this narrative presents Medea and Luna as lovers, the assumption is to understand this as a lesbian relationship. Scene One begins with a conversation between Medea and a prison guard, juxtaposing this conversation with a separate scene showing Luna waking and dressing to go visit Medea. We understand Luna’s intent because she is speaking to the woman who is still in her bed. Interspersed with these present-time exchanges is a scene from Medea’s memory of her son Chac-mool being taught to plant corn by Luna. Medea remarks, “And the stonemason’s voice entered me like medicine. Medicine for my brokenness.” Luna walks from memory back to the bedroom, finishes dressing by putting on a “men’s suit jacket” and speaks to the woman in her bed, telling her about Medea and promising to return the next evening. From this we understand that Medea and Luna had once been close, that Luna had been close with Medea’s son, and that Luna has separated herself, at least partially, from Medea. We also understand that we are witnessing the end.

Scene Two brings Luna and Medea together in a time before the prison and the end, discussing a letter that has arrived from Jason announcing his plans to wed a new bride. For their transgression as a same-sex couple the pair along with Medea’s son has been forced into exile in Phoenix. Luna asks Medea if she is jealous, which Medea dismisses claiming instead that she is a rabid dog.

LUNA: You never divorced Jason…why?
MEDEA: You believe in that piece of paper?
LUNA: Yes, when it means you could be taken away from me.
MEDEA: I’m not your custody case. Don’t treat me like one.
LUNA: No, Chac-Mool is. Our son is the custody case.
MEDEA: My son.

This exchange seems to announce Medea’s uncompromising possession of her son, as later she is also unwilling to share Chac-Mool with his father Jason. But one could also read this pronouncement of Medea’s need to be the exclusive parent of Chac-Mool as an extension of her attachment to boyishness. Rather than equating Luna as a female figure who might have equal claim to co-parenting the boy, Luna is actually filling the role of the missing child in the original myth—where Medea has two sons. She is a second boy for Medea, but unlike Chac-Mool who is growing toward man-hood, Luna is an eternal boy who can never achieve manhood, while simultaneously thwarting her womanhood. Later in the play the character Mama Sal explains the parameters of womanhood to Luna:

When you’re a girl, hija, and a Mexican, you learn purty quick that you got only one shot at being a woman and that’s being a mother. […] You go from daughter to mother, and there’s nothing in between. That’s the law of our people written como los diez commandments on the metate stone from the beginning of all time.

Luna has found a place in-between through her boyishness.

Luna identifies herself as a lesbian, and struggles to compel Medea to recognize that they are both lesbians involved in a lesbian relationship. With the question of losing Chac-Mool to Jason Luna observes, “It’s like the thought of losing Chac…no kid between us…and we got nothing to disguise what we are to each other. Maybe for you, Chac-Mool somehow makes us less lesbian.” Throughout the play, Medea resists the label “lesbian,” sometimes by shifting it solely to Luna, and at other times by citing her motherhood.

While others in the play-world, and most observers of the play, regard Luna as a lesbian, Medea slips while drunk and calls her a boy:

MEDEA: Remember how I’d wrap my thighs around your boy’s face. (Holding her face) How come I called it a boy’s face when you’re so female?
LUNA: (Pulling away) Just macha, Medea.
MEDEA: A boy’s hunger, that’s what I saw there in those dark eyes resting between my legs.

Medea trusts the eternal boyhood embodied by Luna. Later in the play, Medea states the danger of a boy growing to manhood, “Betrayal occurs when a boy grows into a man and sees his mother as a woman for the first time. A woman. A thing. A creature to be controlled.” It is the boy embodied by Chac-Mool that Medea seeks to preserve, and is distraught as he passes into manhood:

Can you smell it, Madre? Mi hijo’s manhood. He wears it in his sleep now. In the morning I find it in a heap on the floor, crumpled in his pijama. Like Luna, I bring the soft flannel to my nose. I inhale. No baby smell. No boy. A man moving inside his body. I felt a small rise against my thigh just now, a small beating heart hardening against the place that was once his home. Where is my baby’s sweet softness now?

The deep contradiction this presents is that while she condemns this attraction from Chac-Mool, she celebrates it in Luna. When speaking to Luna about their early lovemaking, Medea describes it like this:

How does it start? How does it vanish? How is it you used to drink from me as if you yourself didn’t taste the same coppered richness when you brought your own bloody fingers to your mouth. As if when you drew a woman’s shape with your sculptor’s hands, you didn’t find the same diosa curves an valleys when you bathed yourself each day. Eres mujer. But for you, falling in love is to think nothing of yourself, your own body. In the beginning all was me.

Medea is not woman-centered, she is not centered outside of her own self at all—she is Medea-centered, which is part of the reason she is unable to recognize herself as lesbian. Medea, the mother, is resistant to queering even in the arms of a woman stonemason. Luna, the boyish-woman who will never achieve manhood survives Medea’s destructive path, but Chac-Mool, who is passing into manhood does not.

In the final image of the play a dying Medea is held in the arms of a ghost Chac-Mool, described by the playwrights as a pieta image. But this is a reverse pieta, the son cradling the dead body of the mother. The mother becomes the boy, the boy becomes the mother.

Electricidad

As Electricidad mourns over the rotting body of her father, she is not happy to be left behind in a world of women. Her brother Orestes is rumored dead in a hit sponsored by their power-grabbing mother, but we know that he is alive and in revenge-school-training on the DL in Vegas. As long as he remains out of bounds Electricidad is surrounded exclusively by women who want her to calm down, come inside the house, and relax. She is having none of it. She separates herself from the other women by staying outside (which is also closer to us as we watch), and by wearing the pure trappings of her “old-school” chola identity: Levi’s, black tank-top, chancla flip-flops, and a layer of baked-on earth left by the Santa Anna winds. In the world of this play, Electricdad is the only character sporting this look in such a male-centric way. She is the boyish-woman who holds the center of this play-world.

Electricidad seeks to fill the hole left by her father. She is determined to hold vigil over his decaying body until… until what? She believes that her brother Orestes has been killed by assassins sent by their mother, and does not have much of a plan. Early in the play she does, however, announce her complete alliance with her father’s way of life:

They don’t know what I’m capable of when it comes to my love and loyalty to you mi rey.
You are the old ways, Papa.
You are the history and the rason we know how to live.
I want to live the old ways, Papa.
Simple and to the point. […]
Why can’t we live the old ways?
She says I act like a man.
Good.
I’m not a girl.
I’m a chola!

In this declaration she renounces her womanhood, but what does this leave her? Can she achieve manhood? Her lack of true action in the rest of the play indicates that she cannot. She has renounced her born gender, occupying an in-between state between boyhood and manhood.
Electricidad is surrounded by women. While she remains vigilant and still, they tread through her yard. Her mother Clemencia speaks to her from the house behind her, trying to goad her daughter into giving up her vigil. Electricidad refuses, reminding herself of the power-grab initiated by her mother through the murder of the male family members, “She thought that if she killed you, all the old cholo ways would end.” Instead of ending the old ways with the death of the father and brother, Clemencia galvanized Electricidad into a male oriented place-holder. Clemencia herself is described by the playwright as chola in “evening-wear.” Her clothes are form-fitting, her make-up is fresh, and she wears spiked heals, all in fem/butch contrast to her daughter in the yard.

There is another daughter who comes to the yard who is more aligned with their mother than the father. This is Ifiginia, who in myth was sacrificed by the father and avenged by the mother. In this telling she has been away, sometimes in jail, but more recently as a member of a convent. Dressed as a Catholic schoolgirl, she finds her sister Electricidad in the yard guarding the body and unwilling to share the grief or compromise her position over the body.

ELECTRICIDAD: I am making plans, Ifi. I am going to take her last breath without raising a finger. Just watch me. I am not going to walk away from this body until her stillborn heart rests in my hands. […] Help me destroy her, my hard chola sister, who always lent a fist in the loyalty to the Casa de Atridas.
IFIGINIA: I am out of jail. But I see that you have just entered yours. Your solitude has made you loca, hermana. Your grief ain’t opa, babosa. Don’t let it boil.
ELECTRICIDAD: My grief is the match that fuels the fire of my revenge.

Ifigenia will not help her sister continue the cycle of familial revenge. Electricidad insults her choice of returning to the nuns, calling them “dykes,” further cementing her disdain for anything female.

Later, Clemencia again attempts to demonstrate the similarities between herself and Electricidad:

CLEMENCIA: […] You and I are survivors.
ELECTRICIDAD: No tengo nada in common with you, monster.
CLEMENCIA: You hate me because porque me ves inside of you. We are more alike than you can ever imagine.
ELECTRICIDAD: Lies.
[…]
CLEMENCIA: […] Hard chola with no friends to call your own. Your sister always in jail, and your little brother too soft for his own good. Little chola whose only friend was your hard papa. He took the soft skin from you and made you a warrior. And you were stupid enough to thank him for it. But why wouldn’t you? You were in love with him.
ELECTRICIDAD: I hate you.
CLEMENCIA: That ain’t a new sentimiento. I hate me too sometimes.

Comparisons to her mother, or any of the women in her family, enrage Electricidad. She refuses to acknowledge any similarities with her mother, because doing so would crack the image of her father that she has donned. And yet, for all of this man-centered posturing, Electricidada does not take action. She remains, but she does not act. She is like her soft brother, unable to act because they are both locked in boyhood. Orestes, however, has an option because he is capable of entering manhood. He seizes manhood by taking action: exacting revenge for the murder of his father. At his sister’s bidding, he bleeds the life from their mother. Together the brother and sister create a whole-being capable of committing this terrible act. Separately they would have failed. In the myth Orestes becomes the responsible party and faces trial while Electra’s story ends. Here too, Electricidad is unable to progress alongside her brother. She is forever a boyish-woman, unable to continue alongside her brother into manhood. Will that ever be enough?

When You’re A Jet

The boyish-woman is a liminal figure. As represented by these plays she is a figure trapped by her choice to forgo womanhood. A perpetual boyhood is possible, but ultimately unfulfilling, because the boys in these plays are incapable of significant action.

Returning to Anybodys in West Side Story, the result of her final verbal exchange is telling. As a tag-a-long to the Jets, she was in a position to save Tony from being captured by the police after the rumble at the end of Act One. She also manages to infiltrate the rival gang’s territory and overhear Chino’s plan to kill Tony. After delivering this news to the Jets, they disperse in an attempt to circumvent Chino’s retaliation on Action’s orders. As the Jets disperse, Anybodys wants her instructions and asks Action, the new leader of the Jets, for an assignment like the other gang members:

ANYBODYS: What about me?
ACTION: You? You get a hold of the girls and send ‘em out as liason runners so we’ll know who’s found Tony where.
ANYBODYS: Right!
(She starts to run off.)
ACTION: Hey! (She stops.) You done good buddy boy.
ANYBOYS: (She has fallen in love) Thanks, Daddy-o.
(They both run off.)

Love. This qualifier to her final line of dialogue redeems her. She passes from the liminal, eternal boyhood into the beginnings of womanhood because she has fallen in love with a man. Unlike Luna who loves women, or Electricidad who loves her father and nobody else, it is possible for Anybodys to discard boyishness and claim a place as a young woman. While this possibility lingers for Electricidad and Luna, the worlds of their tragedies do not allow their passage into the world of full womanhood. They are forever boyish-women, trapped by inaction either of their own construction or societal impasses. They are denied a form to grow into; their potential goes unrealized— at least for now.

Page turner - OUTRAGEOUS FORTUNE

2010-07-14T09:30:00.002-04:00

I read this book like my life depended on it -- because it does.

Outrageous Fortune, the Life and Times of the New American Play
is a vital snapshot of the current division between the goals of working playwrights and the artistic directors producing new American plays.

The book does not seek to answer the questions it poses about this creative divide: where playwrights see diminishing production opportunities within the perpetual "development" process offered by most theaters while artistic directors claim that playwrights aren't considering the needs of the general audience and no one is writing large plays. Playwrights counter that without mainstage production opportunities they are forced to write "small" for 4 actors or less and a single set contained in a blackbox "experimental" space.

The writers lay their research bare - and it's up to the readers - the people making theater happen - to use this knowledge to make informed change.

Chickens!

2010-05-22T15:36:00.002-04:00

There is a scene in Ariadne on the Island where the two women pluck and disembowel chickens. Because this play has only been heard in a reading or viewed as quasi-staged reading with music stands, the problem posed by the staging of plucking and cleaning of the birds has yet to be solved in theatrical terms. While people like the scene, it never fails to elicit the comment, "Yeah, but, how are you gonna do the chickens?"

I always answer, "Nothing is real in the theater - and chickens are easy."

Of course, "easy" may not be the best word - but something like how to handle chicken plucking is a minor conundrum compared to solving the broader complexities of the play-world... and yet -- How we gonna do the chickens? It turns out - simple!

The plasticity of the play-world in Ariadne holds the key. One of the things that the readers of play enjoy about the world is that it is constructed from barrels of various sizes, nets, boards, ropes, and a few benches. The elements are rearranged throughout the play to define and create the spaces that the characters inhabit. In a world that is constructed of wood, ropes and nets in various configurations, why can't chickens be made from knots of heavy ropes? The ropes would lend themselves to the illusion of dead weight, and small bits of white cloth could be pressed into the knots and braids to be "plucked" as feathers.

Ta-dah! An elegant solution to a sticky problem.

And this solution came about through an intermission convo with a tech-guy during the first public showing of the play at a workshop. Now that solution is included on the front-page of production notes and descriptions. When public workshops of new plays inspire that kind of inquiry and problem solving -- yea workshops!

All out blitz

2010-05-22T14:56:00.002-04:00

I am beginning the planning stages for an all-out submission blitz for Ariadne on the Island. After the wonderful week in Portland, and the strong rewrites - I am optimistic about this play's potential. I've been hunkering down with the Dramatists Guild Directory, highlighter and pencil in hand, and making my plan.

I am primarily targeting theaters that want to see samples. I don't like throwing whole scripts at theaters on blind submissions, unless the theater is one of my top 15 targets. Otherwise it costs about $7 to copy and bind a script - plus anywhere from $4 to $6.50 to mail a whole script. I'd rather spend the $1 or so to send 10 pages and a resume. Most theaters are only reading 10 pages of text anyway - regardless of the number you send. I've had much greater success sending inquiries to theaters than whole scripts. If they're interested, they'll ask for the whole thing - and it will be a priority to read. Sending a script blind just puts it in a pile to nowhere more often than not.

I'm up the "F's" in the Directory - guess I'll crack open a Saturday afternoon beer and continue to peruse.

Lonely playwright

2010-05-11T23:02:00.003-04:00

At a dinnertime talk a few years ago at the O'Neill Theater Center, Romulus Linney spoke to the assembled playwrights. It was casual, all of us sitting in a circle with our plates on our laps. He was sharing a lifetime of wisdom about the career of a playwright, and one of the most remarkable things I recall was him stating, "A playwright in residence at a regional theater is about the loneliest person in America." As I'm sitting typing this in a lovely apartment provided by a regional theater where I eat my meals alone, watching the local news, I know that Mr. Linney was speaking true.

Me in Portland, ME

2010-05-09T20:44:00.003-04:00

Arrived late this afternoon in Portland, ME - in time for tomorrow's Little Festival of the Unexpected meet-and-greet at the Portland Stage Company. I have a day and a half before work begins on my play, so tomorrow I'll be checking out a few of the local attractions and do some shopping. I'll also take my camera out and about and post some pix from around town in the days to come.

Little Festival of the Unexpected May 11-15 2010

2010-05-03T11:19:00.002-04:00

The schedule of plays for the
Little Festival of the Unexpected
Portland Stage Company
Portland, ME

The Center of Gravity by Gregory Hischak
Wednesday, May 12 @ 7:00
Saturday, May 15 @ 7:30

Ariadne on the Island by Kato McNickle
Thursday, May 13 @ 7:00
Saturday, May 15 @ 3:00

Tigers Be Still by Kim Rosenstock
Tuesday, May 11 @ 7:00
Saturday, May 15 @ 12:00

For more info or to purchase tickets online go here:
http://www.portlandstage.org/Event-32.html

or call Mon-Sat : 1pm-7pm : 207-774-0465

Advance Tickets: $10 (plus handling fees)

In Person: Mon-Sat : 1pm-7pm : Pay-what-you Can
Suggested donation $10

All seats are general admission

Help Me Obi-Kenobi: A Star Wars Cabaret

2010-03-30T16:26:00.002-04:00

At last the students of Ledyard High School and I have found a viable topic for an original show: Help Me Obi-Wan Kenobi: A Star Wars Cabaret.

Did STAR WARS change life as we know it? The Ledyard High School Drama Club will present a collection of parodies, songs, and personal stories about the iconic film STAR WARS, its influence, and continued relevance to American culture. The performance event titled “Help Me Obi-Wan Kenobi” has been created by the students at Ledyard High School with the club director and local playwright Kato McNickle to be performed at Ledyard High School May 6 & 7, 2010 7:30 PM. All proceeds from the performance will benefit the Matt Buriak Scholarship Fund in memory of the LHS junior who died this past fall. For more information visit the Facebook Group STAR WARS STORIES or e-mail StarWarsStories@aol.com

The students of LHS Drama have been collecting first person narratives, essays, and other primary source material to create an original cabaret-mélange inspired by the STAR WARS films. By collecting narratives from diverse sources the students will perform a living documentary cobbled from the words of famous STAR WARS geeks like Kevin Smith, academic philosophers like Joseph Campbell, the actual words of STAR WARS creator George Lucas, and personal narratives collected exclusively for this production through interviews from regular people around the world for whom STAR WARS was a significant event. The evening will also pay homage to STAR WARS inspired works, like Robot Chicken’s Papa Palpatine, Kevin Smith’s dialogue about the contract workers on board the second Death Star from CLERKS, and a song medley borrowed from Moose Butter. Of course there will be a requisite lightsaber battle somewhere.

Harpooned

2010-02-26T10:59:00.003-05:00

The Moby Project is a no-go this semester after a less-than-enthusiastic turn-out for actors. While the project is on-hold for now, I have been invited to workshop it at The Dragons Egg, and will be sending it out to other schools looking for a challenging production opportunity.

Moby-ous

2010-02-08T15:37:00.004-05:00

Currently at work on an adaptation of MOBY DICK for the students of Ledyard High School to perform this spring. Started reading the hefty book just before Christmas - making plenty of notes across many pages. Some of the folks at the Mystic Seaport have been helping with it. Now I'm 3/4 of the way through ACT I - and have a read-thru schedules with my playwright buds next Sunday. Arrrg! Back to work!

long time, eh?

2009-08-21T10:42:00.001-04:00

Wile this post is short on content - it is long in coming. Wow. It's been a long time since I blogged -- due in part to forgetting my password.

Oh well.

Here goes nothin'

Humalong

2008-06-07T12:50:00.002-04:00

A Dream Play
(composed moments after seeing it in a dream)

This play should be somewhere in the middle. An MC enters. I’m betting that there has been someone at some point who made an announcement about the show, said hello, or at the very least told folks to turn off cell phones (and if he didn’t mention cell phones, now’s a good time)…

…that guy*.

So, he comes back out (he can still be wearing – whatever)…

MC:
Hello. I’m back. Hope you’ve been enjoying the show. Anyway. Right now we’ve got something just little different. A musical interlude, as it were, and you’re all included. A little sing-a-long break has really become a sort of tradition at these things. It really helps with – well – with – the flow. And interest. It keeps the interest thing going. You know, there are sooooooOooo many plays in one of these things, right? And soooOOOooOo many people involved. You probably came to see someone in particular, right? Someone you know? In the show? And they’ve already been on, or they haven’t even done theirs yet, and you’re starting to think, “I thought these were supposed to be short, cuz they seem pretty long to me”, right? Everybody thinks that. Trust me. They do. And because you’re not alone, because we care about your sanity, because you’re itching just to move a little right now…

A musical interlude.

Music warms the heart of the savage beast, right? And we know you’re getting antsy, soooooOOOoooo warm your wind pipes-up, cuz we’re gonna have a little sing-a-long. And here to lead you through it this year is ____________! Enjoy!

The MC claps his hands in the direction of the wings. From the wings enters a young woman, earnest, but kinda geeky. She carries a drum on a stand and a stool. She has difficulty. The MC rushes and helps. He sets the stool down-center and then abandons her. The young woman sets up her drum, apologizing with her gaze, her grin, and the angle of her body slouch, about the awkwardness of the set-up. She sits, drum sticks at the ready, it’s only just dawning on her that she is alone on stage…

THE WOMAN AT THE DRUM:
Uh. Hi. So. Um. They asked me to play something, cuz the folk-lady they usually get, well she couldn’t do it, and then Benny the piano-guy he couldn’t either, and then CC the other guitar said “No fucking way”, oh, sorry, this is uh, well, CC swears a lot, if you know CC. I don’t swear, no, not me. Uh. Anyways. The interlude. I thought we’d do one of my favorites, okay? Anyone here watch Masterpiece Theatre? This is… The Masterpiece.

She hits the drum. Now, understand, we want her to be good, I mean, who doesn’t want her to be good? Is she good? That’s really up to you. And her. Do what feels best. You know your audience, right?

So. She plays. And then. She starts to hum the melody. She puts in…

Come on guys… sing it with me…!

She gets back to the Masterpiece. If the audience is humming along too, great. Just let it go. If they’re not, then send the MC guy to help encourage them. C’mon! This girl needs help. Just tell that MC to get his lazy-ass out there and SAVE THE SHOW. You’re on a mission, man! GET OUT THERE!

We get thru the song (yea!). The MC claps! Yea!. The young woman kinda bows, maybe waves, maybe drops a stick, has a hard time with the drum, tries to take the stool. The MC helps. He jams the stool somewhere into her arms and sends her off in the direction of the wings. He claps again as the young woman retreats. He does his job.

MC:
Tradition. Gotta love it!

He claps more as he exits. Chances are the audience claps too.

END OF PLAY
AS THE SHOW GOES ON (yea!)

* I know, I know. I’m assuming your MC is a “guy” and then I go further and only refer to him as “he” and never once do I even attempt the more correct he/she, or the even even more correct she/he. Maybe you’ve had a chick introducing the shows this whole time. Feel free to use her instead. Sure, it will destroy the whole tension regarding father/daughter abandonment issues that drives the action, okay so we won’t get the big question about why women repeat the cycle of bad choices concerning men, and the theme that exposes the patriarchy can be tossed out the window. It’s not about what I (the playwright) want. Fuck that. I’m not even here, right? At this stage it’s all about making the play easier for you. So. If it’s easier for you… you have my blessing.

Perchance

2008-06-07T12:24:00.006-04:00

On Dream Logic in the Theater
by Kato McNickle

I woke myself up laughing. Laughing out loud at a play that I was watching.
It was a dream, of course. In the dream I was watching a short play in a ten-minute festival written by a playwright friend of mine (he had asked me to perform it for him). During the dream I was both the actor and an audience member—simultaneously. While in the dream, it did not seem out of place to be both the performer and the observer of the event, and it proved to be great fun. It was the audience member part of me that started laughing, and my laughter—really laughing—caused me to awaken, still laughing. The dream was so vivid, and so recent, that I got out of bed and to my computer a few feet away. I typed the play, called Humalong (yes, the title was part of the dream too) about which I had dreamed. My playwright friend Mike still claims I owe him residuals, because in a weird way, he wrote the play, right?

Is this play conjured in a dream representative of dream-logic? Maybe. It depends who you ask.

Throughout the last century the tension between illusion and reality has been a focal point of most Western theatrical productions. The audience knows that what they are seeing is not real—a fiction—and yet something compels them to believe. The actors know that they are not the characters they portray, and yet throughout the entire process they refer to “in character” and “out of character” as distinct states of being. Across American stages the debate about ‘realism’ in the theater persists. What is ‘real’ in the theater; What is like ‘dream’?

Nietzsche, in his essay The Birth of Tragedy (1872), was an early and influential thinker regarding attributing aspects of dramaturgy and theatrical experience to that of the dream (would that be dreamaturgy?):

Though it is certain that of the two halves of our existence, the waking and dreaming states, the former appeals to us as being infinitely preferable, more important, excellent, and worthy of being lived, indeed, as that which alone is lived—yet in relation to that mysterious ground of our being of which we are a phenomena, I should, paradoxical as it may seem, maintain the very opposite estimate of the value of dreams. For the more clearly I perceive in nature those omnipotent art impulses, and in them an ardent longing for illusion, for redemption through illusion, the more I feel myself impelled to the metaphysical assumption that the truly existence primal unity, eternally suffering and contradictory, also needs the rapturous vision, the pleasurable illusion, for its continuous redemption. And we, completely wrapped up in this illusion and composed of it, are compelled to consider the illusion as the truly nonexistent—i.e., as a perpetual becoming in time, space, and casualty—in other words, as empirical reality.

This question: is it preferable to be awake or to dream, will prove to be an essential component of twentieth century thought, both in artistic realms, and for the social sciences. Is one superior to the other? Is dream an escape, or simply a bi-product of sleep? Are wakefulness and dreaming actually opposites? Is one state exclusive of the other?

In Anatomy of the Drama (1977), Martin Esslin describes the morphing of early twentieth naturalism into other forms:

By concentrating on the concrete detail rather than on abstract sentiments, naturalism tended transform itself into a style in which objects increasingly became symbols, embodiments of ideas. So naturalism merged into symbolism. And as the writers concerned concentrated more and more on these symbols, which after all are in the nature of poetic metaphors, lyrical images, so symbolism came full circle and turned into a type of neo-romanticism. […] [August] Strindburg […] [who started out a naturalist], took a slightly different path. In [his] determination to represent experience exactly as it really was [he] soon discovered that depicting the external world tells only half the story; you also have to include the way the world was experienced by an individual, and that meant his internal world. Hence Strindburg wrote a number of such plays—The Ghost Sonata, To Damascus and the Dream Play itself which, quite in the spirit of naturalism, tried to depict a dream.

This movement with its emphasis on individual impressions was termed ‘expressionism’.

Strindburg himself eloquently describes his intent with his Dream Play (1901) in the following excerpt from the author’s note regarding the play:

Anything can happen, everything is possible and probable. Space and time do not exist. Based on a slight foundation of reality, imagination wanders afield and weaves patterns comprised of mixtures and recollections, experiences and unconstrained fantasies, absurdities and improvisations. Characters split, double, and multiply; they evaporate, crystallize, dissolve, and reconverge. But one single consciousness governs them all, that of the dreamer. […] And since there is generally more pain than pleasure in the dream, a tone of melancholy and sympathy for all things runs through the swaying narrative. Sleep, the liberator, is often tortuous; and yet pain is at worst, the sufferer is wakened and reconciled with reality. For, however agonizing reality may be, it is, at this moment, when compared with the torments of the dream, a joy.

The experience of the internal and intimate dream state was being enacted by actors and presented for an audience. Many modern playwrights were influenced by the expressionists’ experiments, including Bertolt Brecht who expanded the idea into his concept of ‘epic theatre’ , a form that attempted an ‘un-dramatic’ style of expression. Brecht called the audience witnessing a typical theatrical production a “hypnotized mass” , and that this state was out of place for people living in a scientific-age. He describes his observation of the spectators in his essay A Short Organum for the Theatre (1948):

Looking about us, we see motionless figures in a peculiar condition: they seem strenuously to be tensing all their muscles, except where these seem flabby and exhausted. They scarcely communicate with each other; their relations are those of a lot of sleepers, though of such as restlessly […] This detached state, where they seem given over to vague but profound sensations, grows deeper the better the work of the actors, and so we, a we do not approve of this situation, should like them to be as bad as possible.

And so Brecht sought to rouse the hypnotized masses through his innovative techniques of alienation, like epic and other methods based on various sources, as in his study of Noh drama.

At about the same time as many of these artists were examining dreams and dreaming through their work in the theater and artistic life, scientists were also considering the relevance of dreams.

Sigmund Freud began analyzing dream content as part of his psycho-analytical process. The second element of his technique was dream interpretation. The foundation of his theory regarding dreams was published in his treatise Interpretation of Dreams (1900) which hypothesized that dreams were organized around wish fulfillment; sometimes as simple as bodily needs, like dreaming of drinking quantities of water when thirsty during sleep; or fulfillment of repressed desires not available to the conscious mind.

Another psychologist, Carl Jung, published his first work on dreams, The Analysis if Dreams (1909) in less than a decade following Freud. Jung’s approach to dreams was different than Freud’s. He believed that dreams were an integral function of the working human mind, and that that the figurative language of dreams was attributed to the “survival [of] an archaic mode of thought.” Because dreams were contained in the unconscious, dreams were expressions of the unconscious and not necessarily simply expressions of repressed conscious ‘thoughts.’ In his essay General Aspects of Dream Psychology (1948) he confronts the assumptions made by Freud regarding wish fulfillment as the basis of interpretation:

The interpretation of dreams as infantile wish-fulfillments as finalistic “arrangements” subserving an infantile striving for power is too narrow and fails to do justice to the essential nature of dreams. A dream, like every element in the psychic structure, is a product of the total psyche. Hence we may expect to find in dreams everything that has ever been of significance in the life of humanity. Just as human life is not limited to this or that fundamental instinct, but builds itself up from multiplicity of instincts, needs, desires, and physical and psychic conditions, etc., so the dream cannot be explained by this or that element in it, however beguilingly simple such an explanation may appear to be.

Michael Adams in his book Mythical Unconscious takes the Jungian view of dreams as the launching pad for his observations regarding archetypes based in mythic imagery that are woven throughout our unconscious life, combining these theories with the work of other explorers of myth like Joseph Campbell. Through this synthesis, he defines the difference between archetype and image, a principle he calls “archetype constancy” and “image variability” :

Archetypes are not images. An image becomes ‘archetypical’ only when it functions as the specific content of an archetype, but the image that serves this purpose on any occasion is not the archetype. Archetypes are general, abstract, constant forms; images are particular, concrete, variable contents of the forms. While the forms (archetypes) remain constant, the specific contents (or images) vary from time to time and place to place.

Archetypes are made personal, and appear to us as specific images, tailored by our individual subconscious to have meaning. Therefore, in Strindburg’s Dream Play, the images conjured are personal, and we as observers learn to tie into his specific imagery, perhaps by relating it to our own concept of archetype.

So what does recent science have to say about aspects of the dreaming mind?

In an interesting twist on thinking about the question, “Why do we dream?”, Mauro Mancia puts the cart before the horse and proposes that perhaps the function of sleep is to allow us to dream in his report One possible function of sleep: to produce dreams (1995), instead of the traditional view that sleep is the by-product of the need for sleep. He elaborates on the function of human dreaming enabling metaphor, “[D]uring sleep we produce metaphors on which we can build our dreams.” He continues by describing REM as a possible ‘hyperattentive’ state:

Unlike neurobiology, cognitive investigation considers dreams as a symbolic process of elaborating, interpreting and reorganizing in a narrative sequence all the material accumulated in memory during waking hours. The mental structures, whose task is to arrange this symbolic representation, are organized in ontogenesis. […] The cognitive model is backed by the theory put forward by Llinas and Pare, that REM sleep can be considered as a modified attentive state in which attention is turned away from sensory input, toward memories. These authors sustain that dreaming can be considered basically a hyperattentive state in many ways similar to full wakefulness.

He goes on to present current observations regarding the basis of sleep in emotional states:

Melanie Klein’s theory of internal objects has changed our views about dreams. They are no longer simply the fulfillment of suppressed wishes, but become the representation of internal objects and their relationship to the immediate present. Dreams are thus considered representations of feelings, emotions, anxieties and defenses viewed within the analytic relation. Dreams thus become a fundamental part of that rational modality know as ‘transference’. In dreams an individual’s internal objects—as representations and meaningful figures from infancy—are on stage in a private theatre where relations between them with objects of reality are acted out.

By using the private stage as a metaphor for the experience of the dreamer to the ‘witnessing’ of the dream event, Mancia notes a potential psychic phenomenon; could seeing a play in the theater be referencing (even mildly) a dream state? But in the case of the theater, it would be a collective dream state.

In her report Dreams, emotions, and the social sharing of dreams (2008), Antoniette Curci performs a study that addresses “whether the intensity of the emotion experienced in a dream predicts the extent to which this dream is socially is shared.” Her results confirm that emotional intensity of a dream is a valid predictor for the sharing of the content of the dream:

Social sharing behavior generally starts very soon after the emotion—usually the day the episode happened. It is a repetitive phenomenon , as emotions are often or very often shared, and with a variety of target persons, essentially selected among intimates. […] In both correlation and experimental studies, emotion intensity was demonstrated to play a crucial role in eliciting social sharing. [,,,] Neither valence (positive or negative) nor type of discrete emotion seems to play a significant role in eliciting social sharing. Dreams are intrinsically emotional experiences. […] Wax (2004) posits that the universality of dreaming and the high regard traditionally manifested towards dreams are testimony that dreaming is essential as a stabilizing element of group life. The author stressed that humanity has lived and evolved in small groups. The stability and endurance of a group, ad the intricate cooperation between its members, are founded on social activities such as music, dance, the seeking of visions and trance states, the sharing of dreams, and enacting of mythic drama. Similarly, Wagner-Pacifici and Benshady (1993) claim that dreams are a shared strategy that simultaneously tests and forges solidarity. […] [I]t can be predicted that the more a dream elicits emotion, the more the dream will be socially shared.

Another study that connects the intensity of emotion in the dream to the central image by co-authors Ernest Hartman and Tyler Brezler compares participants pre-9/11 central imagery and emotional intensity with post 9/11 responses (2008). The assumption was that the events of 9/11 would cause higher levels of stress, or slight trauma :

Dreams after 9/11 showed a highly significant increase in central image intensity, as central image proportion (number of dreams with scorable central image) but no change in dream length, dream like-ness, overall vividness, or context involving airplanes or tall buildings. There were no ‘exact replay’ dreams picturing the actual events of 9/11 seen repeatedly on TV. These results are consistent with the Contemporary Theory of Dreaming, which emphasizes the role of underlying emotion in producing central dream imagery and suggests that the intensity of the central dream imagery is related to the power of the underlying emotion.

It is interesting to note that it was the prominence of the central image that was enhanced, but not the image itself that changed.

In her report, Dreaming mind-brain: a Jungian perspective (2006), Margaret Wilkinson explores the Jungian-based position that dreams are an essential part of the process for encoding and affective organization of memory:

Dreaming is essentially a cortical activity in that it is the cortex with its billions of connecting neurons that allows us to experience the richness of thoughts and imagery that emerge from the dreaming process. In working with dreams in general, not just those dreams arising from trauma, the individual develops creative capacity to make conceptual and affective links across different realms of knowing; material may begin to move unconscious implicit memory towards the explicit realm of knowledge and memory where it may be thought about.

In this view, sleep is an essential part of memory function, and is essential in linking conscious and unconscious activities in the brain.

In The Scientific Study of Dreams (2003), G. William Domhoff describes an interesting effect produced when subjects are in a relaxed but waking state in darkened rooms:

[F]indings from three laboratory studies suggest that waking thought can have dreamlike qualities when participants are relaxing in a darkened room. In the first two of these studies, awake participants monitored by EEG gave dreamlike responses to 15% to 20% of requests for reports of what was going through their minds. In another laboratory study, judges who compared REM reports with thought reports from awake participants reclining in a darkened room rated the waling reports as more dreamlike. Furthermore, a field study of waking consciousness—which used pagers to contact participants—discovered that 9% of 1,425 had “more than a trace” of dreamlike thought and another 16% had a “trace” of such thought. Taken together, these studies lead to the idea that dreaming may not always be a function of sleep, thereby providing another possible link between waking cognition and dreaming.

Darkened rooms can help induce a dream-like state. Perhaps Brecht was not too far off the mark with his observation regarding a hypnotic state induced by theatre on the spectator? Domhoff continues:

Even though dreams seem to be based to a large extent on experimental-level categories, the emphasis in neurocognitive models on the close parallels between waking thought and dreaming raises the possibility that of the unusual and not immediately understandable features of dreams may be the product of figurative thinking—conceptual metaphors, metonymies, ironies, and conceptual blends. […] [T[he few attempts to undertake systematic studies of metaphor in dreams suggest that most dreams do not seem to relate to obviously primary metaphors. Rather, most dreams are like dramas or plays in which the dreamer acts out various scenarios that revolve around a few basic personal themes. Dreams seem to be instances of the “thematic” point on the repetition dimension, that is, specific episodes or examples relating to general emotional preoccupations, usually negative in nature. They appear to take the form of proverbs or parables, which can be understood only by extracting “generic” information from specific stories. These complex dreams may rely on “resemblance” metaphors, which depend on perception of common aspects of two representational schemata, or on conceptual blends, which often start with basic conceptual metaphors and then elaborated into highly novel thoughts.

Likening the experience of the dream to the watching of a drama or play seems to be a common metaphor in and of itself used to express the dreaming experience by scientists.

In a study conducted by David Kahn and J. Allan Hobson on State-dependant thinking (2005), the co-authors investigated how thinking in dreams differs from thinking while awake. Their hypothesis states that thinking in dreams has “two distinct components, one that is similar to wake-state cognition, and another hat is fundamentally different.” They found that while cognition within the dream scenario was similar to that of the waking state, the ability to think critically about the scenario was hindered and therefore unlike the waking state.

For example, a participant who stated that in the dream he was angry that the woman in front of him was taking to long to climb up a ladder and through a hatch to get into a restaurant. When asked if he would respond the same way in the real world, he said that he would have the same emotional response, but in the real world he would also know that it was absurd the gain access to a restaurant through a hatch in a ceiling, while in the dream scenario that action did not register as bizarre. Participants were asked to track dreams for a two-week period and were asked about their thinking within the dream-state and how they would think about the same situation in the real world. The inquiry uncovered the two types of thinking noted above, context logic and state logic, with state logic termed metacognition :

Metacognition has often been related to self-awareness, that is, being aware that it is the self who is doing the thinking. But in the dream state there is a difference between self-awareness and metacognition. While it is true that during the dreaming state our self-awareness severely impoverished in that we do not know that we are in our beds, we believe, instead, that we are participating in an adventure. In that limited sense there is awareness of the self in the dream. And as we have shown, the dreamer is able to think rationally (compared to waking standards) when participating in his hallucinatory adventures. But the dreamer loses his wake-state ability to distinguish “fact from fantasy,” he is unaware that he is hallucinating. He loses his wake-state gift of metacognition.

Thinking within the dream was similar to wake-state cognition, but thinking about what was happening in the dream, the event itself, was different than in a waking-state. They state their general conclusion about the data:

Within the dream event cognition is often not qualitatively different from waking cognition no matter how outlandish the hallucinatory dream event may be. On the other hand, we are unable to detect how outlandish or bizarre the dream event may really be because our ability to access knowledge about how the world works is impaired. When this kind of thinking is impaired one finds it very difficult to perceive bizarreness.

This is similar to experience a ‘play-world’. If you are seeing a musical then you immediately accept the premise that everyone is going to sing their big emotional expressions, everyone will know the same words in the chorus, and everyone will know the dances. You don’t even have to think about, you just go with it. Perhaps it is our dreaming-selves that allows us to easily slip into the world of a play. This is not unlike the experience of the dreamers in this study. But, it is possible to slip out of the world of the play—and it is usually stated that way—“It took me out” or “I fell out of the world.” So, it seems that the ability to think outside the logic of the play is available, if a stimulus is provided. This seems to tie in with Brecht’s experiments in alienating the audience, to never allow them the opportunity to slip into the play-world—“hypnotized”.

In their collection of results of experimental dream research In Search of Dreams (1996), co-authors Inge Strauch and Barbara Meier devote a section of their book to the comparison of waking fantasies and dreams. While dreams events differ from our waking experience by blending details, persons, and events detached from the continuity of everyday reality, when compared with the waking cognitive act of fantasy some striking differences occur. All participants in this study were evaluated in the sleep lab, using the same criteria used to evaluate REM sleep. Most striking is that fantasies tended to span a greater variety than dreams, and while fantasies took place more often in familiar locations, with every second environment being familiar, they did change location more often than dreams. In dreams only every fourth environment tends to be familiar. Fantasies also feature more people, animals and other creatures than do dreams. Fantasies feature animals more often than do dreams, as well as ‘fabulous creatures’ that in this study only appeared in fantasies and not in dreams. The authors note two marked differences between the reports of waking-fantasy and dreams:

While the fantasy created an idyllic setting, albeit a rather fragile one, the dream offers a dramatic event. Both reports contain bizarre elements, but these differ in impact. During the fantasy, the bizarre seems imposed and not harmoniously integrated into events; within the dream, the bizarre is interwoven with the events an dictates their strtling progress. Fantasy and dream differ further because of two opposite pairs. The loose association of images stands in contrast to a dramatic succession of events; the Fantasy-Self ‘s passive-contemplative attitude differs from the heavily involved position of the Dream-Self. These polarities contribute to the impression that the dream is somehow more serious, more immediate and unaffected, while the fantasy appears more restrained, controlled and non-committal.

Plays are constructed (in general) to operate more like dreams than waking fantasies. While dreaming, the Dream-Self is active in a number of ways, primarily through social engagement:

It is notable how few dreams deal in purely superficial chatter and conventional ritual. When dream persons meet, they do not usually ask, “How are you?” and they do not spend time with talk about the weather. They do not bore each other, but quickly get down to cases. Dreams are characterized particularly by linear and event-oriented scenarios. Dreamers do not constantly wonder who they are, how they impress others and what results their actions might have. Still, they rarely act out of character, but usually participate, quite unsophisticated and involved, in dream events. […] It may seem surprising how rarely dreams expan into the fantastic. Such dreams re not characteristic of the dream experience. In fact, they are exceptions that leave strong impressions and thus encourage hasty generalizations. The limited number of reality-remote dreams may have a special reason: if dreams were to abduct us, night after night, into a totally fantastic and alien world, we would have to reestablish our identity each morning and make sure of the daily world’s solidity. The moderately bizarre nature of dreams permits us to be neither frightened by our nightly fantasies, nor to turn away from them in boredom.

Dreams get right to the action. They do not engage in “chit-chat”, and neither should effective stage drama, as made plain by playwright Doug Wright in an interview with The Dramatist (2004), “If you want diverting conversation, then host a dinner party. If you want to divine something worthwhile about our quest in the world, then write a play.”

From these dream studies a pattern can be deduced that dreaming involves emotional responses on the part of the dreamer; that dreams are usually about scenarios that are personal in nature; dreams are event driven rather than leisurely excursions; that dreaming involves the use of metaphor; that cognition in the dream is similar to waking cognition, but that the ability to discern the plausibility of the content is inhibited; that a dream-like state can be obtained while awake; dreams are not representations of reality, but are pared-down to essential details, interactions, and characters; dreams may be an essential cognitive tool in human learning, sleep may be a function to facilitate dreaming.

Dreams seem to have many of the makings of a really good stage play. For example, stage plays are generally event driven; they are economic in form in that they only feature essential characters, locations, props, sets, etc.; plays rely on metaphor. It seems that our brains may be primed for understanding plays because we dream in logic similar to the type of logic employed in play-worlds. Perhaps it is this logic that drives playwrights to write them.

This is not only at work in the expressionist theater like that of Strindburg, or the epic theater of Brecht. The dynamics of dream logic may be at work on the observer from the moment the lights go down on any stage production. Dream-logic is at work when the play stops to change scene, or doesn’t stop but changes scene anyway, or when Chekhov can serve an entire three course dinner in about ten minutes of actual time. We suspend our disbelief not because we think about doing so—like we have installed a giant crane that hauls disbelief out of the way for a little while— we suspend it because every night, when we dream, there is a built-in mechanism that knows how to inhibit our content-o-meter by recognizing context right away. Every night we practice how to watch a play.

Anne Bogart expresses our experience of Time in the theater, comparing it to the effortlessness of a dream-state from her book And Then You Act (2007):

The theater can uniquely and eloquently express subjective time. Alice falls down a rabbit hole. The logic of time and space alters. The D.N.A. of the art form is akin to dreaming. An entire play can happen inside of one instant of one person’s lifetime. The theater is able to compress time in a way that trauma and dreams do. Dreams are largely non-linear, condensed, and associative. A few moments of sleep time can contain complicated episodes and wild flights of storytelling. If done with rigor and without abandoning dramaturgical logic, theater can do the same, and audiences will follow the logic of a dream. And, like dream time, there is freedom of movement and mind. Time in this case, the personal or subjective time, has nothing to do with clock time.

The “wild flights of storytelling” are something our minds gift to us every night.

It seems that that theater—when it places us in the dark, presents to us a world other than reality, stages a drama built around an event—taps into the mechanism in our brain that knows how to dream. It doesn’t need the formal exploration of the dream-scape, as Strindburg postulated, to achieve this. We are hard-wired to accept rapid movements in time and space—even though these exist only in the mind’s eye—simply by suggesting or implying that great leaps of time and space have been traversed either through a word, a change of light, the movement of a chair, what have you. It does not need to be real, or even pretend to be real. The part of our minds that knows how to dream clicks on (or maybe is always on—just we can’t tell) and fills the void for us. The dream-state of the theater is always present, all while the logic portion of our brains is kept occupied with language, or costumes, or sets, there is another active part that keys up for emotion and event and will ease the mode of transitions in the wink of an eye.

So, is my short play Humalong—the play that I dreamed I was simultaneously performing and viewing—a play that utilizes ‘dream-logic?’ For the expressionists the answer would be ‘no.’ But is going to the theater and seeing this (or any other) play capable of tripping into the dream-logic-state that your brain has been exercising everynight of your sleeping life? That answer may very well be ‘yes.’
Dream on—dream big—dream logic.

RESOURCES LIST:

Adams, M. V., The Mythological Unconscious, (New York: Karnac, 2001).

Arnheim, R., To the Rescue of Art, Twenty-Six Essays, (Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1992).

Bogart, A., A Director Prepares, (New York: Routledge, 2005).

------------, And Then You Act: Making Art in an Unpredictable World, (New York: Routledge, 2007).

Bossler, G., ‘Writers and Their Work: Doug Wright’, The Dramatist, (November/December 2004),

Brecht, B., Modern Theories of Dram: A Selection of Writings on Drama and Theatre, 1840-1990, ed., George W. Brandt, (New York: Oxford University Press, 1998).

Cassell, The Cassell Companion to Theatre, (London: Wellington House, 1997).

Curci, A., and Rime, B., ‘Dreams, emotions, and social sharing of dreams’, Cognition and Emotion, Psychology Press, vol. 22, no. 1 (2008).

Domhoff, G. W., The Scientific Study of Dreams, (Washington: American Psychological Association, 2003),

Esslin, M., An Anatomy of Drama, (New York: Hill and Wang, 1984).

Everdell, W. R., The First Moderns: Profiles in the Origins of Twentieth Century Thought, (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997).

Frith, C., Making Up The Mind, How the Brain Creates our Mental World, (Malden: Blackwell Publishing, 2007).

Gerould, D., Theatre Theory Theatre: The Major Critical Texts from Aristotle and Zemi to Soyinka and Havel, (New York: Applause Theatre & Cinema Books, 2000).

Goodman, L. E., In Defense of Truth: A Pluralistic Approach, (New York: Humanity Books, 2001).

Hartman, E., and Brezler, T., ‘A systematic change in dreams after 9/11/01, SLEEP, vol. 31, no. 2, (2008).

Hunt, M., The Story of Psychology, (New York: Doubleday, 1993).

Jung, C. G., Dreams: Crucial Texts on the Meaning of Dreams by One of the Greatest Minds of Our Time, trans., R.F.C. Hull, (New York: MJF Books, 1974).

Kahn, D., and J. Hobson, A. “State-dependant thinking: A comparison of waking and dreaming thought”, Consciousness and Cognition, vol. 14, (2005).

Mancia, M., ‘One possible function of sleep: to produce dreams’, Behavioral Brain Research, vol. 69, no. 1-2 (1995).

Nietzsche, F., The Basic Writing of Nietzsche: The Birth of Tragedy, trans., Peter Gay, (New York: Modern Library, 2000).

Ratey, J.J., M.D., A User’s Guide to the Brain, Perception, Attention, and the Four Theaters of the Brain, (New York: Random House, 2002).

Root-Bernstein, R. S., and Root-Bernstein, M. M., Sparks of Genius: The Thirteen Thinking Tools of the World’s Most Creative People, (New York: Mariner Books, 1999).

Strauch, I., and Meier, B., In Search of Dreams: Results of Experimental Dream Research, (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1996),

Steiner, R., Sleep and Dreams: A Bridge to the Spirit, ed., Michael Lipson, Ph.D., (Steiner Books, 2003).

Strindberg, A., Five Major Plays, trans., Carl R. Mueller, (Lyme: Smith & Kraus, 2000).

Wilkinson, M., ‘Dreaming mind-brain: a Jungian perspective’, Journal of Analytical Psychology, vol. 51, (2006),

Seriously

2008-01-14T13:47:00.000-05:00

In his play Death of a Salesman playwright Arthur Miller investigates the notion of creating a modern day tragic hero. He frames his play around a character from the working class strata of American society. In so doing he willfully ignores the long established western tradition of the heroic tragic figure emerging from the noble and ruling class. Indeed, Miller’s attempt at creating his modern tragic hero is more akin to a classic comic character like Dikaiopolis from Aristophanes’ The Acharnians rather than the tragic King Oedipus. How does the playwright manage to raise the character of Willy Loman, a common man from the working class, to the level of a tragic hero in the classic style?

At the beginning of Death of a Salesman the salesman Willy Loman is worn out. He enters carrying the mark of his trade; two large sample cases as described in the opening directions:

He is past sixty years of age, dressed quietly. Even as he crosses the stage to the doorway of the house, his exhaustion is apparent.
(Miller, Death of a Salesman p. 12)

Within a few minutes he is stating his disillusion about the current state of the world to his wife:

WILLY: The street is lined with cars. There’s not a breath of fresh air in the neighborhood. The grass don’t grow anymore, you can’t raise a carrot in the backyard. They should’ve had a law against apartment houses. Remember those two beautiful elm trees out there? When I and Biff hung the swing between them? ... They should’ve arrested the builder for cutting those down. They massacred the neighborhood. … There’s more people! That’s what’s ruining this country! Population is getting out of control. The competition is maddening! (Death of a Salesman p. 17-8)

Willy Loman works himself into a frenzy over the growth that has altered the architecture of his neighborhood. As the landscape around him changes, he clings to his hard earned real estate, but the intrusion of the towering apartment buildings on either side of his home has reduced his once fertile patch of ground into a sparse wasteland that can no longer support a carrot. He longs for the happier days of the past when there was prosperity, or at least the appearance of success, in and around his home.

To begin The Acharnians, Aristophanes introduces his hero, the aged Dikaiopolis, directly addressing the audience:

My heart has drunk deep of the cup of woe, and scant the joys I’ve known … I’m fed up with my city and just craving to get back to my village. Ah! my village. We had none of this ‘Coal for sale’, nor oil or vinegar either; we’d never even heard the word ‘for sale’. Everything we needed we produced ourselves … this time I’ve come prepared: if anybody dares say a word about except peace, I’ll heckle him like fury until he shuts his cakehole tight. (Aristophanes, The Acharnians p. 49-50)

Like Willy Loman, Dikaiopolis is fed up with the state of affairs, and longs for a return to his comfortable and manageable village life away from the city, but the war with Sparta keeps him from accomplishing this. He is concerned with trying to persuade the members of the Assembly to make peace with Sparta so that citizens like himself can get back to their peace-full lives away from Athens.

In contrast to the first glimpses of either Willy or Dikaiopolis, both of whom we meet alone and downtrodden, Sophocles’ Oedipus enters at the top of his form. The chorus is already present, as they are the bearers of lamentation and woe. Oedipus wishes to reassure them and is fully concerned with aiding their plight:

Oh my children, the new blood of ancient Thebes,
Why are you here? Huddling at my altar,
praying before me, your branches wound in wool.
Our city reeks with the smoke of burning incense,
rings with cries for the Healer and wailing of the dead.
I thought it wrong, my children, to hear the truth
from other messengers. Here I am myself—
(Sophocles, Oedipus the King 1-7)

It is the procession of the chorus that is described as broken and despondent, while Oedipus is described by the chorus as robust:

…we do rate you first of men,
both in common crises of our lives
and face-to-face encounters with the gods.
You freed us from the Sphinx, you came to Thebes
and cut us loose from the bloody tribute we had paid
that harsh, brutal singer. We taught you nothing,
no skill, no extra knowledge, still you triumphed.
(Oedipus the King 41-7)

Oedipus has a record of achievement. He has single-handedly liberated the city from an oppressive beast and has been raised to the highest position in the city, that of a respected ruler. He is a mature man, but not yet old. Many of the other characters are older than he is, including the leader of the chorus, the blind prophet Tiresias, and his queen Jocasta. Oedipus, unlike the old men at the center of the other two works, is a man enjoying the prime of his life. Oedipus is at his height, supplying ample energy for the spring that is the tragic mechanism from the start of Oedipus the King.

What signals the tenor of each play, whether we are in for a comedy or tragedy? While Willy may share the physical and social attributes of Dikaiopolis, and even shares the despairing over current affairs, it is clear at the onset that Dikaiopolis world is that of the comedic while Willy’s world is that of the dramatic. The signal is the tone. Where The Acharnians begins with Dikaiopolis’ meta-theatrical direct address to the audience acting as a wink-wink-nudge-nudge-this-is-a-play-you’re-watching, Death of a Salesman begins with the sound of a flute and a stage shrouded in darkness. From the darkness the two towers of the apartment buildings that frame either side of the play-world appear, followed by the outline of the house. Miller describes effect the light should have on the observer, “An air of the dream clings to the place, a dream rising out of reality.” (p. 11). The world occupied by Willy Loman is fragile and distinctly unreal. It is interesting to note that Willy’s world is not set at the level of the tragic immediately by any signals other than the title of the play. At the opening of the curtain Death of a Salesman could potentially be a heightened drama, but not necessarily rise to tragic levels.

Oedipus the King possesses tragic potential from the onset. The layering of the fate of Oedipus is established in the opening strains of the play simply by sounding his name, “I am Oedipus.” (Oedipus the King 9). A name so famous that twenty-five hundred years after the play was first performed its significance still resonates. The depth of the tragic crime at the heart of the play is not a secret. Oedipus’ guilt is articulated in the first quarter of the work, when blind prophet Tiresias declares, “You are the curse, the corruption of the land.” (Oedipus the King 401)

One third of the way into Act One of Death of a Salesman Willy is established as a fraudulent braggart as he speaks to his wife Linda about his success selling on the road:

WILLY: I did five hundred gross in Providence and seven hundred gross in Boston.
LINDA: No! Wait a minute, I’ve got a pencil. She pulls pencil and paper out of her apron pocket. That make your commission… Two hundred—my God! Two hundred and twelve dollars!
WILLY: Well, I didn’t figure it yet but…
LINDA: How much did you do?
WILLY: Well, I—I did—about a hundred and eighty gross in Providence. Well, no—it came to—roughly two hundred gross on the whole trip.
LINDA without hesitation: Two hundred gross. That’s… She figures.
WILLY: The trouble was that three of the stores were half closed for inventory in Boston. Otherwise I woulda broke records.
(Death of a Salesman p. 35)

Only the reality that Linda must know the correct figures in order to pay the bills compels Willy to confess the true sales numbers to her. Later in the play it is apparent that Willy is no longer able to sort reality from his fabrications, as when he speaks with his young boss Howard:

WILLY: …Now pay attention. Your father—in 1928 I had a big year. I averaged a hundred and seventy dollars a week in commissions.
HOWARD, impatiently: Now, Willy, you never averaged—
WILLY, bnging his hands on the desk: I averaged a hundred and seventy dollars a week in the year 1928! And your father came to me—or rather, I was in his office here—it was right over this desk—and put his hand on my shoulder—
HOWARD, getting up: You’ll have to excuse me Willy, I gotta see some people. Pull yourself together.
(Death of a Salesman p. 82)

Willy’s lifetime of spinning larger-than-life truths to raise himself in the eyes of others has led to his current state; he can no longer decipher truth from deception. Although in this passage we see him try to manage some truth, as when he corrects himself over the detail regarding how Howard’s father had spoken to him. Here we witness the struggle Willy has to correct a small detail, but we watch him continue to negate the truth regarding his past success when it is challenged by Howard. What is uncertain is whether Willy knows that he is inflating the numbers, or whether he believes the fiction he has created. Miller leaves this for his audience to decide from moment to moment. Part of the subtlety of the play is that as our understanding of the story grows, our assumptions regarding what’s real and what’s false become as malleable as Willy’s numbers.

Dikaiopolis also uses deception to meet his ends, but unlike Willy he does not lose his grasp on recognizing reality from fiction. As he dresses in rags borrowed from the character wardrobe of Euripides he makes clear the intent of his disguise, “—the audience have got to know who I am, but the Chorus have got to be fooled.” (The Acharnians p. 69)

Unlike either Willy or Dikaiopolis, Oedipus is a seeker of truth. While the tragic tract of the play will lead to the revelation that Oedipus is in fact the cause of the curse, he is not a character who hides the truth, nor does he deny the truth once it is irrevocably proven:

Take me away, far, far from Thebes,
quickly, cast me away, my friends—
this great murderous ruin, this man cursed to heaven,
the man the deathless gods hate most of all!
(Oedipus the King 1477-80)

Oedipus is a man who shoulders responsibility.

The architecture of each play-world establishes rules regarding time and place. In both of the ancient Greek plays the action of the play takes place outside in public spaces. This is part of the architectural aesthetic inherent in the restriction mandated by the playing of the action in an outdoor theater. But even here, there are variations. Oedipus the King is set in one location, the area just outside of the palace. Exits and entrances into and out of the palace are employed. The proximity of the private chambers is paramount as the play nears its climax:

O light—now let me look my last on you!
I stand revealed at last—
cursed in my birth, cursed in my marriage,
cursed in the lives I cut down with these hands!
(Oedipus the King 1308-1310)

This passage is followed by a stage direction, “(Oedipus) Rushing through the doors with a great cry.” The fallen king retreats to his private chambers while the action remains on the stage and the chorus continues describing the great calamity. But the door to the private chambers is visible. We do not follow the character, but the presence of the threshold reminds us of the terrible private things happening beyond our sight.

The restriction of location establishes a sense formality that reinforces the dramatic themes of the play. It enhances the discipline inherent in the tragic form, heightening the dramatic tension. Oedipus lives under many restrictions regarding conduct and law, and so does the structure of the play.

In contrast, the world created by Aristophanes is concerned with the scrutiny and deconstruction of the letter of the law. It willfully pokes established social norms and formal laws in the eye. Hence the form freely switches locations enhancing the manic themes of individual enterprise and cunning.

The play world created by Miller is one that utilizes a modern architecture, one where lighting and spatial scope can be minutely controlled. The world of Willy Loman changes location, but unlike either of the two classic works, much of Death of a Salesman takes place indoors, inside the private world. As the story spins some of the action moves to public areas of business, but even those places are indoors. Only when Willy washes the car with his boys does the play move outdoors, but these are scenes of remembering. How reliable is memory? Are these moments outdoors as authentic as the moments that take place indoors in the present? That is a question that Miller raises, and one that helps heighten the dramatic tension. What do we trust when we view the private world not just indoors, but within Willy’s mind?

This notion of memory is an interesting facet of Miller’s play, and it is the mechanism that pulls the focus from simply performing a series of actions in the present, as in The Archarnians, to the accumulated actions of a lifetime to this one moment. This is how Miller establishes the dynamic of tragic proportion. Willy Loman has a past, and it is that past that clings to his being and drives his current mental state and actions. Whether he will be able to survive grappling with the past is the question that drives the play. This is how Miller manages to diverge the character of Willy Loman from his association with the comic characterizations of Aristophanes and squarely merges him with the tragic figures found in Sophocles.

Dikaiopolis has no past, or he has no past that has any bearing on his present actions. The only past that affects his actions is the recent social past that he claims to be abandoning. He has a wife and children, but they are only mentioned once or twice, and they very quickly fall away from any significance to the hero’s actions. He is railing against the Athenian society that is at war with Sparta because the war is disrupting his life. The accumulation of past events, his personal history, has nothing to with the progression of the play. Dikaiopolis is so rooted in the immediate present that he is sometimes aware that he is a character in a play and is therefore able to stride directly to the King-Archon’s seat in the audience and address him directly:

Behold the empty jug. Will you acclaim me
As champion of Bacchus’ festival? (The Acharnians, p. 103)

His request has the double meaning of speaking as the character Dikaiopolis about having drunk so much wine, and as the voice of the playwright requesting that the play win the prize at the festival. Dikaiopolis can accomplish this because he is a character divorced from his past and from any serious repercussions in the world of the play.

Oedipus and Willy, on the other hand, have a great deal at stake in their respective play-worlds. Both carry the burden of their past actions. Both have an articulated past that haunts them. While the techniques used to present the back-stories of the characters are different, the result is the same; that we understand the burden of the accumulated effect of past choices. This awareness of the past and its impact on the future heightens the tragic forces of each of these plays.

Near the end, Oedipus curses his newly gained knowledge of his past:

Dark, horror of darkness
my darkness, drowning, swirling around me
crashing wave on wave—unspeakable, irresistible
headwind, fatal harbor! Oh again,
the misery, all at once, over and over
the stabbing daggers, stab of memory
raking me insane. (Oedipus the King 1450-5)

Stabbing out his own eyes, he sets himself on the path of an outcast and a beggar. He does not hasten death because this is not his destiny. He knows his fate is to die elsewhere, and he can also fathom the fate that awaits his children now that the truth about their parentage is set loose in the world. The tragedy of the Oedipus cycle, past—present—future is contained in these moments. With all of the pieces and images assembled the scope of the tragedy is fully present and engaged both for the play’s characters and for its audience.

It is this presence of scope, of uniting the multiple temporal dimensions of past—present—future, which raises Death of a Salesman to the tragic strata. Willy Loman, in the final passages of the play, realizes the scope of his life, and that it continues into the future not as his single life, but through the life of his son Biff. Willy at long last establishes the connection that unites himself with multiple temporal plains:

BIFF, at the peak of his fury: Pop, I’m nothing! I’m nothing Pop. Can’t you understand that? There’s no spite in it any more. I’m just what I am, that’s all.
Biff’s fury has spent itself, and he breaks down, sobbing, holding on to Willy, who dumbly fumbles for Biff’s face.
WILLY, astonished: What’re you doing? What’re you doing? To Linda: Why is he crying?
BIFF, crying, broken: Will you let me go, for Christ’s sake? Will you take that phony dream and burn it before something happens? Struggling to contain himself, he pulls away and moves to the stairs. I’ll go in the morning. Put him—put him to bed. Exhausted, Biff moves up the stairs to his room.
WILLY, after a long pause, astonished, elevated: Isn’t that—isn’t that remarkable? Biff—he likes me!
LINDA: He loves you, Willy!
HAPPY, deeply moved: Always did, Pop.
WILLY: Oh, Biff! Staring wildly: He cried! Cried to me. He is choking with his love, and now cries out his promise: That boy—that boy is going to be magnificent!
(Death of a Salesman p. 133)

At last Willy recognizes a deep truth, that his son loves him—has always loved him. With this recognition of the truth Willy determines to take action, to propel that love into the future. He swears an oath, that his boy will be magnificent. Willy believes he must ensure the boys success by staking his future. The only means for accomplishing this task is through his own death, for his death will bring the insurance payment to his family. By sacrificing his life he can ensure his son’s future.

Like Oedipus, Willy Loman sacrifices himself for a greater good. Like Oedipus, he carries the weight of his past and understands the potential of his family’s future. Like Oedipus, the lifetime that has come before is defined by this one action in this one moment. Willy Loman rises from the ranks of common citizens because he, unlike Dikaiopolis, is willing to abandon his personal notions of success and comfort for the benefit of others. By accumulating the past, Willy Loman’s story deftly expands across a temporal landscape. This subtle expansion that builds throughout the play, compels heroic action that is fulfilled when Willy is finally able to recognize a deeply human truth and is then willing to take selfless action. Through Willy Loman, Arthur Miller manages to transcend the trappings of the comic hero and shape them into a moving and tragic tale.
____________________________________________________
Resource List:
1. Aristophanes, Lysitrata/The Archanians/The Clouds, trans. Alan H. Sommerstein (London: Penguin Books, 1973).
2. George Plimpton, ed., Playwrights At Work: The Paris Review Interviews, interviewer Christopher Bigsby (New York: Random House, 2000).
3. Erich Segal, The Death of Comedy, (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2001).
4. Toby Cole, ed., Playwrights on Playwriting, (New York: Hill and Wang, 1960).
5. Lisa A. Barnett, Broadway’s Fabulous Fifties: How the Playmakers Made It Happen, interviewer Ted Mabley (New York: New Dramatist Publications, 2002).
6. Arthur Miller, Death of a Salesman, (New York: Viking Press, 1949).
7. Sophocles, Oedipus the King, trans. Robert Fagles (New York: Penguin Books, 1984).
8. C. Whitman, II Comic Heroism, from Aristophanes and the Comic Hero, (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1964).

Where's the audience? Where's wisdom?

2008-01-12T15:25:00.000-05:00

"If you are completely confident in yourself, you don’t have to think about the audience at all. You just do your thing, you just do it properly. This means YOU become the audience. What you make is entertainment, but that needs a certain amount of wisdom."

---Chogyam Trungpa

From “Visual Dharma: Film Workshop,” in the COLLECTED WORKS OF CHOGYAM TRUNGPA, Volume Seven, pages 644-645.

Read more of this quote.

Baring Feet

2008-01-07T19:02:00.000-05:00

At the Dragon's Egg in Ledyard, Connecticut, things are accomplished in cycles. Some of the events are transient, others are tied to seasonal shifts. Later this September there will be a poetry reading timed to coincide with the autumnal equinox, just as there was one to herald the Spring. Summertime brings artists together for an assemblage project based on a common text. Pieces are assembled on the day of the event to tell the designated story. It is rehearsed once and then presented for the public.

The Dragon's Egg is a sacred space dedicated to hosting artists. Upon entering one must abandon their shoes at the door. Chairs are available for people with special needs, but most folks sit on pillows that are spread along the floor. The archway is festooned with prayer flags and above them hangs a series of bells that beg to be rung.

The space is secluded, on the remnants of an old farm, surrounded by woods. The shape of the space is an open sphere. Throughout the year the space welcomes resident guests who come and work on artistic projects. I participate in these events and find myself rejuvenated as a result. This year I became a member of the board of directors for the Egg, and so am committed to the continued life and use of the space.

Two years ago I workshopped a new play at the Egg with a week-long residency. The play itself became a ritual. The space was conducive to that form. Rehearsing barefooted brought a visceral immediacy to the work with the actors that would not have been experienced otherwise. The act of removing our shoes as we entered the space was always mindful and reverential. It reminded us that we pass through the space with others, that we share the space, and that others will come after us and care for the space too, along with us, at some future time.

People often describe their time at the Egg as "magical" whether they come as artists or as observers. Baring our feet, like sweeping the floor after we were done with our work, or turning out the lights, is part of the ritual, and an essential element of the Egg experience.

For more about the Egg on the web:
The Dragons Egg or
Dragons Egg on Squidoo

Mask Project: Making Philoktetes

2007-12-28T12:19:00.000-05:00

Mask Project

Western theater tradition is marked by the classic Greek period of the 5th century BCE. The creative output, theatrical imagination, and social relevance of the Attic theater aesthetic have had resounding influence on the development of representational European theater. From Shakespeare to Brecht to O’Neill to Ruhl, the work of the Greeks is still with us. While a relative handful of the original plays presented at the Festival of Dionysos have survived intact, far less has been found to illuminate the exact nature of the masked performance; and when one thinks of Greek theater, one thinks of the mask. Why else does every drama club and prestigious theater award still carry the image of the mask? The mask represents the nature of ‘the thing that is and the thing that is not’ coexisting in the same form; an ambiguous relationship that still captivates the viewer and the performer alike. In the classic Greek what was the function of the masked performer and how did a performer function with a mask?

Why a mask?
When we consider the tropes of ancient masked performance we do two things: we look at current uses of masked performance, and we calculate where the use of the masked tradition originated. In the conclusion of his book on Masked Performance, John Emigh combines this forward and backward glance in this statement:

The masked actor … (works) within a “plane of similitude” to create the amalgam of self and other that may be experienced as characters. Intercultural performances—and, it seems, cultures themselves—depend on similar strategies in order to acquire their dynamic form, significance, and vitality. For me, the most successful intercultural performances of the past twenty years has been Suzuki Tadashi’s adaptation of Euripides’ The Trojan Women.

This adaptation of Euripides was set in a field in Japan shortly after the atomic bombs had fallen on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The play was performed in Japanese and used masks from the Noh tradition mixed with kabuki face styles, a powerful combination of Western and Eastern aesthetics causing Emigh to remark, “These conventions are never employed literally, but their resonance across the ‘plane of similitude’ Suzuki and his coworkers have found between Greek and Japanese performative traditions act to reshape the form and action of Euripides’ drama, transforming the Greek masks, characters, and action.” The use of the mask reemerges as re-imagined fare.

While the dominating influence of the Greek theater on modern works is evident, the origin of the form is far murkier. The roots of tragedy are believed to spring from early masked rituals devoted to the god Dionysos. Evidence to support this theory comes from the likely origin of the word “tragedy” originating from the word tragos which means goat, and odi which means song. This links tragedy to the dythyramb because some members of the celebrants dressed as satyrs, or goat-men. Other sources claim that “goat-song” derives from the awarding of a goat play as the prize for the best in the early forms of the festival.

Theatricality, the process by which a stage-presentation is rendered, begins to propagate as the 5th century aesthetic is established and codified. In the essay “The use of the body by actors in tragedy and satyr-play”, Kostas Valakas notes how the Greek dramatists refined their art by utilizing the dramatic effect of simple forms:

In both tragedy and the satyr-play the modification of the performer’s body by a simple mask and a more or less elaborate dress produces a theatrical image which is meant to evoke the anthropomorphic world of myth in an unrealistic, but not wholly unnatural, way. Mask, costume (such as a staff, a bow, or a chariot) used in relation to a specific role, the variable voice of the male actor or dancer, and the words of his role… are the differentiating elements of theatricality; they can represent the gender, mythical status, and perhaps the geographical provenance and some individual characteristics of a tragic or satiric character or chorus.

Masks and props are vehicles for understanding, much as music video artists or advertisers rely on symbolic imagery to convey immediate and (they hope) long-lasting recognition.

In an essay describing the influence of the masks on the actors and the Attic audience attending Oedipus Rex, Claude Calame describes the physical attributes of the actor encased in a mask:

(The mask) ‘shifts’ the voice and gaze of the hero, for the mouth and eyes are the two organs which correspond to the holes in the mask’s surface: they let the voice and the gaze of the actor appear to the spectators, beyond the hero he is miming. The mask creates a confrontation between the dramatic action and the public…while mediating this confrontation.

Calame points out that the intent of the mask was not to obliterate knowledge of the performer inside the mask, but to alter that perception, or as Emigh suggests in the aforementioned passage, creates an ‘amalgam’.

David Wiles takes the relationship between the audience and the masked performer a step further. In Attic tragedy of the 5th c the masks were more neutral and naturally proportioned than the stylized masks of the 4th c or exaggerated masks of Rome:

Masks covered the whole head, requiring the spectator to project emotion on to the face and imagine movement in the few simple features tht the mask rendered visible. The actor brought the mask to life through the configuration of the whole body. Later Greek theatre was able to use subtle densely coded masks because the actors stood in shadow, but in the classical period the actors in Athens stood in the circle of the orchestra with the sun behind them.

Depending on the time day, the effect of the sun’s angle could render the actors as silhouettes to some portions of the audience, leaving the understanding of the relationships of the characters to the interpretation of shapes and configurations.

In general, the classical tragic masks were neutral in expression. Richard Green, in his essay “Towards a reconstruction of performance style” explains why:

‘Proper’ Greeks and the gods they created show calm and control even in the most adverse situations, whereas aliens, the outsiders of society, exhibit their emotions. It is an aspect of the ‘classical Ideal’… We should expect that on stage the figures of serious drama also looked ‘proper’. This is surely an aspect of the decorum expected of tragedy.

A god, a king, or a hero would be rendered as ‘ideal’ as possible, and this would mean an appearance of calm or neutrality.

How were the classic masks made?
While very little evidence exists of how the masks of the 5th c were constructed , the images that do exist support the claim that they were representational and not exaggerated. Few written descriptions of 5th c theater production are known to exist, the written records come from later Roman sources who were primarily writing about their current theatrical forms and relying on supposition to remark on classic Greek production values. No masks have survived because they were made from lightweight materials like canvas, cork, leather, or carved wood.

To understand the classical masked performer we rely on painted pottery from the same era depicting actors in performance and in relationship to their masks. Richard Green elaborates on some of the frustration scholars have had in discerning what is theatrical style and what is artist rendering:

All too few pictures survive of classical Greek actors acting tragedy. There are good reasons for this, the principal of which is the convention that vase-painters…were governed by the sense of story conveyed by the performance. Thus what is usually depicted on vases is not the process of performance but what the audience was persuaded to see, as it were the ‘real’ Agamemnon of Greek myth—history rather than the actor playing the role.

While this is frustrating for scholars, it does reveal the realistic effect the masked-performance had on its audience. Had the play been perceived as stilted by the presence of the mask, then I believe the masks would be prevalent on the renderings.

The masks were made by assistants working for the director, and were also responsible for the other aspects of costuming. The masks themselves were made from glued rags, and covered with hair either made from human sources, animal sources, or possibly tow. There are a number of marble mask heads that still survive, although not all are the correct size for matching a mask to an adult. A mask made of linen or cloth could be moulded around the marble form in a process like creating papier-mache objects. In this way a series of masks could be created and either be adorned similarly or with varying hair and coloration.

Why this mask?

The mask presented as part of this project portrays Philoktetes, the lame hero at the center of the 5th century tragedy by Sophocles. Produced in 409 BCE, the play was the second-to-last work by the aged playwright, and the last of his work that he would see staged before his death in 406 BCE. It presents the title character Philoktetes as a man who has been alone on an island for nine years, abandoned by Odysseus as the Achaeans made their way to Troy after he had been wounded by a serpent.

I have attempted to render the mask in a neutral style as befits a hero in tragedy. Originally I attempted an experiment with stiffening linen with glue. I formed the wet-glue cloth over a plastic mask of a human face. It proved impossible to get the wet cloth to remain on top of the form. I imagine what would be needed to mould linen in this way is not just the initial face form, but an indented form that could be placed over the linen to hold it in place while it dried. Another issue with the linen experiment was the way the material folds. I imagine that the linen would have to be cut in such a way that it would dry as a smooth surface, rather than one that buckles and wrinkles as the linen accommodates the shape of the nose and brow. I did manage to get a ghostly image of a face, but it looks like a face pressing itself up against a sheet. It did not render a suitable representation of a face.

To make this mask I used techniques I learned from Dan Potter, founder and director of the Mystic Paper Beasts, a mask/puppet performance troupe that has toured around the world. He enjoys using ‘found’ or recycled objects in his work. I used cardboard reinforced with a coating of glue to make it resilient and less likely to become soggy while applying paint. Masking tape was applied to cover edges and smooth out junctions. This also received a coating of glue and water to make it stronger.

Because the character has been living outdoors on an island for nine years, I wanted to give him a slightly harried appearance. The ‘hair’ is made from homespun yarn to help with this effect. Also, I chose a ruddier complexion for the face, to give the appearance of his many hours exposed to the elements seeking provisions.

Using the information gathered about Attic masked performance I have sought to create a neutral mask with subtle character attributes. The masked performance tradition of the classic Greeks is one of the facets of their enduring drama that continues to fascinate. Their stories and their style of performing are still relevant to our theater today. We have altered the look of the mask—the purpose of the mask—but the masking tradition still holds power and in its presence we listen. By making this mask, I have learned a little more about why these traditions endure.

Resource List:
1. Libby Appel, Masked Characterization, An Acting Process, (Illinois, Southern University Press, 1982).
2. John Emigh, Masked Performance: The Play of Self and Other in Ritual and Theatre, (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1996).
3. Richard Green, Pat Easterling and Edith Hall, ed., Greek and Roman Actors, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002).
4. Graham Ley, The Theatricality of Greek Tragedy, (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007).
5. Don Nardo, ed., Greek Drama, (San Diego: Greenhaven Press, 2000).
6. Stewart Ross, Jill A. Laidlaw, ed., Ancient Greece: Greek Theatre, (Chicago: Wayland Publishers, 1996).
7. M. S. Silk, Tragedy and the Tragic, Greek Theatre and Beyond, (Oxford: Oxford University Press 1996).
8. Sophocles, Sophokles: The Complete Plays, trans. Carl R. Mueller and Anna Krajewska-Wieczorek (Hanover: Smith and Kraus, 2000).
9. Don Nardo, ed., Readings on Sophocles, (San Diego: Greenhaven Press, 2000).
10. Kostas Valakas, Pat Easterling and Edith Hall, ed., Greek and Roman Actors, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002).
11. David Wiles, Greek Theatre Performance, An Introduction (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000).

Special Holiday Offer for YOGA IN THE CAR! order by 12/18/07!

2007-12-13T13:55:00.000-05:00

This is an item from my friend and awesome theater artist/yoga instructor Jen Swain and friends -- It would make an excellent stocking stuffer or gift idea. And this link will take you to the special offer for friends! --Kato

___________________________________________________

'Tis the season for giving gifts, why not Om your holiday shopping experience? Jen, Gennette and the rest of the Om the Road crew are ever grateful for our friends and family, and know you are for yours, too. For the rest of the month of December, you can buy a copy of our CD Yoga in the Car with Jen Swain: Bumper to Bumper to give as a gift for only $10 (plus the cost of shipping and handling - unless you live in LA and we have the good fortune of seeing you. It fits perfectly as a stocking stuffer, no one will have it, it's great for people who have always wanted to try yoga (but can't quite make it to a studio) it's a nice way to let someone know you are concerned about their stress/road rage level, AND at the very least, you will make them smile.

Simply go to Yoga in the Car Please order by the 18th, you have a good chance of receiving the CD's by the 24th.

You are welcome to forward this on to any of your friends who might be interested in getting this gift for someone as well.

http://www.omtheroadyoga.com/OTR_FriendsSale.htm

Flights of Fancy in Deep River thru Nov. 10th

2007-11-06T18:14:00.000-05:00

This is a super funny play by a playwright friend of mine (I performed in the staged reading of it at the O'Neill Theater Center a few years ago). I highly recommend seeing this show. --Kato
---------------------------------------------------------------

THE EAST HADDAM STAGE COMPANY presents

FLIGHTS OF FANCY (PG 13)
A COMEDY BY AWARD WINNING PLAYWRIGHT SUZANNE WINGROVE
DIRECTED BY CASEY CARLE

A raucous, satirical romp through the complications of love, gender
conventions and the creative process!

This laugh out loud production features:
David Cardone, Amy Kirby, Andrew Kirby, Ira Sakolsky, Hannah Simms
and Mary Zuzik.

WHEN: Friday & Saturday NOV 2 & 3 @ 7:30 p.m.
Sunday NOV 4 @ 2:00 p.m.
Friday & Saturday NOV 9 & 10 @ 7:30 p.m.

WHERE: Deep River Town Hall Theater
174 Main St, Deep River, CT

TICKETS: General Seating: $20.00 Seniors & Students: 10% discount
Tickets Available Now! Limited seating - reservations
recommended.
860.873.3521 or EHSCO (directions, parking, additional
information, fanciful graphics!)

"Flights of Fancy" is a dazzling display of comic virtuosity by a
rising new star of American Theatre, playwright Suzanne Wingrove -
two-time winner of Stage 3's prestigious Festival of New
Plays. Wingrove's zany situations, wacky characters and brilliant
dialogue recall the great screwball comedies of yesteryear but
updated with a modern twist.

This play is funny. Funny with heart. To miss this show is to miss a
great night of clever and engaging theatre.

Probley stoopid

2007-10-08T23:47:00.000-04:00

So -- the week before school starts all the pieces for a play idea fall into place, right?
So I figure, what if I get as much done as possible before school starts, right?
So it's in my head waiting to be written, right?
So I start it, right?

A couple of weeks ago I managed to button up act one.

Cool.

'cept.

Now.

I'm crazy crazy busy with school -- and half the play still hammering away on the inside of my head.

Gulp.

Maybe next weekend there'll be time enough for me to get a hunk of act two done.

I hope so.

Send your play out into the world!

2007-08-23T16:22:00.000-04:00

Some places on the web that can help you find theaters interested in your work:

Playwright Zoo on Squidoo featuring a weekly column called The Monkey House with random tips and suggestions, plus link lists to theaters that accept plays and/or queries.

Also -- The Playwright Zoo Archive, a companion to the above mentioned Zoo which houses all of the Monkey House Musings and links to the Featured Playwrights' interviews and plays.

One of my favorite listing boards is En Avant Playwrights

Get into The Loop, monthly e-newsletter that has lots of advice and lots of opportunities.

No dramatist's desk is complete without a copy of the latest edition of The Dramatists Sourcebook updated and published every two years by Theatre Communictions Group or TCG.

And -- join the The Dramatists Guild. Besides member benefits you'll receive their monthly magazine loaded with tips, interviews, and advice; a booklet with contact and submission info for theaters, publishers, and agents; and bi-monthly e-mails about upcoming deadlines and member productions.

365 DAYS, 365 PLAYS in New London August 20-26

2007-08-17T23:48:00.000-04:00

Hygienic Art is presenting Suzan-Lori Parks' "week 41" of her
year-long cycle of plays in the Hygienic Art Park.

This is a world-wide project to present all 365 plays that Suzan-Lori wrote every day for a year.

Hygienic Art will be presenting all seven plays every night for seven nights.
August 20-26
Curtain is 8:00 PM
in the Hygienic Art Park

All performances are FREE to the public.

365 DAYS, 365 PLAYS
by Suzon-Lori Parks
Week 41
in the Art Park
Monday, August 20 thru Sunday, August 26
8-9pm
79-83 Bank Street
New London, CT 06320
860.443-8001

Community Players

2007-08-16T12:48:00.000-04:00

This past Saturday I attended a party at the home of Carol Pratt. She hosts an annual gathering of participants of the Groton Regionl Theatre at her home. I have wated to go to this party for years, and this year I asked a friend of mine if it would be okay if I could go.

"Of course!" -- was the answer.

When I arrived the host was in the pool, but she did hesitate to embrace me and welcome me to the party.

All day long I cozied-up to many of the movers and shakers of the local community theater scene. Some had been in the game for several or more decades. It was fun reconnecting with the local theater makers, hearing the old stories, and saying hello to many people who I have no seen in many years.

It made me rremember how much this community had meant to me as a young theater maker. I had learned a lot from people just like this, people who make theater happen becasue they love doing it.

Much of the foundation of my work as a theater artist was laid by my early work with the groups in my community. Not every experience was golden, but it all held value.

Great thanks to talented, giving, caring people like Carol Pratt and the folks who gathered around her pool last Saturday. They keep theater alive in a personal way that is not possible attain in other theater forums.

Theater belongs in a community.

Playwright Zoo

2007-07-29T11:16:00.000-04:00

ANNOUNCING: The Playwright Zoo on Squidoo has arrived!

Check it out.

It includes a links to major regional theaters that accept unsolicited plays, and resource lists for playwrights.

Zoo Musing #1: Get that play read!

2007-07-29T10:40:00.000-04:00

Get that play READ!
From Playwright Zoo

You've got a new play? You want to know if it works? There's only one way to discover what you've got, and that's to hear it out loud.

Call some of your actor friends, get them over to your house, and have them read your play to you.

What? No actor friends? In case you weren't paying attention when you started writing your play, these things happen in the theater. How can you not know some actors?

Well -- this does happen sometimes, but it is a situation that must be resolved. Go to some local shows, small non-profit theaters, community theaters, college theaters, to see who's doing what in your area. Next -- volunteer to help with whichever group you liked best.

This sounds like a commitment? It is. You are a playwright that has to become committed to your local theater scene. There's no way around that, so quit stalling and COMMIT ALREADY! Involve yourself. Then start collecting actors' contact info.

Not only will your commitment bring you actors, it will bring you additional knowledge about theatermaking, and this will enrich your playwriting. See the benefits of the cycle?

Now, invite some of thoe actors to your house to read your play out loud to you.

Be sure to have refreshments on hand. Also have some snacks, but I recommend staying away from salty/crunchy for a reading. Try fruit or soft candies. That way people gnoshing won't interupt the sound of your play. Also fruit is good for the vocal cords.

Now that you've heard your play it's time to rewrite. Begin by cutting the things that sounded ackward or were redundant. Then start the work of revision. Some plays need only a little tweeking, but more likely your play will need some retooling, rearranging, and new material now that you've lopped off the first half of your play (sometimes that's what happens).

Then you're ready for phase 2: The concert reading... but that will have to wait until another musing.

TheaterMakers Workshops

2007-07-28T11:42:00.000-04:00

The two cold reading workshops that I ran with the TheaterMakers at the O'Neill are now complete. The first one was more succesful than the second, but I had a great time with both and learned a lot about my plays in the process.

The first workshop was held in the basement of the DMT -- and was a more energized space than the second location, which was in the screening room. Also, day 2 was much hotter, the play was more difficult, and the students had just presented their final project the evening before, so they were pretty tired.

The first workshop we put forward WHETHER: A NOAH RIFF. What a blast! The students brought some great work to the table.

The second workshop we worked MINOTAURS. TOREROS. It was unfortunate that the students were not abe to get the text in advance. It is a difficult play to present as a reading, and I'm not sure that the students were able to really understand the play before presnting it. It led to a subdued and careful rendering of the text. Between the heat and the pace, the performance itself dragged. But I thik that the action of working on the play throughout the day was beneficial. I know it was beneficial for me as the playwright.

I was engaged listening to the new sequences, which I think need a little trimming an revision.

I would like to figure out to better communicate cold-reading techniques for future workshops like this. The skills required for cold-reading are invaluble for young actors whoo might wish to make connections with playwrights and theaters. It is a skill to hone, because it can be useful in opening doors.

Lloyd Richards tribute @ O'Neill 7/29

2007-07-26T17:40:00.001-04:00

The Eugene O'Neill Theater Center will honor the late Lloyd Richards, who led the National Playwrights Conference from 1968-1999, above with actress Angela Bassett at the O'Neill Center in Waterford in July 1999, with a tribute at 2 p.m. Sunday at the center. George C. White, founder of the O'Neill, will emcee, and there will be remembrances from conference alumni and friends, video and tributes.

Wendy Wasserstein Fund for Open Submissions @ O'Neill Theater Center

2007-07-13T09:41:00.000-04:00

After the opening play last Thursday at The O'Neill National Playwrights Conference I took a few minutes to thumb through my program. I found a blue slip of paper that announced the Wendy Wasserstein Fund for Open Submissions.

"Wendy Wasserstein was a loyal friend of the O'Neill throughout her distinguished career, from her earliest work as an assistant to Lloyd Richards, and as a mentor to other writers long after her first produced play, Uncommon Women and Others, was developed at the O'Neill in 1977. She was a passionate advocate for the O'Neill's OPEN SUBMISSIONS program and the opportunities it presents for emerging writers who can benefit from the O'Neill's resources at pivotal times in their careers, just as she did."

This fund is an endowment that will ensure the OPEN SUBMISSIONS program in perpetuity. Income from the fund will be used for operational costs of the Open Submissions program.

While I don't have a lot of money to give to this fund myself, I do intend to have a donation can dedicated to collecting donations for this cause whenever one of plays is going up or my production company producess a workshop. I am also going to see if local community groups and theaters will put out donation cans as well.

If you would like to make a contribution, or make a local collection toward this endowment, send it to:

The Wendy Wasserstein Fund for Open Submissions
O'Neill Theater Center
305 Great Neck Road
Waterford, CT 06385
USA

For more information call 860.443.5378
or visit the website http://www.theoneill.org

The 36

2007-07-11T10:00:00.000-04:00

36 Assumptions About Writing Plays

by Jose Rivera

Over the years, I've had the good fortune to teach writing in a number of schools from second-grade to graduate school. I usually just wing it. But lately, I've decided to think about the assumptions I've been working under and to write them down. The following is an unscientific, gut-level survey of the assumptions I have about writing plays, in no particular order of importance.

Good playwriting is a collaboration between your many selves. The more multiple your personalities, the further, wider, deeper you will be able to go.
Theatre is closer to poetry and music than it is to the novel.
There's no time limit to writing plays. Think of playwriting as a life-long apprenticeship. Imagine you may have your best ideas on your deathbed.
Write plays in order to organize despair and chaos. To live vicariously. To play God. To project an idealized version of the world. To destroy things you hate in the world and in yourself. To remember and to forget. To lie to yourself. To play. To dance with language. To beautify the landscape. To fight loneliness. To inspire others. To imitate your heroes. To bring back the past and raise the dead. To achieve transcendence of yourself. To fight the powers that be. To sound alarms. To provoke conversation. To engage in the conversation started by great writers in the past. To further evolve the artform. To lose yourself in your fictive world. To make money.
Write because you want to show something. To show that the world is shit. To show how fleeting love and happiness are. To show the inner workings of your ego. To show that democracy is in danger. To show how interconnected we are. (Each "to show" is active and must be personal, deeply held, true to you.)
Each line of dialogue is like a piece of DNA; potentially containing the entire play and its thesis; potentially telling us the beginning, middle, and end of the play.
Be prepared to risk your entire reputation every time you write, otherwise it's not worth your audience's time.
Embrace your writer's block. It's nature's way of saving trees and your reputation. Listen to it and try to understand its source. Often, writer's block happens to you because somewhere in your work you've lied to yourself and your subconscious won't let you go any further until you've gone back, erased the lie, stated the truth and started over.
Language is a form of entertainment. Beautiful language can be like beautiful music: it can amuse, inspire, mystify, enlighten.
Rhythm is key. Use as many sounds and cadences as possible. Think of dialogue as a form of percussive music. You can vary the speed of the language, the number of beats per line, volume, density. You can use silences, fragments, elongated sentences, interruptions, overlapping conversation, physical activity, monologues, nonsense, non-sequiturs, foreign languages.
Vary your tone as much as possible. Juxtapose high seriousness with raunchy language with lyrical beauty with violence with dark comedy with awe with eroticism.
Action doesn't have to be overt. It can be the steady deepening of the dramatic situation or your character's steady emotional movements from one emotional/psychological condition to another: ignorance to enlightenment, weakness to strength, illness to wholeness.
Invest something truly personal in each of your characters, even if it's something of your worst self.
If realism is as artificial as any genre, strive to create your own realism. If theatre is a handicraft in which you make one of a kind pieces, then you're in complete control of your fictive universe. What are its physical laws? What's gravity like? What does time do? What are the rules of cause and effect? How do your characters behave in this altered universe?
Write from your organs. Write from your eyes, your heart, your liver, your ass -- write from your brain last of all.
Write from all of your senses. Be prepared to design on the page: tell yourself exactly what you see, feel, hear, touch and taste in this world. Never leave design to chance, that includes the design of the cast.
Find your tribe. Educate your collaborators. Stick to your people and be faithful to them. Seek aesthetic and emotional compatability with those your work with. Understand your director's world view because it will color his/her approach to your work.
Strive to be your own genre. Great plays represent the genres created around the author's voice. A Checkhov genre. A Caryl Churchill genre.
Strive to create roles that actors you respect will kill to perform.
Form follows function. Strive to reflect the content of the play in the form of the play.
Use the literalization of metaphor to discuss the inner emotional state of your characters.
Don't be afraid to attempt great themes: death, war, sexuality, identity, fate, God, existence, politics, love.
Theatre is the explanation of life to the living. Try to tease apart the conflicting noises of living, and make some kind of pattern and order. It's not so much and explanation of life as much as it is a recipe for understanding, a blueprint for navigation, a confidante with some answers, enough to guide you and encourage you, but not to dictate to you.
Push emotional extremes. Don't be a puritan. Be sexy. Be violent. Be irrational. Be sloppy. Be frightening. Be loud. Be stupid. Be colorful.
Ideas may be deeply embedded in the interactions and reactions of your character; they may be in the music and poetry of your form. You have thoughts and you generate ideas constantly. A play ought to embody those thoughts and those thoughts can serve as a unifying energy in your play.
A play must be organized. This is another word for structure. You organize a meal, your closet, your time -- why not your play?
Strive to be mysterious, not confusing.
Think of information in a play like an IV drip -- dispense just enough to keep the body alive, but not too much too soon.
Think of writing as a constant battle against the natural inertia of language.
Write in layers. Have as many things happening in a play in any one moment as possible.
Faulkner said the greatest drama is the heart in conflict with itself.
Keep your chops up with constant questioning of your own work. React against your work. Be hypercritical. Do in the next work what you aimed for but failed to do in the last one.
Listen only to those people who have a vested interest in your future.
Character is the embodiment of obsession. A character must be stupendously hungry. There is no rest for those characters until they've satisfied their needs.
In all your plays be sure to write at least one impossible thing. And don't let your director talk you out of it.
A writer cannot live without an authentic voice -- the place where you are the most honest, most lyrical, most complete, most creative and new. That's what you're striving to find. But the authentic voice doesn't know how to write, any more than gasoline knows how to drive. But driving is impossible without fuel and writing is impossible without the heat and strength of your authentic voice. Learning to write well is the stuff of workshops. Learning good habits and practicing hard. But finding your authentic voice as a writer is your business, your journey -- a private, lonely, inexact, painful, slow and frustrating voyage. Teachers and mentors can only bring you closer to that voice. With luck and time, you'll get there on your own.

TheaterMakers Workshop @ O'Neill

2007-07-10T11:11:00.000-04:00

This week (and maybe some of next) I'll be working with the TheaterMakers at the O'Neill Theater Center. We'll be workshopping a play or two of mine with the college-age group that is in-house during the National Playwrights Conference. It's in the throes of radical transformation after a lackluster innagural summer a year ago.

The two guys who are running it this year were participants last year and decided to restructure the project to make it more interesting and valuable to a recent college grad interested in making theater.

Their focus is quite strong -- to make a introductory experience to real-world theater making that bridges the college experience and the professional world. It is timed to make use of the in-house NPC and its creative staff.

Students shadow writer/director meetings, rehearsals, and help with the readings being presented throughout the month-long conference in Waterford, CT.

I'm excited to be working with the group and looking forward to hearing my plays.

Merchant's merchant

2007-06-04T11:47:00.000-04:00

Unconventional Director Sets Shakespeare Play In Time, Place Shakespeare Intended

MORRISTOWN, NJ—In an innovative, tradition-defying rethinking of one of the greatest comedies in the English language, Morristown Community Players director Kevin Hiles announced Monday his bold intention to set his theater's production of William Shakespeare's The Merchant of Venice in...

Read it all

Alice: nil

2007-06-03T01:10:00.000-04:00

I have not come up with anything to contribute to the Alice Wonders project at the Dragon's Egg next week. Alas. If something squeaks out of head, cool. If not -- I'll be the sound person that day and take some good pictures.

At least I can help out on some level...

Actually...

2007-04-04T18:55:00.000-04:00

Part of my course of study at Brown includes cognitive science. Why is a playwright studying cog-sci? To prove scientifically why theater is an essential part of a growing human brain.

An active theater has been a component of all great societal movements.

I intend to prove why -- with dazzling science.

Theatre in schools is an elitist expense

2007-04-01T11:56:00.000-04:00

It's about time someone put a stop to the notion that theatre programs are essential. They are, in fact, a detriment to the social framework of an academic curriculum, and a drain on the morals of our children.

Children should spend more time learning essentials like reading, writing, and pertinent job skills like television repair or creating smarter computers, rather than useless artsy blather. Plays are only writen to seduce our young people into thinking they are better than everyone else, and this is just plain hooey.

Furthermore...

...APRIL FOOLS!

The Baldwin New Play Fest (Elvis will be in the building April 28)

2007-03-28T18:04:00.000-04:00

New Play Staged Reading – In Search of a Better Life with Elvis
By Kato McNickle
Directed by TBA
157 Galbraith Theatre
LIMITED SEATING / NO LATE SEATING

April 28 Saturday Morning 10 am

Baldwin New Play Festival at UCSD (bnpf)

The Baldwin New Play Festival at UCSD (bnpf) produced annually by the UCSD Theatre and Dance Department in late April, focuses the resources and creative energies of the entire department on premiering three or more full-length and one-act plays written by students in the UCSD MFA Playwriting Program.

This season’s bnpf ‘07 includes three fully staged full-length plays, one one-act play, and a possible reading of a new play with an African-American theme chosen from nation-wide submissions. For additional information on the Baldwin New Play Festival and a Ticket Order Form click on this link:
bnpf'07 schedule and Ticket Order Forms

Alice Wonders seeks collaborating artists for June 07

2007-03-28T11:32:00.000-04:00

Photos from The Orpheus Project in 2006

Alice Wonders

June 16, 2007 @ 4 PM
@ The Dragons Egg
Ledyard, Connecticut

The 4th annual Midsummer Narrative Assemblage Event will be derived from Alice in Wonderland. Participants will gather @ 10 AM on June 16th to assemble the material and run-thru the staging.

Each artist creates their own piece, with or without others. On the performance day itself, we see what we see! The Egg may be available for rehearsal beforehand (please contact Marya for more info).

Past summers have explored text themes from Dante's Inferno, Faust, and the story of Orpheus and Eurydice. Expressions have taken the form of sculpture, theatre, dance, belly dancing, dramatic reading, a labyrinth, a walk through a dark woods, dramatic movement, poetry, music, puppetry, amazing work, using all parts of the Egg and its environs.

This summer the theme will be - in an odd sort of keeping with the Underworld theme that has emerged these past few years: Alice in Wonderland. As you may recall, you use the text as your source of inspiration in the creation of a piece, be it dance, music, theatre, puppetry, sculpture, poetry, other.

Each piece, no matter the number of artists involved in it, is limited to 5 minutes! Be in touch with me about your ideas, and I shall try to link you to others who might like to collaborate in some way, if you like - in past years there have been a number of sections that involved artists who did not know each other beforehand, and the resulting work was wonderful, rich, delightful, challenging.

Contact Marya

2 new anthologies feature cool plays and scribes

2007-03-27T18:12:00.000-04:00

Two brand-new play anthologies from Playscripts, Inc.. You can read excerpts of all plays online for free.

Special offer: Save 10% off any book in our catalogue when you order online before April 15 -- simply use coupon code SPRINGTIME when prompted.

Humana Festival 2006: The Complete Plays (30th Anniversary Edition)

"If you have any doubt that regional theatre in America is vital and thriving, then you missed this year's Humana Festival of New American Plays."
--Newsweek

Humana 2006: The Complete Plays collects all ten plays produced at Actors Theatre of Louisville during the 30th anniversary season of the Humana Festival of New American Plays. The seven full-length plays and three ten-minute plays in this anthology encompass many of the most eclectic and exciting new voices in theater today.

Three Guys and a Brenda by Adam Bock
Natural Selection by Eric Coble
Low by Rha Goddess
Act A Lady by Jordan Harrison
Sovereignty by Rolin Jones
Listeners by Jane Martin
Hotel Cassiopeia by Charles L. Mee
The Scene by Theresa Rebeck
Six Years by Sharr White
Neon Mirage by Liz Duffy Adams, Dan Dietz, Rick Hip-Flores, Julie Jensen, Lisa Kron, Tracey Scott Wilson, and Chay Yew

Funny, Strange, Provocative: Seven Plays from Clubbed Thumb

"This anthology represents the jazziest, most edgy writers in contemporary American drama today." --Paula Vogel

Funny, Strange, Provocative includes seven plays produced by Clubbed Thumb, the Obie Award-winning downtown New York City theater company that burst onto the new play scene in 1996. Edgy and thought-provoking, each play is funny, strange, and provocative in surprising, widely varying ways -- including an apartment that both adores and despises its inhabitants in Crumble (Lay Me Down, Justin Timberlake), a metropolitan housewife who senses that something is watching her in 16 Spells to Charm the Beast, and a group of traveling freak show performers who reveal a deep humanity underneath their crowd-drawing deformities in Freakshow, with other inventive stories.

The Typographer's Dream by Adam Bock
Crumble (Lay Me Down, Justin Timberlake) by Sheila Callaghan
Demon Baby by Erin Courtney
16 Spells to Charm the Beast by Lisa D'Amour
Inky by Rinne Groff
Dearest Eugenia Haggis by Anne Marie Healy
Freakshow by Carson Kreitzer

ELVIS IN THE BUILDING

2007-03-15T21:09:00.000-04:00

This is a bit from a press release for a play of mine that will be honored as part of the bnpf at the end of April. --Kato
_________________________________________________________________

SAN DIEGO: Kato McNickle is the winner of this year’s African American Playwriting Contest awarded by the University of California San Diego. Her play, IN SEARCH OF A BETTER LIFE WITH ELVIS, will be presented as a staged reading at the end of April as part of the Baldwin New Play Festival at UCSD.

The Baldwin New Play Festival at UCSD (bnpf) produced annually by the UCSD Theatre and Dance Department in late April, focuses the resources and creative energies of the entire department on premiering three or more full-length and one-act plays written by students in the UCSD MFA Playwriting Program.   This season’s bnpf ‘07 includes three fully staged full-length plays, one one-act play, and a reading of a new play with an African-American theme chosen from nation-wide submissions. Invited literary agents, playwrights and artistic managers from New York, Chicago, Cleveland, Louisville, Minneapolis, Washington D.C., Los Angeles, and San Francisco fly in each year to be among the first to get a sneak peak at the literary giants of tomorrow.

In Search of a Better Life with Elvis is a four-character play that finds a nineteen-year-old young woman on a mission to make peace with her father, a deceased Elvis impersonator who forgot he wasn’t really Elvis. Jezzy has heard an ancient voice calling “Memphis”, so she took off to Tennessee with her father’s ashes, and a plan to give him the gift of his favorite Elvis song. The problem is the voice really meant Egypt, and Jezzy doesn’t know a soul in Memphis. Off-track from the get-go, Jezzy is intent on laying her father to rest, even if it means stealing her mother’s car, trading it for a guitar, and ignoring the lady in the moon calling to her.

ELVIS won a prize

2007-03-12T19:55:00.000-04:00

My play IN SEARCH OF A BETTER LIFE WITH ELVIS has been selected as the 2007 winner of the African American Playwriting Award and will be presented as a reading at the end of April as part of the Balwin New Play Festival at the University of California in San Diego.

Pretty cool, huh?

It means I'll have to miss the last day classes at Brown, but I'll figure all of that out.

The photo is from a workshop of the play a coupla years ago at Wake Forest University in North Carolina.

OUR TOWN @ Tinity Rep feels like home

2007-02-04T21:31:00.000-05:00

Fred Sullivan, Jr. as Doctor Gibbs and Phyllis Kay as Mrs. Gibbs in Our Town by Thornton Wilder directed by Brian McEleney at Trinity Rep.

Trinity Repertory Company

Pictured L to R: Susannah Flood as Emily Webb, Barbara Meek as Stage Manager and Eric Murdoch as George Gibbs in Our Town by Thornton Wilder directed by Brian McEleney at Trinity Rep.

Brown Playwrights Premiere Work at Annual New Plays Fest

2007-02-01T22:42:00.000-05:00

New Plays Festival 25.1

Brown Playwrights Premiere Work at Annual New Plays Festival

PROVIDENCE, R.I. — Original works by three graduate student playwrights will be showcased during the first installment of the 25th annual New Plays Festival, presented by the Brown University Literary Arts Program and the Brown/Trinity Repertory Consortium. “New Plays Festival 25.1” runs Wednesday, Feb. 7, through Sunday, Feb. 11, 2007, in the McCormack Family Theatre, 70 Brown St. All performances are free and seating is first-come, first-served.

New voices, New Plays
The first installment of the New Plays Festival will feature premières from three new playwrights, from top: Enrique Urueta (Forever Never Comes), Ann Marie Healy (Common Decency), and Gregory Moss (House of Gold).

The festival’s first installment includes Forever Never Comes by Enrique Urueta, Common Decency by Ann Marie Healy, and House of Gold by Gregory Moss. Each of the three productions will be presented twice. Schedule information is listed below.

Having served as a forum for the early work of renowned playwrights such as Sarah Ruhl (finalist for the 2005 Pulitzer Prize in Drama for The Clean House and recipient of a 2006 MacArthur Fellowship) and Nilo Cruz (recipient of the 2003 Pulitzer Prize in Drama for Anna in the Tropics), the New Plays Festival has proven instrumental in bringing the work of America’s most talented young playwrights to the stage.

The student playwrights have been working under the guidance of Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright Paula Vogel with graduate students in the Brown/Trinity Consortium and professional artists from around New England to collaborate on this innovative and stimulating week of theatre.

Featured Works

Forever Never Comes by Enrique Urueta
directed by Donya K. Washington
8 p.m. Wednesday, Feb. 7, and 8 p.m. Saturday, Feb. 10

A young man returns home to rural Virginia on his way to start a new life in San Francisco. A young Latina struggling to leave is the only one who sees what’s really going on around her. You can always go home again ... just don’t expect to leave.

Common Decency by Ann Marie Healy
directed by Holly Derr
8 p.m. Thursday, Feb. 8, and 2 p.m. Sunday, Feb. 11

Ladies everywhere are doing all sorts of strange things: taking and being taken, passing on and being passed up, falling in love and falling apart. The people of Calumet have never seen such indecency! What begins as a rollicking winter season of wild abandonment and free expression ends with a chilling blood wedding as the tiny town of Calumet converges and kills in its cry for common decency.

House of Gold by Gregory Moss
directed by Makaela Pollock
8 p.m. Friday, Feb. 9, and 2 p.m. Saturday, Feb. 10

Part Alice in Wonderland, part tabloid headline, House of Gold is the story of a Very Famous Dead Little Girl brought back to life by the desires of a chorus of desperate characters. As she negotiates the dangers of the suburban house that is her entire world, she seeks to reclaim her internal organs, find a snack, and finally divide herself from the dreams of the living.

The festival is led by Artistic Director Bonnie Metzgar, who is currently producing Suzan Lori-Parks’s epic “365 Days/365 Plays” National Festival, an event that marks the largest collaborative effort in American theatrical history. Metzgar also serves as associate artistic director of The Curious Theater in Denver, and was formerly the associate producer at the Public Theatre/NYSF in New York. Other artistic staff includes scenic designer Tristan Jeffers, technical director Bill McLoughlin, lighting designer Jennifer Rock, costume designer Jessie Darrell, sound designer Katy Buechner, properties master Eric Reynolds, and producer Rick Dildine.

The New Plays Festival is made possible through support from an endowed fund for the Adele Kellenberg Seaver ’49 Professorship in Literary Arts. A second installment of the festival, with three more premières, is scheduled for April 18–22, 2007.

For ticket reservations, e-mail NPFtix@gmail.com with your name, telephone number and number of tickets requested.

Record response time

2007-01-28T11:47:00.000-05:00

Just over a week ago I sent a query letter to a theater on the opposite side of America from me. I got a response already. They'd like to read the whole play. Whoa. Can you believe it? Two letters, crossing a continent, and a response in just about a week? Whoa. They play? Minotaurs. Toreros. The theater? A very good one. Keep your fingers crossed for the play, okay?

The BUZZED and CUT

2007-01-15T13:05:00.000-05:00

Erin Sousa-Stanley as Saint Margaret with Kate Downie as Joan in Joan's Voices @ The Spirit of Broadway Theater.

Watched edisode two of YOU'RE THE ONE THAT I WANT last night. It was exciting because this was New York, and I knew my friend Erin Sousa-Stanley was going to be on -- somewhere -- who knows how much or when...?

As it turns out, not much at all.

We didn't even get a chance to see her sing, which is too bad, because she sings really well. I know that she got into the second round. I even know that a film crew came to her house and shot some footage. All for naught. The producers chose to focus more on the losers from NYC rather than the talented.

Oh well.

She did get a little face time at the very beginning, a brief voice clip about "The dream," and we saw her get a stage door hug.

She also got a really nice write-up in Saturday's New London Day newspaper, a well-deserved "The Buzz" feature. Erin's been doing a lot of work in theater all over Southeastern Connecticut. She keeps living the dream.

Got a letter

2007-01-15T12:55:00.000-05:00

In the labyrinth of play production, there are occassional bright spots. One such ray of light came in the mail on Saturday. I got a letter telling me that my play Minotaurs. Toreros. has made it to the semi-final round of selection for a national play development project.

I'll keep my fingers crossed, but won't hold my breath.

Still, I am excited.

You keep your fingers crossed too, okay?

Dublin Carol at Trinity Rep

2007-01-08T17:51:00.000-05:00

William Petersen in Dublin Carol by Conor McPherson, directed by Amy Morton at Trinity Rep

This is a little late. The show just ended its run. It was sold out way in advance anyway. I saw it last month. Wow.

First, when I called Trinity Rep in November to change the night of my tickets for December (a good friend of mine was hosting a fun event) I learned that the show was alreay sold out, so exchanging would be a problem. On top of that, I had good seats. Really good seats. I decided to stick with what I had in hand and send my friend a good luck e-mail.

I'm glad I saw the show.

Being in Southeastern Connecticut, I have not often had the chance to see the work of Conor McPherson, so I was happy to see his name on the line-up at Trinity this season. Aso, I respect William Petersen as an actor and was eager to see what he could do in a theater. I was not dissapointed.

The set was eloquent and spare. I was sad to see the colored lights get rolled up and put away as the action of the play dictates. As promised by the title, there are three visitations. All of them reveal a little more about a life missed, or misled.

The thing that knocked my socks-off and has stayed with me was the monlogue delivered by John (Petersen) about managing a three-day bender, which is prefaced by a story about a woman who buys him drinks whom he calls a "whiskey angel" sent by God. The following monologue about how to keep the drunken state while minimizing the pain of a swollen and disabled liver was mesmorizing. McPherson proved that he is willing to reach into his own experience and turn it into something compelling that serves the world of his play.

The weakest component of the production was the preformance turned in by Rachael Warren, who seemed too old for the role, and whom many patrons near me had great trouble hearing. A number of people in the audience were dependent on having her mumblings reiterated by their respective spouses.

Danny Mefford, a member of the Brown/Trinity Consortium, turned in a fine performance, holding his own with the veteren Petersen, while trusting his character enough to let the language do the work. I look forward to seeing his work again.

I also look forward to becoming better acquainted with the work of Conor McPherson. He's a guy to sit down with, I think.

You're the One That I Want premiere ep last night

2007-01-08T11:16:00.000-05:00

This was actually a pretty good show.

I liked that the 3 people running the audition, the producer, the director, and the surviving writer, were not trying to be all American Idol in how they spoke to the candidtaes. These guys sounded like people casting a show. In fact, I thought they showed more patience and retsraint than some regular auditioning panels Ive observed. Had this not bee for television I think that some of the people would have been dismissed before even opening their mouths (like that 55 year-old crazy-cat-lady who couldn't make eye contact.)

I was glad to see them give the dancing cup-cake a shot. You never know... three years from now that director may need just what that young woman has... and she'll know who to call.

I was surprised at how slim the talent pickings were in Chicago. Maybe it's just not a musical-theater town. Except for the ancient Danny guy (Dominique, I think) I dont think they had a man sent on to Grease-Boot-Camp or whatever it's called.

The one bright side is that the lack of Chicagoians means more room for New Yorkers.

Can't wait to see the NYC auditions next Sunday!

The American Theatre Wing

2007-01-06T16:37:00.000-05:00

The American Theatre Wing

I am continually impressed by what the ATW Site has to offer, including podcasts of people working in all aspects of New York Theater, as well as scholarship information for students in NYC, and other theater-based resources. Check it out.

What you want?

2007-01-06T16:23:00.000-05:00

You're the One That I Want

This could be interesting...

Premieres Sunday, January 7

Kate Crackernuts at A.R.T.

2006-12-05T12:03:00.000-05:00

Last weekend I took a study break to drive up to Boston with my playwright friend Enrique and his director friend Ken to see KATE CRACKERNUTS at A.R.T. The production was performed by the student company.

First off, what a trippy, fantastic playworld! Sheila Callaghan has done a masterful job of creating a tossed-salad underbelly of a playworld. Riffing on the fairy-tale of a pair of mismatched step-sisters (one fancy, one plain), and a pair of mis-matched princes (one serious, one exhasted), she weaves a labyrinth that brings us to its dark, sticky center, and then wheels us out into the universe bypassing traditional fairytale convention.

The company gave a well conceived and energy laden performance, with only a couple of missteps. Kat's fist monologue was played as an upbeat ball o' wonder, when the text pointed to something more along the lines of the burden of responsibilty once one recoginizes the enormity of wonderous things. It took the company bout twenty minutes to relax into the text. Before that it seemed thety were ernestly "selling" the language, rather than living in the language, letting its flux drive the work. The dance at the begginning was interesting, but sexless. All energy and sweat, but no seduction. I wondered if that was the prupose, until later in the play the text decribes the world of the fairy-rave as full of sex. Hmmm.

A key moment with the deceased baby and the rattle was glossed over, and on the way home my companions and I discussed at length what the playwright's actual intent with the moment had been. It seemed like it should have been more thourough, or examined more, but instead there was a hole of non-moment. Hmmmm.

This are a few minor quibbles with a fun, dark exploration of a crazy, sweaty, green fairy tale. We left the theater skipping and trading our favorite lines of dialogue, a whole litany of "I loved the part when..."

I'm really glad I went.

Kick-ass playwriting meeting

2006-11-28T23:24:00.000-05:00

Today I ha a kick-ass playwriting meeting with my playwriting teacher at Brown. Bonnie Metzgar, pictured in the Thelma seat on the TCG Magazine cover.

Wowo.

I have some good hunks to chew on. She is an excellent dramaturg.

Once I've got the two papers I've got for other classes out of the way (by Dec. 4) I'll be able to hunker down and work on the ideas. Till then......... ahhhhhHhhHhHhh! Focus on the school work -- but -- it's -- so --hard -- with -- good -- ideas -- for --play-- soooOOooOOOooOOooooOOoo -- close.

AhhHHhHHGgHhGhGhHppHt!

Hmmph.

Wowo.

Ariadne 1st draft for class

2006-11-27T22:24:00.000-05:00

Finished the first draft of Ariadne on the Island a week or so ago for my Advanced Playwriting class @ Brown. Today it was on the line-up for class discussion.

Things wnt pretty well. There were only two confusions. One of them is an easy fix. The other one, I'm not sure how to solve. I'll need to hear the play first.

The big thing is, it looks like the play held the interest of the readers, and that's cool. That was my biggest worry.

I have a meeting with my professor tomorrow. I'll know more then.

Act I is now complete.

2006-10-17T22:40:00.000-04:00

Do I hear a "Woo!"? Cuz I completed Act I of my long-ass play, ARIADNE ON THE ISLAND (as it is called right now), that I'm writing for Advanced Playwriting today. 72 freakin' pages in an economic font. 20 of the pages came out of my head today...

Gadz!

Woo-hoo! Woo-hoo!

Now -- three weeks to figure out how to make Act II a reality.

For the rest of the week I'll be busy making notes about the Act II action. I do have an ending, so at least I know wht direction I'm going in.

bobrauchenbergamerica

2006-10-12T19:25:00.000-04:00

The graduate students at Brown were going to see bobrauchenbergamerica by the SITI Company at ART last week, and they had an extra ticket, so I tooled along.

I had seen bobrauchenbergamerica a few years ago at BAM, and was eager to see it again. My first experience of the play had been one of twenty minutes of resistance, followed by a surrendering of need for narrative and just going along for the ride. It was bliss. After those first twenty minutes.

This time I would already know how to surrender, Id be ready for it, I'd get those twenty minutes back.

Cool.

And I got 'em.

I had a whole lotta "oh yeah" moments. It was interesting to note how much of the spectacle, even whole characters, had been wiped from my mind. What I remembered about the show wasn't so much the show itself -- although there were moments that stuck. Who could forget the martini being mixed by bodies on plastic... the pizza delivery boy... the American flag wall with lights for stars...?

But overall, what I remember about that first experience of the work was surrendering. That was the gift. That was the action of the play, or rather, its action on me. Surrender, and being so enthralled by the payoff of surrender that I practically clapped my hands off at the end.

The other difference at BAM was that I was in a free seat very, very far away from the stage. I was perched on a steep rake of a wacky old theater, so far over the house right that I could gaze into the wings. My eyeline was above the top of the proscenium arch. At BAM, bobrauchenbergamerica was a show that played out in a large shoebox. At ART I was much closer, row M, in the center, the stage was clear top to ceiling, no proscenium arch, just lights up there, and the play moved in front of me, at eye level, and I could see their faces. These were people speaking the parts, not animated toys in a diorama.

So at ART I walked in ready to surrender, I walked in remembering my favorite bits, I walked in and sat down.

As it turns out, the peek-a-boo nature of the piece wasn't as much fun the second time. I discovered something else. This time I had time to be with each moment and think about it as it was happening. I could get inside the deeper emotional resonances. Most of all, I was able to see not just the razzle-dazzle zany, I was able to recognize what had been forgotten, what had been wiped away. "Oh yeah."

Not every moment worked as well. Most notably, the Pizza Delivery Boy fell way flat. The first time I saw it this guy, this completely new guy walks into the world of the play. We've been watching this play for an hour, watching a company of actors, and from outta no where this pizza guy delivers a pizza and a soul punching monologue. He delivered it like a dead guy -- like a guy whose soul was dead. And here he was stuck delivering pizza to a world with plastic deer and a red white and blue house and people larger than life. He walked in from outside of the play world and delivered a pizza and a worldclass monologue.

At ART it was a different pizza guy. This was a funny, doughy, jocular pizza guy. This was a pizza guy who would have fit perfectly well living down the road from the other folks in this play. He fit so darn well into the play world that the magnificent, terrifying monologue he was set to deliver seemed trite, seemed forced, but mostly seemed false.

Too bad. So I struggled to remember how it was at BAM, and chose to ignore the goose egg pizza guy at ART.

But then there was my favorite moment. It came. The changing of the lightbulb by the nuclear science guy.

This moment proved even richer than the first time.

Then there were things that surprised me that I had wiped them out of mind. The several versions of chickens, including the guy in the chicken suit. "Oh yeah."

The woman eating cake. "Oh yeah."

The bagpiper. "There was a bagpiper?"

Everyone eating chicken and corn. The fact that they really eat chicken and corn. And when they were really eating chicken and corn at BAM, how David Jaffe forgot himself and said out loud, "They're really eating." "Oh yeah."

This was a good play for me to revisit. It has had an effect on my work since seeing it the first time, and this time I got to take a look at how profound the influence has been.

Oh yeah.

Finishes one long-ass scene 2

2006-10-04T19:35:00.000-04:00

This is me -- happy to have finally finished Act I Scene 2 in my new play. Woo. I knew it was gonna be a long scene, I just didn't think it was gonna be thirty pages and 3 weeks o' classwork long.

Due to the length of my play (it's--uh--gonna be looooooooooong), I am stepping page production from 8-10 pages per week to 15-20 in order to have a complete draft ready by the due date.

Guess what I'm gonna be working on this weekend...?

Advanced Playwriting

2006-09-28T10:30:00.000-04:00

I got into Advanced Playwriting @ Brown, being taughts by Bonnie Metzgar. She is a sorta rock-star-vibe kinda presence. When I found out that she was teaching the course I really wanted to be sure I didn't miss out on the chance to study with her. She's got us reading and talking about some interesting and diverse work.

We started off with The Pillowman. What a trippy play-world that is. What a start to our work. Last week we read THE ADDING MACHINE, and this week we're reading DANUBE by Maria Irene Fornes.

We're also writing each week -- each day -- on one play. We will be turning in a full-length play in November. Each class we bring in ten or so new pages in addition to whatever previous weeks has produced.

I'm working on my ARIADNE AND THE ISLAND play idea. I'm taking a chance, because it could easily be dull. There's no fun stuff, no manic energy, nothing falls out of the sky... it's just four characters that have to hunker down and have compelling reasons to talk rather than kill each other.

It's the hunker-down-edness of the venture that scares me. But becuase it scares me, I thought this might be the right place to try it.

Time. Will tell. Eh?

Amazon plays @ Brown

2006-09-27T23:49:00.001-04:00

So.

2 weekends ago.

I saw some incredible readings of new plays. Not ordinary plays, mind you. These were Bake-off plays.

They were modeled on Hippolyta/Hercules/Wonder Woman myth/legend/comic.

They were awesome.

Especially amazing (get it -- "amazing") was my buddy Greg's play. Not just cuz he's my buddy, but because his play took the perameters of the exercise and delivered a story that spoke to my soul. It was wierd, and a little perverse, and it made me fall in love with it. He called it THE AMAZON. It wa a story within a story structure. It made me view man vs woman dynamics in a whole new way.

Bake-offs are amazing (get it -- amazing). All of the plays had interesting, engaging styles and huge energy.

All of them wound up funny -- and yet -- all of them found a way to get into my heart and squeeze.

Bake-offs rule! The Brown MFA playwriting program rules! Woo-hoo!

You gotta check out these pays some day.

The Cherry Orchard @ Trinity Rep

2006-09-25T23:36:00.000-04:00

Emily Young as Anya, and Phyllis Kay as Lovey

This past Saturday I took in THE CHERRY ORCHARD @ The Trinity Repertory Company in Providence. I had a very good time.

This production has a lotta punch and wit about it. The new translation by TRC's Arististic Director Curt Columbus is lean and bright, and lets the pathos move through it like a deep vien of ore that is mined by the observer rather than plodded through.

This one hundred-year-old-plus play sparkled with relevance as Lovey, played by Phyllis Kay, and her family struggle against future change, choosing instead to pretend that all will be well in the end. Of course, in this Russian landscape, we know that all will not be right. Through history's lense we know truths that the playwright did not, and yet, the play is full of prescience. This production made me feel like I ws sitting in the mind of Chekhov, a witness to Russia slipping away, like seeing through his eyes and saying, "Look! Look!".

I also saw a mirror, revealing us, America, pretending that there will always be enough oil to run our SUVs and the environment will right itself and and and... the list goes on.

The cast is a great ensemble, a mix of company actors and Brown/Trinity students. It works.

Also, the design of the show hums. It is fluid space, with just enough concrete textures, like door frames and benches to keep us grounded, but enough air to remind us of the expansiveness of the house, of the landscape, of Russia herself.

I highly recommend seeing this Cherry Orchard. It's a good night of theater that will stick with you. It's worth the trip.
_______________________________

Anton Chekhov’s The Cherry Orchard opens the Trinity Rep’s 43rd season. The brand new translation is by Artistic Director Curt Columbus, who also directs. The show is playing now through October 22nd in the intimate Dowling Theater.

“Privilege, politics and family collide in the Russian master's final work. The household is simmering with anticipation with Lovey's return to her Russian country home after five years away in Paris. She must face what the others know all too well: The money's spent. All that remains is the cherry orchard.”

Tickets are on sale now at the Trinity Rep Box Office at 201 Washington Street, by phone at (401) 351-4242, and online at TrinityRep.com.

Coming in October to The Planning Stage

2006-08-26T12:48:00.000-04:00

In October The Planning Stage will be presenting Sometimes I Feel Like I Missed the Train by Michael R. McGuire @ The Golden Street Gallery in New London, Connecticut.

Here's a little about the play:
Fred, a socially awkward engineer, becomes obsessed with Susan, the married bartender at the local watering hole, setting into motion the destruction of her fragile marriage and family. Sometimes I Feel Like I Missed the Train explores sexual obsession, jealousy and the consequences of parents who cling to their youthful identities and ignore the responsibilities of parenthood.

Here's a little about Michael:
Michael R. McGuire is a 2005 recipient of the CT Artist Fellowship Grant for his play THE NEW GIRL from the CT Commission on Culture and Tourism. His plays PERSEPHONE RULES! (ADVENTURES OF A TEENAGE GODDESS) and THE MISJUDGMENT OF OENONE were published in 2004 by Brooklyn Publishers. His play SOMETIMES I FEEL LIKE I MISSED THE TRAIN was read in NYC as part of the Lark Play Development Center's 2004 Playwrights' Week. His plays KITCHEN ROMANTICS, PERSEPHONE RULES!, AND IT'S ALL ABOUT MITCH were produced at New London's Secret Theatre. His play WHAT'S GONNA SET YOU FREE? was part of the 1995 Local Playwrights Festival at the Eugene O'Neill Theater Center and was later produced at the Avery Point campus of the University of Connecticut. McGuire has written numerous other plays, two novels and four screenplays.

We're still nailing down the dates, but we've got a promising cast and an interesting downtown venue. We'll keep you posted about the production.

Well-crafted plays...? Ho. Hum.

2006-08-24T12:11:00.000-04:00

This was my response to an essay challenge. I thought I'd post it here too.
_________________________________________________________

I think a well-crafted play requires…RETHINKING!

Well-crafted—well-made—well-what?

We’re not making tiny ships to fit in glass bottles, we’re not making fine wine (again, made to fit in glass bottles), we’re not creating anything that can be weighed or measured or quantified. Not really.

We are making stories that look, at first glance, like writing. But that’s an illusion. The play is not the ink laid out on dead leaves. The play needs to be taken from the page, played on the tongue, worked through the body, and made alive on the air. The play is alive, moment to moment, whether in the rehearsal room or in the theater. The play goes on living in the imagination. The imagination of the director, the actor, the patron, even the playwright. The work of the play is to keep the mind occupied long enough to steal the heart of the viewer.

Well-crafted? Perhaps. But not always, and to my taste, rarely.

Look at the work of Sara Kane. Raw talent that squishes your lungs out in broad, clumsy scratches and strokes. reading her work changed the way I write, and it also changed the way I look at the world.

What about early Tony Kushner? The man grabbed on to big themes and big problems and organized them around the notion of angels, going as far as having one break through a ceiling. Who doesn’t recognize that moment now? At the time it was crazy. What guts to actually lay it on the page so that we could someday be in the room with it.

Plays are flawed creations. They have problems. It’s not the work of the playwright to smooth out things and make them tidy, palatable. The work of the playwright is to make the world of the play so compelling, to make the problems so interesting, that some director picks up the play and says, “I want to solve this problem.” It’s the problems, the grit, the contradictions, the impossibility contained within the play that makes it exciting, immediate, and interesting.

Craft? I heard Romulus Linney say that, “The craft of writing plays is applying the seat of your pants to the seat of your chair.” That’s craft.

A great play? It comes out of craft, but goes beyond that into something truer. And we know truth when it’s in the room with us because it will allow itself to be messy and flawed while in our presence. Good manners are for Sundays. Theater is a Saturday night occupation.

Rewrites. Rewrites. Roly-poly rewrites.

2006-08-18T16:08:00.000-04:00

Working on rewrites.

Last week it was rewrites of A YANKEE TRADER, inspired in part by being asked by the LA director to work out the need for one of the technical elements that was causing some major headace and heartache. I reworked a scene where Patrick is playing the piano. i gave them two options. One that still began with the piano, but only had one sound q at the top of the scene. You see, the actor does not play piano, nor is there space enough for the instrument on the small stage, so they've been miming it with computer generated sound Qs. The coordination never came together on the lements. Plus, when the sound gets turned off, there is no resonance. The sound just stops. It was always a poor illussion.

I also wrote the scene without a piano at all, but a fine book of poetry instead. I'm not sure which version they decided to go with. My vote was for the poetry.

While i was inside the play, I decided to make some cuts and revisions. Some of the monologues needed curbing. I have a few more spots I think I'll trim this weekend. It was a little overwritten in spots. Too bad the company didn't have me come out several days earlier. I could have made these changes in advance of the opening.

Oh well.

This week I've been getting into MINOTAURS. TOREROS. Making some headway. I have a lot more work to do on that one.

And I'm making headway on a new script -- in note form. ARIADNE ON THE ISLAND might be popping out of my fingers soon.

We'll see.

LA Times reviews A YANKEE TRADER

2006-08-16T18:38:00.000-04:00

Here's the LA Times Review of A YANKEE TRADER.

Scroll down the page to find it. It's the 3rd listing.

Some Yankee Trader pix

2006-08-08T11:27:00.000-04:00

Minotaurs. Toreros. DIARY: Notes notes notes

2006-07-30T01:10:00.000-04:00

Noodling this play like crazy this week. Gads!

Okay.

So.

Umm.

What next? What next.

I dreamed about this play all last night. I've woken up thinking about it every morning this week. What to do? What to do.

I've been taking notes in order to make sense of the whole thing. What shoul replace the shadow puppet sequences (which were performed as place-holders rather than actual sequences. The portions that i had written to be inside the labyrinth were, for the most part, unstageable).

Meeting with people who had seen it and talking to them about their understanding of the play has been very helpful.

The play is swimming around in my head. I am thinking about it all the time, so I've got to write something about soon our I'll drown in it.

i feel like i'm on the cusp of some greater understanding. It's just that it's all a jumble right now. I'll have to put it into words to begin to make sense of it, I guess.

Minotaurs. Toreros. DIARY: Somo' Images

2006-07-27T22:11:00.000-04:00

Dylan Wardwell as Manolete casts a spell to conjure his mother when she was a young matador.
Marke Desouza as Romero and Kathryn Downie as Miura.
Mary Tuomanen as Eleanora solves the problem of tying Miura's tie.

Minotaurs. Toreros. DIARY: Yeah!

2006-07-27T17:29:00.000-04:00

Last weekend we presented Minotaurs. Toreros. for six performances. We had a blast. More on that later... until then... here's a picture of Kate and Dylan as Miura the matador and Manolete pretending to be Islero the bull.

Minotaurs. Toreros. DIARY: taking Saturday off -- kinda

2006-07-14T23:14:00.000-04:00

Tomorrow, Saturday, we were going to hold a rehearsal during the day. But, taking a look at the weather (hot hot hot and humid) and the list of things still needed to be completed for the load-in to the gallery on Sunday, I decided to scratch rehearsal and work on my "things to do" list instead.

Tomorrow Kate and I will be working in my basement to put together the freakin (what were thinking) matador "suit of lights". Last night I got the sleeves lengthened (they were 3/4 sleeve), and i sewed the pockets shut. The coat I found (on clearence -- thank goodness) had to be modified. Now it needs trim and paint (I'm painting the intricate gold details because emroidering would take a month). No wonder the real deal Suit of Lights costs about $5,000 bucks a pop.

I should also receive the matador hat that I purchased over a week ago cheap on e-bay. It's supposed to be a real one (well, more real than the stupid cartoon types offered from the costume shops online.)

And i still ahve to make a minotaur head! Sheeesh.

Teaching acting in Stonington

2006-07-11T21:07:00.000-04:00

Today i spent several hours in Stonington teaching a fast and furious acting workshop for kids ages 5 to 12.

The younger kids were the most fun. They did some great work and were really open to using their imaginations.

The second half I had the older bunch -- 10 thru 12. They were actually harder to engage and had trouble with some of the concepts that the younger kids really took hold of.

There was also a reporter and a photographer there from a local paper. Maybe my mug will show up in the press next week, eh?

I think I'm going to sleep well tonight. I did a lot of running around, especially with the young bunch.

zzzzzzzzzzz...

Minotaurs. Toreros. July 20-23 in New London

2006-07-10T21:02:00.000-04:00

NEW LONDON: The Planning Stage presents Minotaurs. Toreros. a new play by Kato McNickle, July 20 - 23 at the Golden Street Gallery, 95 Golden St., New London, CT. Performances Thursday, July 20 at 8:00 PM, Friday and Saturday July 21 & 22 at 7:00 and 8:30 PM, and Sunday July 23 at 6:00 PM. Seating is limited, a sliding scale donation of $3 to $10 at the door. For information go to http://members.aol.com/theplanningstage.

Minotaurs. Toreros. is written and directed by Kato McNickle, featuring Kathryn Downie as MIURA, Dylan Wardwell as MANOLETE, Mary Tuomanen as ELEANORA, and Mark DeSouza as ROMERA.

Minotaurs. Toreros. is a fantastic fusion of myth, flamenco, and the poetry of Lorca.

A woman matador prepares for a fight while a boy finds a magic ring, a beautiful young woman in blue finds a yellow bead, and a gypsy casts a spell. Through magic and the lifting of capes a boy makes a wish to know his mother in her younger days, before he was born. In those days she was a famous and beautiful matador. He discovers the woman who would become his mother, he sees her life, and begins to understand her nature, a labyrinth that winds and twists, obscuring and unraveling the true nature of things. Minotaurs. Toreros. is a pattern, where the play itself becomes the puzzle to be solved.
The Planning Stage is a new play development project focusing on works by playwrights living in Southeastern Connecticut presenting plays in multiple formats, including concert readings, staged readings, and workshop productions. Minotaurs. Toreros. marks the first workshop production presented by the project. It also marks the ninth teaming of McNickle and Downie as playwright and actor either locally or in New York, and their first venture as co-producers.

Last September playwright Kato McNickle was in residence at the Atlantic Center for the Arts studying for three weeks with Pulitzer Prize winning playwright Paula Vogel. Each of the three weekends the seven resident playwrights would embark on a 48-hour challenge to write a play, called a bake-off. The myth of the Minotaur was the subject chosen by the playwrights the first week of the residency, an experiment to see what happens when a group of playwrights write “the same play.” Of course, every play was extremely different from every other. One of the results of this challenge was Minotaurs. Toreros.

Minotaurs. Toreros. DIARY: Rehearsing a week in

2006-07-10T11:53:00.000-04:00

Eight days ago we bagan rehearsals for Minotaurs. Toreros. -- pool-side! We've been holding the rehearsals at the home of coproducer and actor Kate Downie. When the weather permits we rehearsa on the deck.

So far, it has been permitting.

We have had to make a fast cast change. Our original actor to play Romero hadd to bow out due to scheduling conflicts, so this past Friday Mark DeSouza stepped into the role. Mark had been enlisted to play flamenco guitar for the production, but when we turned up an actor short six days ago, Mark agreed to make his stage debut with us.

We've had our share of mix-ups and false starts with this workshop production, but the work at the rehearsals (now that we're finally getting them roling) is phenominal.

This week I have to make a reasonable "Suit of Lights" for our female matador. Yikes. More on that as the week progresses.

Minotaurs. Toreros. DIARY: site launched!

2006-07-08T12:18:00.000-04:00

I've just finished launching the web site for Minotaurs. Toreros. a play of mine that is receiving a workshop production later this month.

http://members.aol.com/theplanningstage

My friend kate is an actor living in NYC, but is home this summer and wanted to do one of my new plays, so we agreed to coproduce this one. It's one of the "bake-off" plays that i wrote while in residence at The Atlantic Center for the Arts with Paula Vogal last fall. We found an art gallery in downtown New London that is loaning us their space and we're putting together the rest of the production.

We've just completed the first week of rehearsals and so far we've been having a great time.

Let me know if there are any glitches with the site (the aol.members space is free, but sometimes you have to reload the page if it gets stuck -- alas).

the Planning Stage presents
Minotaurs. Toreros.
a new play by Kato McNickle

a woman matador prepares for a fight
a boy finds a magic ring
a girl dressed in blue finds a yellow bead
a handsome gypsy casts a spell

Minotaurs. Toreros. is a fusion of
myth, flamenco, and the poetry of Lorca.

July 20 thru 23, 2006
Thursday at 8:00 PM
Friday & Saturday 7:00 PM & 8:30 PM
Sunday at 6:00 PM
in the Golden Street Gallery
New London, Connecticut
$3 to $10 sliding scale
donation at the door.
860.445.2909
theplanningstage@aol.com

Lloyd Richards Dies at age 87

2006-07-01T23:12:00.000-04:00

O'Neill Center Director Of 32 Years Dies At 87
Lloyd Richards, Who Headed Playwrights Conference, Is Remembered For His Inspiration

By Ben Johnson, Day Writer

Lloyd Richards, the artistic director of the Eugene O'Neill Theater Center's National Playwrights Conference for 32 years and a Tony Award-winning director who revolutionized the way new plays and playwrights made their way to the stage, died of heart failure late Thursday at Mount Sinai Hospital in New York.
He died on his 87th birthday, his wife, Barbara Richards, said.

Richards also was a major influence on playwrights as dean of the Yale School of Drama and artistic director of the Yale Repertory Theatre.

“He had an incredible warm and corroborative association with actors, and a very amazing ability to inspire and get the best out of his playwrights and actors,” said George White, who founded the O'Neill center in Waterford and appointed Richards artistic director of the Playwrights Conference in 1969.

When the late August Wilson came to the conference in 1982, Richards decided to mentor him. Over the years he worked closely with Wilson on Wilson's cycle of 10 plays about the African-American experience, including such well-known works as “Ma Rainey's Black Bottom,” “The Piano Lesson” and “Fences.” Both “The Piano Lesson” and “Fences” won the Pulitzer Prize for Drama.

Actor Charles S. Dutton was one of the people who found inspiration in Richards' commitment to the theater.

“Lloyd is the man more responsible for my career than anyone,” said Dutton, who had learned from Barbara Richards that her husband was ill. “He gave me my first professional job as an actor in August Wilson's 'Ma Rainey's Black Bottom' in New York. I was a guy from the streets and the projects, and through Lloyd I learned sophistication and how to be an artist. I owe my life in some degree to that gentleman.”

Richards is often credited with expanding the kinds of roles African-American actors played on the American stage in the late 1950s and early 1960s. He was perhaps most famous for his work with young playwrights and actors, including Wilson, John Guare, Lorraine Hansberry, James Earl Jones, Lee Blessing and Sidney Poitier.

“Lloyd was one of the most important people in American theater in the last 50 years,” said Blessing, an award-winning playwright who worked closely with Richards on several plays. “The best memory I have of Lloyd is the first memory, of hearing him give the great O'Neill speech to everyone who'd come up there for the conference. He talked about the importance of playwriting, and how important it was for playwrights to go on that journey. I heard that speech many times. It was always very long, but it was always fresh.”

Blessing, whose play “Cobb,” about baseball player Ty Cobb, won the Drama Desk Award for Ensemble Acting, said Richards was an honest critic and a shrewd adviser for all of the playwrights who visited the O'Neill.

“He sat down with me one day and said, 'You're very good at this, and it's important that you choose good themes for your plays,' ” Blessing said. “And after that, I wrote my first political play, 'A Walk in the Woods.' The impetus to write that play was really inspired by Lloyd.”

Born in Toronto in 1919, Richards moved with his family to Detroit soon after and attended Wayne State University, where he studied theater and radio production. Richards' father died when he was 9, and his mother went blind, forcing him to go to work to support his family at age 13. It wasn't until much later, after his graduation from Wayne State and a year-long stint in the U.S. Air Force during World War II, that Richards followed his interest in theater to New York City.

Richards found that even in New York, work was hard to find for African-American actors in the 1950s. But he managed to appear on Broadway in productions of “Freight” and “The Egghead,” while simultaneously working in radio and teaching acting.

His big break came as director of Hansberry's “A Raisin in the Sun,” which premiered in New Haven and opened in New York in 1958. The play, which told a realistic story about a contemporary black working-class family in Chicago, galvanized Broadway and forever changed the representation of African-Americans in American theater.

“Lloyd had a passion and reverence for new playwrights and new work, and a commitment to them,” White said. “Whether he was or wasn't optimistic about the future of American theater, he sure as hell worked hard for it and believed in many of the people who were trying to make it in theater.”

White, who spent many days fishing for bluefish, stripers and bass with Richards off the Connecticut coastline, described his friend as a man who had an appreciation for music and was a connoisseur of red wine.

When the two men had lunch less than a month ago, White said that despite his recent history of heart disease, Richards was going strong.

“It was kind of a social lunch,” White said. “I was bringing him up to date on the O'Neill and the Playwrights Conference, and what was going on there. We gossiped about the theater and people. He was teaching, right up to the very end, because that's what he loved doing. He was always a great teacher of acting and directing. He will be sorely missed.”

In addition to his wife, Richards is survived by two sons, Scott and Thomas.

Doug Williams Movie Guy

2006-06-25T17:31:00.000-04:00

This is Doug Williams at the premier of his new collection of short films THINGS PEOPLE DON'T TALK ABOUT. Isn't he a cutie? Anyway...

The premier was held in Stonington at a wonderful 50 seat viewing studio last week. The invited audience was comprised of friends, family, and cast members.

Doug's movie really made the grade. Doug is 17 years old, but he carries himself like someone of far greater age. he is committed and focussed on becoming a better filmaker, and this was clear from the outset in the content and style of his film.

This collection was alternately funny, touching, serious, and moving.

Doug has gotten support from the community, both for acting talent and technical prowess. Sonalyst Studios leant a hand in this film's creation, as did many residents of the Stonington Boro, and Doug's high school program.

Kudo's to Doug and to all of the people who made the film possible. Mr. Williams is a talent to watch.

The Orpheus Project: a bit of bliss thru the underworld

2006-06-21T15:19:00.000-04:00

Kate Downie and Jermey Shelton at the moment of Eurydice's death by the snake bite on her wedding day.

Wow-a-kazowa.

The Orpheus Project was AWESOME.

I mean it.

A W E S O M E .

We got together a little afternoon last Saturday and rehearsed the whole piece together. Just that one time. A collection of artists. Some from New York, some from Providence, so from Ledyard, Mystic, and New London, all coming together at The Dragon's Egg and presenting a take on love and loss organized around the myth of Orpheus and Eurydice.

This is one take on the myth -- Persephone and Eurydice in a movement/discussion over the rules regarding Eurydice's walk to out of the underworld. (This piece was mind-blowing)

Mary Tuomanen and a couple of sock puppets brought an upbeat shift on the walk out of the underworld.

Next year there will be another project pulled together from various sources and artists. I can't wait.

LIVE FROM NEW YORK: Tonys tonight @ 8 on CBS

2006-06-11T11:47:00.000-04:00

The Tony Awards will be broadcast tonight starting at 8:00 PM on CBS. Are you gonna watch?

Go to the American Theatre Wing web site and check out everything from this year's nominees to a poster archive of past winners. www.tonyawards.com

Connecticut Open House Day: Saturday June 10

2006-06-07T13:37:00.000-04:00

Connecticut Open House Day
Saturday, June 10, 2006

Connect with Connecticut’s Cultural Treasures! Join the party as art galleries, museums, theaters, historic properties, and tourism attractions across the state open their doors to Connecticut residents on Saturday, June 10, 2006.

Connecticut Open House Day is a one-day statewide celebration of Connecticut’s exceptional world of art, history, film and tourism. All types of venues throughout Connecticut open their doors to residents to encourage them to discover—and rediscover—all of the unique cultural and tourism assets and attractions.

Orpheus and Eurydice: DON'T LOOK BACK! Rehearsal

2006-06-06T18:52:00.000-04:00

Last night I was busy with a rehearsal with my friend Kate who is putting together a 5-minute contribution to the ORPEUS AND EURYDICE PROJECT: Don't Look Back that will be held at The Dragon's Egg later this month.

Kate is doing a five-minute slice of the Zimmerman Orpheus/Eurydice bit from her Metamotphoses.

Our version features Jeremy Shelton as Orpheus, Kate Downie as Eurydice, and Jake Kaiser as Hades.

Plays @ The O'Neill Theater Center this summer

2006-06-01T19:37:00.000-04:00

The Eugene O'Neill Theater Center in Waterford has announced the eight plays that will developed as part of this summer's conference. They are:
• “Bird in the Hand” by Jorge Ignacio Cortiñas, 8 p.m. July 5 and 7. A comedy about a young Cuban man tied in knots by romantic complications, the specter of SATs and the fading flamingos in Miami.

• “Air Conditioning” by Tommy Smith, 8 p.m. July 6 and 5 p.m. July 8. A darkly comic look at the dangers of meeting up with old friends when the rich are rich and the poor are desperate.

•“1001” by Jason Grote, 8 p.m. July 12 and 14. “Arabian Nights” meets “Manhattan” as a love story unfolds inside a troubling political fantasy.

•“The Little Flower of East Orange” by Stephen Adly Guirgis, 8 p.m. July 13 and 5 p.m. July 15.In a New York City hospital a woman, identity unknown, goes in and out of consciousness. In prison, her son tries to figure out how she got there.

•“The K of D” by Laura Schellhardt, 8 p.m. July 19 and 21. The truth is, Charlotte's brother kissed her on the lips before he died. The legend is, now everything she kisses also dies.

•“False Creeds” by Darren Canady, 8 p.m. July 20 and 5 p.m. July 22. While uncovering the source of his supernatural visions, a tormented young African-American man discovers his own family's connection to one of American history's most horrific events.

•“The Exchange” by Ursula Rani Sarma, 8 p.m. July 28 and 3 p.m. July 30. In a small post office in the west of Ireland, one man struggles to let go of the past and, with the help of his daughters, to move into the future. “The Exchange” Comes to the O'Neill as part of an exchange with the Abbey Theatre in Ireland.

There will also be a Theater for Youth Project, “The Tale” by Tommy Smith, 7 p.m. July 16. A musical comedy that's a zany look at the lives of the gods on Mount Olympus. Written for grades 5-9.

Tickets will be on sale beginning June 15. Call 443-1238.

Theatre Linina's Summer Shorts Fest (my buddy Greg is one of the playwrights)

2006-05-31T13:53:00.000-04:00

SUMMER 2006
LiminaLab: Summer Shorts III: Double Vision
Original Scripts. Staged Readings.
By Various Playwrights

How does the director's interpretation affect what you see on stage? Find out this June! Back at the Bryant Lake Bowl for the third year, Summer Shorts features original 10-minute scripts directed by emerging local directors. This year's Festival will feature a new twist: each script will receive two separate, autonomous productions involving a different director and cast; these “paired” productions will be performed back-to-back. As in past years, audience members provide written feedback for each production and vote for their choice each week to receive a second performance as part of the “encore night” at the end of the month.

Where: Bryant Lake Bowl Theater 810 W Lake Street, Mpls
When: June 5th, 12th, 19th, 26th, 30th (ENCORE NIGHT), 2006
Time: Mondays 7:00PM - Encore Night Friday 7:00PM
Tickets: $12 (Call for group rates)

Order Tickets by Phone
Call the BLB at 612-827-8949

Your ballot for the Tonys...

2006-05-28T16:34:00.000-04:00

Make your Tony Award predictions at NYTimes.com.

Hartford Stage's Frankie and Johnny - the designers shine brightest

2006-05-28T13:32:00.000-04:00

Last night I went with friends up to Hartford Stage to take in their season finale Frankie and Johnny in the Clair de Lune by Terrance McNally. We had a fun night out, but it was the company i was with as much as the show itself.

This Frankie and Johnny played by Robert Clohessy and the single-named Portia were a good pair, especially Clohessy, who seemed most comfortable in the role and in the large space at Hartford Stage. It took longer to warm to Portia's Frankie, partly because she was prone to shouting for the first fifteen minutes or so, and the other part due to passive stage dynamic.

This show is built and designed for heavy-wieghts to tackle, and anything less is a little like yesterday's fish.

Which may be why whenever this show is written about the first paragraph or two is always devoted to the previous pairings -- Kathy Bates and Kenneth Welsh; Edie Falco and Stanley Tucci; Rosie Perez and Joe Pantoliano; or the film with Michelle Pfeiffer and Al Pacino.

This show was good. I enjoyed it, but I wasn't rocked by it, it didn't hit me in the gut, and I believe the play has the potential to pack a wallop. This production tickled me.

There were times that I found myself more involved with the details of the realistic set than with the action of the play. "Hey, the refridgerator light works, but the refridgerator doesn't run. Probably means the food isn't actually cold." "Hey, that's real water running in the sink. Wonder how they rigged that? Do they turn off the valve at night after the show?" "Lookit the pepper -- it looks ike they started using that one on Thursday, they'll have to use a new one tomorrow, and what happens if they run out of bread?" And so on.

It turns out that all of my friends had similar thoughts turning thru their heads too.

Why doesn't Frankie eat more of her sandwich? Why is Johnny's bread toasted too (we concluded that something was going wrong with the toaster)? Is that a real stove? With all of this reality, couldn't they have taken an hour or so of rehearsal to instruct Mr. Clohessy in the proper way to slice vegetables (since it is remarked upon about how skillful he is with a knife)? Hmmm.

At the top of the show there was the coolest effect of a car passing below the warehouse loft, it's lights shining past the giant glass windows in a stream. It was used twice at the top of the show, and once at the end. A nice trio following the rule of three, and a nice deign choice. Also, the sunrise and the ever brightning and defining NYC skyline was beautiful. But I found myself watching that rather than the actors.

So, we had a nice time. If you go you'll probably have a nice time too, but my feeling upon leaving the theater is that the stakes were not dire at the Hartford Stage last night for its mismatched lovers, it was n't all or nothing, it was medium-rare, pleasant, but nothing special.

Tickets to Frankie and Johnny in the Clair de Lune at Hartford Stage, 50 Church Street in downtown Hartford, CT will be available by calling (860) 527-5151. For more information, visit www.hartfordstage.org.

Cyrano De Almost Worth It...

2006-05-22T20:38:00.000-04:00

Cyrano De Bergerac is the final show of the season at Trinity Rep -- and it was almost good. I was impressed with the production and found my self surprised at how fun the production was -- until it ground to a halt with the final scene.

Oh my freakin' god...couldn't that lame duck--wrap up the plot points--die Cyrano DIE ALREADY-- scene be adapted -- or better -- cut from the play?

Up until then -- the production works. After that point it dies dies DIES! Gack! Blech! An otherwise fine production was pretty much ruined by the meandering stale end.

Oh well. Nice try.

Podcasting from the American Theater Wing

2006-05-16T19:31:00.000-04:00

An Earful for Theater Lovers
Podcasting the Great White Way
By June Thomas
Posted Friday, May 12, 2006, at 3:27 PM ET

...........
The hosts of Downstage Center, XM Radio's John von Soosten and the American Theatre Wing's Howard Sherman, are both knowledgeable, poised interviewers who bring years of theater expertise to the conversation. Their guests are the cream of Broadway and beyond. Recent visitors include actors Patti LuPone, Jill Clayburgh, Cherry Jones, and Jonathan Pryce; directors Doug Hughes and Susan Stroman; composer/lyricist Jerry Herman; authors John Patrick Shanley and Paula Vogel; and the Public Theatre's artistic director, Oskar Eustis.

Because the interviewers seem to have seen every show and memorized every cast album from the last few decades, the guests always appear completely at ease as they chat for 35 to 50 minutes about their careers and their latest gigs. It's a master class in interview technique as much as anything else.

...................

http://www.slate.com/id/2141726/

Charles Wright quote -- good for poets or playwrights

2006-05-16T18:58:00.000-04:00

"--Time is the great destroyer. Time is what feeds us and takes it away at the same time. Time is what starts us and time is what ends us. We live in time. We would like to live outside of time. But we can't, of course. And so the clock is what we all write about. Our lives are all about the clock. It starts at 12, and it ends at 12."

-----------American poet Charles Wright during an interview from 1998

read the entire interview from the PBS News Hour online archive.

SITO @ Looking Glass Diary

2006-05-16T14:30:00.000-04:00

Swimming in the Ocean is agoing to be staged at the Looking Glass Theater in NYC as part of their summer director's forum in June.

So far so good. The director has had some really great ideas and I am impressed with her understanding of the play. i might travel into the city to see this one.

This particular play has been performed many times -- this is about its 15th production. it is a short play, so i never make any money from it, but it does get done.

With this production I just got word that the director would like to include a live violin to create the sound effects. i said "Go for it." It's an exciting idea -- and will either be brilliant or potentially annoying as hell -- but that's the chance you take. I think it's a great idea, and its one of many things that is fueling my interest in seeing this production.

Potcard Plays

2006-05-15T10:56:00.000-04:00

Check out these POSTCARD PLAYS at the EMPTY SPACE.

My friend Greg is one of the playwrights -- based on some work we did in Florida at ACA -- the "Unstageable Play" exercise.

Original Cast of RENT reassembles in NYC for anniversary

2006-04-26T15:52:00.000-04:00

Another Season of Love: The Original Cast Reassembles for a 'Rent' Anniversary

By ANTHONY TOMMASINI

To celebrate the 10th anniversary of "Rent," the original cast members performed the show in a semistaged version at the Nederlander on Monday.

From left, Wilson Jermaine Heredia, Anthony Rapp, Jesse L. Martin and Byron Utley in a 10th-anniversary performance at the Nederlander, another milestone for a show that is much loved around the world.

Brown New Play Fest April 26-30

2006-04-23T17:47:00.000-04:00

Brown University Literary Arts Program and Brown University/Trinity Repertory Consortium present:

NEW PLAYS FESTIVAL
April 26-30, 2006
McCormack Family Theater, Brown University

Providence, RI — The work of three extraordinary playwrights once again finds voice in New Plays Festival 24.2, which opens at the McCormack Family Theatre at 8pm on Wednesday, April 26th. The plays are performed in repertory throughout the week. Each play is as unique as its writer. Sam Marks’ dark humor peoples a 1960’s Catskills comedy club with a dysfunctional duo (The Joke). An apparently innocent dinner party in middle-class suburbia gets dirty when unexpected visitors arrive in Andy Bragen’s Food Porn and teenage sex games grow up in Don’t Stop by Molly Rice. Working under the inimitable guidance of Pulitzer Prize winner Paula Vogel the playwrights find truly original ways to envision the rules by which we construct our lives. Having served as a forum for the early work of playwrights like Nilo Cruz (2003 Pulitzer Prize for Drama), Sarah Ruhl (Pulitzer Finalist), and Shay Youngblood (Kennedy Center Lorraine Hansberry Playwriting Award 1993), the New Plays Festival in its 24th year continues to be instrumental in bringing the work of today’s most exceptional playwrights to the world stage starting right here in Providence!

Featured Works:

Food Porn by Andy Bragen, directed by Geordie Broadwater
On a snowy night in Columbus, Ohio, aspiring gourmet Maggie Redd prepares the meal of her life, and everything goes wrong. Food Porn is a brutal comedy about war, doughnuts, and haute cuisine.

Don’t Stop by Molly Rice, directed by Brigitta Victorson
The spirit of Don Juan is ignited in the body of an adolescent girl. A robot programmed to seduce unleashes his powers on the audience. Men surrender, women dance for each other, and bodies crack wide open. Watch their shapes change as they pick their way through a twisted forest of desires.

The Joke by Sam Marks, directed by Annie Piper
Struggling to find fame in a Catskills comedy club in 1965, two comedians find that they are able to talk to each other solely through their jokes. As the jokes become darker and more personal, Doug and Ed must decide whether to stay together as a duo or learn to talk to each other in another way.

Performance schedule:

Wednesday, April 26th
8:00pm:Food Porn

Thursday, April 27th
8:00pm: Don’t Stop

Friday, April 28th
8:00pm:The Joke

Saturday, April 29th
2:00pm:The Joke

Saturday, April 29th
8:00pm:Food Porn

Sunday, April 30th
3:00pm:Don’t Stop

New Plays Summit, a colloquium of writers, directors, and producers of new works currently working in the industry, will follow the Saturday afternoon performance, starting at 3:30pm.
All performances are free and seating is first-come, first-served.

New Plays Festival 24 is organized and presented by the Brown University Literary Arts Program in conjunction with the Brown University / Trinity Repertory Consortium. The playwrights are second year MFA candidate students in playwriting at Brown University and develop their work under the direction of Pulitzer Prize winner and Seaver Professor of Playwriting Paula Vogel. Working with them are the students of acting and directing in the Brown/Trinity Consortium MFA program who study under the talented direction of Curt Columbus (Artistic Director, Trinity Rep), Amanda Dehnert (Acting Artistic Director 05-06 Season, Trinity Rep), Erin Cressida Wilson, and Stephen Berenson (Chair of the Consortium) among many others.

Boots on the Ground @ Trinity Rep looks at the War in Iraq

2006-04-23T15:58:00.000-04:00

Last night I went to see BOOTS ON THE GROUND @ Trinity Repertory.

Whoa.

It's a piece of documentary theater culled from interviews gathered last fall from Rhode Island residents. It brings a unique personal perspective to the impact of the war in Iraq. By illuminating the details of the lives of Americans close to home and at war I have gained a level of intimacy with the soldiers and their families that had not entered my strata before seeing this play.

Early in the performance I found myself wondering, "Why isn't this a film documentary? How is this theater?" Soon after that thought I found myself abandoning the notion of "play" and "theater" and became involved with the stories, with the woven storylines, and tapestry storytelling being played before me.

There was humor mixed with the horror, with the hardship, with the unknown. One woman told the story of a beer can that she treasured, keeping it on its place on her night table until the return of her husband. A pastor told the story of a fallen soldier from his parrish, and in the soldiers wallet was a picture the pastor had given as a gift at the soldier as a boy, and how he had presided at the soldiers funeral.

The tales of camel spiders -- who ever heard of such a thing -- and they dared us to look them up online -- and you can -- CAMEL SPIDERS They are CREEPY...!

After the performance of the play (ACT I) -- the audience is invited to have a public discussion of the work, of the war, of ourselves (ACT II). The first woman who spoke last Staurday was the mother of a soldier in Iraq. She and her husband had come to the performance and had worn their United States Marine Corps shirts -- embroidered in gold on black heavy-wieght cotton sweatshirts. She said that only one person had asked her about her shirt all evening, and that was revealing to her. She was afraid that this play would not change people's attitiudes about the war -- actually, not so much attitudes, I think, as awareness. We walk around not seeing the war. We only feel it at the gas pump.

It was also noted that had the interviews been done in the past several months and not last year, that the tone of the piece would have been very different regarding the people's feelings about the Bush Administration. That a nation contemplating the impact of the war in Iraq post Hurrican Katrina and with gasoline prices over $3 in Rhode Island would demand a greater examination and response in the dialogues and monologues presented.

These are all interesting and valid points. To the mother of a soldier who sat with us last Saturday night, I can say that this play has made me aware of the war, of the soldiers fighting the war, and of my own consideration of those facts and those people.

It woke me up.

BOOTS ON THE GROUND plays thru May 21 at the Trinity Repertory Company in Providence, Rhode Island.

Final Planning Stage for Spring series @ Westerly

2006-04-21T00:28:00.000-04:00

Last night was the final installment for Spring 2006 @ the Westerly Library for the Planning Stage. We had a record 48 people in the audience.

It looks like we may have to move future readings at the library to a larger room, because between the people and the sculpture it was a bit cramped in the art gallery.

Still, the actors were great and the two featured playwrights got a lot out of the public airing of the plays.

All in all -- a good event and strong finish for our second series held at the Westerly Library.

The Planning Stage: CUT reading

2006-04-15T22:02:00.000-04:00

Here's a slightly blurry pic of Heidi Harger and Michael McGuire at the reading of CUT by Anna Maria Trusky last Wednesday evening at the Westerly Library. It was a packed house in the art gallery.

The reading series continues on 4/19 at 7:00 PM with WAR AND PIZZA and DEER IN THE HEADLIGHTS. Got to The Planning Stage for more info.

Call for Artists for June 17 Event @ The Egg

2006-04-11T11:59:00.000-04:00

Call to Artists!!

Dancers, Actors, Musicians, Poets, Mimes, Puppeteers, or any combination thereof, and open to suggestion - for the Third Annual Narrative Assemblage Event on June 17, 2006 @ The Dragon's Egg in Ledyard, Connecticut.

The text/ story this year will be, (in keeping with our past two explorations of hell and not hell, via the Inferno and Faust):

Orpheus and Eurydice - Don’t Look Back

Contact me for more info or go to Arts Caravan to read the press release.

FYI: This is a vounteer, arts collective event. Artists create/perform/rehearse/organize their individual contributions and the whole production is assembles on the day of the performance. Plays/poems/songs/performance art projects are up to 5 minutes in length each.

Von Trapps: The Next Generation

2006-04-09T14:56:00.000-04:00

A New Bunch of von Trapps, as Alpine as Sushi and Apple Pie
By STEVEN McELROY

In "The Sound of Music," when the young von Trapps weren't playing practical jokes on their governess, they were bicycling around Salzburg singing "Do Re Mi" and entertaining at fancy parties. Now a new generation— the great-grandchildren of Baron and Maria von Trapp — is running up and down scales for an audience. Sofia, 17; Melanie, 15; Amanda, 14; and Justin, 11; perform professionally together, sometimes going so far as to don lederhosen onstage.

Indeed, it seems as if the von Trapp Children, as they are known, are leading 21st-century versions of their predecessors' careers. They may have their own Web site, (vontrappchildren.com), but just like their forebears, including their grandfather Werner (called Kurt in the musical), they travel extensively giving concerts and have recorded albums of folk melodies, Christmas classics and songs from the musical. They'll even play themselves in a movie next year. From a hotel in Arizona, one stop on a tour that includes their New York debut this month at the Lamb's Theater, the children spoke by phone about the von Trapp life.

Read excerpts from the conversation at:
www.nytimes.com/2006/04/09/theater/09mcel.html?_r=1&oref=slogin

YANKEE TRADER poster art for LA Production

2006-04-05T10:30:00.000-04:00

Bullying piece peace

2006-04-02T20:21:00.000-04:00

Last tuesday we worked out what we'll be doing with the Bullying Issue Piece. Thre are 5 kids willing to perform, so that's who I am rehearsing with. The performance has been downgraded to a short performance at the theater that will be video taped. And there will be a pizza party for the kids.

We'll use the video to show the work at an inter-school sharing day in May. Also, the kid will video tape some of the monologs seperately -- ina video studio -- and they will be shown at the sharing day too.

See? A solution. Whew.