Category Archives: theater

theater

But what did “Dividing The Estate” get in homeroom class?

Rob Kendt and Isaac Butler have a new site, CRITIC-O-METER – it’s like Rotten Tomatoes for New York theater – it compiles all critics’ reviews to award plays a letter grade.

If you look at their listing for HAIRSPRAY, for example, you can see that the site also excerpts portions of all the reviews from which they determined the grade. It’s a good way to get a sense of what lots of different writers think of a show.

From their explanation of the whys and wherefores:
Critic-O-Meter is an idea borne of the blogosphere. Critic and editor Rob Weinert-Kendt and myself (director and writer Isaac Butler) were having matzoh ball soup at the Polish Tea Room when Rob mentioned that he had read on a blog that someone said “You know, they really should have a Rotten Tomatoes for theatre reviews”. In true slowest-moving-art-form fashion, we then puttered about talking about it for a few months before finally building the site you see before you today.

We approve!

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art, politics, theater

Bart Sher to direct August Wilson? Really?

I am very surprised to have to report that Bartlett Sher, artistic director of the Intiman Theatre in Seattle, will be the first white director to ever direct a Broadway production of one of August Wilson’s plays – JOE TURNER’S COME AND GONE at Lincoln Center next spring.

All previous Broadway productions of Wilson’s work have been directed by black directors. The NYT and Playbill reports of this news failed to note this fact, focusing instead on Sher’s recent Tony for South Pacific. I got this news from ArtsJournal, who got it from the Pioneer Press, out of Minneapolis.

Some responses:

This is another way of saying that the dominant culture knows more about us than we know about ourselves.
– Actor James Williams

I’m still a little troubled by the decision. Racial representation in theater (at least in New York) has not improved much since the Wilson-Brustein debates. Other than LaMaMa’s Ellen Stewart, there is not a single artistic director of color at a major New York theater, 80 percent of plays produced in New York are by white men despite the fact that white men account for roughly 15 percent of New York City’s population, casts remain segregated, and black directors rarely get tapped to direct plays by white writers.
– from critic Isaac Butler’s comments in the Time Out New York blog.

The issue, of course, is access — if Lincoln Center won’t hire a black director to direct an August Wilson play, what will they hire a black director to do? I get that Sher is the resident director, he’s on staff, he’s done big things for them before, and I get (and kind of think it’s great) that he’d want to direct a Great American Play to follow up his Great American Musical (South Pacific) — and it’s wonderful that Wilson’s work is considered to fill that role. But if the door doesn’t open for directors here, where does it open?
– playwright & blogger Kristoffer Diaz

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design, theater

standby, sound 1-3, lights 1.

This Guardian theatre blog entry from Maxie Szalwinska has four clips of sound designs from recent productions in England. You can listen to them at her post. It’s great to be able to hear some design from another country. She writes:

This increasing importance of sound in the theatre is, in part, down to new and improved technologies, but productions at the vanguard of sound design are as likely to be lo-fi as high-tech. And it goes hand in hand with the trend towards more immersive theatre, and cross-fertilisation between theatre, film and radio.

[…]

Gareth Fry, the visionary sound designer for Waves and … some trace of her says he is indebted to a book about Foley artistry called Noises Off written by the stage manager of the Old Vic theatre in 1936, which “details quite precisely how to create the sound effect of a steam train using 18 stage hands and garden rollers”.

(Created a “design” category with this post.)

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chicago, theater

I will need a suggestion from the audience…

Last night, I saw a show at Improv Olympic here in Chicago, in the Wrigleyville neighborhood, which reminded me of a touristy section of New Orleans. I went with an actress friend who takes classes there. We saw the 8 pm show, Revolver and the Deltones (an improvised musical group). The theater was packed – there must have been over a hundred people – and as we were leaving, a new group of people was coming in and buying tickets to the next show. They have two theaters which each play two shows a night, six nights a week. It’s effectively an improv rep. Coming from audience-starved Los Angeles, I was stunned and overjoyed. My friend and I stood outside waiting for the 22 bus down Clark Street to our respective east-west sub-streets, and this was our conversation: “I can’t believe it.” “I know.” “No, really, I can’t believe it.” “I know.” “No, really – ” “I know.”

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theater

as we speak,

my sunglasses are turned up on a table here at The Grind in Lincoln Square, where Ee and I are working, and a ceiling fan is being reflected spinning around in their eyes, which makes them look like they’ve just seen a topless woman, in an old cartoon. I’m certain that this is exactly the kind of uncomputerized technical effect we need more of in theater. It’s surprising, and it works, and if you think about it you can figure out how.

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the chorus, theater

the pierced mask scene

Last night, after watching the Senators for an hour and a half, (“That’s just not true.” “That’s not true.” “That’s Senate inside baseball”…) and drinking Smirnoff mixed with something that contained 15% cranberry juice, I crawled into bed and dreamt a fully staged version of a scene which doesn’t exist.

I was in the lobby of the auditorium of Q School, where I taught LYSISTRATA workshops two weeks ago, hanging out with my friend and co-teacher JF and some of our high school classmates. The next scene to be presented was the pierced mask scene from King Lear (there is no such scene) and the director was our former teacher and mentor, Ted W. I was bantering with friends, other teachers, and laughing – and suddenly I decided I couldn’t miss Ted’s staging of this famous scene.

Distracted and drunk in the dream as I was in sleep, I rushed into the auditorium (proscenium with raked seating) late, almost disrupting the scene, and to the extreme disapproval of the students’ parents sitting around me. I slid down in my seat.

Two seated narrator birds in white beak masks spoke in a synchronized unison whisper, one from the back center of house right, one from the stage. Their lips were amplified visually somehow – I could see nothing else. The whisper, like feathers or snakeskin, was present in every corner of the auditorium, which had house lights up and the stage dimmed. They spoke in verse, which I cannot remember.

I was annoyed that they already knew how to do choral speaking – why had we bothered with the workshops? They were so good.

A diagonal chorus of four, one man and three women, in gold half-masks ran down the house right aisle, all facing the house right wall, all with the skin of their torsos gleaming under red cloth. They announced the arrival of the king, I think, also in verse and in unison. Their spacing was beautiful. Mechanical. Each head was a foot lower than the next.

The young king appeared from the same aisle entrance I had used. He was being played by a student I taught last year. He was elaborately made up, but unmasked. He was cloaked.

He called, in verse, for the appearance of the pastries (I am not making this up!) and a conveyor belt carrying syrup-oozing golden stacks of hexagonal sponge cakes, topped with raspberries, ran behind the chorus, through the center seating block of the audience. The cakes kept moving, and the chorus speaking.

Suddenly there was a lighting shift. House lights went dark, and there was abrupt movement and sound on stage. (In the dream, I remember not understanding how the actors got from the aisles onto stage, but in my reconstruction it’s clear that there must have been a second, identical group of actors on stage, and the instant darkness created the illusion of their transport.)

A terrifying pattern of light which looked like an enormous staple, or a 3-sided rectangular gate, moved through the darkness from upstage left to downstage center/right, with a sound like a screech.

The gate stopped and revealed the young king, immobilized, bolted to a chair like that Bacon painting, and screaming. In the dim light all you could see was that he wearing a grotesque mask, grey-white, bulbous, and with eye-slits. The mask was like half of a white pumpkin turned on its side.

It was as if the moving gate had been his chair being pushed out.

Above his head and stage right of him, on a pole, or midair, was a fool/Dionysos/trickster character, an actor combined from a friend of mine in LA and another former student, shrieking and laughing at him.

Dionysos began his monologue, which I knew was to tell the king that the pierced mask would never come off his face again, and I woke up.

This dream certainly owes a lot to Richard Foreman’s WHAT TO WEAR, which I saw with Chris Danowski in Los Angeles at REDCAT, and I think the “pierced mask” as a group of words is somehow taken from the “pierced chair” that the Popes were supposed to have to sit on to have their gender checked. But otherwise, I think I may have finally had an original idea. If by original, you mean Dionysian.

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theater

some definitions

Writer – someone who cares too much.

Director – someone who also cares too much, but is prepared, for the sake of the play, to be the person who couldn’t care less.

Actor – Forced to reside between these opposing forces, both carefree and careful at the same time.

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directing, self-blogerential, theater

talking cats

So, I watched the Budweiser commercial with the dog and horse high-fiving each other, and I think we are at a period in society, for whatever reason (and by “we” I mean my narrow class-subset of young highly educated people who watch too much imagery) where “we” are highly entertained by the idea of talking animals again. A history of this subject would be great, but more than writing the article, I really just want to make a very simple Youtube video with a dog and a cat in “conversation.” No attempt would be made to have them move their mouths or anything. We’d just show the camera on the two of them there, and have actors speak. They could read “Talk To Me Like the Rain And Let Me Listen.” They could have an ordinary conversation. Found text, staged written text, anything. Much like how LIFE IN HELL has the still images. I think, and I don’t quite know why I think this, but I think it would be superbly entertaining and would also tell us something about our selves in this particular moment in time.

Part of the trip I’ve done on myself the past four years is to de-academicize myself. I was brought up in the academy, by which I mean that education is the cardinal virtue of my family. And I’ve had to learn, in order to make theater, to – when I have impulses like this – to resist analyzing them until I have staged them. The staging of them is the analysis. Going in with too much of a theory about how it is supposed to work will make them not work as well as they could.

I have been tempted to veer back towards theory a bit this year. But I know that I won’t really understand why it is things ought to work until I make them work. This blog ought to be called Practice Makes Theory instead of Style Over Substance. Maybe I will rename it.

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