Category Archives: theater

int'l theater, theater

put a naked person on stage

“This is a play about sex made by people who seem to have made it so that they can show it to their parents and grandparents without embarrassment.”

– UK blogger Andrew Haydon weighing in on that “sex choreography” question, in his review of UNBROKEN.

Andrew also pointed SOS to an interesting post by director Chris Goode. Scroll down to get to him talking, in great detail, about sex and staging sex.

My favorite line was this, “I think pretty much the most significant thing theatre can do is put a naked person on stage and let you look at them,” but it’s not fair to quote him out of context. His whole argument is worth looking at – he has a lot to say, and says it from a lot of experience.

As I said in my response to Andrew’s comment, all this talk of staging sex in UK theater makes me desperate to know more about the processes in which all these directors work.

Standard
quotes, theater, writing

sink to the bottom

“JED: I just gave him a smile colder’n the Cumberland River and watched him sink to the bottom.”

– Robert Schenkkan, “God’s Great Supper,” THE KENTUCKY CYCLE

Schenkkan is a playwright who worked closely with a number of directors I know from my assisting days. I’d heard a lot about this work – nine short plays all set on and around the same contested plot of land in Eastern Kentucky – but never read it, until yesterday. It has enough murders in it for a television show, and so much sad history of the United States that, after reading it, I almost didn’t want to look outside. Smallpox-infested blankets. Civil War debts. Coal mining. Union strikes. Marriages and children and two families killing each other like Mark Twain.

Standard
chicago, theater

write me the money

I began a new grantwriting project today, the first one for a Chicago theater. I’m very happy to be doing more of this kind of work. Grantwriting can be so cookie-cutter, but I really love the challenge of it – placing the maximum amount of style and creativity into a very restrictive form, a kind of praise-song. Superlatives upon superlatives. An abundance of excellence.

In the course of hanging around the theater I’ve met some other young people who are engaged in some kind of volunteering or assisting of the staff, and talked about employment prospects in the field. There’s no doubt that it doesn’t look too good right now.

I’m lucky to have some work. I think part of the reason I’ve managed to remain employed is that the extra-artistic skill set I’ve cultivated – grantwriting and fundraising – is more essential now than ever. No matter how bad it gets in the arts, until we all throw in the towel entirely, we will all, all of us, always need folks to go find us some more funding.

Standard
chicago, theater

you put your left foot in

Yesterday, I attended a play reading at a local theater, and was once again pleasantly surprised by the large Chicago audiences who turn out for new work. The play was good and the vocal audience discussion afterwards was even better.

I’m going to be taking a playwriting class and also doing some grantwriting this winter. Back in the game? Theater for Dara hasn’t always been the healthiest thing – or most conducive to sleep, rest, exercise, relationships, friends, three meals a day, a bank account bigger than a stick of gum, etc.

I am reminded, since it IS Super Bowl Sunday, of other people who take part in pasttimes (football? ice skating?) that can create long-term damage to the body or the soul. I read an article recently, which I can’t find this moment, that interviewed many former football players who were now dealing with lifelong injuries from their pursuit of the sport. Of course, they overwhelmingly said they had no regrets.

I do have some regrets about all the theater I’ve done, and the greatest one is financial. I wish that when I was younger and had enough energy to burn so many candles at so many ends that I looked like a human fireworks display that I had used some of that energy towards making money, to support myself in my late twenties, while I redistribute my energies more towards writing.

I have some sense of a few years mismanaged, of time not spent well, of decisions that could have been better made. I took care of the art but I didn’t take care of my self – and the result is some resentment, however slight, towards the art.

But being in that theater yesterday, hearing an audience experience a play in process-progress, I felt things I haven’t felt since I left. I felt my soul lifted like a tarp on an unused car. I felt the engines turn on.

If there is a way to keep doing this kind of work, but with less damage to body, soul, and checking account, then I’m going to try. Playwriting can’t kill you, right? Yet?

Standard
the chorus, theater

well, you said you liked puns.

Channel-surfed, recently, to the Hand Jive scene from GREASE, and insisted that it be watched, despite the presence of a less-than-choreography-loving friend.

A: You have to understand – this movie – and this scene in this movie – has made my work what it is. This may be the most influential source I have.
B: (incredulously) Really?
A: (proudly) You don’t know this, but right before I got to Chicago, I spent almost ten years working on the chorus in theater.
B: That’s a different kind of Greece.

All part of the same chorus.

What I didn’t say, and could have, is that I once made a very experienced actor perform the hand gestures from the Hand Jive throughout an entire serious monologue of Agamemnon’s. At the time, I was entirely hung up on having one gesture per line. I wasn’t working with a choreographer, and I had run out of gestures.

If you look at this Broadway clip of the Hand Jive, perhaps you can see why I thought some good might come of this choice. See how automatically the movements come out of their arms. When you’re doing the dance, you become focused completely, like some kind of weird pat-your-head-rub-your-tummy sensation. It strips away facades. It’s an “activity,” for goodness’ sake, like Meisner.

Choruses have to be moving. Stylized text requires stylized movement. I knew there was something about the Hand Jive that worked to make individual actors behave like parts of a chorus – to unite discrete individuals into the swarm-of-bees mentality. It builds ensemble between the dancers.

Did I make this clear, to myself, the actor, or any audience member? Probably not. But it’s clear to me now.

In the light of B’s comment, perhaps, although I didn’t know it, I was making some kind of mash-up chorus-on-chorus commentary. GREASE meets Greece. These are the kinds of things that it’s best not to know about yourself, but knowing them is so satisfying.

Standard
education, theater

against my will, I am sent to bid you come in to dinner.

I have been riding three hours a day, twice a week, on three different buses and trains to audit an undergraduate class devoted to the works of the playwright whom Leland Stanford Stamper calls “Willy the Shakes.” The professor is an expert on S. in performance, and we are never far from the text as spoken. He frequently soliloquizes, from memory, during the class. Very old-school.

Something that surprised me, as I prepared to read R3 and R2, was how little I enjoy experiencing these plays as books. It’s as if we are discussing the scores of great symphonies without ever listening to the music. Although it isn’t possible to watch a Shakespearean film without disagreeing about interpretation, I think that, in the future, I will always watch the movie first, if there is a movie. These lines don’t work for me on the page.

It is odd, too, to be gathered anew in a room with a large group of people, discussing a play, and to not have it begin with a read-through. I keep looking round for the designers, notebooked and spectacled, scribbling illegible cue notes. I expect to hear, murmured from behind me, “Dara, here’s the new script.” How do they even know what they’re talking about if they haven’t read it aloud?

Were anyone to be so misguided as to give me the direction of a drama seminar, I would abolish the sections and replace them, instead, with a reading (aloud) of each play in question.

Standard