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Heart transplant, $10

By on February 3, 2012 in Writing

THE WHISTLER will open on May 17th in Cincinnati at a newly renovated downtown storefront venue to be called (probably) Court Street Speakeasy Theater.  Wow!  I’m trying to keep my role as playwright distinct from my role as co-producer, but things are moving fast and fun, with a call for auditions having already gone out from director Tim Waldrip and co-producer Carol Brammer of Cincy’s Clifton Performance Theater.

It’s a deep space, and we’ll likely take advantage of it to create a wide stage. The building dates back to before Prohibition; during the long dry spell its warren of basements (below the retail floor where we’re building out the theater) was used to hide beer kegs from the law.

The people involved so far are professional, optimistic, and experienced. I hope this new little theater fills right up — 75 seats, maybe? –and stays that way for a six-week run. Then another city, and another. In two or three years, who knows?  This might be the last time tickets will be as cheap as $10.

But there’s a lot to do: carpentry, electrical, repainting, new lights, a full facelift–and that’s before we do stuff specific to this production! Put the date on your calendar if you’d be so kind: Thursday through Sunday for 4-6 weeks beginning May 17th. We’re beginning to gather production funds now, and it’s a great chance for donors to help us change the world. Heart transplant, did I say?  With no immodesty I say that I think our world needs this play. Please help me make it.

You can read more about the play here.

One wedding and a funeral

By on February 2, 2012 in Writing

The best of this year’s “second stage” series at Burning Coal Theatre in Raleigh, NC has been Stephen Massicotte’s Mary’s Wedding, directed by Joshua Benjamin. Massicotte is either a Canadian claiming to live in New York or a New Yorker claiming to come from Canada, but he is at any rate well known in Alberta, where Mary’s Wedding premiered in 2002. If I say that it’s a sweet, sad, well-constructed yarn about a young farmboy who falls for a girl and  goes off to die with the horse cavalry in WWI, you’ll think “Oh, I might better spend my time reading Rupert Brooke’s dispatches from the trenches or watching Stephen MacDonalds’ Not About Heroes.”

WWI

Cavalryman poses

But no.  Like you I immediately thought of the 2004 Playmakers’ production of the MacDonald piece, which put WWI poets Siegfried Sassoon and Wilfred Owen on stage to argue and tear your heart out. This one is different, a real narrative (not a meta-narrative) told with a fine ear for adolescent awkwardness. It’s told not quite chronologically backwards but at least out of order in a series of flashbacks and flashforwards, a technique I have tried and admired, yet in Massicotte’s hands the technique does not call attention to itself. Actors Caitlin Davis and Matthew Hager evinced just the right degree of self-consciousness, and though all war stories threaten to become maudlin, they held it in check till the script gave them no quarter in its closing moments.

Massicotte’s definitely an author worth watching. I don’t a need to rush out to see his other anti-war play but I sure would like to see his more recent The Clockmaker.

Silent stage

By on January 25, 2012 in Writing

Just ran across an interview with playwright Annie Baker (Body Awareness, Circle Mirrror Transformation) in the Boston Globe. Regarding her precise stage directions for awkward silences she notes:

“I’m interested in silence because I think it’s a huge unacknowledged part of our daily lives…And by silence I don’t mean portentous, Pinter-esque silence — although that can be great too — I just mean the absence of talk. It’s not actually silence I’m after so much as the things that we do when we’re not talking. Someone jiggling their knee. Someone staring into the sun for a full minute and humming. Someone flossing alone at night in their bathroom. All of this stuff is absent from most contemporary theater because people are so freaked out about holding the attention of an audience who would rather be at home watching action movies and sitcoms. But as an audience member, there’s something really exciting to me about watching someone scratch their elbow onstage and not say anything. Partly because a lot of audience members get weirdly uncomfortable and tense when that happens. I had no idea you could alienate people so much just by being quiet. Some audience members really start to freak out. And then other people love it. That’s really interesting to me — when half the audience is going crazy and half the audience is enthralled.

“How to put this? My plays are often about what happens when we’re not talking. I’m not interested in a bunch of people sitting in a living room talking really fast and being witty and yelling at each other — put that on TV, man. What can we do onstage? Movement. Silence. Stillness, then sudden movement. Interesting stage pictures. The living human organism in front of us, doing strange things.’’

Who’s THE WHISTLER for?

By on January 13, 2012 in Writing

The Whistler may have the power to change people; to make them go home from the theater shaking their head; to help them resolve to forgive…themselves, at least. Audiences will laugh out loud, hold a mirror up to the mirror held up to them.  Who might love it?

  • Women who love men who love guns
  • Fathers who don’t understand their sons
  • Sons who don’t understand their fathers
  • Anybody who lost their innocence too early
  • Husbands and wives who love each other and yet…
  • People with a secret

Once More into the Trapeze, Dear Friends

By on December 21, 2011 in Writing

Staging technologies can be integrated so as to seem, if not inevitable, at least natural. I think of the 2004 Danish movie Strings, performed by marionettes, as a particularly moving example.  Well, last weekend I got to see Henry V (on Trapeze) at Burning Coal Theatre in Raleigh, NC.

To say that nothing really prepared me for it means that despite hearing about it ahead of time from artistic director Jerry Davis, and even after watching their video trailer, I assumed the trapeze would be a gimmick rather than an organic part of the production. Certainly including it in the title suggested that we were meant to come to some kind of Cirque du Soleil in which Shakespeare was likely to take a back seat; I was even afraid they would write some iambic pentameter of their own expressly alluding to the hardware.

Anyway, Director Steven Cole Hughes pulled this off in Raleigh pretty well. The five trapezes (what, in that little space?) are virtually the only set, and they become walls, battlements, thrones (of course), scaffolds, weapons, and I forget what all. They allow the actors to use the vertical space of the theater in a wholly different way–the highest bits being reserved for the moments of highest drama–and of course to move swiftly, capturing some of the rapid confusion of warfare; and to deploy their bodies in unexpected ways to disconcertingly good effect, as when characters are executed and dangle upside down.

Few lines are actually delivered upside down, but I rather like the idea.