Green Parties
MINNEAPOLIS and PITTSBURGH: As April turned to May this year, theatre practitioners came together for the Sustainability in Theater (SIT) conference, hosted by the Minnesota Theater Alliance in Minneapolis. The conference, geared toward exploring ecologically friendly theatre practices while educating attendees on how to bring the ideas home, was even green in its approach to attendance: While 90 people were at the conference in person, 30 people (including your fearless reporter) telecommuted from across the globe.
As MTA executive director Leah Cooper explained, the remote-access aspect was “a great big leap into the unknown for us. We had three parallel satellite conference locations—basically there was an office full of people in New York, another in Los Angeles, and another in Toronto, sitting together watching and participating.”
Remote attendees were given a taste of two approaches. The first day of the conference was webcast via the Brave New Workshop Experimental Thinking Centre’s Qwikcast Online Event Broadcasting. The second day SIT relied on Google+ Hangouts, enabling SIT to become more interactive for remote users by giving them the opportunity to be seen and heard, or simply cut their volume and video and observe.
The interest in a greener mainstream theatre in the U.S. has grown tremendously over the past few years, as evidenced by the emergence of organizations like the Los Angeles–based Center for Sustainable Practice in the Arts and, on the other coast, the Broadway Green Alliance, both founded in 2008. The growing activity and influence of these organizations, as well as earlier pioneers abroad, such as Arcola Theatre in London, England, was on prominent display at SIT. Over the course of two days, SIT topics and activities ranged from creating a “zero waste” operation to a Laugh Yoga break.
Also in May and June, another installment of “Earth Matters on Stage” took place at Pittsburgh’s Carnegie Mellon University (the last was at the University of Oregon in 2009). A symposium devoted to a broader vision of ecology in performance, EMOS includes a playwriting competition, performances and readings, as well as more traditional panels and workshops dealing with all things ecological within the performing arts.
—Mike Lawler
Slow and Steady ‘Hughie’
OMAHA, NEB.: “I knew it. I knew it,” said Eugene O’Neill on his deathbed at the Sheraton Hotel in Boston. “Born in a hotel room, and God damn it, died in a hotel room.” The hotel of his birth in Times Square is now a Starbucks. But one can’t help but wonder how the writer, known as much for his poetry as his pessimism, would respond to the news that one of his plays—originally set in a hotel—is being done in a wind turbine in Nebraska.
Hughie, written in 1942 and first performed in 1958, will be staged at site-specific locations around Omaha July 6–28, including a vacant lot, an old Northern Power Company historic warehouse, a bankrupt national chain store and a bluff overlooking the Missouri River. Director Kevin Lawler, producing artistic director of the Great Plains Theatre Conference and co-founder of Omaha’s Blue Barn Theatre, discovered the little-produced O’Neill play, a one-act, during a particularly lonesome bout of his own. “I fell in love with the play, and then there was no turning back,” he says.
Like much of O’Neill’s work, Hughie boasts virtuosic stage directions of epic proportions that Lawler incorporates into his production. “The stage directions are some of the most extensive that O’Neill wrote—and that’s saying a lot,” he jokes. “Oddly, a large percentage of the stage directions describe, in incredibly vibrant detail, the inner life of the night clerk, Charlie, who only has a handful of actual lines in the play.” These stage directions include dialogues with other characters like firemen and lengthy inner monologues that, according to Lawler, “are exquisite and reveal immense amounts about the characters. They are almost an entire second play that is interwoven into the first.”
O’Neill himself might have had other ideas. In fact, in a 1942 letter to critic George Jean Nathan, he implied that Hughie was “written more to be read than staged.” Lawler is unfazed. “I decided from the beginning to remove all the standard pressures regarding money, space and time,” he declares, noting how he and his team have been developing the piece over the course of the past year. Collaborators include Nils Haaland, who co-founded the Blue Barn with Lawler; actors Doug Hayko, Mary Kelly and Erika Hall; composer Nevada Jones and costumer Mallory Prucha. Lawler takes on choreography, set and sound design, in addition to directing.
“On the traditional three-to-four-week time frame, I often find myself working to get the show hammered out with terms like ‘get it up on its feet’ and ‘up to speed’ by a certain date. A lot of the sense of exploration can be restricted in the service of expediency toward the opening-night goal,” he says, unsure if he will ever return to working in a traditional rehearsal time frame again. “It doesn’t make sense. Do you rush through sex or a really great meal?”
—Eliza Bent
Far Away, So Close
GUADALAJARA, MEXICO: The title Timboctou is an idiosyncratic spelling of the African town popularly signifying “the furthest remove from reality,” notes Travis Preston, dean of California Institute of the Arts’s school of theatre and artistic director of CalArts’s professional producing wing, the Center for New Performance (CNP). But the play itself represents something much closer to home: It’s a binational collaboration between CNP and Cultura UDG, its equivalent entity at the University of Guadalajara in Mexico. After a successful run last March at REDCAT, CalArts’s downtown Los Angeles theatre, Timboctou will appear at Teatro Esperimental de Jalisco in Guadalajara, July 6‑15.
Though the lead artists behind the bilingual production, director Martín Acosta and playwright Alejandro Ricaño, are Mexican, the cast and designers are a roughly equal mix of U.S. and Mexican artists. According to Preston, Mexico’s headline-making narcotics troubles are not the play’s subject but its “background. It’s really more about the interaction of strangers who find their lives intertwined by acts of violence. There’s border politics at the back of it, including the drug wars. But the piece isn’t topical in that way.” While CNP has collaborated with troupes from Russia, China and Indonesia, working with Mexican artists makes sense, Preston says, not only because of proximity. “It is close to us, and culturally close to us, but it’s also just a particularly exciting time in Mexico, where filmmakers and artists are leading conversations across the arts.” And now across the border. Visit www.theater.calarts.edu.
Archiving Lee and Lynn
WASHINGTON, D.C.: When today’s theatremakers make their final exits, will their e-mail correspondences, Twitter feeds, Facebook statuses and blog posts be archived online? No one knows for sure, but in the meantime theatre scholars can enjoy two recent major acquisitions in the nation’s capital: the collection of Lee Strasberg, donated to the Library of Congress, and Lynn Redgrave’s archive, gifted to the Folger Shakespeare Library.
The effects of Method acting guru Strasberg include more than 240 boxes of correspondence, rehearsal notes, lecture drafts, photographs, theatrical renderings and drawings, address books, acting-class rosters, and playbills. Says librarian James H. Billington, “[This] documents a crucial chapter of the nation’s theatrical history.”
Across town, Redgrave’s collection includes professional and personal papers documenting her lifelong interest in the Bard and her illustrious family, including her father Sir Michael Redgrave and her mother Rachel Kempson. “The collection will be of particular interest for those interested in the Redgrave family’s deep engagement with the work of William Shakespeare,” said librarian Stephen Enniss. Visit www.loc.gov and www.folger.edu.
Texted Translations
NEW YORK: Audiences at Repertorio Español, like theatre audiences everywhere, will be instructed to switch off their cell phones at their seats—all the better to view text on individual screens mounted on the railing in front of them. Joining the likes of international opera houses, including New York’s own Metropolitan Opera, Repertorio has installed the Figaro Simultext translation system so that English-speaking theatregoers can reliably follow the company’s Spanish-only productions.
Repertorio’s small-theatre version of the system will broadcast simultaneous English translation (or a Spanish transcription, for hard-of-hearing patrons) on seatback screens. The cost of the new system, funding of which came via the support of New York state senator Liz Krueger, is estimated at just under $260,000.
Previously Repertorio employed two to four actors to perform simultaneous English translations from a soundproof booth at the back of the theatre, which patrons could hear via an infrared headset. “It’s never been the ideal way of doing translation,” admits José Antonio Cruz, Repertorio’s associate producer. “But the way our space is configured, projected supertitles wouldn’t work; some people in the back wouldn’t be able to see them.”
While most of the Repertorio audience speaks Spanish, Cruz said, typically 10 percent of attendees have used the live interpreting service in the past. And, like a live interpreter, the Figaro system operator will need to supply the translation in real time, along with the flow of the dialogue, so the job is likely to go to an actor.
The general public isn’t the only intended audience, he adds: “Theatre critics who come to see our work will write glowing reviews. But there’s always a line at the end about the translation being an issue. We think this is definitely better.” We’ll look out for reviews of the first plays to use the new system, including Carmen Rivera’s La gringa and Yoshvani Medina’s Probation. Go to www.repertorio.org.
Ferrer Forever
NATIONWIDE: Diamonds are forever, and so are first-class “forever” stamps. The most recent face to grace the postage-sized sticker is José Ferrer, the award-winning Puerto Rico–born actor, director, writer, musician and producer who died in 1992.
Ferrer was the first Latino actor to win a best actor Oscar, for 1950’s Cyrano de Bergerac, in the same role for which he also won a Tony in 1947. His Broadway debut in A Slight Case of Murder came in 1935 after stints at Princeton and Columbia. Ferrer fans and stamp collectors can view the Ferrer Forever Stamp via Facebook, Twitter or at the Postal Service’s philatelic site: www.beyondtheperf.com/2012-preview.
Openings, Rehabs, Near-Misses
NATIONWIDE: The spring and summer witnessed a slew of renovations, ribbon-cuttings and rescues, all with the net result of opening, reopening, or keeping open the doors of operating theatre venues.
In New York, the Lark Play Development Center opened a new, 9,300-square-foot home in the Theatre District after 18 years of renting at various venues, including the Chelsea Playhouse. The new Lark, designed by Stephen Furnstahl, has several spaces: a modular mainstage that can be rearranged entirely for rehearsal and performance, a smaller reading and rehearsal room, and a quiet writing room for playwrights to work in. Artistic director John Clinton Eisner calls the new Lark “both a tool box and a toy box for artists.” Go to www.larktheatre.org.
Uptown, Lincoln Center Theater opened an intimate 112-seat space called the Claire Tow Theater on the roof of its sprawling thrust mainstage, the Vivian Beaumont Theater. The new space, designed by Hugh Hardy of H3 Hardy Collaboration Architecture, will be the home of Lincoln Center’s three-year-old new-play program LCT3. The first play in the new space was Greg Pierce’s Slowgirl, directed by Anne Kauffman. Visit www.lct.org/index_lct3.htm.
In Washington, D.C., the historic Howard Theatre, built in 1910, had a dramatic reopening in April. Once a hub for the city’s African-American audiences, the site of musicals, public speeches, vaudeville and performances by music giants from Duke Ellington to the Supremes, the Howard was shuttered in 1980 after decades of neglect. But after a $29-million makeover by Martinez+Johnson Architecture, the Howard is rocking again. Visit www.howardtheatre.org.
In Portland, Ore., the Portland Playhouse won an appeal against a zoning decision last year that would have shut it down. The conflict over a permit was definitional: Is theatre a “community use” or a “commercial/retail/sales” use? The city council agreed with the playhouse’s case just in time to open the playhouse’s production of Tarell Alvin McCraney’s The Brother/Sister Plays. Go to www.portlandplayhouse.org.
Finally, back in New York, the embattled Off-Off-Broadway pioneer the Living Theatre eked out $24,000, through the Lucky Ant crowd-sourcing website, by a mid-May deadline to keep its doors open. The troupe founded by Judith Malina and the late Julian Beck vowed to use the money not only to pay rent but to hire a consultant to develop a five-year strategic plan and “turn itself into a financially sustainable arts organization.” Who could ask for anything more? Visit www.thelivingtheatre.org.
Streets & Tweets
ST. LOUIS, MO., and WASHINGTON, D.C.: Rick Dildine, executive and artistic director of Shakespeare Festival St. Louis, was troubled by the city’s dead-end streets when he began living in the Gateway to the West in 2009. So he created an event that would not only open up the streets but involve community members.
The first ever PNC Arts Alive Shakespeare in the Streets bowed in April, coinciding with the Bard’s birthday. The New World, an adaptation by Nancy Bell of The Tempest, unfolded in the Gravois Park neighborhood under the direction of Tlaloc Rivas. Rivas, Bell and designer Justin Barisonek spent several weeks in Gravois conducting story circles with locals. Rivas notes parallels between Prospero’s island from The Tempest and the Gravois neighborhood: both are isolated, yet welcoming. “I had an image of Prospero in his final act,” says Rivas, “where he breaks his staff as a gesture of relinquishing his magic power in order to embrace forgiveness. In my interpretation, I envisioned our Cherokee Street Prospero, at the end of the performance, symbolically destroying a gate—uniting our neighborhoods once again.”
In this mash-up of community immersion, storytelling and Shakespeare, the character of Gonzalo says:
The people here in City South, in Louis Saint,
They do be different, that much is sure.
Some immigrants, some working class
Some artists and many others, too.
But here they are.
Together. Every day.
And basically, they’re…
Pretty chill
With one another…
I would not change it.
“I wanted to take what we do really well—and that is making Shakespeare’s plays—and partner that with residents, to invite everyone onto the streets and provide the city with another lens with which to look at the neighborhood,” says executive director Dildine. “I would love to celebrate every single neighborhood in the city. What does a Shakespeare play look like in North St. Louis, in South St. Louis, or in West County?”
Meanwhile, a celebration of the Bard took place over the Interweb. For Will’s 448th birthday, The Black Women Playwrights Group of Washington, D.C., launched 12Tweets@12Noon. Every Monday, Wednesday and Friday from April 23 to May 18, the group’s writers delivered 12 lines in 140 characters or less via Twitter. Tweets on @bwplaywrights introduced followers to scenes and characters from plays by Betty Buttram, Joy Hunter Carroll, Karen L.B. Evans, Louise V. Gray, Mary Stone Hanley, Jeanette W. Hill, Debbie M. Jackson, Lois A. Wiley and Irelene Ricks. Find out more online: www.blackwomenplaywrights.org.
Festival Carousel
NATIONWIDE: Summertime festivals are easy—to find, that is. In Shepherdstown, W.V., the Contemporary American Theater Festival (July 6–29) presents free lectures, readings, panels and an art exhibition, along with such plays as Gidion’s Knot by Johnna Adams, The Exceptionals by Bob Clyman, In a Forest, Dark and Deep by Neil LaBute, Captors by Evan M. Wiener and Barcelona by Bess Wohl. Go to www.catf.org.
Meanwhile, adventurous New York theatregoers will puzzle out the acronym PAM. Does it stand for Paradoxes At Midnight? Pipsqueaks Are Maniacs? No, it’s IATI (Theater Todo Vanguardia)’s fifth annual Performing Arts Marathon (July 26–Aug. 12), featuring “three weeks of pure, unfiltered vanguardia,” which will include theatre, dance, music and multidisciplinary numbers. Visit www.teatroiati.org/programs/pam.
Also in New York, an opportunity to see South African plays not by Athol Fugard comes July 25–Aug. 4 when Imbewu Trust brings some South African theatre companies to New York’s Horse Trade. Plays include Every Year, Every Day I Am Walking by Magnet Theatre, which concerns the refugee crisis in South Africa, and Tin Bucket Drum by Think Theatre Productions, about a little girl born with a revolutionary heartbeat. Find out more at www.imbewufestival.com
Up and to the left, in Portland, Ore., JAW: A Playwrights Festival returns for its 14th year (July 16–30). Free and open to all, JAW gives local playwrights a chance to shine in the “Just Add Water: Made in Oregon” five- to eight-minute play fest, while high school students will see their work in the “Promising Playwrights” series. Mainstage plays selected from a national search include Bo-Nita by Elizabeth Heffron, Broken Stones by Fin Kennedy, The Bachelors by Caroline V. McGraw, San Diego by Adam Bock, The People’s Republic of Portland by Lauren Weedman and The Few by Samuel D. Hunter. Go to www.pcs.org/jaw.
Beyond Anne Frank
MIAMI: Some years ago, when Arnold Mittelman, president and producing artistic director of the National Jewish Theater Foundation, met Michael Berenbaum, who oversaw the creation of the U.S.
Holocaust Memorial Museum, Berenbaum confessed one oversight in that museum’s curation. “He said that they didn’t create a Holocaust Theater Archive,” Mittelman says.
So Mittelman is setting out to create one. His first step: a four-day working conference in Miami last May to come up with a plan. With support from the Knight Foundation, the conference gathered top theatrical and archival professionals to “create a blueprint of how this comprehensive research and production-oriented Holocaust theatre archive could be made.” With a purview covering the years 1933 to the present, Mittelman says among the archive’s goals would be to feed today’s theatre with educational and archival materials to accompany productions—simply to ensure that there are more productions of Holocaust-themed work other than The Diary of Anne Frank. The task couldn’t be more urgent: “Within the next five to 10 years, the last of living survivors of the Holocaust will have died. It’s a different world we’re going to be heading into.” Visit www.holocausttheaterarchive.org.
Closing for Good
PHILADELPHIA: The Theatre Alliance of Greater Philadelphia is dissolving after 22 years advocating for area theatres. But this is good news, says outgoing executive director Margie Salvante. Come again?
The alliance got a wakeup call, Salvante says, two years ago, when recessionary pressures showed it was competing with, not complementing, the work of a number of local support organizations, including the Greater Philadelphia Cultural Alliance, the Nonprofit Finance Fund, the Nonprofit Center at LaSalle University, and the city’s Arts and Business Council. It was even competing, Salvante says, with its own member theatres. “Our business model had 5 percent of our income coming from dues and 95 percent from the same market that was also supposed to fund our member theatres. That model was no longer sustainable.”
So the alliance put its focus on audience engagement and rebranded itself as PhillyTheatreTix. That too became unsustainable, however, when TheaterMania—a for-profit web-based ticketing service headquartered in NYC—entered the Philadelphia market, presenting another competitive hurdle.
“We would have needed a high-level marketing person to compete with TheaterMania, which would, again, mean pulling more contributed revenue out of the same market our theatres are in,” says Salvante. “And why? TheaterMania is offering a good service.”
Programs run by the alliance—which had a budget of just over $900,000 in its last fiscal year—are likely to live on. The Wilma Theater will take over the Tessitura Consortium, a group of theatres that share the Tessitura ticketing database software. Salvante is less sure who will take over the annual Barrymore Awards, or such membership services as a job board, a listserv and a theatre credits database, but she is confident they will find a home. Though she’ll have to find a new job herself, Salvante concludes, “The Philadelphia theatre industry has successfully been put on the map and is now growing on its own steam. This board had the bravery to step up and say, ‘Mission accomplished.’”
