A letter from me. To you.

Dear friends of Stolen Chair,

You've been getting quite a few publicity blasts from us lately, but I wanted to take a moment to share some thoughts with you sans flashy graphics and HTML code. (Before I begin, though, I do want to remind you that you only have a few days left to register for our Community Supported Theatre before the Nov 22 launch event.)

Along with the rest of the core company and six incredible collaborators, I've just returned from Stolen Chair's 13th creative retreat where we noodled around with ideas for our 13th original work, QUANTUM POETICS: A SCIENCE EXPERIMENT FOR THE STAGE. For three days we worked together, lived together, and cooked together as we explored a slew of exciting theories from neuroscience and quantum physics. It might sound like serious business, but if you saw our quantum-inspired "Three Little Pigs," you be as tickled as I was.

And, for the first time in Stolen Chair's history, we'd like to invite you to be a part of these experiments. Stolen Chair has just launched the country's first Community Supported Theatre (CST), an innovative new way of connecting theatregoers with theatremakers, and we're now accepting members. On Nov 22, charter members of our CST will kickoff their season with an exclusive live showing of some of the most exciting (and most ridiculous) highlights from our creative retreat. For the eight months after that, CST members will watch each step of the project's development up until its premiere next summer, seeing first-hand how an idea becomes a play. Our members will not only have the opportunity to discuss the work with us at open rehearsals and work-in-progress presentations, but to learn alongside Stolen Chair as we invite some of the country's hottest science writers to come speak to us. (Members will also build exploding volcanos with us at our members-only science fair and dance the night away at our "Atoms and Eves" themed Valentine's Day Party!)

As the director of QUANTUM POETICS, I could not possibly be more exhilarated by the possibility that this work will be developed through collaboration with a circle so much wider than the artists in our creative team. As co-artistic director of Stolen Chair, I am proud that our organization is the first in the country to offer this depth of engagement to our audience. As someone who has faith in theatre's power to bring people together, to challenge our perspectives, and to delight us, I feel so lucky that I'll have the chance to participate in this novel experiment in building a real community comprised of engaged art-makers and art-lovers.

Hope you'll join us! Remember, the party starts Nov 22nd.

To read more and sign up, please visit: http://communitysupportedtheatre.org

If you have any further questions, please email cst[at]stolenchair.org for more info.

Best,

Jon Stancato

Huge, massive, earth-shatteringly good Stolen Chair news

I apologize for the unfathomably long blog silence but we've been very very busy with this...

After 9 months of research and development funded by an innovation grant from The Field's Economic Revitalization for Performing Arts (ERPA), Stolen Chair has been awarded a $20,000 implementation grant from ERPA to adapt the business model of Community Supported Agriculture (CSA) to the theatre.

So...IT'S ALL HAPPENING, FOLKS! We're gonna create the country's first Community Supported Theatre (CST), a development playground/research lab/community of audience-investors who will trace our newest project, Quantum Poetics (A science experiment for the stage), from its first creative retreat to its first public work-in-progress presentation.

You can read about the grant and our plans here and listen to my presentation (at the WNYC Green Space!).

Please tweet this, blog this, facebook this, talk about this at water coolers, and mention it loudly on subways: people interested in becoming charter members of our pilot Community Supported Theatre should visit http://communitysupportedtheatre.com to find out more and drop a line of interest to cst[at]stolenchair.org. We're especially looking for a small group of booster members who will receive highly discounted or free memberships in return for help recruiting other members.

The speech that got booed

So I was one of the five artists on the "cultural entrepreneurs" on the panel at Wednesday's New Economy Smackdown, hosted by The Field & Galapagos. The unedited audio of the entire event is already online. You can read Claudia La Rocco's take on the event here and Morgan von Prelle Pecelli's own panel statement here. Below, however, is the speech I made, a speech which received the event's first boos. The offending statement is in bold and I stand by the remarks even more after hearing how many hackles it raised.

Jennifer asked all to create a soapbox manifesto reflecting on how the current arts economy is affecting us and our work. I struggled to get any thoughts out, because the more I thought about it, the more I realized none of us in this room should be here talking about the arts economy. There is no such thing as an arts economy since non-commercial arts by their very definition don't follow market logic and can't compete in the market place without dependence on non-profit support structures and the government . So we can embrace our role in the margins of the economy and struggle the way that performing artists have struggled since theatre and religion parted ways, or we can model ourselves on the only other two positions left to us in a market-driven economy: as charity (quite like an endangered species) or as community resource (like a neighborhood garden). Well, if we're a charity we should follow the model of other charities: humpback whales don't send out end-of-year asks or write grant applications, so we shouldn't either. We should depend entirely on the goodwill of people who don't want to imagine a world without theatre and therefore raise awareness, funds, and support to ensure we continue to exist. But, I don't want to be a charity, in large part because I don't think our social cause has enough merit to compete with other charities who actually change lives on a grand scale. So, the only round hole we can force our square peg of a "business model" into is as community resource. In this interconnected, digital age, if our art can serve as a meeting place for communities of like-minded individuals to connect, celebrate, and be challenged, then we might find a way of restoring theatre's primacy in people's lives and creating sustainable theatre-making organisms (not organizations).

But, since we are, however, here to debate the "arts economy," I'll add:

Why is there now, why has there been, and why will there always be prime, beautiful, ready to theatricalized real estate sitting vacant for extended periods in all 5 boroughs? If someone can work out insurance, tax deductions, box-office splits, zoning laws, etc so that businesses have a reason to open their doors to artists then we can do what we do best, drive in droves of foot traffic, people with expendable cash some of whom may be looking to rent a new office or storefront. 80% of Stolen Chair's operating budget goes towards space rental. Knock out that cost and we can pay our artists not only living wages, but competitive ones.

As producer of a company made up of people whose survival jobs are freelance and often paid hourly, I am sick of arranging (or trying to arrange) quid-pro-quo deals that will help Stolen Chair the organization save money at the expense of the individuals who are Stolen Chair. In most cases, we'd be better off adding an extra-hour to our work-weeks and donating that money to the company.

We need the next generation of gatekeepers or, in the very least, our current crop needs to start communicating with each other and rethink what it means to support "emerging" art. The supply of indie theatre in New York will always outstrip the demand, but by presenting, critiquing, and funding the same two dozen artists, our gatekeepers stifle innovation and creative movements the same way corporate monopolies do.

So. Yeah. Boos. (And then some cheers in response to the boos.).

I obviously wouldn't work eleventy-billion "survival" jobs and put trillions of hours into each Stolen Chair show if I didn't believe in the fundamental power of art to transform lives and feel strongly that the choice to wake up and dedicate ones' life to art is nothing short of radical and revolutionary. That said (and perhaps this is due to Stolen Chair's recent experience as a Jenzabar Foundation finalist alongside far more vital social missions), I think that if art tries to compete with "real" charities toe-to-toe, we will not only lose, but feel terrible for entering the fray. So let's pull ourselvs out of this terrain entirely, rediscover art's special place, and develop compelling and innovative ways for people to use the power of their pursestrings to ensure that we continue to exist.

A social media manifesto (or...how to help Stolen Chair win $3,000 with 5 seconds of your time)

One of the major auxillary components of Stolen Chair's Community Supported Theatre business plan is the comprehensive web of collaborative social networking tools we'll be using (and, in some cases, already use) to enrich communication between our company and our audience. When The Jenzabar Foundation announced a call for such proposals for their $3,000 Social Media Leadership Award, we quickly drafted and submitted a summary of our social media outreach programs.

Good news: Our proposal made it to the semi-finals.

Even gooder news: You can be the vote that brings us to the finals (and the $$$!). The winner is the organization which reels in the most comments on their proposal.

You know how tough times are for artists right now. Help Stolen Chair expand our programs (and our reach) by writing a few encouraging words at the bottom of our proposal (you don't even have to read it!). The race is tight right now and your one vote could be the deciding factor which shapes our entire season. Whether you have seen our work or not (heck: whether you have heard of us or not!), I hope you'll take the time to post a few words here: http://thejenzabarfoundationblog.com/2009/04/09/the-stolen-chair-theatre-company/

(Comments take at least one business day to be moderated before Jenzabar posts them)

THANKS SO MUCH!!! (And please spread this around!)

Puppet playlist recap and London street performers

On March 12, Stolen Chair joined a group of 12 other physical theatre artists and musicians at the Tank to present pieces inspired by the work of Tom Waits (as part of the first edition of Puppet Playlist).  When we first found out about the event, we were still in the thick of Theatre Is Dead but not yet in the thick of Quantum Poetics (pitch coming soon) or the possible Man Who Laughs remount (yes, you heard it here first!).  So, as devout Waits fans, we knew we wanted to participate but also knew the whole thing would sort of be a fun one-off for us.  As a company which spends 6 months developing new work, doing a little w.i.p. thrown together in a weekend is somewhat out of character, but we'll also take any opportunity to play.  

We started working with the music, splicing together a 6 minute piece out of Waits' "Temptation" and "I Don't Wanna Grow Up."  We found ourselves continually fighting the desire to craft some sort of literal narrative (being tempted to grow up) which the music could score.  It is so so so so easy (and, forgive the pun, tempting) to fall into literal storytelling when songs have lyrics.  Music videos always struggle with this.  Do you offer a video which tells the story of the song, tells a completely different story (which will either complement the song or, in the very least, not divert attention from the song), or present a series of images which create a resonance chamber in which the sonic images and figurative language can bounce around.  We decided to do the latter, structuring it so that there was still a clear frame for the audience to grab onto (Noah's "realistic" child-like character encountering a series of arresting and bizarrely erotic images staged as automaton machines by David and Liza).  

What emerged was definitely the most abstracted theatrical vignette we've created since Portrait of Dora As a Young Man in 2002.  And you know what?  We had a damn good time doing it!  I wish we could have rehearsed it more (and, um, at least once on stage) before running it for an audience, but people seemed to dig it (a few strangers coming up to compliment the actors after the show). This was the 4th Stolen Chair event in 2 years (the Kinderspiel staged reading, the Kill Me remount at the Brick, and Theatre Is Dead being the others) which was truly "unapologetic."  We had so fully let go of any fear that the audience was not going to "follow" us that we ended up creating a much more compelling event for the audience to "follow" than if we had let ourselves worry if we were going to be liked.  Moral of the story: there really is an audience for anything, and if one creates and present work with total conviction and faith in its worth (or simply its status as an experiment), one will please far more crowds than if one tries to craft a crowd pleaser.  May seem like a no-brainer, but it's one we routinely re-discover. :)

Speaking of pleasing crowds, Kiran and I had the good fortune to catch a remarkable street performance in Covent Garden, London last week.  They were just a pair of middle aged British clown jugglers, but as we sat there for 20 minutes on the cold pavement, I learned more about theatre than a semester worth of classes could have taught me.  Some lessons learnt:

• Wear the structure on your sleeve...and then play!  The second thing these clowns did was introduce the unicycles (pictured at right) which would serve as the routine's finale.  Of course, they prolonged and toyed with us for over 20 minutes before delivering the promised finale.  This playful dramaturgy takes Chekhov's gun theory ("If in the first act you have hung a pistol on the wall, then in the following one it should be fired. Otherwise don't put it there.") one step further, and, I think, is especially vital for companies like Stolen Chair who tend to devise unfamiliar theatrical structures.  Show the audience the unicycles so they know where you're taking them.  (And don't take too damn long to get there!)
• Define failure on your own terms.  The clowns told us to "Boo" loudly whenever they dropped a club or ball.  They then mocked us when we didn't "Boo" loudly enough.  This transformed what should be a net energy loss (the failure of a routine) into an energy gain (audience shouting loudly at the stage in complicity with the performers)
• It's okay to remind the audience that they are watching live theatre and not television (and that live theatre is always an interactive event).

That last bullet helped Kiran and me re-realize (for the umpteenth time) that there is one thing that brings together all the theatre we want to make: it is ruthlessly and brazenly theatrical.  We don't just want to parade another art form on stage (film, visual art, and literature being three of the most commonly "theatricalized" culprits).  And the only thing which really, at the end of the day, separates theatre from these arts is presence: of the actors and of the audience.  The former is hard to quantify (though many have tried) beyond the simple existential fact that, yes, the actor is a live human being standing anywhere between 5 inches and 500 feet in front of you (depending on the level of play and the theatre's architecture, of course).  

But the audience?  That's simple.  They are simply there. You don't need to train them to be extra-there.  But you do have to encourage/demand/invite/bribe/threaten/tempt them to be an actual theatrical audience (one which implicitly accepts and savors the presence of the actor and the interactive phenomenon that is live theatre) or you can let them keep their distance like your actors are projections on a 30' screen, pretty pictures in a frame, or talking books.  I'm all for works of art that blur the lines of their genre and all for stealing freely from visual art, film, and literature (just look at Stolen Chair's body of work), but we (by which I mean Stolen Chair) kinda always need to be working to discover new ways of making sure the audience is present with us, not just enjoying us (or...[gulp] actively loathing us).  

Logo contest: $$$ & wine

This from Liza Green, our director of Marketing:

Stolen Chair Theatre Company (aka Stolen Chair) announces LOGO DESIGN CONTEST.

Calling all graphic designers, Stolen Chair is in search of a new logo. Ours is no longer a fit for our growing indie theatre company, and we are holding a design contest to find our next image. The winner will receive $200, a case of wine and tickets for our 2009 season. We will be accepting logo submissions until Oct 13, 2008.

About Us:

The Stolen Chair Theatre Company is a critically-acclaimed award-winning collaborative theatre laboratory dedicated to the theft, recycling and re-examination of historical performance styles, and to the creation of visually stunning and uniquely contemporary work where the earnest and
ironic happily co-exist. Find out more and check out our old logo at www.stolenchair.org

What we’re looking for in the logo design:

* object and/or text based
* clean/modern
* can stand on its own
* scalable (should look good on business cards and on t-shirts)
* easily change color scheme
* no human figures
* include company name: Stolen Chair

Ideas that we'd like our logo to convey:

* delightfully wrong
* hip
* multilayered
* irreverent
* twisted authenticity
* collective/collaborative

Please submit designs (high res. pdf) before Oct 13, 2008 to logo@stolenchair.org. Students welcome. Sketches welcome. Designs that are not chosen will be destroyed. Winner will be notified by November 1, 2008.

The New News: May 24, 2008

While I have very little idea how this magically seems to happen every time we close a show, we started rehearsing the new version of Kill Me Like You Mean It one day after we struck The Accidental Patriot. And while Kiran was cutting Kill Me down to 45 minutes for the festival gig, she was also revising Kill Me and Kinderspiel, which will be published THIS Thursday by United Stages and launched at a book party at the Drama Book Shop that evening (that's a caricature of Kiran in the Drama Bookshop's display window!).

So: all this news and more awaits you in our last e-newsletter, which you can receive regularly in your inboxes if you sign-up here.

Whoa, Nelly. Stolen Chair explodes.

We had a very full weekend with scene work, music rehearsals (5 original songs in multi-part harmony), combat rehearsals (2 mass battles and 3 duels), production meetings, a podcast, and our postcard design (see right), not to mention all of the costume and set building that's happening for the show. I still haven't seen the entire 18 person cast in the same room yet, but I'll have that chance over the weekend. Big as this show is (it's really really really BIG!), the production itself is only one of the many many things that will be happening during the run. On the evenings that The Accidental Patriot will not be running, Stolen Chair will be producing quite a few exciting events.

Commedia dell'Arte Maestro Antonio Fava will be returning for a masterclass on April 26th, and on April 27, he will bring his performance, Pulcinella's War, back for its second NYC engagement (we produced its premiere last year in front of an oversold crowd!) in a one-night stand. More details on that will follow soon...

During some of our other "dark" nights, we'll be presenting Pirates, Patriots, Patricides, several evenings of short works of theatre inspired by ancient Greece, the American Revolution, and...Pirates! We've got some really wonderful work lined up, including a visit from the Strike Anywhere Performance Ensemble which will be creating a live "soundpainting" of a Sophocles text, a Commedia-inspired take on colonial America from Ron Nicholson, and at least two very silly pirate plays: one from the inestimable li'l Jimmy Comtois of Nosedive Productions and the other from L. Pontius (off Broadway's Umbrella), directed by our very own Emily Otto (who might I add is doing quadruple-duty as the piece's director, the curator of this entire short works program, our dramaturg, and our music director!!!).

Oh, and did I mention that we'll spend the last couple weekends of our run rehearsing a new version of Kill Me Like You Mean It, which will have two performances (June 2 & 8) in the Brick Theater's Film Festival: A Theater Festival?

We'll have more details about all of this in the coming days and we'll also have interviews with Kevin Lapin of Floating Brothel and Jeff Lewonczyk of Babylon Babylon coming up in the next week. Stay tuned!

Voices in print and on the air

Big press day for Stolen Chair and our Pirates of the Aegean party. We're a VOICE CHOICE (with the inset picture taking up almost the entire page!) in this week's Village Voice, and a podcast I moderated about indie theatre fundraising hit the NYtheatrecast website today.

So...hit the new stands, plug in your ipods, and get inundated by Stolen Chair's media-industrial complex :)!

And...um...BUY YOUR TICKETS!!!

The new news: 1/30/08

Last newsletter of the month went out today. The pirate party headlined, accompanied by a reminder that admission is 33% cheaper if you buy online before party time rolls around. So...do it. Buy online. Now.

Only other item was a plug for the K'spiel photos and the announcement that K'spiel DVDs are now for sale. $10 if you want 'em. Just email me.

The busiest weekend of Stolen Chair's life...or one of them

Whoah. I am astonished I've survived to write this. This weekend (by which I only mean Saturday and Sunday) featured 2 marathon rehearsals of the swashbuckler culminating in a semi-staged reading (for which nearly 25 people showed up: surprising, since we were expecting 3), a podcast for nytheatre.com I moderated about indie theatre fundraising (posting later this week), a decorating party for our fundraiser (less than a week away! visit www.partylikepirates.com and buy your tickets now!), and our quarterly board meeting.

Here's what John Clancy over at Scrappy Jack's had to say about last night's reading. (He even manages to plug like mad for our party. Oh, John, how we do love thee!)

Saw the first reading of the first part of Stolen Chair's latest last night, working title The Tragic Swashbuckler. Going to be great. Part three of their Cinetheatre Tetralogy, this time it's Errol Flynn meets Sophocles. So fucking funny and smart. Everyone needs to go to their big Pirate Party this weekend, Saturday the 2nd at the Underwater Lounge out in Dumbo. Nancy and I will be out on Long Island, partying like respectable people, but the rest of you can party like pirates. Live swordfighting, a Delphic oracle, DJs, all like that. Info and tickets at www.partylikepirates.com.

So, yeah, the reading went pretty well (I will post a pic as soon as we get them downloaded); we never know what to expect with these things. It was great to hear people laughing at the reading. Sure, we camped up some material that might be a little more earnest in production, but I think a lot of laughs showed that people were on board with this crazy concept. Still working out the kinks with the tragic chorus but I feel like that's a pretty universal struggle for all playwrights and directors dealing with that trope.

Mission for the next few days is to turn our working title into a title that works...

Raping and Plundering and Photoshopping!

Here are my faves from our ever-so-much-fun photoshoot with the brilliant Carrie Leonard, shot on location at our party venue, the Underwater Lounge (one swanky space, if I might add!).

Enjoy!

PartyLikePirates.com

Aviva Meyer's swanky design for the pirate party website is now uploaded and pretty damn cool. Check it out at www.partylikepirates.com and buy your tickets now!!!

We just did a photo shoot to promote the party. Best. Stolen Chair activity. Ever. I'll post photographer Carrie Leonard's gallery for the day tomorrow or later in the week.

The new news: Party like pirates!!!

January newsletter #1 of 2 just went out to our subscribers. Read it here and sign up here to have the next one delivered straight to your email.

Here's the headlining news:
Stolen Chair presents Pirates of the Aegean (2/2)
A swashbuckling pirate dance party with an Ancient Greek twist.

Dust off your eye-patch and finish sewing your tunic, because on February 2nd, Stolen Chair will be swashbuckling our way into the Underwater Lounge for our Pirates of the Aegean fundraising party. DJ's, live swordfights, a Delphic oracle, and more.

Buy your tickets now at www.partylikepirates.com.

• Enter an underground pirate ship and maraud the coasts of ancient Greece!
• Witness live swordfights fought with naked steel on the dance floor!
• Discover what the fates have in store for your future at our Delphic Oracle!
• Savor a glass ’er two o’ Captain’s Blood!
• Dance as our sails are filled by music from three rockin DJ’s:
  -Been Jammin makes you shake your booty with Soulful Funky House Beats o
  -Friar Tuck’s hip-shakin' mix of funky house, breakbeat, and electro-techno will get you on the dancefloor and put a smile on your face
  -Shane Digital brings you thumpin mashup and some Baltimore club

…with clairvoyant performances by Lulu Miller and Jonathan Harford, spectacular swordplay by fight master Barbara Seifert, and décor by Laura Sheedy and David Bengali.

Doors open at 9pm and the party runs until 3am.

Tickets are $14 at the door (or $9 in costume) and $9 advance tickets are available at www.partylikepirates.com

@ The Underwater Lounge
located in the Water Street Restaurant
66 Water Street, Brooklyn
-Click here for map-

Calling all would be swashbucklers & tragedians!

The Tragic Swashbuckler Playdate: Tuesday, Dec 11 (evening)

The Stolen Chair Theatre Company invites all interested male collaborators to join us for 2 hours of collective creation as we begin developing The Tragic Swashbuckler, the third installment of our critically-acclaimed CineTheatre Tetralogy, a 1930s swashbuckler by way of Aeschylus, exploring how susceptible morality can be to the conflicting pulls of loyalty to self, lover, family, fraternity, nation, and god. This comic mash-up will feature rapier duels and rapier wit as it satirizes humanity's dependence on moral codes, however flimsy they might be.

We're starting from scratch on this and we need your help. If you're a fan of classic 1930s Errol Flynn swashbucklers (or even the more contemporary Princess Bride and Pirates of the Carribean), have had some experience performing Greek tragedy, enjoy a good stage fight, or just want to wile away 2 hours playing pirates, we hope you'll join us. While the evening will by no means be structured like an "audition," participants will be the casting pool for the two all-expense-paid creative retreats (the weekends of Dec 15 & Jan 5), the staged reading (the weekend of Feb 2), and the production itself (running for 4 weeks beginning April 18).

Please contact info@stolenchair.org with a letter of interest if you'd like to attend and please note if you would be interested and available for either or both of the retreats, the reading, and the production.

About the CineTheatre Tetralogy: In 2005, Stolen Chair debuted The Man Who Laughs, a live silent film for the stage. The play was met with popular and critical acclaim and has since been published in Playing with Canons, inspiring Stolen Chair to launch an ambitious 3 year program to adapt 3 other classic film styles to the stage. The next installment of the series was 2006's Kill Me Like You Mean It, an absurdist film noir for the stage which was called an "intriguing" "clever" "high-styling" "must-see" "stroke of genius" by an assortment of critics. The company plans to run all four of the installments in repertory for its 8th season in 2010.

About Stolen Chair: The Stolen Chair Theatre Company is a critically-acclaimed award-winning collaborative theatre laboratory dedicated to the theft, recycling and re-examination of historical performance styles, and the creation of visually stunning and uniquely contemporary work where the earnest and ironic happily co-exist. Stolen Chair was featured in New York Press' Best of Manhattan 2007, is a recipient of NYtheatre.com's People of the Year award, and has been praised by TimeOut, Flavorpill, nytheatre.com, Backstage, and PBS' New Theatre Corps. The company's 6th season is supported, in part, by public funds from the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs.

Get Drunk and Play w/Stolen Chair

"GET DRUNK AND PLAY" NIGHT
Thursday, Oct 18 @ 10pm

Remember transforming your family's old refrigerator box into a dungeon?

The Stolen Chair Theatre Company has spent the past 6 months training to play like kids for KINDERSPIEL ("Child's Play"), a provocative and playful new production running every weekend in October. We've had such a great time "kinderspieling" that we want to invite everyone we know to come join us for a playdate. We've got loads of free wine and a stage filled with fun objects, and we invite you to get drunk and play with us. Or skip the drinks and just play with us. Or skip the playing and drink all you want while you watch other people play with us. Or sit in a corner and play by yourself while knowing that there are people drinking and watching you play.

$10 gets you the open wine bar and about two hours to recapture your youth in the company of friends and complete strangers.

Space is extremely limited so please RSVP by contacting jon@stolenchair.org.

You can find out more about Kinderspiel at www.kinderspiel.us, where you can also click through to SmartTix and purchase your ticket for the show that Martin Denton calls "required viewing for the theatrically adventurous and those in search of the most provocative and thought-provoking work that indie theater has to offer."

Messymaking on the 6th Floor: Kinderspiel's staged reading at the Ohio

As I've written in earlier manifesti, Stolen Chair is a laboratory theatre and, as such, we often try to use the metaphor of a pharmaceutical lab (as they often both have non-profit and commercial components) to articulate our relationship to the ideas of process and product. In such a lab, one works out ones experimental drug as fully as one can before subjecting poor unsuspecting humans to the nasty side effects. With a theatre's lab reading, however, a script/production concept is tested out in front of an audience (hopefully of colleagues and intimates) long before it's fit for human consumption. Sure you can learn a lot from testing your drug/play on humans while it's still really rough around the edges, but is it a good idea?

In the past, Stolen Chair has had a very rickety relationship with the notion of a reading. The very first public reading we had (Virtuosa in late 2004) was 2 years into our company history and, strangely enough, about 6 months after we had produced the play itself. Not exactly the traditional path of play development.

Since becoming resident artists at Horse Trade, lab readings (of the chair and music stand variety) have been par for the course. But because these plays have been written specifically for an ensemble of actors, scripted on their bodies, and already tested out in rehearsal, I can't say that these readings have been extraordinarily enlightening for Emily, Kiran, or me; primarily they've served to bring our designers, board members, and co-producers into the process.

When we submitted Kinderspiel to the 6th Floor Series, we literally had no idea what we were getting ourselves into. Not only was the production just a microscopic zygote of a conceit at the time we applied, but we had never even had a chance to see another company tackle the 6th Floor format as many of us work on Monday nights.

We entered the space at 5pm on Saturday night with a box full of props and roughly 20 pages of text, neither of which the cast had ever seen before as most of our R&D on this project has centered around developing character, exploring the Weimar setting, and experimenting with the notion of child's play. All we knew was that we had 10 hours to create some forum in which we could, as a creative team, actually make discoveries about this project rather than, as we had in the past, simply use the reading as an opportunity to clue our collaborators in.

So, the traditional chair & music stand format wasn't going to work for us as one of the most importants things we needed to learn was how an audience would respond to the play's kinderspieling moments, the indulgent expanses of child's play that the production's entire conceit rests on (and, incidentally, the carry-over from the very first exercise we did after warm-up in our Kinderspiel retreat in February).

We began trying to roughly stage the entire play, to do a sort of first pass and establish a few marks to hit in each scene. Dee-zas-ter. It's one thing if you're doing pychological realism and can create enough solid ground just by scoring when people enter, when they exit, when they stand, and when they sit, but to do the physicality of a Stolen Chair production half-way would just make us all look bad (and, for what it's worth, also made the text's meaning less discernible). Like oh so many rehearsals for this challenging project, it was only in the last 45 minutes of Saturday's rehearsal that we began to hit upon a way to make this work.

We came in on Sunday with a clearer plan for action: Emily and I selected a list of about 2 dozen stage directions (roughly 1/4 of which were kinderspieling episodes) that we could actually direct on stage, as it were. We intentionally picked textless moments to stage so the actors could leave their scripts at music stands, fully commit to the staging, and then return. In order for the actors to have the opportunity to fully invest in their characters physicalities, we ditched the chairs and had 4 of the 5 characters standing. When we were done it certainly didn't look like any reading I'd ever been to.

Roughly 15 people showed up for Monday's reading, almost half of which were newcomers to Stolen Chair's work and had heard about it through Soho Think Tank's emails and the listing in the Onion. The 20 pages of text ran over an hour in performance and we made a big ol' mess on stage (forcing us, with great relish, to realize that our set will likely be destroyed by play's end each night). Though it was by no means ready for the masses, I was really proud with how much spaghetti we were able to throw against the wall after only 10 hours of rehearsal, and, based on the feedback we received afterwards, it seems as though some of it actually stuck :)...People really responded to the way in which we used the conceit of child's play and fairy tale-ish prose to approach some rather dark material (to paraphrase a comment from Vanessa Sparling, the series' curator: "Sexualizing children is disturbing; sexualizing adults who are playing like children,is very disturbing!"), to the questions the play poses about rationalizing art, about class, and about mainstreaming the marginal, and to the gusto and commitment with which actors involved in this project must throw themselves (Layna smashed not one, but two props in the heat of the action; to be fair she broke one of the props on the other so it was kind of a twofer).

We also learned a lot about what didn't stick. We obviously still need to develop the plot and the play's emotional arc more clearly. The balance between monologue and action needs to be tinkered with and we're likely going to alter the conceit of the text, as well, losing the Germanic syllables while keeping the German grammar.

If you happened to catch the reading and have more feedback you'd like to offer, comment away.

And now we get to go switch gears again and focus on the upcoming Commedia dell'Artemisia performance at the Brick's Pretentious Festival on Friday. Have you bought your tickets yet?

Swarthmorean Sojourn (w/slideshow!!!)

The show always goes on, doesn't it? After what was one of the most difficult tech weeks Stolen Chair ever had, we somehow managed to pull off last weekend's gig performing Commedia dell'Artemisia at Swarthmore College's Alumni Weekend. In the week leading up to our departure, David and I probably slept a combined total of 6 hours, staying up far too late to build the set in my apartment (my neighbors must looove me!). And if it wasn't for the kindness of a Rosebrand associate named Marco, the two hours we spent in traffic just blocks from the Holland Tunnel might have prevented us from picking up the backdrops that were central to the design. But we made it to Swarthmore, PA with the set and the cast in about as many pieces as they were supposed to be.

The weekend was Kiran and my 5th reunion and Stolen Chair's 5th anniversary all wrapped up together. Our directing mentor, Allen Kuharski, arranged the event as an opportunity for us to perform at the school that has been so generous in its support of the company for the past 5 years. It was also the show's "out-of-town trial," an opportunity to put it up in front of a large audience before bringing it to the Pretentious Festival this weekend (have you bought your tickets yet?!). We had great turnout from class years '42 through '02 and brilliant Swarthmorean feedback from the audience; the performance simultaneously whet my appetite for the upcoming Pretentious shows and began the countdown towards the inevitable post-pardum depression that will set in when this fabulous show goes, as James Comtois says, to that Great Production in the Sky. Luckily, even before Commedia closes on the 29th, we'll be kickstarting Kinderspiel in earnest at a June 25th reading for Soho Think Tank's 6th Floor Series.

Stressful though it might be to spend every waking moment with the same group of people, all of us dealing with pre-show jitters and sleep deprivation in our own ways, I was really excited to live and breathe theatre and only theatre for 48 hours straight. No day jobs. No cell-phone signal (at least for me...damn T-mobile!). Just Commedia dell'Artemisia. Again and again and again. The weekend had me lusting after the possibility of a future college tour circuit. (Any colleges out there want to book Commedia? Cross-lists with both Art History and Gender Studies...any takers? Email me if you want to chat about it...)

I'll let the 31 pictures below speak the remaining 31,000 words I had originally intended for this posting. Some on stage, some backstage, some far off stage on Swarthmore's lovely campus. Enjoy!

Special blog-reader discount

Use coupon code "BLOG" when you order on SmartTix for $5 off adult admission to Fava's February 24th performance, Pulcinella's War.

Legendary Commedia dell’Arte performer, maestro, and maskmaker, Antonio Fava presents his signature show, performing lazzi from the life, death, and resurrection of Pulcinella, the stock character he inherited from his father and one of comedy’s most beloved scoundrels.

The following is an excerpt from Maestro Fava's press release:

War, unfortunately, is a timeless and universal situation experienced by all cultures and peoples-- it is also a classic situation for the Commedia dell’Arte. Pulcinella’s War, by Antonio Fava, features Pulcinella and Zazzà: two masks, of the oldest and longest lasting comic theatrical tradition still on the boards - the Commedia dell’Arte, with almost five centuries of uninterrupted history.

Pulcinella’s War tells the comic story of Pulcinella who goes to war not for glory or honor but to solve his problem of love. To Pulcinella, war appears as a refuge, a solution, a form of intentional, planned suicide. The audience follows Pulcinella’s exploits and his relationship with Zazzà, the woman who is his match.

Fava gained a passion for Commedia dell'Arte through his father, a famous Pulcinella in Scandale, Calabria, Italy. From this, he would go on to become the world's leading teacher and director in the Rennaisance art-form so few know about or even understand. In 1980, he created the International School for Comic Acting in Reggio Emilia, Italy for the purpose of teaching and training performers from around the world in Commedia, Masks, Mask-making, Opera Regia, Tragedy and the original variety show.

Party time!!! Excellent!!!

It's official. The second annual Stolen Chair un-fundraiser (no cover charge, no suggested donation, no reason not to come and party away with the Chairs) will be held at.......Drumroll please.....I said, drumroll please......Dammit, who hired this drummer anyhow?!.....Could we get a triangle?.....Anyone?....Cowbell?....Okay: cue cowbell!....[clank clank clank clank clank]....

February 23rd

8pm until our Dramaturg says "Stop!"
Slainte Bar & Lounge
304 Bowery (Betw. Bleeker and Houston)
Drink specials from 8pm-1opm...

Raffle prizes...

A slideshow of Stolen Chair's greatest hits playing on the bar's TV system...

And the first public announcement of our next collective creation!