A very pretentious cabaret

A heads up for next week: Scene 1 of Commedia dell'Artemisia will be making an appearance at the Pretentious Festival's Opening Night Cabaret. The festivities will be this Friday night, beginning at 7pm at the Brick Theater.

Check out their website or more info...

Our "Music" Rehearsal

For those of you who needed a good reason to GO AND BUY YOUR TICKETS for the Pretentious Festival appearance of Commedia dell'Artemisia, look no further than the exquisitely awful cell-phone video shot by evil genius set-designer/performer David Bengali at our "music" rehearsal:



Hey, David, do you have a version of that with sound?

Commedia dell'Artemisia Interview #1: Mask-Maker Jonathan Becker

Long time blog readers will remember the film noir and absurdism interview series we conducted in the weeks leading up to the opening of Kill Me Like You Mean It. Well, as we countdown to the opening of Commedia dell'Artemisia at the Pretentious Festival, we wanted to bring in some of the country's leading experts on mask design, commedia dell'arte, Moliere, and verse playwriting to share their thoughts.

Today I'd like to introduce you to Jonathan Becker: actor, teaching artist, dancer, puppeteer, puppet designer, dancer, fight choreographer and...mask-maker! I've been teaching Commedia and directing with Jonathan's neoprene masks (purchased at theater-masks.com) since 2004. The masks have been dropped, kicked, left out in the sun and in blizzards, and forced to absorb gallons about gallons of actor-sweat and they still look like they've been freshly cast (unfortunately, they've since lost that new mask smell...). In addition to the complete set of Commedia masks he offers, Jonathan has a variety of other character and decorative masks available. (I might add, that his Commedia masks do double duty as my living room's wall decorations.) And if you don't like anything he shows on the site, you can do what Disney and Lincoln Center did: order a custom mask.

And here's what he has to say...

1. How do you define Commedia dell'Arte?

Hmmmmm… The Commedia is so many things. I would define the Commedia as the ultimate human comedy. It is an outrageous celebration of the foibles of humanity. The Commedia is forever contemporary given that it is based on archetypes and universal themes. It is trickery at its finest.

Everything in the commedia is a ruse even the act of story telling. One thinks one is off to see a play but in the end it is what the characters of the commedia choose to give that evening that is the experience of the audience.

As a style, in the commedia, it is the style itself that’s in play. It is different in other forms of theatre. For example, it is the text in Shakespeare, the story in a melodrama, and the characters in Contemporary American Realism. The style itself is what is important in the commedia.

In commedia you have an actor playing an actor playing a character having a direct conversation with the audience.

2. What do you think is the most common misconception of Commedia?

That it is an historical form of theatre that needs to played as such and that it is based completely in improvisation.

3. Where does the inspiration for your Commedia masks come from?

The masks are based on both the historical forms of the traditional commedia masks but also on the animals that are closest to the charters in personality and temperament.

4. Tell us about Neoprene. What are the advantages of working with this material as a sculptor and as an actor?

Neoprene is an industrial latex compound that cures to a mostly rigid form. It’s original application was as an additive for adhesives. Someone figured out that it could be used to make masks. I wish it had been me then I’d feel like a smart person.

In a neoprene mask the wall of the mask turns out to be about 1/8” thick and is slightly flexible. This material has been being used by mask makers here in the US for about 18 years. It provides for a very professional grade working mask. Its greatest asset is that the masks can be made in an affordable way.

The weight and feel of the mask is similar to that of a leather mask. The masks are padded and strapped. The wear on the mask will depend on the care that it gets and how many times it is exposed to extreme cold and extreme heat. For the most part, neoprene masks are pretty much indestructible. I toured with a company that had to make changes so quickly that the masks were often thrown on the floor over and over again and those masks would last a year or more of constant touring and playing 250 or so performances a year.

5. Why do you think Commedia dell'Arte is an important training for contemporary actors?

Commedia is an important training tool because it involves the use of masks which are designed as living sculpture. This means that in order to support the mask and maintain the life of the sculpture the actor must always be in a constant state of honest discovery. It is impossible to lie under a mask. Learning to play commedia is like learning to play the violin. One has to be a virtuoso to pull it off. It is hugely technical and an absolute mastery of the technique must be had in order to play.

The actor must have a true mastery of the principles of the craft of performance to succeed at the commedia.

6. You teach workshops which fuse both Grotowski-based and Lecoq-based actor training. How do you reconcile the two distinct styles in your own work and pedagogy?

Do you have an hour… here is the short answer:

I fuse them. Lecoq is all about space and rhythm which involves a relationship to the audience since they are part of the space. The physical conditioning of the plateau work and the attention to the kinesthetic and intuitive sense of physical impulse is second to none in the Grotowski work. I use the two at different points in the training process and to accomplish different goals depending on the outcome I am reaching for.

7. Do you have a favorite Commedia character to play? Why?

I most often play Pantelone because he is closer to me in real life but I love playing Tartaglia. The simple stupidity of this character appeals to me.

8. While Commedia-inspired groups like the Mime Troupe have been around for decades and while some elements of Commedia-esque satire have been absorbed by the sketch comedy world of SNL and such, do you think that we'll ever see a traditional masked traveling Commedia troupe dealing with contemporary material?

I would hope so. But I’m not sure that it can happen in our culture. We in America do not have a tradition of masked performance and so have a difficult time relating to masked styles of performance. The masks of our culture are Darth Vader, Freddy from Friday the Thirteenth and evil clown masks for Halloween. It’s difficult. Maybe if we tire of the virtual world we will long for something else and truly theatrical forms of performance will begin to flourish.

9. What can Commedia and its legacy teach us about creating contemporary satire?

Situation is the basis for comedy and the universal is what is funny. That it is ultimately the physical nature of the comedy the rings true and is most exciting. I always think of Lucile Ball, Bill Cosby, Rhett Skelton, Archie Bunker (all of the characters in this sit com) oh and
stupid and ridiculous are a good place to start when solving most problems.

10. Anything you'd like to plug?

Sure… Buy lots of masks from www.theater-masks.com or just send me all your money. That works too.

...In addition to today's interview, you can look forward to hearing from Christopher Bayes, one of the country's leading teachers of clown and Commedia and Kirk Wood Bromley, New York's most prolific verse playwright. Have another interview suggestion? Comment away...

Kinderspiel's Dramatis Personae

Down below are the characters we explored on Saturday's rehearsal as we tested out the konceit detailed in Kinderspiel Korrections: Part 2. We used the "dropping-in" exercise I picked up from Larry Sacharow in 2001 to find the characters' physicalities and then the ensemble created a very long but very brilliant composition which staged how these characters might deal with the 4 tropes of child's play that I wrote about on Friday. Finally, the ensemble spent some time trying to stage Kiran's very first zygotic stab at the play's language, a fabulously demented mix of English words following German grammatical rules, German/English hybrid words, and nonsense words made out of strange English or German compounds. You can read a little bit of this in the excerpt section of Kinderspiel's finally posted show page on stolenchair.org. And while you're navigating away from the site, feel free to take a gander at the production's webpage placeholder at www.kinderspiel.us. (I know, I know, we couldn't get dot-com...)

If you've navigated back to blog (or never left at all), I hereby present to you, in no particular order, the possible dramatis personae for Kinderspiel:

"Anita" played by Alexia Vernon


"Max" played by Cameron J. Oro


"Heinrich" played by Sam Dingman


"Anna" played by Elisa Matula


"Sylvia" played by Liza Wade White


(You might have recognized some of the above pix. They are all photos or paintings of famous writers, painters, and performers from 1920s Berlin.)

Kinderspiel Korrections: Part 2

(If you haven't read Part 1, please see below.)

Last we saw our fearless Co-Artistic Directors, they were in the middle of a dual to the death with the Dionysian forces attempting to overthrow their pet project Kinderspiel. Will their partner in criminally brilliant theatricality, the Dramaturg, step in and save the day? Stay tuned...

...

...

........

(trying to live up to the vicious insult that Alexia launched at me: blog tease. Can you believe that?! The nerve!)

....

...

............okay, I can't take it anymore. Our new and improved and more than slightly demented vision for Kinderspiel takes its lead from Hedwig and the Angry Inch (the play, not the movie). Through the structure of various musical acts, each fully genre'd, Hedwig tells his/her origin tale: how he became she and then he again (more or less. kind of. it's complicated. see the movie). Similarly, we'll present an evening cabaret performance composed of acts, moderated by an MC, which, combined with banter and monologue, will explain the origin story of the Kinderspielers and how they came to do what they do. Except our acts will be sequences of child's play, consisting not of play-acting, but the following tropes:

• Questions & Answers:
  
• ex. Q: "Why is the sky blue?" A: "Because if it was black we wouldn't be able to see anything during the daytime."
  
• These questions can be stimulated by real world phenomena or by imaginary constructs from the below tropes. They are often deadly serious and carry the force of logic.
  
• Role-Playing:
  
• ex #1: "Let's play house! You'll be the daddy and I'll be the mommy and we'll be poor because you can't get a job and I'll let in strange smelly men and give them a tour of the bedroom while you wait on bread lines."
  
• ex #2: [5 year old talking on pretend cellphone] "Hello, honey. I'm at the station! Can you hear me? I need you pick me up. I'm at the station. Can you pick me up at the station? I'm by the train."
  
• These simulations of "adult" life often boil down stereotypes of domestic life and ones community in ways that only the sharpest of satires can mimic.
  
• Games:
• ex: "Okay, so each time you walk past the bench you need to jump twice and say the name of the person behind you but unless you say it backwards you have to walk backwards."
  
• These games often have so many invented and/or improvised rules than no adult can comprehend how they could possibly be fun. But they are probably the truest example of direct democracy...assuming, of course, that there isn't a bossy 8-year old barking out all the rules herself!
  
• Experiments:
• ex: magnifying glasses on ants, salt on slugs, stacking things so high they fall and break, and designing and building a robot of scrap metal in the dumpster in the hopes of creating a friend who will clean your room, do your homework, and get you a girlfriend (not that I ever did that. Because I didn't! And I definitely didn't try to plug it in and get electrocuted! Who would be that stupid?! Stop looking at me like that!).
  
• These experiments can often be destructive and cruel but they can also be the way kids learn about life, death, gravity, electrocution, and many of the other truisms that will govern their adult lives.
  

Now, we ain't no psychologists (though I've been home-schooling a 10th grader in AP psych so I'm not totally clueless. At least I hope not...wait, am I?), but, as far as we can tell from our playground and playdate studies, these discrete activities and their overlap cover the gamut of child's-play that is infused with the same sort of glorious kid-logic as great children's literature.

(Cry for help: if anyone out in the blogosphere knows of actual studies that categorize and or analyze kid's play, please comment or email me directly so we can be better informed. Emily, can you cast about for this, too?)

So, if the piece is essentially the interwoven biographies of 5 kinderspielers, who are these Weimar-era men and women anyhow? Check back on Monday for details as we present Part 3 of Kinderspiel Korrections.

In the meantime, comments are eagerly solicited, especially on one troublesome subject in particular: how do we develop this piece in such a way that it is read as a riff on how childhood is processed by adults rather than just a celebration of the oft-cliched "wisdom of the child"?

Kinderspiel Korrections: Part 1

So, we spent about 3 weeks toying with a concept for Kinderspiel that just doesn't look like it will either a) actually address the questions we want to address or b) actually be possible to do.

Fortunately, we learned a lot in those 3 weeks of experiments. It can be awfully frustrating for all parties involved to flail about in unknown territory only to come to the conclusion that nothing has been concluded. But such is the valiant and commendable mission of a laboratory theatre company! The alternative is what? We would only do plays that were already written or develop ideas that we were 100% certain we could pull off. Where would the fun be in that?

As it stands now, Kinderspiel PR reads: "Set in the demimonde of Weimar Berlin, one cabaret offers access to the ultimate taboo: watching adults play as children. Stolen Chair presents the world's greatest children's story, told exclusively for an adult audience. After all, why should childhood be wasted on the young?"

In our rehearsal experiments, we had been interpreting "play as children" to mean "play-acting as children." Putting aside for the moment whether or not the nature of our ensemble's play-acting was or was not faithful to actual child's-play, this interpretation forcibly skews the play too far towards the Dionysian on Nietzsche's artistic spectrum (Um...can you tell I've been spending too long doing PR for Stolen Chair's gig at the Pretentious Festival?). While about 8 years ago, in the thick of my Grotowski-worship, I would have bribed, maimed, and killed for the opportunity to direct a paratheatrical experiment, Stolen Chair's whole formula is based on reinvigorating classical (or classic) structures. We make perversely-conceived and aesthetically-preposterous well-made plays. And...we tell stories! Good stories. We just couldn't find the Apollonian structures necessary to keep the play-acting component and find opportunities to forge those into a well-made play and a good story.

The chief problem play-acting poses is that it fully negates character; part of play-acting means so fully committing to the spirit of the moment that the social clues that reveal character just disappear. And it's reductive: while there's room therein for wild creativity, the plot tropes it seems to force (Grotowski similarly noticed that in his early paratheatre experiments, most of the improvisations revolved around certain banalities like pseudo-tribal conflict and group celebration) won't give us the opportunity to explore the questions which originally gave rise to this piece.

But, where does that leave us? Ah, well that's part two, coming to an RSS-feed near you in about 3 hours...

Brick-o-lage

Kiran, Cam, Liza, Emily, and I crouched down and crawled through the Brick's adorably lilliputian entrance for the first time today. The space is like an airier, brick-ier Red Room, with a layout that all the Chairs are really familiar with, narrow and deep. It was nice directing in the space and all of the Brick associates we met were really welcoming.

Tonight was a very special rehearsal: our first time actually digging into the moments that we've spent the past month creating. For those of you who haven't been in a rehearsal with us, we have an interesting 2-phase "blocking" process. Phase 1 happens in a frenzy, with what seems like 5 dozen people shouting out ideas simultaneously until the entire play is staged before any of us has anything even resembling a handle on the play's characters or important themes. This phase of the process can be very jarring for actors who like to cook up their characters slowly, especially when they don't know that Phase 2 will follow shortly thereafter.

Phase 2: we spend the rest of the rehearsal process refining/undoing our hastily staged moments so that can actually live in the same performative world and support character throughlines. This phase of the process can also be very frustrating for actors, especially those who wrote down the blocking for Phase 1 in pen :).

What I love about working with this company is by the time we're half-way through phase 2, I start to get existentially depressed as I watch rehearsal and see only brilliance on stage, no longer remembering an ounce of how I may once have contributed to said magic. I mean it: I actually enjoy wallowing in that deep despair because it's a testament to just how much of a big messy collaboration our work always is.

And now we just have to write the damn ending...

Go Em!

Our jaw-droppingly brilliant dramaturg/composer, Emily Otto, has joined me as a member of NYtheatre.com's summer reviewing squad.

Read all about it here.

"Put that in your blog and smoke it"

This posting's title is courtesy of Layna Fisher, Tuzia in our remount of Commedia dell'Artemisia. We are about 2/3 of the way done restaging the rewrites (with a recast ensemble) and I am having the time of my life working on this (and I hope the rest of the creative team is too). I spend most of each rehearsal laughing mine arse off, yet somehow we're right on schedule. I'm more than a little bit sad that we're only going to have three chances to share this.

Back when we first tossed up the possibility of remounting this show, I asked Emily (resident dramaturg) if it was an "immature" work. Not "immature" as in poop jokes and rubber chickens (alas, we haven't found a way to work either of these into Stolen Chair's ouevre), but "immature" insofar as it was something we developed before all of the growth that the company had in 2005 and 2006 (which was, in a sense, first catalyzed by the Stampede Festival performance of Commedia dell'Artemisia).

As we've rehearsed it over the past month, I've rediscovered a certain sharpness in it that really hasn't been in any of our pieces since. While I've blown out my vocal chords debating the "meaning" of most of our pieces, these meta-conversations about Commedia seem so much more loaded. Perhaps because this is one of the few projects on which we've worked that actually has the potential to raise controversy and ruffle the feathers of even the most liberal of audiences. It's a comedy about rape, a raucous and ribald farce about sexual violation, with a little torture thrown in for good measure (Hey, Kiran, you should make sure to work in some of the 24-backlash popularization of torture stuff into the last scene, huh?). And the rape we're satirizing is the actual historical forceful defloration of the Italian painter Artemisia Gentileschi. Delicate stuff, and we're not exactly "tip-toeing on egg shells" around it. We are trying, however, to be even more faithful to the story's original details, perhaps only because the truth, in this case, is far sicker (and, truth be told, far more comical) than any fiction we could invent.

Ultimately, the piece is a diatribe against those who attempt to universalize the subjectivity of human experience: those who look at Artemisia's "rape" and process it with the same context that it would have in our contemporary society, those who actually believe there is any throughline in the history of marriage (one besides the historical subjugation of women, of course), those who believe that great art has always been driven by personal demons, those who eschew responsibility for their ideologies by hiding behind a wall of tradition that is as variable as the Billboard music chart.

Diatribes aside, it also has more slapstick than any piece I've ever had the pleasure of directing. Prat falls, slaps, and kicks in the groin galore. Who could ask for anything more? (Hey, that was almost a couplet! Watch out, Kiran!)

There are only two NYC performances (and each house size is only about 50!) so buy your tickets now, and don't forget to support the rest of our friends at the Pretentious festival!!!

Pretentious Update

Tickets for our production of Commedia dell'Artemisia at the Pretentious Festival are now on sale. Buy 'em here.

We'll be doing a very special post for the Pretentious blog in a few days and we'll simul-post that here.

I'll also be sending out process updates on Kinderspiel and Commedia dell'Artemisia throughout the week.

What's the new news?

April's e-newsletter should be hitting inboxes as I write this. Any loyal blog-readers won't be surprised by any of the updates, though if any of you aren't already on our mailing list, sign up right now!

Festive post #100

While we're not likely going to be throwing a "100th Post Party," we nonetheless have some exciting news to share. The line-up and dates for the Pretentious Festival, the most important theater festival on earth, have been announced. We're very excited to aspire to the pretension of such fellow participants as Mr. Ian W. Will and Mr. Trav SD (both of whom I interviewed on the blog during the leadup to Kill Me Like You Mean It).

In a daring attempt to rival Moliere's greatest work and single-handedly revive the tradition of Commedia dell'Arte, Stolen Chair presents Commedia dell'Artemisia, a masked farce in rhyming couplets, satirizing the controversial rape trial of Italian Renaissance painter Artemisia Gentileschi. As the teenage virtuosa Artemisia tries to escape the clutches of her miserly father, she becomes entwined with Agostino Tassi, a master painter and criminal who would rather screw than woo. Transforming these complex historical figures into commedia stock characters, Stolen Chair irreverently eviscerates history, hypocrisy, rape, romance, art and artifice.

The production will perform on Sun 6/17 @ 2:30pm and Fri 6/29 @ 7pm at the Brick Theater. (...and, in case you've forgotten, between those two performances, Kinderspiel will have a staged reading at the Ohio Theatre as part of Soho Think Tank's 6th Floor Series on June 24th!)

To gear up for the piece, I'm thinking about launching a Commedia dell'Arte interview series on the blog and maybe even bring in an art historian to guest-blog about the historical background on which the play is based. In the meantime, I leave you with our research page and this link.

99 bottles of beer on the blog

Yep. We're up to post 99. You're all invited to celebrate #100 with us as we commemorate the momentous occasion by proceeding with business as usual...

Now to turn this into a real post:

After last week's scheduling snafu, we finally had our first post-retreat rehearsal for Kinderspiel today. Here's what we learned:

• Our threshold for boredom is extremely high. I was worried that in the work we were doing, we would be challenged to give ourselves permission to push past the place when repeated tasks, games, and play grow dull, but I just don't think we're ever going to get bored.
  
• 15 minutes of improvised play can be easily repeated. I gave a simple scenario to be explored. 5 actors would pretend to be asleep. I would tap 2 while their eyes were closed. When I clapped my hands, they were all to wake-up. The tapped actors would playact as giants and the other 3 as kids. I just let the improv roll for 15 minutes on camera. Afterwards, we talked about the inner logic that people were using to explain their role in the playworld and we collaboratively narrated the improv as a Grimm's fairy tale; it was no more or less absurd than any of those tales. I asked them to repeat the improv without losing the sense of spontaneity and discovery, and it ran 14 minutes and 40 seconds...the only thing that really distinguishes the two improvs on tape is that I stupidly tried to zoom in and frame shots in #2, basically meaning I lost most of the action.
  
• You can't MC unless you know your audience. Intuitive though it may seem to be, it did not occur to us that it would be difficult Alexia to experiment with the role of master conferencier without giving her any background on the fictional audience to which she was pandering.
• In developmental work, failed exercises are just as useful as successful ones. Like any other laboratory group, sometimes we put an idea out there that falls so miserably flat that we just mop it under the risers and pretend it never happened. In Kinderspiel, however, these exercises are just as important to the feedback loop, and today, one of my (overly ambitious and complicated) activities flopped but nevertheless yielded some of the day's most productive advances.

After the day's highs and lows, we headed over to Sympathy for the Kettle to guzzle some tea and sort out how we should proceed. The current formula:

1. Videotaped improvisation of a simple scenario (i.e. 2 giants and 3 kids wake up in the same space)
2. Group discussion of the improv's kids-logic and literary tropes
3. Before the next rehearsal, Kiran prepares a draft of the improv, rewriting it to reference said tropes more clearly, weave into societal analogues, metaphors, and morals, and add narration for the MC.
   
4. Try to fuse the original improv with the new text without losing the spirit of spontaneity.
   
5. Create an embarrassing video montage and post it on youtube (Optional)
   

At some point in the not too distant future, we're also going to need to begin kinderspieling as Weimar characters instead of as ourselves. We'll probably have the actors research photos and histories to develop a character and then see how these characters can play together.

Assuming that the final "product" for which we're shooting will be a sort of neverending story in which characters, props, and space continually transform to become new characters, props, and space, we need to explore what happens to the kinderspielers when they are not actively involved in the moment's play. Do they sit down and play cards and drink beer? Do they break-off into smaller groups and parallel play until their play intersects with the narrative again? I think we'll actually have to kind of reverse-engineer this: for the time being we'll just have people leave the stage and then, once we figure out how they'll need to reintegrate into the narrative, we'll find something for them to do onstage that can develop into the role they will need to serve in the story.

Simple, right? We'll see how this all goes...

The mean bone in our body

A few weeks ago, Kiran and I got quite a thrill listening to the new cast (featuring Stolen Chair's evil genius* set designer David Bengali, Stage Kiss's Layna Fisher, and SCTC resident actors Cameron Oro and Liza Wade White) read through Commedia dell'Artemisia for the first time. It's fast, it's funny, and it's filled with vitriol, like the sort they used to fling at those medieval-soldier-types as they tried to scale the castle's keep. As cynical as KMLYMI was, we have never since created anything that is as downright mean as Commedia... And I don't mean "mean-spirited" or "negative," I mean "ruthlessly and unapologetically nasty."

But it's funny. And it's really delightful. And it's mean-ingful.

As we've begun to rehearse the piece, it's been a treat allowing ourselves to forget the production's last incarnation and build the new production from the ground up, allowing the new performers to fully own these characters. The only moment that I would have been tempted to keep, I had to reimagine anyway, as Cameron doesn't quite have the circus-chops to do the front flip that Jon Campbell used to do just before the rape scene...oh, and speaking of rape scene: this sweet and innocent li'l comedy of ours actually has the stage direction "He rapes her."

The piece is rather magical insofar as it pretty much stages itself. Once an ensemble can get used to sharing the mask with the audience and figures out how to clearly demarcate each state change (similar to beat changes, except each one is played to 11, as they say in Spinal Tap, and they happen in rapid succession and seemingly without internal motivation), moments seem to flow logically from each other.

While we certainly had comic bits and business in the Stampede Fest version of the piece in early 2005, Jon Campbell and I (who had trained in classical improvised commedia) were disappointed that we didn't let any extended lazzi develop. While in lots of places, these lazzi would conflict with the timing of Kiran's couplets, I'm really eager to find at least 3 or 4 places where we can just run free of the text for a few minutes. That said, I know that can't happen until we have total security in the skeleton of the piece, something we were never able to achieve in the compressed developmental process for version 1.0.

Kiran's actually setting out to tinker with the script a bit for version 2.0, but it's certainly not going to be anything close to the overhaul that happened between Stages Kiss 2003 and Stage Kiss 2006 (which, as those who caught both know: had NOTHING in common!). She's probably just going to punch up some of the less punchy lines and maybe add a little bit more interaction between Tuzia (Artemisia's neighbor/surrogate mother) and Orazio (Artemisia's dad) and/or Tuzia and Tassi (Artemisia's tutor/rapist). We're tossing around the idea of reworking the ending so that the double-casting (the actress who plays Artemisia also plays the judge) can be a product of the plotting itself, but we still need to let that idea incubate a bit more before it hatches...

Can't wait until next rehearsal on Thursday...it's ladies night: just Liza and Layna. :)

*David is not, in fact, evil. But he is, in fact, a genius. I'm not kidding. And even if he wasn't a genius (which he is), he looks enough like a genius to pass as one.

Putting the "fun" back into annual fundraising drive...

It begins: that time of year when Stolen Chair ever-so-subtly asks you to dig deep into your pockets to support one of NYC's most ambitious indie theatre companies (that's us!).

We'll be sending out our fancy-pants trifold brochures and solicitation letters next week, but if you're ready to contribute now, you can save a few saplings and donate now.

For those who want to maximize their gift and minimize the impact this gift has on their wallets, we've introduced recurring monthly donations.

Visit donate.stolenchair.org this instant and we'll try to make this whole fundraiser thing as quick and painless as possible.

Old press is good press

"...twists truth and lies into a theatrical pretzel that circles around itself for 90 tight, funny minutes."

Check out Jeff Lott's review of Kill Me Like You Mean It and profile of Stolen Chair in the March issue of the Swarthmore Alumni Bulletin.

Available in pretty .pdf or humble .html...

Double-booked

For the first time in Stolen Chair's history, we're rehearsing two pieces simultaneously.

How did this happen?

As some of you may remember from an earlier posting ("Alma Mater Matters"), we were invited to bring a piece to Swarthmore College's 2007 Alumni Weekend Reunion. Not only will this be our first time bringing a piece to a college campus, it will be Kiran and my 5 year college reunion and the 5th anniversary of Stolen Chair's founding. Oh, the nostalgia!

We spent a long time thinking about what piece to bring to the event and had to consider two major factors:

1. Mood: The spirit of most colleges' alumni weekends is usually pretty rowdy, so we had to knock The Man Who Laughs out of the running, figuring most alums wouldn't appreciate a tearjerker at 5pm on a Saturday, right before they head off to a party to hook-up with their freshman flame. We assumed that something with a libidinous streak would pair nicely with our audience's energy, leaving us with Stage Kiss and Commedia dell'Artemisia.
   
2. Time: Though we could technically perform a piece of any length, doing so would likely mean alienating a majority of alums from our audience as most like to bounce from activity to activity. Stage Kiss hovers at about 90 minutes, so Commedia dell'Artemisia (gliding just past the 45 minute mark) seemed the natural choice.

Commedia dell'Artemisia??? What's that?!

Short answer (otherwise known as a blurb, in this case the ultra-pretentious blurb we submitted with our application for the Brick's Pretentious Festival): In a daring attempt to rival Moliere's greatest work and single-handedly revive the tradition of Commedia dell'Arte, Stolen Chair presents Commedia dell'Artemisia, a masked farce in rhyming couplets, satirizing the controversial rape trial of Italian Renaissance painter Artemisia Gentileschi. As the teenage virtuosa Artemisia tries to escape the clutches of her miserly father, she becomes entwined with Agostino Tassi, a master painter and criminal who would rather screw than woo. Transforming these complex historical figures into commedia stock characters, Stolen Chair irreverently eviscerates history, hypocrisy, rape, romance, art and artifice.

Long answer: Well, in 2004, Stolen Chair created (and self-produced) a piece called Virtuosa, a collective creation freely inspired by the lives and work of three female painters of the Italian Renaissance: Sofonisba Anguissola, Lavinia Fontana, and Artemisia Gentileschi. The play was a collage of different styles, one of them being a 10-minute long commedia dell'arte inspired farce in rhyming couplets, superimposing commedia stock characters onto the real life historical figures of Artemisia Gentileschi, her father (painter Orazio Gentileschi), the man she accused of rape (painter Agostino Tassi), and the neighbor who acted as a procuress (Tuzia). The piece let us throw our voices as Moliere, taking on the sexual hypocrisy inherent in the trial's original controversy and the equally hypocitical ways Artemesia's story was reclaimed by the feminist movement.

Later that year, Stolen Chair wanted to apply to the much-lauded Stampede Festival (produced by Feed the Herd Theatre Company), but we didn't have a new piece up our sleeve. We sent the festival's producer the 10-minutes of Commedia that we cannibalized from Virtuosa and we were accepted. Great! Except...we got this news just before X-mas and opening night was the first weekend in February. We had no cast and no script. The only reason we even had masks was because I was currently teaching a 10-week Commedia dell'Arte course for 9th graders.

Kiran put together a script by the new year, we found a terrific cast and somehow, over the course of our briefest rehearsal period ever (20 hours spread over 3 weeks plus about a half-dozen hours of tech, at best!), we managed to put on a show that was well-received (sold out all performances except for Super Bowl Sunday) and finally allowed us to make Martin Denton's acquaintance. Oh, and did I mention I was in it? Yep, the first and last time that I tried to direct and perform.

But now, over 3 years after the zygotic version of the piece first appeared, we decided it would climb out of rep for a one-night stand at Swarthmore College with an all-new all-star cast. It seemed a shame to get the show all tarted up for just one night out on the town, so we applied to the Brick's Pretentious Festival and we were accepted for two performances in June.

So, we are busy as Brighella (sorry, commedia reference) getting the piece back on its feet and it is a blast, if only because this time I get to sit back and watch all of the proceedings without having to put my actor cap on.

But....

Today we also had the first post-retreat rehearsal of Kinderspiel. Blurb? Sure: Set in the demimonde of Weimar Berlin, one cabaret offers access to the ultimate taboo: watching adults play as children. Stolen Chair presents the world's greatest children's story, told exclusively for an adult audience. After all, why should childhood be wasted on the young? Kinderspiel was accepted into Soho Think Tank's 6th Floor Series for a staged reading on June 25, and will enjoy a full run at UNDER St. Marks in late September.

It is exhilarating (for me, at least) to have these rehearsals back-to-back. I can actually feel myself becoming a better theatre-maker by virtue of the quick gear-shifting I have to do, allowing me to become more aware of the elements of my directorial identity that are project/style specific and those that are tied to my overall vision of theatre-making.

I'll be blogging about both of these pieces at length either tonight or tomorrow morning...

Blogger's block

So, I think this stretch of blog-silence has been the longest since post #1. Why? Well, for starters, I haven't yet figured out the blogging balancing act of juggling this blog and my personal food blog ("Three Little Truffle Pigs"). A more thrilling answer, perhaps, is that Stolen Chair is currently in the midst of much excitement: 2 shows, our annual fundraiser drive, grant frenzy, our first college tour, our first festival appearance since early 2005, and more.

In the next few hours, I'll try to break this all down into a handful of shorter blog postings...

Child by proxy

In 1st grade we had something called the Miss Piggy Contest. For each book we read, we received a Miss Piggy sketch that we cut out and glue-sticked (or is that glue-stuck?) to our composition notebooks. The first grader with the most Miss Piggy pages won. Ever the deal-maker, I convinced my teacher that since I was reading Hardy Boys and other big chapter books while everyone else was reading picture books, I deserved two stickers for each book. I easily overwhelmed the competition and won the grand prize of...a composition book filled with Miss Piggy pages. That's it.

In the past few weeks, I've been reading nearly as feverishly as during my golden Miss Piggy days, but instead of burning my way through books a few years ahead of my reading level (wouldn't it be great if adults had a "reading level?" Judith Butler writing for a 35-year old reading level? Salman Rushdie for the 45-55 set?) , I've been devouring children's literature so I can begin to get a handle on the tropes. I'm proud to announce I've read every last fairy and household tale of the Brothers Grimm and just finished the last delightful page of Dahl's BFG.

So, what did I learn?

Well, in most of the great children's literature I've been reading, from Dahl to Grimm to Kastner to Snicket to Carroll, the child protagonists don't actually think in kid-logic. The kids are usually very down-to-earth, pragmatic, sensible, and fully socialized, with flights of fancy few and far between. And yet, the fictional worlds in these works always seem to follow the rules of kid-logic: wildly unimaginable (to adults, at least) events occur spontaneously (and yet organically) and are accepted without question. What's particularly brilliant and insidious about the work of Kastner and Snicket is that this frighteningly unpredictable world with unstable rules is not some fictional wonderland, but the actual world. And actually, even the most fanciful elements of the work of Grimm and Dahl and Carroll are still fully in dialogue (sometimes fabulously anachronistically so) with the authors' contemporary worlds. In one of the Grimm's tales, a talking sausage has been sent to go cut wood to bring home for his friends the mouse and the bird (yes it is an AMAZING story!) and is devoured by a hungry dog who later justifies his actions by saying the sausage wasn't carrying the appropriate travel documents.

Now, how a child protagonist resolves her conflict with the absurdist worlds she encounters reveals quite a bit about a book's overall message. In some of the pieces (think Alice and Wendy), the protagonist expends all of her energy trying to make the nonsensical land conform. In others (think of Snicket's Violet Baudelaire, Kastner's Emil and Dahl's Sophie), the children are forced (usually under threat of real danger) to accept the world as it is; in abandoning their conformity they usually find the solution to their dilemma. One model bespeaks the child's struggle to master her own inner absurdist in order to transition to the adult world, the other validates the child's "special" modes of cognition and creativity.

This is interesting to me. Very. But it also brings me to another point. The tensions between the adult world (represented by child) and the child world (as represented by proxies, be they giants, witches or what-have-yous) are most often articulated (even in the Grimm's stories) by a wry omniscient narrator.

Now I struggle: how can we commit to creating a world of group fantasy and show its interaction with the everyday without such a narrative presence? And if we have one, how can that narrator be present without undercutting the world of play?

Thoughts?

All right. You all ponder; I'm off to try to get 2005's Commedia dell'Artemisia back on its feet with an all-new cast...

Inspiration or something like it

So, after my last post which took stock of where our company stood after our retreat for "The Weimar Fairy Tale Project," Kiran and I struggled to figure out what the next step should be for the project. It was like writer's block but worse: co-artistic directors' block [cue dramatic outro music]! This has never happened to us before and it's very clear why it's happened this time. We've always started with either a style or a story or a something. This time one could say we were starting with a concept, but only in the broadest sense of the word. It is only through realizing the many ways this project parallels Stage Kiss that we were able to begin making sense of it. And now that Kiran and I have wrapped our wee wee heads around this big ol' beast of a project, we need to bring our collaborators back in and see if our ideas hold water (or anything else, for that matter!). After a week of discussion, I'd like us to hit the studio and try making some art and stuff. If, by early May, we (and I probably mean it royally here) don't feel like the project's off and running, we'll take stock again and see if we need to whip up a totally new project proposal.

So, here's what we've come up with:

In Kinderspiel (note the new working title!), Stolen Chair presents a transgressive and debauched drag performance which, instead of deconstructing gender, seeks to break down binaries between adults and children. Set in the world of Weimar Berlin, one cabaret offers access to the ultimate taboo, an opportunity to watch adults play as children do. After all, “child’s play” is too important to be squandered on the young.

Here's what this means:

The thing that emerged as most exciting from the retreat (for us, at least!) was not the transgressive power of seeing adults perform as children because, frankly, after enough productions of Peter Pan and enough SNL sketches, that particular effect has lost much of its edge. What actually seemed to carry transgressive power was seeing adults (clearly marked as such) play the way children do. At this point we felt torn between--you'll have to pardon the intrusion of intro-level undergraduate performance theory--Apollonian and Dionysian models. We were frustrated that the path which seemed to make the most sense was an Artaudian/Paratheatrical environment in which the audience not only watches adults get their child-like groove on, but also has an opportunity to indulge in that play themselves...all in all a very UN-Stolen Chair endeavor. On the other hand, we worried that the sense of play we were after would be crushed by the sort of repetition that a more formal production would require.

The world we're imagining might look something like this (much of this would just be contextual backstory, of course):

• A group of characters drawn from the Weimar-era Berlin demi-monde have decided to escape the repression and depression of everyday life by creating a Kinderspiel club. (Kinderspiel translates to "child's play," "a play performed by children," and "a play performed for children.")
• Their activities have begun to attract attention from the wider public, and what started off as a private club soon transforms into a major Berlin hotspot, though the proceedings face continual opposition from the Communists, National Socialists, and Capitalists, all of whom have different reasons for frowning upon such transgression.
• The performance itself would be an extended session of "pretend," in which the Kinderspielers would create, with just the cheap props and set they have on hand, the world's greatest children's story, an anachronistic pastiche of children's literary tropes (ideally fused with the actors play as seamlessly as drag performance and Elizabethan-pastiche were fused in Stage Kiss).

It's our hope that the piece will:

1. Be even more "emancipating" (as reviewer Will Cordeiro put it) than Stage Kiss insofar as its dedication to kid-logic will create a topsy-turvy world of unstable meanings and deconstructed dogmas.
   
2. Allow a space for audience members (of any age) to break down (with delight) the usual divide between the social spheres respectively designated for adults and children
   
3. Allow a space for audience members (of any age) to enjoy the subversive naughtiness of children's literature without feeling condescended to.
   
4. Be a blast to perform given the balance between psychotically high-charged improvisatory energy and precisely scored performance.
5. Use the backdrop of the Weimar-era's tensions between sociopolitical despair and liberatory sub-culture to explore how participation in transgressive performance can range from active subversion to passive escapism.
   

So, Chairs, have at that! Feel free to post comments on the blog if you want to go public with your thoughts, but it would be great if all of you could email me or the group list and let everyone know what you're excited about so we can move forward on this. And if you're not one of our collaborators but tuning in all the same, feel free to post away in the comments section as well.