Costumes

I come in peace

Last year we had the lovely Madira Hoffman designing costumes for Copenhagen.  But this show... this show has a bit more challenging requirements.  Seascape takes place by the ocean.  And there are some rather interesting characters that come out of the ocean to take part in the show.  Specifically, giant sea creatures.  And that means building costumes.

The amazingly talented and creative Shannon Clark is designing and building our lizards and we couldn't be happier.  He's taken a look at some previous productions, some actual lizards (including the Galapagos Sea Iguanas and the Komodo Dragon) and come up with his own design.  Here we see the first step in the process.  Ryan Brock has been fitted for the base of the costume.  Onto this will go scales ridges and a tail (a big tail...  he's proud of his tail).  We're lucky to have Shannon working on the show,and we'll keep posting pictures of his work as it comes together.  But to see the finished product... well you'll have to buy a ticket for that.

And We're Off!

Seascape had it's official first rehearsal tonight.  Usual first rehearsal stuff.  Calendar, talk about the set, read through the script.

It was great.  Great in that way that starting things is.  You see so much possibility, so many ideas forming. But it was also great in that way that first reads are.  It's such a reminder that a play is a verb not a noun.  It is a thing that happens not a thing that is.  When one reads a play at home, you can come to some ideas about a character, what is going on, why, but then you hear another person who has taken it in, has thought, and begins to breathe the character, and something completely different can come out.  Several times in the read through an actor showed me something I hadn't seen before.  Each time it was a discovery, like looking closer at a picture, noticing a fine detail.  I just love being surprised in that way, it's a magical thing.  The play isn't static, it's fluid. That very malleability is what makes plays so endlessly watchable.

Anyway, I'm really looking forward to this show.

Beginnings

So, this post is about beginnings.  We will begin our rehearsal process Monday, and I'm equal parts excited and trepidatious.  I know this show is going to be great.  Our cast is great, our crew is great, our designers are great, and our director... our director has wisely surrounded himself with great people.  I'm really excited about the show.  We're just about to get started with actual rehearsals, but John and I have been working on it for months, trying to tie up the details and smooth everything into place.

But I want to talk about another beginning.  One more important to local theatre than the start of our little adventure on Monday.  You see, a new beginning is happening at our venue, Common Ground.  Last year we did a week at Common Ground and a week at The ArtsCenter in Carrboro (for various reasons, it worked out best that way).  This year, we're happy that we'll be exclusively at Common Ground.  Very happy, since we will have a set that will be a little harder to move than 3 chairs this year.  And Common Ground will be having a very special new beginning of its own.

As reported in the Indy this week, Devra Thomas is taking over Common Ground Theatre, and Seascape is going to be the FIRST show in the space under her guidance.

Now let me say up front that this caused me (and in turn I caused Rachel) a bit of consternation.  When I found out about it, my immediate reaction was "what do you mean Rachel won't be running Common Ground?  What's going on?  Oh no!"  But after several (yes several, I can be a bit of a panic, sorry Rachel) emails, and learning that Devra was taking over the company, well I couldn't be happier.

Rachel has done so much (SO much) for local theatre.  Let me say that the reason we produce at Common Ground is that it is a good space that is affordable.  Common Ground is cheap enough that you can fail.  You can put up a show, and have no one come, and it won't kill you.  That's the kind of cost structure you need for independent, experimental, or just plain community theatre.  Almost every other space we looked at (other than The ArtsCenter who were great co-hosts last year) was just too expensive.  In addition to being an excellent director and a hell of an actor when she's on stage, Rachel has kept Common Ground available, open, and .. well there as an amazing resource for the theatre community.   I've seen some bad shows there, but some absolutely incredible ones too (boy, one of my favorite shows ever was LGP's production of Pinter's "The Birthday Party" there.  Good stuff).

Anyway, Devra is a great choice.  And really, not enough is said for those that work at arts administration. Raleigh recently lost an amazing and creative company with a long tradition (REP), and ... well I don't know what the heck is going on with NC Shakes after they cancelled their production of Mackers (how ironic..).  Things like that really make you realize the critical importance of good administration.  You're a fantastic actor.  You're a director with incredible vision.  Well, good, but if you don't have an organization behind you who will know (and let me be clear, this isn't a fame thing... I mean, you want people to come to your show right?  You want to connect with them, and have a meaningful experience right?  The point of theatre is that it has an audience after all).  Without people shepherding our arts organizations, watching their budget, fund raising, and managing costs, well, all the other stuff, the fun stuff, the costumes, the lights, the audience the theatre, that stuff DOESN'T HAPPEN.  It can't happen.  Having artisitc vision, having a company, creating a community, creating art with your audience, none of that happens if you spend too much on costumes and don't pay the light bill.  Just as much as theatre needs great artists, it also needs great people who care about theatre enough to use their considerable talents to make the conditions right.  They set the oven to the right temperature, they buy the ingredients, and they find the right dish so that the chef can make the pie.

All of which is a (very) long winded way to say that Devra is just that sort of person. She cares deeply, passionately about theatre, as much as any actor or director I've ever met, and having someone with that skill set and dedication is going to be an amazing asset for Common Ground.  I'm thrilled that we're going to be the production that bridges this transition, and I hope we make both Devra and Rachel proud of the amazing space that they have created for the triangle theatre community.

Seascape - The Cast

I'm pleased to formally post the cast list for Seascape:

Charlie:  John Honeycutt
Nancy: Julie Oliver
Leslie: Ryan Brock
Sarah: Samantha Corey

I am really honored to be working with such a strong group of actors.  The fact that such great people are putting their trust in me as a director/co-producer fills me with pride.  I know this show will be great already.
Someone asked me what I'd be doing as a director.  With this cast... basically trying to stay out of their way! I look forward to helping craft the play, asking questions, helping the actors make choices that are clear and consistent, helping them find the reality of their characters in their physical and vocal performance.  But mostly, yeah, I'll be a resource for support and an extra set of eyes.

When he directed me in Earnest, Jack Hall made the observation that "theatre is an actor's medium, film is a director's medium" and that statement is quite true.  In film, a director can choose which camera angle to use.  Which take, which performance.  Sometimes directors will film rehearsal and use that (because they feel the spontaneity of the performance is important).  Sometimes directors will shoot a scene 40 or 50 times (Kubrick had a reputation for doing this).  Through the use of editing and selection, the director can really control the performance and the choices in film.  The pace, the tone, even the meaning of the scenes can really be altered by the choices made in the editing room.  In theatre, it's very much the opposite.  You can work and work a piece, you can prepare an actor, you can discuss motivation, objectives, personality, choices, etc for weeks.  But when the curtain goes up, those choices belong to the actor.  The actor has to be completely comfortable in the character and just be.  And that's not something the director can control. You have to prepare with the actors, and then give them control.  Ultimately, it's about trusting each other's vision, understanding and art.  Which is why I'm really looking forward to working with such a talented cast.

I'm really looking forward to this show.  You should be too.

Seascape

South Stream Productions is proud to announce it's second show ever.  Seascape by Edward Albee.  Production dates are Jan 3-5 and 9-12.  This time, all shows will be at Common Ground, which will be easier for us.

We'll be announcing a bunch more stuff as planning progresses.  We're six months out, so we are in the very beginning of the planning process.  There will be lots of details coming.  Hopefully as we go through the process we'll talk some about costumes (there's an interesting costume challenge with this one) and set (yeah, we'll need more than 3 chairs this time), and other stuff.  We will be running a kickstarter campaign again to pre-sell tickets and (if you're so inclined) get your name in the program.  Maybe even some other goodies.

But that stuff is in the future.  Right now, I wanted to let people know that we have the rights to the show, and we're about to finalize the venue contract, and it looks like it's going to happen, so I want to start getting the word out there.  I'm already planning, reading, planning, reading.... The more I read this script, the more I just love it.  So put it on your calendar, coming, in January 2014, let's go to the beach!

photo by jimg944, used under creative commons liscense

In Memory of Eugen Merzbacher

I wanted to take a moment to recognize the passing of our friend Eugen Merzbacher last Thursday, June 6.

He was the advisor for our production of "Copenhagen."  He and his wife Ann were most kind to us. They invited John and I to their home and told us stories of meeting Niels and Margrethe Bohr during their year at the institute.  They provided us with biographical material, and even shared pictures with us.  It was such a thrill to talk to people who actually knew the people involved in our story, and Eugen literally wrote the book on quantum mechanics.  Eugen and Ann's kindness and assistance brought a richness to our production that we would not have had otherwise.  We will miss Eugen and our thoughts and prayers are with Ann.

John Honeycutt, Eugen Merzbacher, and Brook North

On Race

Oh good, a white guy talking about race.  Clearly there's not enough of that on the internet (and cable tv, and ...).  What could possibly go wrong?

So I saw Once on This Island last night at RLT.  I am not a big musical theatre person but it was nice.  The woman who played the Mother Earth goddess was ridiculous good, and over all the songs were catchy and the dancing was pretty tight for a community theater production (with a couple real stand-outs).  But...  It was white.  Very white.

Ok, so if you're not familiar with the story, check out the wikipedia page.   The entire show takes place on Haiti, and the central conflict revolves around the racial politics of the island, and the separation between the peasants who are "black as night" and the grande hommes who are mulatto, being mix-race descendants of the former French colonialists (Beauxhomme, the male lead/object of privilege is described as having skin "the color of coffee with cream").  This racial dynamic is not only important to the plot, but it seems kind of important to the message of the play too.  That the people of Haiti, after staging the only successful slave rebellion in history, managed to re-create a cast system based primarily on racial lineage which they had just rejected.  The grande hommes culturally aspire to be French (sending their children to expensive French schools) while they are still not considered French by the French.  They still suffer rejection because they reach out toward their former colonial state for cultural validation rather than embrace the peasant culture (from which they are also descended).  This is particularly brought to the fore in the ball scene where Ti-Moune performs a peasant dance at the grand ball which connects with the audience of grande hommes who had previously been dancing in European style.  The rejection of peasant culture as "low" and the raising up of European culture as "high" and the parallel dynamic in skin tone are prominent themes in the piece.

In this casting, well, all the grande hommes and a number of the peasants are white, as is the goddess Erzulie (goddess of love).  And that's... well it's challenging.  When I saw the cast in the opening number I thought "uh oh."  I mean, it's tricky right?

Lemme back up.  One of my earliest experiences with theatre was playing "Phra-Alack" in the King and I.  Now, the King and I is, quite obviously a play set in another specific cultural place, Thailand (Siam in the play).  And my character was "Phra-Alack."  And if you know me, you know I'm about the whitest white boy around (back then I even had blonde hair to go with the blue eyes).  Now the production was in San Rafael, California, across the Golden Gate from San Francisco, but even there, there were very few Asians in our cast (hmm parallels?).  That meant... well it meant hair dye and makeup (yep, I'm pretty sure we were in yellow face, at least we had eye makeup) for a bunch of little kids, and ad-lib Thai language (yes, I just made shit up that sounded Asian... hey, I was like, 9 or 10 or something).  Looking back, I feel a little embarrassed, but also, it was a lovely show.  Really.  A lovely script and I was enthralled by the older (what, probably high school aged looking back) performers.  And I'm glad that people didn't look at the show and go "well, we'll never get enough Asians to come out for this, let's do My Fair Lady instead."

It's not necessarily a bad choice.  On one level, well, you cast who auditions for your show.  Shows that tell stories from other perspectives are really important.  This is a good story with really fun music, why shouldn't we do it?  If casting white people in Once on This Island lets you produce the show, if it gets the story told, well then good!  If you have auditions and few performers of color show up, do you cancel the show?  That seems worse to me.  We shouldn't shy away from telling these stories because we feel uncomfortable playing people of a different race or background.  If anything, we need to seek out MORE voices and themes from different perspectives.  Heck, that's part of what makes theatre valuable.  The ability to relate to other people, to empathize.  Putting on the mask of another culture or experience helps us (and hopefully our audience) realize the basic commonality of experience we share as humans.  We live in story and hearing someone else's story makes us realize that.  Should people in upstate Minnesota never produce this lovely show because of the casting?  How much poorer would we be if we felt that way?

But, but but... Well, the flip side of this is that we're not exactly in Minnesota are we?  If RLT did the King and I they're gonna have to cast lots of non-Asians, but Raleigh is 29% African American, Durham is 43.8% African American.  Why wasn't the talent pool of available people deep enough that you could cast it, well at least somewhat more racially appropriately?

Now there are a couple explanations for this.  First of all, it's poor coordination.  Justice Theatre Project is about to open Ragtime, another show that calls for a large African American casting.  I know there are a number of performers in Ragtime who would have loved to play roles in this show (and would have been great) but you can't be in two places at once.  Coordination is a persistent problem in the triangle (IMHO as an audience member).  Last season we were treated to two productions of Next to Normal and two productions (one weekend simultaneously running) of The 39 Steps. This season it looks like we'll get two productions of The Tempest plus one more Tempest-themed show.  I don't know why but this tends to happen. It would have been nice, as an audience member, if JTP and RLT had found a way to let me see people shine in both productions.  And the overlap, well at a certain point maybe you just run up against supply limitations.

I also feel that there's a larger issue.  I see it more in some groups than in others, but I will say in general, theatre around here tends to be pretty white.  I noticed this especially with the Durham Savoyards, a group that produces an annual Gilbert and Sullivan musical in Durham.  Durham is basically half black.  There are almost no African Americans in their company.  That's just ... well it's odd.  Don't mistake me, I think they're great folks, and I honestly think their process is race blind (as much as that is possible for any human). Their auditions are always open calls and I am sure they would happily cast talent no matter what their race in any role.  It's not a matter of being racist, or not being welcoming.  I think it's more a matter of not reaching outside of your regular channels for talent.  It just seems like an annual theatre production with open casting in a community like ours, well if there are very few African Americans in it, there must be a problem somewhere right? It's much easier to post the audition announcement in the Indy and on your website and then just sit back and see who shows up.  But ultimately you aren't engaging new audience, and you probably aren't getting the best people on stage.  If your population is half black and you have one person in a twenty person cast that is black, well, I'm pretty sure you don't have the best possible actors for your show, just based on math.  Finding a way to reach out to new communities would broaden the audience and produce better shows.  Outreach also means, if you're serious about it, casting all your shows in a more race blind manner.  If your African American performers know that the only character they can audition for in "The Crucible" is Tituba, well, they're not going to come out for that.  And maybe the next show too, and by the time you want them, they're not part of your community any longer.  You can't do "ok this is our large black cast show" once every two years and call that outreach and inclusiveness.  There's nothing wrong with casting white people in Once on This Island as long as you're casting black people (and Asians etc) in Oklahoma.

There probably are larger issues of race and privilege at play here.  I'm not going to say a lot about that because, well I don't have a lot of personal knowledge or information, so anything I say is pretty speculative, but theatre means having free time that you can give, and paying for gas to get back and forth, and, especially for musical theater, paying for and attending training like dance classes and voice lessons.  And there probably are some cultural issues too: that theatre is seen as culturally "white" because so much of our "classic" theatre is ... well it's written by white men and so from a white male perspective, and is typically performed with white casts.  Now that doesn't need to be a barrier (James Earl Jones recently played Big Daddy on Broadway), but it can be, and, especially for people just getting into theatre, I suspect the voice of many plays being one of privilege, is a barrier.

All this being said... the cast does a great job.  Maybe RLT could do a better job with outreach, but ultimately that's down to the company management, not the director or his cast.  And I wanted to say that they played it correctly.  They were admirably clear in who they were, and the script and the song supports that.  Admittedly it was odd watching a blond haired, fair skinned Hatian love goddess sing about love conquering a racial divide between two people who were, well, not very racially divided.  But once you get into it, it isn't a barrier to enjoyment of the piece, and the cast did an admirable job of just presenting their characters with conviction in movement and voice.  As an audience member, the cast did not leave me questioning their choices or the show, but the casting in general, and what it says about the theatre community in the triangle, raises issues that can't (and shouldn't) be ignored.