Tag: Theater

Samuel Johnson on Reality in Theater

Theatre is powerful because it works in exact concordance with the way our heads work (not the way reality works). To quote Samuel Johnson (via Harold Bloom in Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human): “Imitations produce pain or pleasure not because they are mistaken for realities but because they bring realities to mind.” The truthfulness of the theatre is determined by the audience. Theatre is consensus. And that consensus is a function of characters who speak and act the way characters in our collective head speak and act. In other words: archetypes. Success can only be measured by the ratio of what I (the artist) see, versus what the audience thinks they see. Marcel Duchamp, a great lover of science, suggested this ratio. He said the closer to one-to-one this ratio becomes, the greater the artist. But of course, no one can measure such a ratio.

Wake Up and Smell the Coffee
Eric Bogosian
From the end section – BUILDING CHARACTER MY METHOD FOR CREATING THE SOLOS

Denver Center for the Performing Arts – Behind the Scenes Tour, Pics from

https://www.denvercenter.org/behind-the-scenes-tour/
Tour Admission
$12.00 ticket(s) + $2.16 fee(s)

Fun time. Recommended.

Note to non-Denver residents, the theater near you might have a similar tour.
As an example: https://www.msg.com/guided-tours/chicago-tours/chicago-theatre-tour

Set Design and Long Day’s Journey Into Night

When the play ends it is well past midnight. The three men, exhausted by drink and confession, are spaced about the living room in the semi-darkness like gutted animals. Over their heads the addicted mother moves around the upstairs rooms rummaging among her belongings for trophies of her lost youth. She has been offstage for the entire fourth act. The men are suddenly alerted by her footsteps as she starts to come downstairs. O’Neill has meticulously prepared for this moment, drip-feeding the audience little by little with the information that will give it power. It is one of the most extraordinary moments of theatre in twentieth-century drama, and the most honestly earned, and it is achieved simply by someone turning on an electric light.

I need to digress for a moment to describe our set in a little more detail. It consisted of a living room beyond which, through folding doors, was a more formal space with a suite of furniture and a piano. The position of the four folding doors was slightly different for each scene. In the last act only one of the panels was open and the piano was out of sight. Michael Annals had supplied a wonderful detail to his design. Above the folding doors was a fanlight of fretworked wood. When the light was turned on by someone whom we cannot yet see but can only be the mother, the pattern of the fanlight reared up out of the darkness and a column of light spilled into the room through the one open panel. In performance, both onstage and in the auditorium, there was a silence so dense with anticipation that you felt you could slice it.

Then suddenly, out of sight, we hear the piano being played, a clumsy, childish attempt at a Chopin waltz. I’d insisted on live music, preferably played on a piano that needed tuning, and we’d engaged the vocal coach, Chuck Mallett, to supply it, which he did with great skill, mimicking the arthritic fingers which were meant to be doing the playing. The music abruptly stops and the audience’s anticipation is now informed by misgiving. The mother, holding her wedding dress over one arm, steps into the open panel of light. Connie looked exactly as O’Neill describes her: ‘The uncanny thing is that her face appears so youthful. It is a marble mask of girlish innocence.’ Lost in the past and oblivious of her family she begins to recount her life as a young girl in the care of the nuns at her convent. She drifts across the room not addressing but by turns in the proximity of each member of her family. Finally I had her arrive stage right beside the rocking chair, which in the previous scene had been displaced from its usual position close by the oval table and now stood isolated some yards away. As Mary recalls her girlish vocation to be a nun she sinks into the rocker, facing the audience.

Stage Blood: Five tempestuous years in the early life of the National Theatre
Michael Blakemore

The Hot Wing King – Denver Center for the Performing Arts

On the eve of the annual “Hot Wang Festival” in Memphis, Tennessee, Cordell Crutchfield thinks he has finally found a recipe that will land him the coveted title of Hot Wang King. He has assembled a raucous team of sous chefs, comprised of his beau Dwayne and close friends Big Charles and Isom. The four-man team is cooking with plenty of spice and innuendo on prep night until a family emergency thrusts Dwayne’s troubled nephew into the mix. Tensions boil over into heated arguments — and one team member starts messing with Cordell’s secret sauce.  

With the crown, prize money, and their relationship on the line, Cordell and Dwayne are forced to reckon with what it means to be a Black man, a father figure, and part of a loving family. Winner of the 2021 Pulitzer Prize, The Hot Wing King by Katori Hall is a boisterous, in-your-face dramedy that is guaranteed to leave you salivating for a second helping.  

NOTE – Highly Recommended

https://www.denvercenter.org/tickets-events/the-hot-wing-king/

The Lehman Trilogy – Denver Center Performing Arts

Winner of the 2022 Tony Award for Best Play!

Hailed as “a genuinely epic production” by The New York Times (original New York run), The Lehman Trilogy follows three German-Jewish immigrant brothers, and their descendants, as they navigate fire, flood, war, and panic to build a financial behemoth that changed America.

In 1847, the Lehman brothers open a modest clothing shop in Alabama. But they have big dreams. They evolve as new opportunities arise. They capitalize on railroads, oil booms, personal computers, and, eventually, capital itself. They become so intertwined with the U.S. government, and in the daily lives of millions of stakeholders, that some begin to believe that Lehman Brothers, the institution, is too big to fail.

This extraordinary feat of storytelling uses only three actors to trace 163 years of family history and business. Until one day, in 2008, when it all comes crashing down…

DCPA

Highly Recommended.

Anna Deavere Smith – NPR Interview

Anna Deavere Smith plays real Americans on stage – and she shares her lessons
It’s Been a Minute

LUSE: Anna is a pioneer of what’s called verbatim theatre, where the characters’ lines come straight from interviews, transcripts or recordings. But what does that look like? Basically, Anna interviews real people, selects their most powerful moments, then studies their words, speech patterns, and body language so that she can sort of become them.

DEAVERE SMITH: My grandfather had said when I was a girl, if you say a word often enough, it becomes you. I decided to really study how the people around me spoke. I literally would walk up to people in the street of New York – this is in 1980 – and say, I know an actor who looks like you. If you give me an hour of your time, I’ll invite you to see yourself performed. The whole idea was to use this technique in a way to chase that which is not me.

…

DEAVERE SMITH: I became interested in how the rhythm of speech could inform an idea of who someone was. First of all, I don’t become anybody. People say that. I think of it as trying to make a jump. I call it the broad jump towards the other. You don’t make it, but you’re in this other place – colleague of mine, Richard Schechner at NYU, would talk about an idea of the not-not. So I can’t be you. So I’m not you. And I’m not me, but I’m in this other place. I’m in this effort.

And psychologically, what that is about, I think, is how I’ve decided to deal with my own sense of nonbelongingness, having grown up in a segregated city. If you really look at the whole thing I’ve been doing, it’s to get close to my opposites and to get close to strangers as a way of dealing with the sense of estrangement. And technically, what I do is listen to speech the way that you might listen to music. So I don’t just learn words, I learn utterances, and I – so I become acquainted with the – what I say is the song someone’s singing. And a lot of my work has to do with disaster and catastrophe…

Clyde’s – Lynn Nottage Play

In this feisty new comedy by two-time Pulitzer Prize winner Lynn Nottage (Sweat, Ruined) and directed by Jamil Jude (Choir Boy, DCPA), you’ll become a fly on the wall of Clyde’s, a roadside sandwich shop, in all its gastronomical glory.

At Clyde’s, formerly incarcerated individuals cook up meals that range from sublime to soul-crushing. Even as the surly shop owner tries to keep them under her thumb, their kitchen mentor, Montrellous, guides them on a quest to create the perfect sandwich – and reclaim their lives. Through this shared pursuit, each cook must face their demons on their personal journeys towards purpose, self-worth, and even salvation.

https://www.denvercenter.org/tickets-events/clydes/

Highly recommended.

RIP Michael Gambon, Anecdote from Anthony Sher book

Michael Gambon, Dumbledore in the ‘Harry Potter’ Films, Dies at 82
After he made his mark in London in the 1970s, he went on to play a wide range of roles, including Edward VII, Oscar Wilde and Winston Churchill.

Below from, Year of the King: An Actor’s Diary and Sketchbook, by Antony Sher. Gambon talking about his audition for Olivier, where he did Richard III.

Gambon: `Shall I start again?’
Olivier: `No. I think I’ve got a fair idea how you’re going to do it. You’d better get along now. We’ll let you know.’

Gambon went back to the engineering factory in Islington where he was working. At four that afternoon he was bent over his lathe, working as best as he could with a heavily bandaged hand, when he was called to the phone. It was the Old Vic.

`It’s not easy talking on the phone, Tone. One, there’s the noise of the machinery. Two, I have to keep my voice down ’cause I’m cockney at work and posh with theatre people. But they offer me a job, spear-carrying, starting immediately. I go back to my work-bench, heart beating in my chest, pack my tool-case, start to go. The foreman comes up, says, “Oy, where you off to?” “I’ve had bad news,” I say, “I’ve got to go.” He says, “Why are you taking your tool box?” I say, “I can’t tell you, it’s very bad news, might need it.” And I never went back there, Tone. Home on the bus, heart still thumping away. A whole new world ahead. We tend to forget what it felt like in the beginning.’

Ingmar Bergman’s Greenroom in the Sky

A few years ago, when Lars Lofgren was still head of the Dramaten, he and Bergman walked past the greenroom, a spacious place full of oil paintings of the theater’s old luminaries and big pieces of well-upholstered furniture, which five it the cozy feel of a gentleman’s club. The greenroom door was open, so Bergman walked in. Nobody was there. Lofgren recalls, “‘Listen!’ Bergman said. I couldn’t hear a thing. ‘What is it?’ I said. Bergman said, ‘They’re all here.’ ‘What do you mean?’ ‘The actors,’ Bergman said. ‘They’re not finished with the theater.'” Lofgren continues, “He looked around the room and turned to me and very lovingly said, ‘One day, we will be with them.'”

Joy Ride – Show People & Their Shows
John Lahr

Forgetting Your Song and Finding Your Song – August Wilson

In his theatrical vocabulary, “finding a song” is both the expression of spirit and the accomplishment of identity. Some of his characters have a song that they can’t broadcast; others have given up singing; some have been brutalized into near-muteness; and others have turned the absence of a destiny into tall talk—the rhetoric of deferred dreams. But Wilson’s most brilliant demonstration of “carrying other people’s songs and not having one of my own”—as one character puts it—is in Joe Turner’s Come and Gone, where a conjure man called Bynum, who has a song, discourses with Loomis, who has been separated from his. Bynum says:

Now, I can look at you, Mr. Loomis, and see you a man who done forgot his song. Forgot how to sing it. A fellow forget that and he forget who he is. Forget how he’s supposed to mark down life. See, Mr. Loomis, when a man forgets his song he goes off in search of it . . . till he find out he’s got it with him all the time.

Joy Ride: Show People and Their Shows
John Lahr

RIP – Keith Johnstone

Keith Johnstone, a pioneer in improvisation who trained a generation of actors and comedians in impromptu performance and creativity, on and off stage, has died. He was 90.

Johnstone passed away at Rockyview Hospital in Calgary on Saturday, according to his personal website, with no cause of death specified. The creator of Theatresports and co-founder of The Loose Moose Theatre Company was born in Devon, England on Feb. 21, 1933.

Johnstone trained at the Royal Court Theatre in London and was a teacher at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art. The Royal Court Theatre commissioned a stage play from Johnstone in 1956 and he remained a part of that prestigious live stage troupe over the next decade.

Summing up his philosophy, the key to improvisation is not to be prepared, Johnstone told a TEDx event in Calgary in 2016. “Improvisation is high risk. People think it’s like show business. It’s much more like sport,” he said, before adding the best performance calls for reaching for the obvious, not the clever. “The clever is an imitation of somebody else, really,” Johnstone added.

Keith Johnstone, Improv Trailblazer, Dies at 90
The creator of Theatresports trained and inspired a generation of actors, screenwriters and comics in improvisation and in-the-moment creativity, including ‘Better Call Saul’ star Bob Odenkirk.

Highly recommend Johnstone’s book – Impro: Improvisation and the Theatre

Ken Tynan – Theater Aficionado Anecdote

At the last dress rehearsal, a straight run prior to the first preview, I noticed a figure sitting to the rear of the stalls with a notepad. It was Ken Tynan. Afterwards I went up to greet him and found him mopping his eyes with a handkerchief. He couldn’t have paid me a more sincere compliment because what made Ken cry in the theatre was not the sadness of the subject matter but the skill with which it was realised. Provided it matched his standard of ‘High Definition Performance’, he could be brought to tears not only by a tragedy but by a farce, by a solo comedian, by a team of acrobats. They were not easy tears to induce, but it was this genuineness of emotion that had made him such an exceptional critic, and as I was beginning to learn (and rather to my surprise) such a loyal friend.

Stage Blood: Five tempestuous years in the early life of the National Theatre
Michael Blakemore

Highly recommended book

Chekhovian – Michael Blakemore on

The sort of production I aspired to was the very opposite of what at the time was conveyed by the adjective ‘Chekhovian’. Though the plays may leave you with a sense of the sadness and bleakness of life, this is not what they describe. Chekhov’s characters are for ever on the hunt for amusement of some sort, anything to distract them from the underlying drift of their lives. They play games, stage amateur theatricals, enjoy magic shows, or just sit under the trees in the garden having long circular conversations over their tea. And they are always offering each other hospitality. The first two acts of Three Sisters are both extended parties, and the most spectacular party of all, the most absurd, is the ball given by Ranevsky in The Cherry Orchard on the day she and her brother put the family home up for auction. Her social equals who would normally have attended such an occasion have all moved away from the district or died. However, so determined is she to cheer herself up with music and company that she makes up the numbers of guests by inviting such people as the Postal Clerk and the Stationmaster. This is surely as funny as it is tragic, and suggests that the playwright was not joking when he described the play as a comedy. Walk past a London pub on a warm summer night, with customers spilling on to the pavement: the intense and jubilant buzz of people absorbed in the pursuit of a good time blocks out any thought that for some of these same people (and for all of us eventually) winter is not far away. Chekhov allows us, unlike the pub’s customers, to see both these realities at once.

Stage Blood: Five tempestuous years in the early life of the National Theatre
Michael Blakemore

Disney Ushers Don’t Point – Michael R. Jackson Fresh Air Interview

GROSS: Since you worked as an usher at “The Lion King” when you started the process of writing “A Strange Loop” and the main character in “A Strange Loop” is an usher at “The Lion King,” now that you have a hit show, do you talk to the ushers? And do you try to hire ushers for whom this will be a good theater experience, a good opportunity for them to kind of almost be an apprentice?

JACKSON: Well, I don’t have anything to do with hiring the ushers. They’re – they belong to a union, Local 306. They place them in the theaters they work at. But I do. When I go to the show, I do often talk to them. They’re very nice people, but they also have a different situation than I had when I ushered because when you’re a Disney usher, you have this long employee handbook, and you’re considered a cast member. And you’re – and the people who come to see the shows are guests. And they are – and it’s almost like you’re working at a theme park. Like, they want to create, like, an experience for the people coming to see the shows. And so they’re just very strict about everything from grooming to how you can gesture to the restroom and all that sort of stuff. It’s – like, it’s pretty intense.

GROSS: How are you supposed to gesture to the restroom? What’s the proper call?

JACKSON: Open-handed. You’re never supposed to point.

‘A Strange Loop’ writer and composer started out on Broadway as an usher
Michael R. Jackson’s Tony and Pulitzer Prize-winning musical is about a young Black gay musical theater writer named Usher, who works as an usher at a Broadway show — just like Jackson once did.