Posts from — January 2010
A New Recipe for “Trifles”
“Theatre of a Two-Headed Calf re-imagines a classic American play”
Brooke O’Harra isn’t interested in the Trifles that most people think they see.
January 29, 2010 No Comments
A Long Life in “Our Town”
Actor Keith Perry sets a record with Thornton Wilder’s classic play
Now at the Barrow Street Theatre, the current Off-Broadway revival of Thornton Wilder’s Our Town is the longest-running production of the play in history. What’s more, the actor Keith Perry, who plays a deceased farmer in the famous graveyard scene, has never missed a performance. That means he has appeared in more consecutive performances of this classic play than any other actor.
Recently, Perry spoke to TDF about his work in the show.
[VIDEO]
To see this video with closed captioning, please go here.
“Actor Keith Perry sets a record with Thornton Wilder’s classic play”
Now at the Barrow Street Theatre, the current Off-Broadway revival of Thornton Wilder’s Our Town is the longest-running production of the play in history. What’s more, the actor Keith Perry, who plays a deceased farmer in the famous graveyard scene, has never missed a performance. That means he has appeared in more consecutive performances of this classic play than any other actor.
January 27, 2010 No Comments
“Happy” in America
Playwright Lucinda Coxon navigates life as a foreign
woman in the New York theatre scene
By LINDA BUCHWALD
Lucinda Coxon, a British playwright and screenwriter whose works have been
produced on both sides of the Atlantic, says that Happy Now? is her most
commercial play to date. That makes her something of an anomaly in New York:
A foreign woman with a hot property.
The story of a frustrated working mother and her similarly dissatisfied
friends, Happy Now? begins performances tomorrow at 59E59 after runs at the
Yale Repertory Theatre and The National Theatre in London. It is a departure
from Coxon’s earlier work like Vesuvius, a dark and poetic play in which
characters known only as The Woman and The Man quietly learn to cope with
their fear of the world. When it premiered at South Coast Repertory in 2005,
Vesuvius’ set was an abstract suggestion of an ash-covered world. Happy
Now?, meanwhile, feels rooted in the reality of domestic life. “It may be
difficult in other ways, but it’s full of very real things.” Coxon says,
“The pill is quite heavily sugared. It has quite a lot of jokes and people
have found it very funny.”
Playing as part of Primary Stages’ twenty-fifth anniversary season, which is
dedicated to female playwrights, Happy Now? arrives in an Off Broadway
season that has boasted several buzzed-about plays written by women,
including Annie Baker’s Circle Mirror Transformation, Lynn Redgrave’s
Nightingale, and Young Jean Lee’s Lear. Broadway, however, remains dominated
by male writers.
Asked how she perceives this imbalance, Coxon, though not overly familiar
with Broadway, guesses that women are writing less-commercial plays than
men. But she is quick to add that Mamma Mia! is an extremely successful show
with many women behind it. “Catherine Johnson, who wrote the book for that,
is a British playwright with a track record of writing really interesting,
quite difficult plays, and with Mamma Mia! she wrote something that
obviously had a much broader commercial appeal,” she says. “She’s the same
person. She just happened to in that one instance hit on a much more
commercial venture. But it doesn’t mean that she’s only going to do that for
the rest of her career.”
As for Happy Now?, Coxon muses that it became a hit-selling out at the
National Theatre before it opened-partially because of its subject matter.
“The idea of a play about a woman who is struggling, that alone proved
enormously popular because in theatre, there isn’t very much about it,” she
says. “It may be something that novels deal with or that television deals
with in kind of a superficial way, but it’s not something that plays have
dealt with very much.”
The play was also well received at Yale Rep in late 2008, which added to
Coxon’s positive experience as a British writer working in America. She
attributes part of her good fortune to her outsider status. “I remember
describing to [popular American playwright] Sarah Ruhl one day at South
Coast Rep the relationship I had with some of the theatres in the States,
and I assumed it was the same for everyone,” she says. “She looked slightly
slack-jawed in amazement and obviously felt that she at that time had had a
less charmed run at it. I think what I was experiencing was essentially a
kind of outsider glamour, and there was a kind of courtesy being extended to
me that was not necessarily being extended to other women playwrights.”
Coxon, who is herself a mother, recognizes the struggles that female
playwrights face, from raising children to the boys’-club nature of the
business, but she has stuck with it. “I suppose I’d give it up if I could,
but it’s a sort of illness,” she says. “I think it’s a disease, writing for
the theatre. I can never understand why people would want to catch it, but
it’s a disease, and people who continue doing it do it because they can’t
help it.”
Linda Buchwald is an assistant editor at Scholastic. She blogs for
Critic-O-Meter and her own blog, Pataphysical Science.
“Playwright Lucinda Coxon navigates life as a foreign woman in the New York theatre scene”
Lucinda Coxon, a British playwright and screenwriter whose works have been produced on both sides of the Atlantic, says that Happy Now? is her most commercial play to date. That makes her something of an anomaly in New York: A foreign woman with a hot property.
January 26, 2010 No Comments
TDF Costume Collection: a silent film
We could give you a lengthy description of Theatre Development Fund’s Costume Collection, but wouldn’t you rather watch an action-packed movie about a distraught costume designer whose production is saved by the Collection’s offerings?
We thought so. But first, here’s a little background to help you enjoy the film:
Whether you’re designing costumes for an Off-Broadway show or a high school production in Des Moines, the Theatre Development Fund’s Costume Collection is here to help you. The Collection provides non-profit organizations with low-cost rentals of professional costumes, many of which are donated by Broadway, regional and major opera productions. Designers can rent costumes in person or take advantage of the Collection’s mail order service if they are working outside the New York area.
And now… on with the show! (If you would like to see the close captioned version of this film, then please go here.)
We could give you a lengthy description of Theatre Development Fund’s Costume Collection, but wouldn’t you rather watch an action-packed movie about a distraught costume designer whose production is saved by the Collection’s offerings?
January 22, 2010 No Comments
Keep Yours “Lears” Open
“Playwright and director Young Jean Lee puts her process on display”
It opened last week at Soho Rep, but that doesn’t mean Young Jean Lee has finished Lear. She’s just finished… for now.
Lee’s play, which riffs on Shakespeare’s King Lear to explore how adults cope with the death of their parents, is currently at the in-between stage that Off-Off Broadway is designed to support. Lee, who’s also directing, has workshopped the piece several times, and now she needs to see it in a full production in front of an audience. However, she also needs the freedom to make major changes, and Off-Off Broadway, with its smaller budgets and adventurous audiences, thrives on that experimentation.
For patrons experiencing Lear means not only seeing a show, but also glimpsing how Lee works. Each preview performance was different from the last, with new scenes being crafted almost every day.
“She’s writing about things that are hard,” says Sarah Benson, Soho Rep’s artistic director. “The way she articulates herself is through her work, and I think one of the amazing things about her is how much faith she puts in her process.”
Of course, theatres and ticket buyers must have faith if they’re going to support an ambitious piece like Lear at the beginning of its life. (Among other things, it mashes Shakespeare with scenes from Sesame Street and bits of Lee’s own poetic dialogue.) But Lee has earned that faith with hits like The Shipment, a subversive look at black-white racial dynamics, and Songs of the Dragon Flying to Heaven, a lampoon of Asian-American culture.
Success has encouraged her to keep pushing herself with Lear. “It’s been a crazily difficult process–much more so than usual,” she says. “I still haven’t figured everything out.”
Part of her challenge has been mastering Lear’s structure. Actors might portray King Lear’s children, storming about in period costumes, only to transform into characters from the famous Sesame Street scene where Big Bird learns that Mr. Hooper has died.
“The whole show is reflecting an emotional state,” Lee says. “It’s almost like the characters are allegorical representations of states of mind. But when you’re directing, that’s so intangible. How do you ask actors to capture an emotional state? For me, it’s been a lot of groping in the dark. It’s been a lot of pure intuition.”
But that’s not to say the production is haphazard. After workshops, Lee realized she had to eliminate older figures like King Lear and just focus on younger characters. And during previews at Soho Rep, she learned valuable things about how actors should play certain moments and which scenes connected most with an audience. “Overall, I feel like the basic story of the show is being told,” she says, “And in a lot of ways, the show as it stands is stronger than other shows I’ve done because every step has been harder and I’ve been more challenged.”
Lee accepts that she’ll leave this production with more to learn about the show. “I think it’s going to be a few years before I understand what’s going on because in some ways, I’m beyond what I can do as an artist,” she says.
Not everyone would admit those limitations, but Lee says they’re an important part of her work. “The reason I seek out projects that exceed my abilities is because I have this ultimate faith that I can figure it out, this steel core in me that says, ‘Succeed or die,’” she explains. “I flirt with failure, but if I know I’m going to fail, I adjust the goal. I have faith in my ability to adapt and adjust and make things work.”
Mark Blankenship is TDF’s online content editor
It opened last week at Soho Rep, but that doesn’t mean Young Jean Lee has finished Lear. She’s just finished… for now.
January 20, 2010 No Comments
