Lovely monsters

Excited as I am to be going home today, I have to admit it was sad leaving the theater for the final time last night. Walking along the banks of the Iowa River, watching the black water flowing languidly by, stopping on the bridge to look at where the river curves out of sight, looking back to the theater lobby still mobbed with thrilled attendees – I’m going to miss all that.

Since I last wrote, I saw Lisa Leaverton’s new piece, One Plum. (Lisa’s play Why Love Doesn’t Recognize Its Name appeared in PCS’s Now Hear This series a couple of years ago.) Plum transformed one of the university’s several theaters into an amazing environment representing – well, the environment. The actors of One Plum created a visual and aural landscape in and around the audience that took us rapidly through season after season, reflecting issues along the way such as climate change and pollution. Nature’s hurly-burly (and humankind’s part in altering it) was treated comically but pointedly, the main spines being a human’s couples attempts to reproduce themselves and the struggles of a colossal plum tree to bear fruit. Incredibly inventive and ever-morphing, the experiential nature of the piece was a delight.

As if in response to One Plum, the next day’s reading of a new Andrew Saito play, The Patron Saint of Monsters, also looked at some of nature’s side trips as manifested in human beings. Its first part chronicled the making of an actual medieval saint; part 2 explored her elevation to cult status. And in the final section we see how she became associated with healing and/or comforting misfits of all stripes – while simultaneously displacing the more pagan “monsters” already around. The photo above shows you a gaggle of schiachpercht, the indigenous folk who don't cotton to the Christian incursions.

Following Andrew was a new play by Tali Ariav, Bloodlines, a harrowing duologue between a hospitalized girl and a soldier who may or may not spring from her fevered imagination. I was so shattered by this play that I left the theater even as the applause was in progress to go outside in the dark and just be with the experience of the play. (And nearly missed that night’s adventure of hanging out at The Sanctuary, a theater speakeasy that was popular back when James was a student at U of I – something reassuring about that.)

Friday night was Joe Luis Cedillo’s new play, Columpio. If you can envision Arthur Miller’s family dramas translocated to a Chicano family living near Newhall in the 1990s, you’ll get a sense of how Joe’s play works. Spanning three generations of increasing assimilation, with all the credits and debits that implies, this was a deeply felt portrait of a family in crisis. I hope this play gets produced soon in Los Angeles, where it could be a watershed piece of theater.

Saturday we were treated to brunch at one of the playwrights’ home – a 14-acre farm with sheep, goats (we got to feed goatlings less than a week old), and disturbingly large hens. Plus bovines. The place sported a gargantuan barn and a gorgeous farmhouse that date back to the mid-19th century. This playwright, Janet Schlapkohl, scrambled eggs for me at one point that she had just taken from the henhouse. Let me tell you: fresh eggs are light year apart from what you get in the supermarket. These eggs were so flavorful that they needed no seasonings. And yellow…

We returned to see Janet’s play Tro Musikk, a warm, big-hearted piece about upper-Midwesterners suffused with Scandinavian culture and inflected with those charming accents and quaint expressions (“you betcha!”) that we associate with cheese country. Not that the play mocked those people or that part of the world; on the contrary, I wanted to move in, to love among them from now on. I loved every minute of this play. Laughed like a macaw throughout, only to be surprised and touched – frequently! – by the sheer humanity of the characterizations. Even though the play is framed by the supernatural (troll-like figures lurk in the moods and grin at human foibles), ultimately the play was about forgiveness and redemption. Yes, the big themes. Powerful stuff. Which is easier to get your arms around when you’re accompanied by an accordion.

The Festival crescendoed last night with the premiere of Achilles, Scourge of Man, an outrageously rock and roll spectacle about the famous warrior that seem to happen now and back then and throughout time. As with One Plum, the theater was transformed for the occasion. Powerful lights beamed down from the top of the theater, filling the cavernous space; searchlights continually scanned cut the audience; the sound of helicopters approached and receded. So once again, to enter the theater was to enter the play. Tricked out with video screens, supertitles and a rock score that shook the risers, this was a balls-out production effort that grabbed me by the throat and demanded (and got) my attention every minute of the story.

As outstanding as the production effort was, however, it would not have mattered had Kevin Artigue’s script been any less provocative. This writer knows how to assault his audience with language, but also how to drop it down to a whisper, and when to provide the palate cleansers that let you savor new sensations. Indeed, “sensation” is the perfect word for this work, which had lots to express about men who treat war like an epic video game. (Kevin has worked with the brilliant Ken Roht, by the way, whose seemingly reckless extravagance informed this play.)

Like I said: a terrific year for the Playwright’s Workshop’s New Play Festival. I got a great glimpse into where theater may be headed. And I’m encouraged.

Hermanas, Piranhas and AutoErotica

Yep – the above-captioned items are only part of what’s going, right here in Iowa City. At this writing, I’m midway through the Playwrights’ Workshop’s New Play Festival at the University of Iowa. It’s an amazingly broad spectrum of content, style and form, just as you’d expect – and hope.

Festivities kicked off with a reading of a new play by Louisa Hill, called Child’s Pose, that uses competitive track, yoga and ballet as indices of generational difference. And a full production of a new play by Tony Meneses entitled Las Hermanas Padilla. Tony’s play was a rare treat, with a cast of 10 (all female), two directors, and a kaleidoscopic story that was almost always in motion, which of course threw the few quiet moments into sharp relief. Focusing on an extended family made up entirely of sisters-in-law, its repeating premise about the war-time deaths of their husbands – deaths whose advents are delivered one by one through carrier pigeons, who drop death on the sisters like inverse paracletes – was poignant without ever being sentimental. The play was suffused with a magic that seemed native to this (unnamed) land: a pregnancy that goes on indefinitely, a stigmata-like wound that provides the sisters with ink.

Sheela Kangal, whom many of you will remember her from TCG days, debuted a remarkable monologue she calls Norm, which explores one character’s identities past and present and yet to come. And Jen Silverman – a writer already making a name for herself at noted developmental from New Georges to Seven Devils -- premiered a disturbing new piece titled Gilgamesh’s Game, about a death cult whose apotheosis is to achieve “terminus.” In this endgame, players started by facing smaller fears (scorpions, leeches, piranhas) and progress until … well, until game over. But what happens when the cult’s originator becomes its first heretic? This stylish, darkly droll play devolves around three characters who each having very different reasons for playing.

And Jess Foster’s Hard and Fast brings a very special fetish into sweetly comic perspective. Subtitled “a love story,” let’s just say I’ll never look at an Austin-Healy 3000 quite the same way again. Or a Chevrolet Fleetline.

By the way, I share the privilege of seeing all this fun new theater with three other “Festival Guests,” as we’re called: the pulchritudinous Carson Kreitzer (whose indelible play Enchantment will be remembered by JAW devotees); the classy and breathtakingly insightful Megan Monaghan; and the absolutely fabulous Beth Blickers, who is America’s answer to Peggy Ramsay. (And I’m the only man, ya.) Stay tuned.

Just drop in to see what condition your condition is in

How cool is this? TCG is hosting a series of national town hall meetings to take stock of theater and our place in it. Here’s your chance to kvetch with the best of them and contribute to the ongoing national debate about what to do with this glorious anachronism we call the American theater.

Alas, since you need to register the Thursday before each forum, it’s already too late to participate in the actors’ dialogue. But that leaves four more, and fortunately, you wear many, many hats in the theater anyway, right?

Ironically enough, I’ll be missing the dramaturgs’ klatch; I’ll be steeping myself in new playwriting at the Iowa New Plays Festival. Twelve plays in six days! I do love a good marathon.

Anyhow, here are the deets:

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TCG Independent Artists' Forum
Moderated by Board Members of TCG

We want feedback from independent theater artists: How can we strengthen the relationship between individual artists and institutions? What would strengthen the artistic vitality of theatre?

TCG is hosting a series of five teleconferences for independent theatre artists. These focus groups aim to engage individual theatre artists in a far-ranging dialogue to discuss how individual artists are doing in the American theatre field today.

Five teleconferences are scheduled, each for a specific discipline in the theatre: actors, directors, dramaturgs, playwrights and designers. We recognize that many artists play multiple and varied roles within the theatre, and that for some artists, these categories do not fully capture what they do in the field. If you are a multi-disciplinary artist, or you do not see your discipline represented in the calls below, please self select one category that you feel is closest to your area of expertise.

The teleconferences will take place for one hour on the following days:

• April 19, 4pm EDT: Actors
• April 26, 4pm EDT: Directors
• May 3, 3pm EDT: Dramaturgs
• May 3, 4:30pm EDT: Playwrights
• May 10, 4pm EDT: Designers

Artists interested in participating must register below by 5pm EST on the Thursday prior to the teleconference. Our intent is to have as geographically and culturally diverse a group as possible represented on the call. As such, 30 participants will be selected from the registrant pool by lottery. Participants will be notified either way by the end of the day on the Friday prior to the call. For maximum efficiency, a series of questions will be circulated to participants prior to the call. Registrants who are not selected for the call will be given the opportunity to voice their points of view via electronic survey.

Follow the link above to register. And let me know what happens.

Heartland THE END for now

Attending the Iowa New Plays Fest wasn’t all just watching shows, strolling under the redbuds along the river and marching into town for coffee, just so you know. After every production and reading, the Festival guests met with the playwrights and their collaborators to talk about whichever play we’d just seen. And since most of the writers also met privately with the guests….that’s a lot of meetings.

And why not, right? The beauty of the system is that the guests are far, far from home and they’re in Iowa with the sole mission of responding to the work they’re seeing. No distractions. Or, well. Morgan, John and Wendy had their Crackberries to plug back into whenever a meeting ended, but they certainly gave of themselves generously in the meetings, be they group or personal.

A case in point is Seven Dreams of Her, a remarkable play by graduating playwright Sarah Sander. Taking place entirely within the dreaming mind of the main character, the story concerns the rise and demise of a triangulated relationship between two women and a man. And it tells it story by looping around the same Gordian knot again and again, as in a musical fugue, while the dreamer tries to sort out what happened and to begin healing from it.

As directed by Sarah Ballema, the set was an austerely gorgeous dreamscape with a bright red tree for a focal point, extending from the stage floor up into the fly space, out of sight. Late in the play, when one of the characters starts uprooting this tree, it’s a shocking moment – will the tree float away now? The play is replete with moments like that.

Because of its complexity, Seven Dreams of Her could have been very hard to speak to individually – in each case, the respondents would have been coming from an idiosyncratic POV. But because we respond to each others’ thoughts as well as to our own, this wound up being a great discussion. In particular I recall we discussed a graph that’s seen briefly on a chalkboard during the play (the protagonist is a mathematician) in which a length of a curve function is missing. And that a quote preceding the play, in the script version, mentions that standard procedure in solving an equation is to isolate one variable from the others. We tease out this idea, and Sarah agrees that while the idea was central to her writing the script, it has turned out to be nascent in actual production. And so on to re-writes. I felt she left the discussion know the respondents were unanimous in their excitement about her script, and that she now knew how to privilege the parts of her play she most wanted in the foreground.

As always, Art was there to direct and redirect the discussion, and Dare Clubb framed the conversation for us. I looked at all the playwrights assembled there, Sarah and her colleagues, and wondered if they had any inkling of how rare discussions of that depth are, once you’re out of school. Decades after my own graduation, I still miss them.

Heartland part two

According to Art Borreca, who runs the Playwrights Workshop and is my colleague of old from the New Haven Canning Factory, the group of Festival respondents is one of the best they’ve had in a long time. Sure, he may say that to every group every year, but personally I’m very fond of us. There’s the legendary Morgan Jenness, the only person ever to win an Obie for her dramaturgical contributions; there’s John Eisner of the Lark, tall and lanky and looking to my mind like a French revolutionary (sans culottes, of course). Wendy Goldberg has somehow managed to be away from the O’Neill long enough to be here, and the downright glamorous Regina Taylor has a perspective all her own to offer. I’m loving hanging out with them here in Ioway.

And Festival madness has continued non-stop. Wednesday's production was Greg Machlin’s A History of Bad Ideas (pictured above), directed by Joe Luis Cedillo. It took place in yet another theater space in the School – this one with a steeply raked seating area that gave me the impression of looking down into a well. That was perfect for Greg’s play, which takes place entirely in the cramped living quarters of a struggling writer and his charming but damaged girlfriend, who duke it out for the upper hand. Sweetly sad and affecting, the play was clearly a fave with the audience.

Thursday we returned to the studio space to a reading of Sheela Kangal’s smart, edgy play about a family divided against itself, for which religion is the family business. The House of Grateful shows that Sheela has a wicked ear for the sort of relations where people have learned how to twist the knife in as few words as possible from years of practice. On each other. I’m looking very forward to the next draft of this work in progress.

Yesterday (Friday) we were treated to Joshua Casteel’s drama about another religious family and its destructive secrets, Mourning Aletheia. As though tapping into the national playwriting zeitgeist, Joshua’s writing……dares to be realistic! There, I’ve said it! Realistic! Though Joshua says this play actually isn’t representative of most of his writing, it did remind me that there’s a remarkable shift going on nowadays – plays being written again in a style reminiscent of Tennessee Williams, for instance (who did time here at the University long, long ago), or even Inge. But with a difference, of course, since writers have been upping the ante for decades now…..

Friday evening we were treated to a taut, eerie, austere new play by Mary Hamilton, We Three (deftly directed again by John Kaufmann). Because the play has two startling reversals I won’t spoil the plot for you – since I am sure theaters will be producing this play – I’ll just say that this script is just a few refinements shy of readiness for main stage performances.

Today we heard a reading of Joe Luis Cedillo’s play, Painted Skin, an extremely ambitious and metaphor-rich piece that was a finalist for the Bay Area Playwrights Festival last year. And the Festival came to climax this evening with a wild piece of Americana by Morgan Sheehan-Bubla entitled Dust Town. Directed by Anthony Nelson, the play uses a storytelling motif to present a pair of contrasting fables: in the first, a women succumbs to temptation and is destroyed by it, whereas in the second a strong female character throws off her shackles (literal and figurative) to triumph over despair.

Thunder and rain serve as aural integument in the play, and tonight, conveniently enough, we finally finally got the rain I’ve been missing since my arrival seven days ago. Talk about web-footed Oregonian -- I have to laugh at how I exulted tonight, walking to the theater alongside the Iowa River, which was glassy and speckled from all the raindrops pouring down on it.

It’s still pouring, Which nakes me miss Oregon something TURRible, as they might have said in tonight’s play. Or as one of my childhood crushes, Wednesday Addams, used to say: “It’s so nice and gloomy.”

Greetings from the Heartland, Part One

Go Hawkeyes and whatnot! I’m here at the annual New Plays Festival produced by the School of Theater at the U of I in Iowa City, where I’ve been since last Sunday, so it’s high time I told you what I’m seeing here.

This is the third time the School has honored me by inviting me to this fabulous festival of work by the MFA theater students. Playwrights are the focus, but director, dramaturgs, designers and many others are also contributing to the event, and their enthusiasm for this week is better than a triple shot of Foglifter Espresso.

The Festival a heady mix of aesthetic styles and philosophies, and I’ve always found it’s a prescient time; these writers are the next wave of plays moving into the American repertoire, after all, and historically these writers have been a great source of future collaborator for me. David Adjmi, Allison Moore and Kirsten Greenidge are all writers I met here for the first time, to name only a few.

So imagine my anticipation. And I’m glad to say we got off to a good start with a reading of Tony Meneses’ remarkable new play Bajo Agua. Tony also directed, assisted nimbly by dramaturg Kate Stopa. Reminiscent of some of Anouilh’s frothier plays, Act 1 is a lighter-than-air dream state in which a trouserless groom-to-be (played Rick Garcia, he of the movie star good looks) wakes up in a room next to a fiancée he doesn’t remember. Act 2 ventures into deeper waters, figuratively and literally, as we learn about the fiancée’s own fugue states and also why the groom was so deep asleep in the first place.

All this took place in a large lab space – a narrow yet cavernous space tank well-suited to the play’s sense of spiritual submergence. For that evening’s offering, we moved to a full production in a largish theater space with a three-quarter thrust config. The Toymaker’s War, written by Canadian playwright Jennifer Fawcett and directed by Bruce Brandon, is clearly a work in progress, but one with great promise. In scenes that shift between present-day Montreal and the Bosnia of 1995, the script is a taut examination of journalistic integrity at the breaking point. Ms. Fawcett can write, and I expect we'll be seeing much more from her.


The next day we were treated to a theatrical epiphany entitled Why LOVE Doesn’t Recognize Its Name, written by Lisa Leaverton and directed by John Kaufmann. (Above is a rehearsal photo; John is in the foreground, Lisa’s at the far right.) The action revolves around a shop called Lee’s Expressive, where Lee and his staff (the “Mechanics of Expression”) strive to help clients whose speech patterns are clogged with words that are too ornate, or have the wrong shade of meaning, or just plain don’t communicate. Since the Mechanics sometimes get stuck themselves, they occasionally have recourse to Deep Mystery – the audience – whom they consult to get the perfect spare part, meaning a word or phrase that will be strikingly apt.

Part scripted play and part free-form event, it was deliriously fun for the audience of about 50 to be cast as Deep Mystery, especially when feeding words to a Mechanic so drunk on language and its potential that we fall in love with her. The message she ultimately synthesizes from Deep Mystery’s mutterings was surprisingly moving to me. William Burroughs and Laurie Anderson used to say that language is a virus; this play brings us to the realization that as powerful as human speech is, it functions best when it transcends itself.

Stayed tuned for more about the Festival.