Center Theatre Group News & Blogs

The Art of Teaching Theatre: Summer Theatre Warrior

Lynn Clark — Fri, 29 Apr 2016 19:57:00 -0700

What special opportunities does this season of endings and beginnings offer theatre students in particular? How can they keep their creative juices flowing during the summer, especially if they are not going to participate in a theatre program or camp?

We put these questions to two inspirational figures in California’s arts education community: Jesse Bliss, a Los Angeles-area artist, educator, and activist, and Michael Fields, director of the California State Summer School for the Arts (CSSSA).

Jesse and Michael offered insight and advice to young people who are interested in cultivating their theatrical skills throughout the summer, no matter what their access to resources might be. Please share this post directly with your students, pick and choose the tips you like best, or incorporate them in summer assignments.

Jesse Bliss on “The Summer Theatre Warrior”

Nepantle is an ancient Aztec word used to describe the transitional space between here and there…the space life offers all human beings over and over again, whether it be on a small or grand scale. We experience everyday transitions and major ones, from standing up after sitting down to moving to cities and becoming adults. nepantle is the space that defines what is neither here nor there—not where you were, and not yet where you are going.

That is the summer for young people: a time when you’re done and complete with where you’ve been and ready to take on the mysterious adventures ahead. In the interim, in the Nnepantle, is a great opportunity for them to enhance their theatre skills. Theatre artists tell stories about the human experience, which means learning about different perspectives and ways of viewing the world, and how different people deal with conflict. This is enormously valuable for students. With this in mind, here are some ways to deepen your practice as a theatre artist aside from attending workshops:

1. Observation. Watch a variety of people in various environments. Grab a cool drink, have a seat, and take in an active environment such as Downtown Los Angeles’s Grand Park. Notice the variety of ways people carry themselves, dress, and interact depending on age, experience, and personality. This will help you to understand the breadth of human behavior.

2. Write. Keep a daily journal. Do a timed free write letting everything spill out. The only rule is not to stop until either 1-3 pages are filled or 10 minutes have passed. This will keep you close to your own thoughts, feelings, and dreams. Write scenes and/or poetry.

3. Read good books and watch good films. Both will enhance your understanding of story structure, conflict, and character development, expanding your understanding of storytelling and the human experience.

4. Practice monologues. Find work that speaks to your heart or use work you’ve written yourself. Memorize new work. Allow yourself the freedom of working on your own.

5. Work with friends. Find other creative minds and enjoy an informal writing circle. Watch each other’s monologues and write and rehearse scenes. Brainstorm ideas together.

6. Attend the many phenomenal and free events offered in Los Angeles during the summer including theatre, museums, and concerts. Creative environments of all kinds can be inspiring in different ways.

7. Spend time in bookstores perusing through different types of publications, from plays and films to art and comic books.

The summer is a beautiful time to explore, expand, and engage in self-led cultivation of your theatre skills, bringing a breath of fresh air to your learning process. One advantage of being a theatre artist is that life itself is a great teacher of the craft.

Michael Fields on Putting Your Best Intentions to the Test

My favorite Irish poet, William Butler Yeats, wrote, “Training puts your own best intentions to the test.”

At the California State Summer School for the Arts (CSSSA), our intent is to provide an immersive, rigorous training in the arts for high school-age students. It is a training that provokes the theatre artist to experience new ways of working, new ways of seeing, and new ways of thinking about their work. It is a training that doesn’t tell you “what to do” but rather presents all kinds of different “how to do’s.” And it is a training that focuses more on the journey than the destination. It is not about the end result or product. There is no big final show. It is about the act of discovery and the constant small steps that a theatre artist must take daily in order to continue to evolve their craft and, hopefully, their life in this work.

As long as you are passionate about the work, you don’t need to participate in a full production or enroll in summer programs like CSSSA to train in this way.

1. Watch. See as much theatre as you can at whatever level is available to you, both live and online. YouTube now gives everyone access to full productions by some amazing companies from around the world, and to interviews where great actors talk about their work and craft. Get a sense of what you like.

2. Talk. Go talk to the people who make work you like. You’ll be surprised by how many will want to talk to you.

3. Volunteer at a theatre if you can. It can be invaluable to be part of the process. If classes on any aspect of theatre in your community are accessible and affordable for you—take them.

4. Read plays. Reading plays, from classics to brand-new work, is something of a lost art. If you have friends who share similar interests, read plays together.

5. Audition. If you can audition for work in your community, the best way to keep evolving acting/directing/design/playwriting chops is to do the work itself. In the process, you will find a community of other people who share your passion.

Alan Mandell and Barry McGovern on Playing Beckett, Past and Present

Center Theatre Group — Thu, 28 Apr 2016 19:35:00 -0700

At the heart of Samuel Beckett’s Endgame is a relationship between two characters—Hamm and Clov. Hamm is the chair-bound master who is dependent upon his servant, Clov, for life while browbeaten Clov—who is unable to sit—dreams of nothing but leaving.

Alan Mandell and Barry McGovern bring this complicated relationship to life in our production of Beckett’s masterwork, which plays the Kirk Douglas Theatre through May 22, 2016. At the ages of 89 and 67 respectively, Mandell and McGovern may be the most experienced actors and Beckett interpreters ever to play these roles, but it is the character of their relationship that lends their performances particular weight.

When asked how they know each other for a recent interview with Center Theatre Group, the two braced themselves simultaneously with, “Well…” before chuckling at their unplanned synchronicity.

“We met—I think it was in The Hague,” said Mandell.

“We met in the Peacock in Dublin,” said McGovern, “back in 1980. You were doing Endgame.”

In that production, directed by Beckett, Mandell played Nagg—Hamm’s father, who resides in an ash bin. Mandell recalled his very first rehearsal in the role (which he has played on numerous occasions). The actor playing Nell, Nagg’s wife and fellow ash bin-dweller, was out. But rather than cancel rehearsal, Beckett decided to join Mandell onstage himself. “I was terrified at the time!” confessed Mandell. “He said, ‘We’ll pull up two chairs. I’ll do Nell and you do Nagg’…and there were all sorts of people there!”

If Mandell and McGovern still harbor any anxiety about performing Beckett’s work, they do not show it. McGovern quoted Beckett to explain why he’s not fazed by the challenges of playing Clov: “If people want to have headaches among the overtones, let them—and provide their own aspirin.” He added, “People often try to complicate things…Endgame is about leaving. It’s all about Clov, the servant of Hamm, wanting to leave—to get away. This is the day he is finally going to break this symbiotic relationship that they have. We’ll see—at the end—whether he leaves or not, but he’s always talking about leaving. ‘I’ll leave you.’ It’s about finishing and leaving. ‘Finished’ is the first word in the play.”

“The end is in the beginning, and yet you go on,” added Mandell by way of Beckett.

Beckett has a reputation in popular culture of being more than a little depressing and Endgame—which Beckett reportedly began working on soon after the death of his brother—is often thought to be his grimmest work. However, McGovern said that audiences should arrive at the Douglas ready to laugh. “It’s a very funny play. I mean, it’s a serious play and it’s a harrowing play in some ways. But it’s a very gripping play,” he said. “It’s about everyone who is in a relationship. And any relationship, as we all know—however good it is—has its fraught moments, to put it mildly.”

So what about Mandell and McGovern’s relationship? After joking about how much they hate one another, McGovern confessed, “Alan is just an all-around nice guy...My admiration is boundless for this man.”

To which Mandell added, “I wouldn’t do Endgame without Barry. I mean, I just wanted the very best actor and someone of great intelligence to work with—and that’s him.”

Famous Actors Who Have Played Beckett's "Endgame"

Center Theatre Group — Tue, 26 Apr 2016 18:39:00 -0700

With a combined age of over 400, Alan Mandell, Barry McGovern, James Greene, Anne Gee Byrd, and Charlotte Rae are one of the most experienced casts ever to take on these challenging roles. In honor of their virtuosity, we have gathered a list of other actors who have wrestled with Endgame.

Hugo Weaving, Hamm (Sydney Theatre Company, 2015)

Hugo Weaving is probably best known for roles like Agent Smith in The Matrix and Elrond in The Lord of the Rings trilogies, but in 2015 Weaving donned blacked-out glasses and stepped into the role of Hamm—a wheelchair-bound pontificator—for the Sydney Theatre Company production of Endgame. He told The Guardian: “The music and structure of the piece is very clear. If you veer from that to any great extent, you’re in big trouble. But when you do find your own lives within that form, then it can be a very joyful experience. Beckett has the most amazing sense of humor. All his writing is infused with it.”

Luke Mullins, Clov (Melbourne Theatre Company, 2015)

2015 was a banner year for Endgame in Australia. In the Melbourne Theatre Company production, Luke Mullins—an award-winning Australian actor and frequent Beckett interpreter—played Clov. He spoke about the process in a 2015 interview with The Guardian: “So many of [Beckett’s] pieces are just exquisitely written, perfect objects. It’s incredibly satisfying to have such a clear set of instructions to follow that if you do follow them—not so much obey, but really follow—it’s creating something you couldn’t otherwise do as an actor.”

Elaine Stritch, Nell (Brooklyn Academy of Music, 2008)

Elaine Stritch brought her incomparable wit and pathos to the role of Nell for the 2008 Brooklyn Academy of Music production of Endgame. While many actors speak of Beckett with awe and deference, Stritch took a pithier approach telling The Gothamist: “I think maybe you have to be as old as I am to understand [Beckett]. I don’t think you can fake anything onstage but if you could fake an author I think he would be a good one to fake. Because everyone in the audience is having trouble too! So you can kind of join forces with them. They come back and say, ‘God, this is hard to understand.’ And I say, ‘No s*** Dick Tracy.’”

Alvin Epstein, Nagg (Irish Repertory Theatre, 2005 & Brooklyn Academy of Music, 2008)

Alvin Epstein is an absolute OG interpreter of Beckett’s work. He performed in the first American productions of both Waiting for Godot and Endgame, and in 2005 and 2008, he climbed into a ash bin to play Hamm’s father, Nagg—first for The Irish Repertory Theater and then alongside Stritch at the Brooklyn Academy of Music. In an interview for Jonathan Kalb’s 1989 book, Beckett in Performance, Epstein defended Endgame’s ambiguous ending: “I’m now a firm believer in not answering questions that Beckett doesn’t answer. If Beckett leaves it open, it’s because he doesn’t want it answered, and in a deeper sense, he isn’t even asking—the question is irrelevant.”

Simon McBurney, Clov (Théâtre de Complicité, 2009)

Simon McBurney is the founder and artistic director of the decorated Théâtre de Complicité in London and a sought-after performer with an IMDB page that stretches on and on. In 2009—after two of his leads dropped out—McBurney decided to play the role of Clov in the Complicité production himself. Shortly after, he described what it was like in an editorial for The Guardian: “S***, they laughed there last night. I squirm in annoyance. Shut up—stop thinking of the audience. But you can’t with Beckett. It’s like trying to stop thinking of the ground beneath you when you are 2,000 ft up in the air, watching a landscape spread out beneath you. One false move and nothing means anything.”

John Turturro, Hamm (Brooklyn Academy of Music, 2008)

John Turturro is a decorated thespian and a frequent collaborator of Joel and Ethan Coen, gracing both the silver screen and Broadway stages alike. In 2008, he played Hamm at the Brooklyn Academy of Music with Stritch and Epstein. Turturro spoke to Beckett’s idiosyncratic voice in an interview with WNYC’s Leonard Lopate Show: “People are sometimes so afraid of [Beckett] because he’s approached so intellectually. And he was a person who read everything. There wasn’t anything that he didn’t read. But in the end, it took him a long time to find his voice, and when he did it was a personal voice.”

Suzan-Lori Parks’ Journey from a New York Bar to Household Name

Center Theatre Group — Mon, 25 Apr 2016 01:49:00 -0700

How did Parks get here, and how does she think and talk about her work? A number of interviews over the past 20-some-odd years offer a window into her evolution and her art. In a 1994 interview with Bomb magazine, Parks explained why she chose theatre as her medium.

I got into theater because there are things about theater that I love, and that I can do. You sit down. You write. You think about how a play has to work to be effective. That’s what makes it the most difficult form. Plays have to be soft and loose and completely flexible and completely taut, to withstand the minds, and hearts, and souls of thousands of hundreds of people, and actors getting in there and saying, “What’s my motivation?” And directors going, “What are we going to do at this moment?” Think of Shakespeare. He was such a good writer because he was a playwright.

In 1987, she produced her first play, Betting on the Dust Commander. In 2006, she described the experience to The New Yorker.

I was hanging out at the Gas Station—a bar then on Manhattan’s Lower East Side…and you’d sit there and drink and look at the cement walls, and I was, like, to the guy who ran it, “Hey, man! Can I do a play here?” And he was, like, “Oh, sure!” They didn’t have any chairs. They hadn’t done a play in their life. I had never done a play in my life. We ran for three nights. My dad, my mom, and my sister, and one of the homeless guys from the neighborhood—that’s basically all the people who came.

What followed was a body of work that quickly established Parks as a bold talent who did not shy away from grappling with difficult subject matter such as the Middle Passage, exploitation of the homeless, and race in America. Winning the Pulitzer Prize in 2002 for Topdog/Underdog made her a household theatrical name. Shortly after, she described the effects of her public success to The Seattle Post-Intelligencer.

[Winning the Pulitzer Prize] required me to keep reminding myself not to take myself too seriously. One could blow up or trip on yourself because of something like the Pulitzer. But I’m not that kind of person. I gotta keep going on to the next thing. I’ve got to not be afraid to play the guitar or sing for people, or continuing to grow. I also want to learn to surf. One could get locked in by the Pulitzer, thinking this is who I am. Doors open with it, but doors in your mind could close.

Parks is interested in anything but closed doors. When asked what role the performing arts has in elucidating the state of contemporary America in a recent interview about Father Comes Home From The Wars for KPCC Southern California Public Radio’s The Frame, Parks responded:

I think we continue the dialogue. We give people a way to talk about things—[or] issues. I think we give people a way to understand their world. Just like old storytellers. Just like Homer, with The Odyssey. He gave people a way to understand the war. To feel it, you know? A lot of stuff today, they don't want you to feel, they don't want you to think; they just want you to buy something. We want you to feel and think and keep on keepin’ on.

Read more about Suzan-Lori Parks’ writing, her relationship with her teacher James Baldwin, her inspiration for Father Comes Home From The Wars, and how she “gets it out” in this interview with Center Theatre Group.

How Slaves Fought—and Found Freedom—in the Civil War

Center Theatre Group — Wed, 20 Apr 2016 01:40:00 -0700

Nonetheless, Hero eventually goes to war—as did thousands of slaves forced to serve as body servants to their masters or to perform manual labor such as building roads, fortifications, and armaments for the Confederate army. “Every slave who ended up supporting the Confederacy did it against his will…essentially with a gun to his head,” said Harvard historian John Stauffer. Hero may be offered a choice of sorts, but most slaves had none—except perhaps to choose self-preservation over death. “In a lot of wars, people make decisions not because of what they believe in politically or ideologically, but because they think they’ll be more likely to survive,” said Stauffer.

John Parker, a slave on a Northern Virginia plantation, ended up manning a cannon for the Confederates at the Battle of Bull Run after he was sent to the war by his master. He remained on the battlefield to strip Union soldiers of their arms and valuables and to bury the dead on both sides. Upon returning home, he found his plantation desolate, and decided to escape to the North. Once there, Parker offered his account of the Battle of Bull Run to reporters, who recounted it in Northern newspapers. Parker also explained how he found himself on the side of the Confederacy: “We only fought because we had to. We wish[ed] to our hearts that the Yankees would whip and we would have run over to their side but our officers would have shot us if we had made the attempt.”

Neo-confederates have used John Parker’s story to try to prove that slaves willingly fought for the Confederacy. “It’s a way of suggesting that the Confederacy wasn’t about slavery, that the Confederacy wasn’t racist,” said Northwestern University historian Kate Masur. “That doesn’t bear out historically. It just wasn’t the case.”

Slaves who managed to escape to the Union often provided valuable intelligence to the Northern forces. “Military personnel would interview them, ask them how they got away, ask them what was happening where they came from—were people demoralized, how much does food sell for,” said Masur. “Escaping slaves were excellent sources of information.” One such slave was William A. Jackson, Jefferson Davis’ coachman, who escaped at Fredericksburg and provided detailed information to Union forces.

The Union quickly realized that escaping slaves could become a valuable resource on a number of levels. “The Confederate army could not exist one day without slave labor,” said UCLA historian Joan Waugh. A few months into the war, Congress passed the Confiscation Act of 1861, which authorized Union forces to refuse to return runaway slaves to Confederates who attempted to claim them. As the Union secured more and more Southern territory, African-American men and women left their plantations to go behind Union lines, where they were put into “contraband camps,” said Waugh. Thousands of the men ended up enlisting in the Union army as part of the 180,000 African-American troops who fought for the North.

“There was no way the Union would have won the war had it not been for the support of African-Americans,” said Stauffer. “Even racist whites acknowledged that.” There were social consequences as well. The service of African-American soldiers, said Stauffer, paved the way for the eventual passage of the 13th and 14th Amendments, which banned slavery and granted African-Americans citizenship.

This story still isn’t part of the Civil War narrative Americans typically learn in school. “People are familiar with the Emancipation Proclamation and with the idea that Lincoln freed the slaves,” said Masur. “Yet there’s all this evidence of an incredibly dramatic story of emancipation on the ground and of slaves' determination to destroy slavery in the course of the war.”

How we remember the Civil War continues to matter. As recently as 2011, said Stauffer, a survey showed that two-thirds of white Southerners believed that the Civil War wasn’t fundamentally about slavery. “We’re still fighting the Civil War,” he said. “The basic questions and issues of the Civil War are still the central questions in the United States today.” Issues that tore this country apart 150 years ago—race, states’ rights, and citizenship—remain divisive issues this election year.

“The wonderful thing about Father Comes Home is that it takes place in the 1860s and at the same time, it’s about things that are happening today,” Suzan-Lori Parks told NPR. “And I think what I really appreciate about the play and the audience that comes to the play is we all are recognizing that this play is giving people an opportunity to reflect. It doesn’t say what should or shouldn’t happen. It just gives people an opportunity to reflect about the world we all live in.”

Explore more:

The War of the Rebellion is a compilation of the official records of the Union and Confederate armies. Series 2, Volume 1 preserves some of the history of slaves’ escapes during the war.
Stephanie McCurry’s Confederate Reckoning and Bruce Levine’s The Fall of the House of Dixie explore the Confederacy’s brief, last-ditch debate about arming slaves.
The University of Maryland’s Freedmen and Southern Society Project compiles first-person accounts of emancipation from “liberated slaves and defeated slaveholders, soldiers and civilians, common folk and the elite, Northerners and Southerners.”

Thanks to Kate Masur for recommending the above resources.

Art That Drinks from the Well of ‘The Odyssey’

Brendan Haley — Tue, 19 Apr 2016 01:08:00 -0700

In a recent interview about Father Comes Home From The Wars (Parts 1, 2 & 3), which plays the Mark Taper Forum through May 15, 2016, playwright Suzan-Lori Parks explained that while the play is not a retelling of The Odyssey, Homer’s tale nonetheless came to influence the work:

The Odyssey is in our drinking water. So you get bits and pieces and shards and shrapnel of a lot of things. The Odyssey is a big thing you get. It’s a big thing that people latch onto and think I’m doing a retelling of The Odyssey. No, I’m not. That’s not where I’m coming from. It’s Star Wars! It’s Ulysses S. Grant.

In celebration of Parks’ new classic, we’ve gathered together a list of works that also share drinking water with Odysseus’ daring journey.

1. James Joyce’s Ulysses (1922)

No discussion of artistic works inspired by The Odyssey can begin without mentioning James Joyce’s masterwork. This modernist novel follows Leopold Bloom of Dublin as he goes about the minutia of an ordinary day—June 16, 1904, to be exact. While a novel of such domestic leanings may not seem—at first glance—to have anything to do with The Odyssey, each of Ulysses’ 18 parts draw direct thematic connections between Odysseus’ epic journey and Leopold’s everyday one. Ever the bedevilment of college professors and literature students alike, Joyce once remarked that he had “put in so many enigmas and puzzles that it will keep the professors busy for centuries arguing over what I meant.”

2. Cream’s “Tales of Brave Ulysses” (1967)

This free-loving musical odyssey is a direct reference to one of the most famous episodes of Odysseus’ epic journey, in which a band of sweetly singing monsters—the Sirens—almost manage to lure Odysseus and his men to untimely deaths. Odysseus only managed to elude them by filling his sailors’ ears with wax. He himself wasn’t so lucky, however, and as Eric Clapton’s rock supergroup put it: “How his naked ears were tortured by the sirens sweetly singing / For the sparkling waves are calling you to kiss their white laced lips.”

3. Stanley Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968)

Stanley Kubrick’s sci-fi masterpiece draws more than just its title from The Odyssey. Where Homer writes of demi-gods communicating news of Odysseus’ journey to Zeus (whose Latin name is Jupiter), Kubrick depicts the Monoliths, mysterious, otherworldly beings that communicate with the planet Jupiter about the technological development of humankind. Perhaps the film’s most direct reference to its source material is HAL 9000, a psychotic one-eyed supercomputer who is a clear reference to the Cyclops.

4. George Lucas' Star Wars Trilogy (1977, 1980, 1983)

George Lucas has said that 2001: A Space Odyssey was “hugely influencing,” and Lucas, too, tackles many of Homer’s themes in his three original Star Wars films. Loyalty is a theme both Homer and Lucas explore deeply. Odysseus must choose between loyalty to his family and his own immediate happiness as he is constantly tempted to quit his long journey home. Likewise, Luke Skywalker must choose between loyalty to the way of the Jedi and becoming a Sith apprentice to his father, Darth Vader, and the “Dark Side” of the Force. But most obviously, both Star Wars and The Odyssey are tales about a journey, in which the main characters travel to and are changed by the many lands and beings they encounter.

5. Hayao Miyakazi's Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind (1984)

Upon first glance, Hayao Miyazaki's post-apocalyptic anime in which the world has been covered in a toxic jungle and massive insectile monsters hunt the remnants of humanity at every turn doesn’t seem to have much of a connection to The Odyssey. However, Miyazaki’s Nausicaä is named after and partly inspired by a supporting character: a princess who provides aid to a shipwrecked Odysseus. While Nausicaä of The Odyssey may take a back seat to Odysseus, Miyazaki’s Nausicaä takes center stage as she desperately struggles to prevent a war between two nations on her dying planet.

6. Carol Ann Duffy’s “Circe” (1999)

Dice it small. I, too, once knelt on this shining shore
watching the tall ships sail from the burning sun
like myths; slipped off my dress to wade,
breast-deep, in the sea, waving and calling;
then plunged, then swam on my back, looking up
as three black ships sighed in the shallow waves.
Of course, I was younger then. And hoping for men. Now,
let us baste that sizzling pig on the spit once again.

When Odysseus lands on the island of Aeaea, half his men have the misfortune of encountering the sorceress Circe, who transforms the men into pigs. Poet Duffy’s 1999 feminist reimagining of Circe—released as a part of her poetry collection, The World's Wife—takes place years after this encounter, as she describes how she loved cooking the different parts of the pig as a young woman: “One way or another, all pigs have been mine— / under my thumb, the bristling, salty skin of their backs, / in my nostrils here, their yobby, porky colognes.”

7. Joel and Ethan Coen's O Brother, Where Art Thou? (2000)

Joel and Ethan Coen’s O Brother, Where Art Thou? is a fairly faithful adaptation of The Odyssey featuring many plot points from Homer, including a protagonist on a journey to reunite with his wife after an absence of many years; an encounter with a Cyclops; and singing Sirens—all within a gritty and absurdly humorous vision of the Deep South in the midst of the Great Depression. Interestingly, neither Coen brother had read the source material before writing the script.

8. Margaret Atwood’s The Penelopiad (2005)

Atwood’s novella is part of the Canongate Myth Series, which asked modern authors to reimagine ancient myths from many different cultures. In Atwood’s contribution, Penelope—long dead—looks back on the events of her life. She recounts her life in Sparta as a young woman, her marriage to Odysseus, and the events depicted in The Odyssey. All the while, she corrects historical misconceptions about herself and ultimately questions why it is that her husband—a man who was not well respected in his own lifetime—should be remembered so fondly by history.

9. Enda Walsh’s Penelope (2010)

Irish playwright Enda Walsh’s modern tragicomedy concerns the attempts of four men to win the affections of Penelope while residing in the wreckage of a dried-up swimming pool on her and Odysseus’ estate. The play attained critical acclaim at Edinburgh’s 2010 Fringe Festival and according to Ben Brantley’s New York Times review, “dares to suggest what it might have been like had Samuel Beckett, instead of James Joyce, decided to reinvent Homer’s Odyssey.”

Jo Bonney Directs an Intimate Epic, a Contemporary History

Center Theatre Group — Thu, 14 Apr 2016 00:17:00 -0700

Set on a plantation in West Texas and a Civil War battlefield from 1862–1863, Father Comes Home From The Wars “is a conversation about the past, the present, and the future, as any great epic story is. But its focus on the individual characters makes it very intimate,” said Bonney.

The play follows a slave named Hero who must decide whether to follow his master to war and possibly earn his freedom—while fighting for a cause he does not believe in. Father Comes Home From The Wars draws inspiration from many different epics, including The Mahabharata and The Odyssey, and Parks envisions it as a nine-part epic. Later pieces will follow the characters and their descendants. These first three parts make for a big play, with a dozen actors on the stage (including a “Chorus of Less Than Desirable Slaves” and a very funny dog named Odd-See) and live music, written and composed by Parks.

“It does the piece a disservice to talk about it simply as being a play about slavery,” said Bonney. “Within the bigger toxic context of slavery, the focus is really on the individuality of these men and women and their very different ideas on the idea of freedom. It asks the question, what does freedom mean to people? Then and now?”

It is a personal story for Parks herself, who was named a finalist for the 2015–2016 Susan Smith Blackburn Prize playwriting award for this show. “This piece is very close to Suzan-Lori’s heart because her father was in the military,” said Bonney, and the play is set in West Texas, where her mother grew up. Father Comes Home From The Wars is “something that she’s wanted to write for a long time.”

Parks brings to this story a mix of “formal language with very colloquial language, the past and the present,” said Bonney. “I decided the look and feel of the production should also have that juxtaposition.” The set mixes period elements—what Bonney called “an iconic slave shack”—with modern elements, like bare soil and a metal ramp for entrances and exits. The costumes reflect the same mix, with characters wearing modern sneakers with a period skirt or a contemporary beanie with period pants.

Current events, particularly the killings of young, unarmed black men across America, have made the echoes of the piece and the antebellum era reverberate even louder for audiences. “It’s a continuum,” said Bonney. “And the baggage of that period is still being carried today.”

In 2016, Women Run the Mark Taper Forum

Center Theatre Group — Wed, 13 Apr 2016 23:59:00 -0700

Jo Bonney, who is directing Father Comes Home From The Wars (Parts 1, 2 & 3) at the Taper through May 15, 2016, sees this as part of a larger shift, though one that’s still in the making. “There’s no doubt that the professional landscape for women playwrights and directors has substantially improved over the past several years,” said Bonney, who has been directing plays for over three decades, and who received a 1998 Obie Award for Sustained Excellence of Direction. “Although I have to say that this season at the Taper is certainly not yet the norm; it’s a role model for other theatres.”

The Taper season is full of strong female characters, from the mothers and daughters of The Mystery of Love & Sex (written by Bathsheba Doran) and The Beauty Queen of Leenane (directed by Garry Hynes) to Penny, a slave on a West Texas plantation in Father Comes Home From The Wars (Parts 1, 2 & 3) (written by Suzan-Lori Parks and directed by Bonney), the successful artist and lawyer of Disgraced (directed by Kimberly Senior), and the famed eponymous singer of August Wilson’s Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom (directed by Phylicia Rashad).

Yet none of these plays are strictly about women’s issues, nor are any of them aimed at attracting female audiences. Kimberly Senior believes that this is to her, and the play’s, advantage. “I kind of work best when I’m doing work that’s not my experience, so I can bring this other perspective,” said the Disgraced director. “We don’t hire a serial killer to play a serial killer. Part of our work as artists is to have empathy to step into someone else’s shoes. Let’s expand what kinds of stories we think women are capable of telling.”

A number of the women at the Taper this season have spent their careers doing just that. They have over 175 years of theatre experience among them, and have directed a broad range of shows all over the world. They have also amassed a number of impressive awards while breaking various boundaries. In 1998, Garry Hynes became the first woman to win a Tony Award® for Best Direction, for the original Broadway production of The Beauty Queen of Leenane. In 2002, Suzan-Lori Parks became the first African-American woman to win the Pulitzer Prize. And in 2014, Phylicia Rashad became the first African-American woman to win a Tony Award for Best Actress in a Play.

But while there are fewer and fewer boundaries left to break, there is still more change to come. “So much of it is a question of mentorship for female artists of all kinds,” said Senior. Until now, women in theatre didn’t see other women directing and women writing, and didn’t have role models—much less mentors—in whose footsteps they could follow. But Senior is hopeful that things will be different for the next generation. “We want to raise up artists of excellence and authenticity and experience, and that takes time,” she said.

Bonney hopes “that this conversation becomes redundant. That the issue of gender is a non-issue, and that the question of which plays are chosen to be produced in a season and helmed by which directors will simply be about vision and creativity.”

At the Taper, and in all of Center Theatre Group’s work, this is already the case. “We never look to a director or a playwright to represent a particular group or fill some kind of quota,” said Ritchie. “We produce stories that are fresh and relevant, from the voices we think our audiences will find most compelling. It doesn’t matter to us if those voices are male or female, and we don’t think it matters to our audiences, either.”

A Gentleman's Guide—to Love of Theatre

Center Theatre Group — Tue, 12 Apr 2016 19:14:00 -0700

A Gentleman’s Guide to Love & Murder, which plays the Ahmanson Theatre through May 1, 2016, is a rollicking musical comedy that provides a macabre, stylish, and—dare we say—gentlemanly guide to avenging your mother’s honor while simultaneously gaining control of your family fortune. In honor of this virtuosic and hilarious theatrical experience, Center Theatre Group is proud to present our very own guide—to love of theatre. We think any gentleman (or lady) bringing children to a show for the first time will find Theatre Basics: A Starting Place for Introducing Children to the World of Live Theatre indispensable.

Down the Rabbit Hole with "Through the Looking Glass"

Lynell George — Mon, 11 Apr 2016 19:00:00 -0700

Behind those curtained windows, a dozen men and women, of varying ages, backgrounds, and native tongues, sat looped in a tight circle, balancing spiral notebooks and electronic tablets, sharing snippets of stories many had never revealed aloud. Not quite strangers and yet not quite friends, the ensemble had been gathering for weeks at the Circle Squared Collective performance space in Montebello to write their autobiographies, and to imagine the “autobiographies” of another group of Angelenos across town. On this particular evening they were teasing out their narratives’ make-or-break details—all the while, their eyes locked on their director, reg e gaines (who wrote Bring in ’da Noise, Bring in ’da Funk), as playwright Jerry Quickley (Live From the Front) looked on.“Whatever you do,” Gaines intoned, “You have to make us—the audience—believe it. You have to bring it.”

The next evening, 15 miles—and a universe—away, a similar scenario unfolded along Degnan Avenue, inside Leimert Park’s The World Stage. The “Stage” has long played host marquee names in free jazz and spoken word, but on this winter evening many of those assembled Leimert Park locals—predominately African-American—didn’t think of themselves as writers or actors in a formal sense. They may have understood the power of stories—personal reflection or passed-down histories—but kept them sealed away.

Over the course of seven months of weekly workshops in Montebello and Leimert Park, Through the Looking Glass strived to unseal those stories. Participants dug into their own lives and communities while at the same time exploring how they see the people of another place. How we see others is often a reflection of how we see ourselves—which is why shattering our assumptions about “the other” is essential to truly uncovering who and what we are and can be. “In the end,” said Quickley, “All these communities really have is their stories.” Through the Looking Glass is intended “to speak to the emotional state of these places.”

This notion of bridging perceptions about race and culture captured Center Theatre Group Associate Artistic Director Diane Rodriguez’s imagination. When she learned about Quickley’s first iteration of the project, which paired students at Stanford University with incarcerated youth, it felt like a natural dovetail with CTG’s efforts to build substantive dialogues across the city.

Rodriguez also wanted to be strategic. “When we looked at the numbers, just 1% of our audience came from those communities,” she said of choosing Montebello and Leimert Park. “Both neighborhoods were similar but not identical: they are majority middle-class but also have lots of working-class people. Leimert Park has a lot more art happening, but Montebello has a small scene as well. We wanted to tap into that—that kind of secret desire that people have to express themselves,” said Rodriguez. “And often, the magic word is ‘access.’ We basically wanted to create a whetting of the palate and an interest, or curiosity, that might not have been there.”

Quickley kept that in mind while choosing the writers and performers. “We were really interested in people who had not been commissioned artists,” he explained. The stories were important, but so was imagination. “I was looking for not just people who wanted to shout their story, but also the grandmother who must be coaxed.”

For Jameleah Reign, finding herself part of the Leimert Park crew was an out-of-the-blue gift. Being tapped was surprising, she said, because apart from daily journaling, she didn’t imagine herself a writer. An immigrant from Belize, a student, and a mother of four, she’d been trying to navigate life as an undocumented woman—an identity that set her apart from the largely African-American residents in her community. The process helped her to come to a new understanding of herself. “I couldn’t read my writing out loud the first few months. It was very intimidating for me,” she said. But once she got called on, she explained, “As I read—about the death of a brother, living undocumented, getting married, divorced—I realized I did feel comfortable sharing because it was my truth.”

That “ownership,” Quickley observed, evolved as the group began hearing the echoes of their own experiences—their struggles, joys, and frustrations—in the words of people in the other community.

“We learned that we really weren’t that different,” said Manuel Marron, a member of the Montebello group who had shown promise as a writer in high school but in the 10 years since graduation had left little space for it. The opportunity to contribute to and eventually perform in Through the Looking Glass—which was staged in both Montebello and Leimert Park as well as the Kirk Douglas Theatre in February—was revelatory. “When I first showed up, I had no idea where this whole thing was leading,” he said. But by the end, standing in the stage wings at the Douglas, “I hadn’t felt that much natural excitement in so long.”

As a collective, Marron said, they created a new community—one on the stage and one that now lives beyond it. But the larger lesson Marron takes with him is to push outside the familiar—to explore and go deeper. In everything.

“What really causes conflicts is that we think we’re the only ones going through what we’re experiencing,” he said. Ultimately, however, ”We’re all going through it. But to finally be able to speak the words—and have them heard—that’s the power of what art can do.”

Through the Looking Glass is supported by a grant from The James Irvine Foundation. Since 1937, The James Irvine Foundation has provided more than $1.5 billion in grants to over 3,600 nonprofit organizations across the state. The Foundation’s mission is to expand opportunity for the people of California to participate in a vibrant, successful, and inclusive society.

Through the Looking Glass Highlights

Each participant spent 56 hours in weekly writing workshops in their community.
Writing prompts included, “Write about a smell that makes you think of your neighborhood” and “Create a list of the 30 most important events in your life.”
Playwrights Branden Jacob-Jenkins (Appropriate) and Lucas Hnath (The Christians) spoke at workshops; participants also read their scripts and attended their plays at the Mark Taper Forum.
Creative project leads Jerry Quickley and reg e gaines have been friends for decades, and also collaborated on Quickley’s solo show Live From the Front, which gaines directed at the Kirk Douglas Theatre in 2006.
The three final performances were attended by over 500 audience members.