Being in the Room Together (or: theatre criticism!)

Last night and tonight were my first Wednesday and Thursday nights off since before Vanya opened... so what, six or maybe seven weeks? And I have to be honest, it feels good. In between missing the production and everyone involved... aside from those feelings, having my evenings back does feel good. But doesn't it always?

I could write more about that experience but instead I feel compelled to write some other experiences, specifically two great shows I saw this week that were great for completely different but maybe sort fundamentally philosophically similar reasons!

On the bus ride over to our last show, my friend, comrade and cast mate Ron and I were discussing (philosophizing as it were) as we often do on the nature of theatre! Somehow or another, the topic came around to how contemporary audiences' perception of theatre is inevitably influenced by their experiences with film and cinema, related but very fundamentally different mediums. Ron went on to decry theatre that attempts somehow to replicate cinema in spite of these differences or because the way we experience stories as acted out by people ala theatre is so affected by our experience of cinema... This is a long winded way of bringing around the point that the most successful  theatre fundamentally acknowledges you, the audience and us the performers are in a room... together! And what makes live theatre especially compelling to us audiences in the age of cinema is the texture of that experience and how it is so much missing in our lives. I think ultimately acknowledging that is a big part of what made Vanya so successful.

And the same could be said of the two productions I'm reviewing in this blog post, Project: Project's "What Are You Doing Here?" and Whistler in the Dark's Tales From Ovid.

And it is my earnest hope to sincerely well, review them! Which is something I don't often do. Well, I sort of do, have you read many of my blog posts? I often react to the pieces I see. But I tend to avoid out and out reviewing things because as an acting member of the theatre community I can't be critically objective both because I know and have worked with or my opinions are somehow affected by my relationship to so many people making theatre and also because well, I want to work them and for that to happen I have to be hired by them and reviews can be touchy things, right? So if I were setting out or felt compelled to write a Thomas Garvey-esque scorching criticism of something or somebody (and in the past I've had to restrain myself) I couldn't bring myself to write anything like that about anyway. So I'm not really a true critic, and that's fine. But in the case of Whistler in the Dark and Project: Project I feel like I also know the people behind those companies well enough that I don't foresee them taking anything I have personally and perhaps even welcoming my criticism and commentary as part of a broader discussion, so here it goes! Critical response review a-ma-gigs!

Let me start by saying that Project: Project's "What Are You Doing Here?" is definitely the kind of show I could stand to have more of in my life. Conveniently located in the Democracy Center which is a fifteen minute walk away from my apartment, for a suggested donation of $5 a piece and under an hour long oh and I forgot to mention phenomenally entertaining, original, engaging and energetic. Basically like, the perfect way to spend a Sunday afternoon, which is when I happened to be seeing it, which happened to be their last performance. Talking to people afterwards and from the product I experienced it was clear I was therefore seeing the show in it's best possible light, all the mechanics of the piece hummed along beautifully while also incorporating the numerous discoveries the performers had made from bringing their devised, largely improvisational work before an audience four times previously.

Oh, so what exactly is Project: Project and what do they do? What an excellent question! It's a site specific, interactive, immersive... performance piece? For vague reasons, there are Boy Scouts but also Roller Derby Girls and the Boyscouts have crushes on the Roller Derby Girls and vice versa except when they have crushes on each other or not at all. It was delightfully convoluted, or maybe just a little convoluted if you weren't totally on board with being broken up into groups of five or six and being lead between the Democracy Center's different rooms, including the kitchen, bathroom, library and a room with arts and crafts. Meanwhile, the action unfolds around you as characters run back and forth falling in and out love and commonly asking audience members for pick up lines or relationship advice when not flirting or courting one another. In the end, the majority of the characters get paired off, and not always in ways you expect! All of this was structured around the very clever conceit of starting and ending in the so called "Ball Room", the biggest room and sort of main hall of the Democracy Center (and probably where you've seen anything there like a reading if you been to Interim Writers or what have you, a group that shares membership with Project: Project). While in the ball room, most of the plates and pieces which constitutes the plot begin spinning starting with the Roller Derby Girls crashing the Boy Scouts trial orientation for new Cub Scouts which the audience is supposed to be a part of.

Did you follow all that? Did I mention it was interactive? Which generally is something that I'm into! I like being a participant in my theatre pieces, I mean as I previously stated by being in the room I am already so I don't mind taking an extra step. But then again I am an actor and I crave attention. And this is a tricky tight rope to walk and thing to pull off. The pieces of "audience interaction" in Lily's Revenge were frankly... not great, mainly consisting of reading off pieces of paper a few times during the show. It didn't really add too much (and also chatting with performers between acts, which I'll admit was more effective). In the case of Project: Project, I wasn't completely sure what our role was supposed to be. Over the course of the bathroom segment (which was maybe my favorite part of the piece) audience members were explicitly polled for pick up lines, and throughout the piece there was no fourth wall so actors constantly referred to or addressed the audience. But at other times it wasn't clear if actors were talking mostly to the other actors on "stage" with them, or to the audience or a little bit of both and when should we be contributing? One guy for example hooted and hollered and added his own asides to the content of the second ground scene, which although, you know, not appropriate, I can't really blame him. And luckily it didn't detract from the overall experience, but I do believe for future endeavors from the company it could be better incorporated, that's all!

Overall I thought it was a super fun show and an awesome use of the Democracy Center space. The main thing that made it work for me along with the clever staging, was the sheer energy and commitment to their characters of the ensemble of performers which included some very, very talented local vets of the fringe scene. For me as an actor, seeing all of their choices and picking out what was scripted, what was spontaneous and what must had developed from the run about their interactions was a big part of the fun and that aspect was so well incorporated, it was hard to tell! And I also can't say how much I enjoyed moving from room to room watching the story unfold as the actors scurried around us in a well oiled hum of choreography and placement... man it was just so cool!

And you know what else was super cool? Tales From Ovid... I mean, holy shit, melted my fucking face. Over the summer (man I guess it was still summer when I took it, or early fall) I took an intensive in Lecoq Technique with Whistler in the Dark, with several members of the Ovid ensemble and the core of that work really shone through for me, enhanced and informing my experience of watching their performance. There are so many little, really beautiful moments I could highlight... the way the actors thrummed and moved as one when Danny Bryck was personifying the sun comes to mind... the way they incorporated the music, for another. The amazing and beautiful silk work. Their sheer physical presences together as a singular unit...

So yeah, all that just incredible shit. My only possible critique is the show's length and the absence of an intermission made it difficult to be completely and fully engaged throughout the entirety of the performance, I mean two hours is a long time to sit in one place and never think "oh and what should I do for dinner?" but anytime I drifted off I was inevitably pulled back in by another awe inspiring moment.

To be honest, I'm still a little too overwhelmed by the experience to write more than "it was really awesome" but it was really awesome! And it was really exciting seeing a show from my peers on the fringe elevated and brought to a new level of exposure by an organization like Arts Emerson and my one time professor Rob Orchard, who I took a class with many years ago when he was still at ART and who I said hi to on the way to the show. Hi Rob! I know Rob Orchard has better things to do than read this... but still. Also hi Meg Taintor! And Max! And Jeff! And anyone else involved with either Whistler or Project: Project who stumbles across this, my message to you, keep doing what you do!

*Editor's Note: I also interviewed Jeff Mosser, co founder of Project Project for my podcast and talked to him about the project (project) on that show. And like I said I took that intensive with Whistler. So I really can't be critically objective! But those are my thoughts on these shows, enjoy!

Audience Response

After seeing two pretty high profile shows these past two weeks (Hamlet at Arts Emerson, and the Lily's Revenge at ART) and also being on the receiving end of various audience reactions as part of Uncle Vanya... it seems like there should be a blog post in here somewhere, no?

I don't like to write reviews (except if it's of a show I'm in, in which case it will be unabashedly and acknowledgedly positive... I think I may keep doing that) because well, I'm not a critic! But I am a theatre person, so of course when I see things I inevitably respond to them as such. On the one hand, I am inherently aware of the artifice involved and try as hard as I can to go a long with it's intended effect while appreciating it as such.

One thing to be said about Hamlet and the Lily's Revenge, both of them had a lot of that going on. And both of them I enjoyed throughly, while parts of them I was less crazy about.

My Uncle Vanya cast mate Kate said something really profound after seeing the Old Globe's production of Hamlet... something to the effect of "it reminded me that even though it's a very famous/important company from a very famous/important city, things can still not work in a production and those things don't necessarily circumvent or prevent that or make that any less likely to happen" only she said it much more eloquently and profoundly and specifically in the context of our ensemble, a fundamentally fringe company making theatre in a place that is decidedly not a theatre destination or important place. But still, tonight we had audience members saying to us "that was the most incredible theatre experience I've ever been to or been a part of" so there you go!

How did I respond to those big productions from big fancy companies? Let's start with Hamlet. Other people's reviews I've read have said their Ophelia was problematic. Now, I don't know and I don't expect I'm likely ever to meet the actress who played Ophelia so I feel OK nodding generally in agreement with that assessment... but I mean, I don't know. What's Ophelia supposed to be like that she wasn't? OK well I guess a more compelling performer in the role... she could have been more intense. Other things she could have been too I'm sure that I can't think of. The point is, I don't claim to know Hamlet all that well. I guess I know it better than a lot of Shakespeare's plays, because I was sort of in a production of it in college (the anti-Hamlet I've blogged about previously) and for me the best way to become actually familiar with any theatrical work is to do it. Or probably to see it a bunch of times, and I think I'd only seen Hamlet performed once before, and watched the Ethan Hawke version... that's about my experience with the piece.

So who am I to try and deconstruct what did or didn't work about it? Other people have opinions based on past experience with the work. I only have my experience seeing it this one particular time. Ophelia feels easy to point out, because I read that in a review before seeing the show so I'm sure it colored my response to an extent. An had I known the actress playing her, or had a personal connection of some kind to her (as is often the case when I see plays) I'm sure I would have felt differently!

Anyway, how did I actually feel about the show separate from the meta context of the event itself which was as I was watching it bringing attention to the meta contextualization taking place *pause for breath*? Like I said, I liked it! It was funny. My Dad is fond of arguing that Hamlet shouldn't qualify as a tragedy because it's so full of funny lines. And I like the idea of staging Shakespeare in such a way that is entertaining while not undercutting or underselling the text or the story itself, because Shakespeare was fundamentally writing to entertain people, and so the profundity of violence and coarse Elizabethan phrases, along with the ruminations on human nature and inventing the human or whatever (also not whatever, he was a pretty great writer).

I had two favorite parts about the production, one was the sound design, specifically the use of foleys (which is a way of saying old timey sound effects) and the music. All of the players played their own instruments and sang, just like an old timey troupe of players would have done back up until the death of vaudeville more or less. The other was the conceit of a young Hamlet, Ophelia and Laertes. Hamlet was really good. All of the ensemble was awesome in their different parts, but Hamlet was really good. And I don't know, I know some versions of the text suggest he's in his 30s, but that never made sense to me. Insert argument for Hamlet being a teenager or whatever here. I don't care about the dramaturgy. I guess just as a still young person, with comparatively little distance between now and being 17 (although of course that gap is growing, it was an especially visceral experience) it elevated the stakes for me, somehow. And it gave the sense for me that the characters were more existentially trapped than if they'd been older people more able to reason. It made Hamlet's mistakes more justifiable as an inability to handle the sensory overload of his father's death/murder and his mother's incest. He's like, 17, of course he's going crazy at all this shit! Oh, and of course Ophelia doesn't know how to handle it either. Oh fuck and now her boyfriend killed her father, oh and she drowned herself (question mark?) oh no poor thing...

But then at the end, the players play their instruments, and Hamlet gets up and so does Ophelia and they dance together. And sincerely, that was my favorite moment of the play. I felt my eyes water just a little bit. It was so sweet and moving, their dancing in the afterlife or whatever it was or wasn't, and the audience clapping/applauding to the beat of the music.

I also liked Lily's Revenge. I'm even less able to be objective of the production, because I actually know people who worked on it. But I'm happy to say I throughly enjoyed it. I loved the costume and production design, which is clearly where most of those Harvard/ART "dollar-dollar bills y'all" went, and especially the movement (which was done by my dance teacher Yo-el, hi Yo-el!) and I thought it was really fun and engaging.

Was it innovative? That's a deeper and trickier question. I was talking to a friend of mine after the show who has much more history than I do with queer theatre, and was around when the various performance art aspects it was integrating were being conceived, and in that department he wasn't particularly impressed and for the sake of not misquoting him I won't go any further. I did recognize the constituent cultural studies materials around gender and cultural and societal norms being referenced and accessed throughout the piece... more or less, I think. And I guess it didn't read to me as a member of generation Y as an attempt to "shock" ala Rocky Horror, the popular reference template for this genre of work, although it did clearly gesture flamboyantly towards Brecht and all the verse and meta theatricality reminded me of Marat/Sade and Peter Weiss. So in that sense, it was of a piece for me of our current cultural landscape of repurposing and remixing. German post modernist theatre technique meets Japanese Noh theatre meets a drag show. The significance of which I'm still processing.

Anyhow, one way or the other it was definitely a spectacle, and an event I'm glad I experienced. As for the length, that didn't really bother me too much. The pacing and placement of intermissions was such that I didn't feel a compelling need to check my phone's clock and I'd been encouraged against doing so by being given a wax paper baggie thing to place my deactivated phone in to. Given the interactive nature of the production, I was concerned what significance that would harbor later on, but it was essentially a gimmick meant to remind you to engage with the "here and now" of the performance, one of the play's themes.

And of this moment, those are my responses as an audience member and "theatre person" to the plays I've been able to see when I haven't been in the theatre myself, doing my own show! I think I like this format, maybe I'll try revisiting it... maybe.

To Train Or Not To Train? (it's a rhetorical question)

Hello blog. I'm writing this chunk of blog post from backstage at Uncle Vanya. Which, have you bought your ticket to yet? Its pretty great. Anyway this is week two, and we've been extended through November 11th! So there goes your excuse to miss this once in a life time piece of theatrical inspiration. 

So speaking of which, I saw the Globe Theatre's production of Hamlet today at Emerson. How was it? I liked it. I enjoyed having such a young Hamlet, it put the play in a context that made sense for me. My closest connection to the text was from doing that sort of anti Hamlet in college that I've referenced which actually had a vaguely similar conceit. And I liked all the minimal staging and the effort to bring some of the atmosphere of the old globe to the Paramount. Anyway, I'm going to try and read it this week and come up with more of a response. 

During intermission, I got an email confirming I'd been accepted to the month long intensive training with Shakespeare and Company, out in Lenox. Before you congratulate me on anything, it's not an accomplishment so much as an inevitably of my application. Which is to say, it's $4000, for the month of January in Western Mass, and considering the economic situation of most actors I don't imagine it's especially competitive. But it's sort of ironic that I received my official acceptance while watching a Shakespeare play, and since I wasn't cast in that show I blogged about going up in that same time frame, I'll probably do it.

And I'm looking forward to it. All of the people I know who've gone through the training speak very highly of it, and this will be my first exposure to a conservatory-esque environment, as opposed to all the evening and extension classes that have made up my training, I'll live and breath acting and Shakespeare for at least a month, and that's exciting, right? It'll be hard too, being away from home and my friends and family and especially my girlfriend. But worth it, I hope.

So thats where I'm at, and also figuring out what to do next. The trouble is it will keep me from doing a show until March or April, which will leave December relatively barren, and that kind of worries me, as I always feel my best when I'm active creatively and doing stuff and having a reason to leave my apartment. Especially during the winter time, which is always tough, with the cold and reduced day light, etc.

But I have this blog, my music, oh and my podcast which has been going actually pretty well. It took me a few tries after the first one to get in a groove but I released a new one and have another on the editing dock I'm happy with. So far I've had three "guests", one of them recurring in the form of my friend Jesse, and some other peeps I have in mind to invite on. My goal starting out was just to get to where I dont suck and I feel I'm accomplishing that. The question now is, when do I go on iTunes? Usually in your first day or two on the service you get listed as a new show and with that some base number of downloads which then drops off. How much it drops off depends on how good your product is. I've moved to a new, higher quality recording method, and have gotten much slicker at editing. Sooner or later I've gotta bite the bullet and take those steps. Which, actually I'm excited to do.  

And excited for what the future holds! Which, well, is anxiety until I get cast in my next thing. But there auditions, and since I keep booking things I must be doing something right. Whatever that is, I've just got to keep on keeping on, doing what I do.