Judicial Theatre Review of "The Overwhelming" at the Art Fuse

Bill Marx, Editor of The Art Fuse, is conducting a new experiment, the "judicial arts review." To quote Marx:

As coverage of the arts in the conventional, mainstream media wanes, critical discussion of the arts online has settled into two extremes: there’s the corporate dream of an omnipotent “Google” reviewer for all and the chaos of opinions fired off in individual blogs of varying quality and intellectual integrity.

My aim with the Judicial Review, of which there will be one a month in the coming year, is to fashion a mid-way between these two unsatisfying polarities — to create a flexible place where professionals and non-professionals, artists and amateurs can exchange views and judgments about the arts. This will serve as a model for a civil conversational setting that will invite independent discussion as well as encourage participation in the arts.

To this end, he has assembled a panel including myself, playwright Peter-Adrian Cohen, and Timothy Longman, Director of the New African Studies Center at Boston University, to review Company One's production of J.T. Rogers' play about the Rwandan genocide, The Overwhelming.

Brother Blue 1921-2009

On November Third, Brother Blue (Dr, Hugh Morgan Hill) left the land of the living. He took the title of "storyteller" but could be, and often was, described as a shaman, griot, or performance artist avant la lettre. He was a powerful presence in the Boston area as well as internationally for decades, telling stories to children, teenagers, and adults, as well as serving as a friend and mentor to countless artists.

Brother Blue loved King Lear and often described Shakespeare as the "greatest bluesman the world had ever known."

I had the joy of many encounters with him and his wife and constant companion, Ruth Edmonds Hill, a historian, folklorist, and his documentarian and manager. Last time was this past June at a reading by former U.S. Poet Laureate, Rita Dove, at the Harvard Bookstore. Despite such luminaries in the room as Dove, Henry Louis Gates, and Kevin Young, in the hour or so that followed the reading, Blue held court in his own unique manner, so when he draped his arm over my shoulder, I felt like a prince.

Often times, I would encounter him holding court in the café section in the front of the Harvest Co-op in Central Square, and and I soon found that to anyone who knew him, "I was talking to Brother Blue" was an acceptable excuse for tardiness. One day, he told me that he was tired of so many of so much of the traditional mime repertoire that had since become cliché and demanded of me, instead, to "show me the sun having trouble getting up in the morning."

I did not want to refuse, and I could not, and right there in the café, I performed what could only be termed 'the first draft" of what would become, my mime piece, "O, Mister Sun, Don't You Fall Asleep On Me." That was the sort of influence Blue could have on people.

I have looked about for any written accounts of my encounters with Blue and found an entry from my 2005 blog about one of my stints with Bread and Puppet:

Brother Blue and Ruth Hill arrive early to the evening’s show. Blue is one of the great American storytellers, and the elder statesman of Boston’s bohemia. Ruth is his wife of many decades, documentation, manager, and less flamboyant partner, dressed in a richly textured patchwork of blues, greens, and purples, she has a rye and dry sense of humor, that stands out in contrast to Blue’s exuberance. Blue praises Peter as "one of the world's greatest" Peter laughs and announces his willingness to accept “the Brother Blue Nobel Prize.”

After the show, Brother Blue confides in myself and Mary Curtin, the producer of the Cambridge run, a Bread & Puppet “geezer” and saxophonist with the Second Line Social Aid and Pleasure Society Brass Band that he regards Peter as "Beyond Genius” that his uniqueness is such that the world will not have another like him soon. That when Peter is gone there will be no more Bread & Puppet.

Blue easily could have been describing himself: his uniqueness was such that the world will not have another like him soon.

Other tributes of note:

Laura Packer's announcement on the MassMouth blog.

Warren Senders' Brother Blue is Immortal on the Daily Kos.

Obituary WBUR's Online Edition

Obituary in The Boston Globe

Notes on Class

I've been following Professor Matthew Isaac Cohen's blog about his course on Bread and Puppet Theatre at Royal Halloway, University of London, with interest in part because my essay "Breaking with Bread and Puppet" which is both a narrative of my decision to stop working with the troupe as well as a critique of the imagery that prompted my decision (for which I've gained a small amount of notoriety.) The main focus of the course to have the students investigate the theatrical techniques most closely associated with Bread and Puppet. Despite any political falling-out with B&P founder, Peter Schumann, I strongly endorse theatre-makers drawing upon these techniques. In fact, despite the fact that Total War is primarily written in a naturalistic style, I do incorporate many of these techniques I learned as well.

This past week, Cohen's class was assigned to use what they were learning to parody the political and racial stances of the far-right, and arguably, neo-Nazi, British National Party. One group of students was assigned the instruction:

Using a ringmaster, explore the idea that the BNP deny the Holocaust.

Which I found particularly ironic since the argument of "Breaking with Bread and Puppet" was that Peter Schumann had deliberately misrepresented the history of the Warsaw Ghetto, and by extension, the Holocaust, in order to misrepresent the West Bank Barrier Wall, and was thus engaged in what can be termed "soft-core" Holocaust Denial.

In my view, the BNP provides too easy a target, now if they were assigned to parody the controversy around the attempted boycotts of Israeli academics by the British University and College Union, that would have been edgy.

Nobody Sucks... Except That Guy

Last week, Don Hall, Chicago-based actor, director, theatre-observer, and activist (and well-known enough in the theatrical blogosphere that I trust someone will correct me if I left anything out) has been posting a series on the audition process on his blog An Angry White Guy in Chicago. Having recently been in the position of casting actors for Total War, and like Hall, not being "institutionalized (meaning I didn't go to college to learn how to do this work)" I found myself nodding in agreement with much of what Hall and some of his other readers had to say:

2. Take some time and find out what the director is looking for - I'm happier than shit to tell you what we're up to and what you can do to get "the edge."

3. [...] I know within about fifteen seconds whether or not I can use you in my show - a good director knows in advance what he's looking for to some degree - and the only reason I let you get through that 2-minute monologue that somehow manages to be five minutes long is because you came all this way, there's no reason to be unnecessarily rude.

The bottom line is:

This means if you don't get called back, it isn't because you suck.

So if you did audition for the reading of Total War and didn't get the part: that's right: you didn't suck; you just weren't right for the role; you might have been right for a completely different role. In fact, since this was a staged reading, and I conducted my audtions in an informal, unorthodox manner, in a neighborhood coffeehouse (I simply didn't have the budget to rent out a space for auditions, though to be fair, I interviewed for my teaching gig with OpenAir Circus in the very same coffeehouse, and the informality seemed to encourage actors to volunteer their personal interest in the project) I might have liked you personally, even if I diecided not to cast you.

* * *

As with every rule of social interaction (such as theatre-making) there is always a statistical outlier: in this case, it was someone who, despite having some talent, proceded to so alienate me during the audition that I would not even consider adjusting my sought-for preferences to accomodate his strengths. It all began when I received the following (yes, multiple) emails (Note that the name has been withheld for obvious reasons):

My voice has been described as deep, resonant, beautiful, and hilarious. I have been practicing for five years now and am able to express a wide range of personalities.

[...]

I feel that I would be perfect for the role of Duane McCormack. [...M]y writing has recieved significant praise from my honors professors so the role will come quite naturally to me.

Duane McCormack is a fictitious character, so the actor isn't actually expected to do any writing associated with the play. So while I appreciate that an actor might want to draw upon some aspect of their own life in order to relate to a character or to the themes of the play, this struck me as odd. Nonetheless, I sent a .pdf of the script along with a list of pages where Duane appears, concluding that this would be sufficient for the actor to judge for himself if the character is right for him and if so, provide hints as to how to approach the role.

So, in between meeting other actors at my table (which I rent by ordering espresso and bread pudding) our friend whose "voice has been described as deep, resonant, beautiful, and hilarious" shows up for his audition. His voice is indeed resonant and he has movie-star looks. Then he explains his interpretation into the character:

"Duane is a journalist; he's a truth-seeker."

This struck me as an odd misreading, so I suggested that "He is a student journalist but he's more defined by the attempt to keep his head above water while the comrades to which he's tethered are sinking, than by any quest for truth."

The actor ignored my suggestion and read it his way. Not having a lot of actors auditioning for the role, I tried to consider if his interpretation added something I had not seen before (which had already occurred during the first staged reading.)

None of this would have been worth commenting upon until he started exhibiting the oddest behaviors. While I was flipping through the pages of my script to find the next bit of dialogue I wanted to hear him read, he put on his sunglasses, presented his profile and asked me if I saw his resemblance to Tom Cruise and Ashton Kutcher.

As I was conducting this audition in the oddest of places we were interupted when a young woman who had been a friend of a former roommate of mine, dropped by to say hello and asked about my cat. After the brief exchange of pleasantries and my explanation that I was conducting auditions, there was no exchange of email addresses, phone numbers, no words or gestures implying a hoped for future communication, which apparently the the actor missed, he slyly smiled and purred:

"A possible interest?"

He then launched into what must have been a rehearsed speech about how he was going to make my play great because he was going places, which, leaving aside the pathological narcissism, was simply insulting to the talents of the actors who had already volunteered to work on this project.

Leaving aside his unsuitability for the role, I simply did not want to put my actors in a position of having to work with this guy.

So I sent the standard, diplomatic response:

It was a pleasure meeting you, but alas, I can't offer you the role of Duane. Thank you very much for taking the time to read with me.
Best,
Ian

To which he responded unexpectedly:

Hi Ian, (This is good, just read it)
Too bad, your production will suffer as a result of this unfathomably ignorant decision. Ha Ha Ha Ha Ha. Can you see that put to rhythm? I can, because I much more gifted than you will ever be in your life. Again, I offer my condolences to your woefully inadequate conclusion.
Yours Truly,
The Great And Noble [Name withheld]

In the end, I found Matthew Zahnzinger, who besides nailing the role, had the added bonus of already being in rehearsal with Mikey DiLoreto on the Factory Theatre's production of Kid Simple, and that's always a nice coincidence.

Not Only Do I Use Facebook...

Not only do I use Facebook, but I am in the Facebook movie.

Earlier this week I was in a scene in the upcoming film about the creation of Facebook, The Social Network directed by David Fincher and written by Aaron Sorkin. I was hired to play a mime performing in Harvard Square in 2003. Interestingly enough, I did perform mime in Harvard Square in 2003 and since I was using my own costume, it could be argued that I was playing myself.

It was an interesting experience and very different from working in theatre. I signed a confidentiality agreement so don't ask me for plot details (note: I am only confirming that I was employed to play a particular role in a particular film) and I didn't take photographs while on the set (part of the contract) so don't expect me to show you any either.

First rule of the confidentiality agreement: Don't talk about the confidentiality agreement.

One thing I will note is that while standing around the square with the crew and cast while the shot was being set up, passers by, and indeed some actors, asked to have their photos (I guess the main cast are allowed to take photographs) taken with me. Out of the whole evening, I saw only one genuine instance of coulrophobia when a woman had a panicked reaction upon seeing me, which tells me that it's not as widespread as one would think by reading the internet.

Time Question

In a recent thread on the Plays and Playwrights Yahoogroup a number of participants asked what it meant when it is written in the body of the play that it takes place in "the present" (presumingly when it was written) but that "present-day" references are often dated by the time of a given production.

Of course to my mind, even "the present" is a specific milieu; stories set in "the present" rapidly recede into historical fiction. Certainly, when I chose to set Total War in the 1990s, and not "the present" it meant that the characters would be making cultural and political references and using technologies of that era and not of "the present" I currently inhabit.

As a consequence, I made a small number production notes throughout the script in order to explain some of these technologies that are either no longer in use, or may be disappearing in the foreseeable future. The result was an instance of an unintended outburst of laughter when at the last staged reading, the audience heard stage manager, Anika M. Colvin-Hannibal read aloud:

[NOTE: Due to the time period in which this play is set, a "Dictionary" is a large bound book with a finite number of pages of paper, and not a potentially infinite digital hypertext.]

Aggravation of Prometheus

Have you heard the story about the event promoter who advertises a reluctant artist with the full expectation that it will force the artist to perform at an event, even after the artist says, "no?" No? With the internet and just a little bit of insanity, anything is possible! Read on, gentle readers and learn why "to defriend" is such a useful neologism...

I have never hidden that my entrance into theatre has been by a circuitous route. Though a long time fan of theatre, my career as a performer really began as a spoken-word artist at a long list of defunct alternative art-spaces-- eventually leading me to Cambridge's open-mic poetry scene, which gave me a weekly, and sometimes twice-or-thrice-weekly opportunity to hone my chops in front of a small audience.

Eventually, though, I discovered that what I really wanted to do as a writer and performer could not be accommodated by the conventions of the open-mic or the poetry slam. Still, despite my ambivalence, I've maintained a relationship with the scene, which sometimes finds ways to accommodate me.

On the evening of August 13th, I visited Squawk Coffeehouse, where The Fire of Prometheus was performing. FoP is a performance poetry troupe that had been based in Cambridge during the 1980s, some members moved away and some stayed in the area. Though I had known William Barnum for years, I only met the rest of the troupe after I was drafted from the open-mic of Stone Soup Poetry into the Barnum and Buddah [sic] Poetry Circus in December of 2000, where FoP comprised a separate "ring." While I got along quite well with a number of the performers, the group itself was so aggravating that I quit within six-months, soon afterwards begin my study of mime, and co-founded Cosmic Spelunker Theater with both Barnum and James Van Looy.

I hadn't seen Bill in a number of months (unlike me, he has no ambivalence towards the open-mic) and had not seen either RU Outavit or Kasara since I quit the Poetry Circus some eight years prior. At the end of the evening I was invited to take the stage and performed my mime piece, "The Argument," and then after calls for an encore, "The Marmalope." RU seemed especially taken by my mime work.

And then the insanity of the Canatbridgean poetry scene came to reclaim me from my liberty

A couple of days later I receive an instant message from Danzr Von Thai, the brother of RU, who, while no longer performing with Fire of Prometheus, seems to have styled himself as their manager.

He asked me about performance venues in the area that would be suitable for the Fire of Prometheus, and having heard that I had "stolen the show" (he apparently repeated this on a number of blog comment threads no matter how irrelevent it was to the topic at hand) invited me to join the Fire. I was willing to share a bill or two, but when on September 24th he named October 5th as a date, I emailed him via Facebook:

I have to check in with my time commitments-- I have a reading of my play on the 11th and so I am going to be swamped much of that week with read-throughs and other logistics.

In addition, I was very unsure if the other members of FoP had even agreed to include me since I heard nothing from them about it. This should have been the end of the story but instead Danzr kept texting me that they had already advertised that I was either now part of the group or sharing the bill. So on October 1st I sent this email:

I've also since seen the poster for the gig since we spoke this afternoon, and since I'm not on it; it's pretty clear that, as I suspected, the group never voted to include me, let alone invite me.

So I don't think it's right to be telling me that I'm supposed to be in the group when the others haven't agreed to it.

Though I repeatedly told him that I was unavailable for the October 5th performance, and questioned his claims that he was speaking for the other members Fire of Prometheus, he kept announcing that I would be there on a number ofblogs, and claimed that he had made a YouTube video (which I never saw) about my appearance, and was reposting every announcement wherever he reasoned it would do any good. It was on October 4th that I received the following strangely phrased reply:

Like I said, you can generally trust the locals to phuk thing to shineola; I gave Mic Billy Hell about that phuk up... of course you're in like flint as I've been saying all along... that was a rushed job my Mic recycling an old poster.

Eventually I came upon his announcement in the comments section of Chad Parenteau's blog. For reasons that become clear, Chad decided to delete most of the following exchange from his comments section, so I have recreated the exchange from both my personal email and from Danzr's reposting on the R U Outavit blog.

Danzr Von Thai said...

This promises to be one spectacular event... a milestone
in Stone Soups illustrious history and definately a "Do NOT Miss & bring your cameras and video gear" ! Also, the "Fire" will be introducing Mater Mime: Ian Thal !!

ps... please note: this is also a benefit gala for: "Poets for Human Rights" ... #Poet_R_U's Causes http://bit.ly/1lw4Ly http://bit.ly/OsHkK Please Help #Poets_for_Human_Rights #Stop_Child_Abuse

c):-)

10/04/2009 9:35 AM
Chad Parenteau said...

I heard that Ian will not be there, unfortunately.

10/04/2009 4:54 PM
Ian Thal said...

Also, the "Fire" will be introducing Mater Mime: Ian Thal !!

Actually, I won't because I am in pre-production for a staged reading of my play, Total War. This should have been made clear as we've already discussed the matter privately, Danzr.

Also, out of respect to my teacher, James Van Looy, I am not so comfortable being called "master mime."

10/05/2009 6:06 AM
Danzr Von Thai said...

Dearest fans of Mime Ian Thal:

Please note Ian has tragically succumbed to a rampamt flare up of a boiling emergence of latent Primadonnaitis possibly linked to a typo in the spelling of his last name ( Thall instead of Thal ) in an uncirculated press release intended for the "Underground Surrealist Magazine".

This horrific malady, sadly but apparently accurately first diagnosed by legendary shaman "The Buddha", is progressively invasive and, as Mic Cusimano - Professor of Surrealism has woefully declaimed : "Has no known cure" !

We all need to join forces and petition for divine intervention to enact a miraculous recovery or, if in the presumed ghastly baseline clinical scenario, a speedy and peaceful ascension...

May all hail Sekhmet and if any local Shemshemet practioners receive this baleful news before the predicted debasement please, at any and all cost, disregarding your own potential peril as this affliction, at this advanced stage can be infectious, and hasten to this beloved Mime's aid ! (sic)

Yours in grief...

Danzr Von Thai

(c) c);-(

10/05/2009 10:03 AM
Ian Thal said...

Danzr:

I attempted to deal with you through private channels but I have been forced to say something because you kept making inaccurate public statements about when and where I would be performing.

You were well informed of my schedule conflicts before you made any public announcement, either here, on Chad's blog, or elsewhere.

I already stated a willingness to share the bill with Fire of Prometheus on a date that would not constitute a schedule conflict for myself, but your response has been to go from insulting me in private to insulting me in public, which reflects more on your character than on mine.

Good day, sir.

Finally, Danzr posted to my Facebook wall, demonstrating a lack of understanding my time commitments:

Yo Ian... I see where your play isn't to be presented until NEXT week ! Good luck, brake a leg and smoke the joint ... c);-)

This was clearly a situation where "to defriend" is a handy verb to know, as in the sentence "I defriended Danzr."

Needless to say, I did not perform on October 5th.