Plays with the Economics or Capitalism tag are mostly about:
1. People suffering in a climate of reduced employment opportunity.
2. The broad impact specifically of unscrupulous and unconstrained capitalism on the less wealthy.
3. The villainy of specific bad economic actors and its consequences.
4. Classism and isolation between the wealthy and the poor in general.
5. Send ups of the absurdity of profit seeking as a primary motivation.
All of these are important topics, and I was favorably impressed with the vast majority of the scripts. However, only category number 5 really spoke to any of my example capitalism failures, and almost none of the plays revealed a sophisticated model of capitalism as part of their structure.
There were two plays that specifically spoke to economic theory, in the same way that [Michael Frayn's] Copenhagen speaks to physics or [Tom Stoppard's] The Hard Problem speaks to brain science. (I’ve seen productions of both of those plays recently, so may be a little over-prepared to see more work with a hefty academic basis.) Clearing Bombs by Eric Samuelsen imagines a conversation between two major 20th century economists stuck on a rooftop during WWII and passing the time with a deep but lively economic debate. Jan Kultura, Substitute Teacher, Meets the Crowd by Ian Thal is a short play that essentially presents a case study of crowd sourced creativity as a vehicle to steal ideas from people without having to pay them – well larded with good economic thinking. These stood out to me as good examples of scripts we could stand to have more of.
Meanwhile, two little twins, one a boy and the other a girl, who looked like two little jewels, wandered, from I know not where, into the palace and found Talia in a trance.
UptownWorks NYC posted photos from rehearsals for my play Jan Kultura, Substitute Teacher, Meets The Crowd which they will be presenting as part of the inaugural event in their Liberated One-Acts series of staged readings.
Plays by Michael Panes, Christian Cole-Howard, and Gabriel Straszun will also be featured that evening.
The reading will be held on Sunday, December 13 at 7:30 p.m. at Liberated Fitness NYC at 1005 Columbus Ave, New York, New York 10025.
The event is free but it is recommended that one email Uptownworksproductions@gmail.com to reserve seats.
UptownWorks NYC is directed by Amanda Black and Daniela Hart.
Photos courtesy of UptownWorks NYC
My one-act play, Jan Kultura, Substitute Teacher, Meets The Crowd will be be receiving a staged reading directed by Daniela Hart as part of the inaugural event in UptownWorks NYC's Liberated One-Acts reading series on Sunday, December 13, 2015 at 7:30 pm.
I will be in attendance.
UptownWorks NYC is run by Amanda Black and Daniela Hart. This post will be updated as more information becomes available
The evening's bill will be:
Reindeer Afterlife by Michael Panes
What Do You Mean? by Gabriel Straszun
Jan Kultura, Substitute Teacher, Meets the Crowd by Ian Thal
The Arrangements by Christian Cole-Howard
The cast for Jan Kultura, Substitute Teacher, Meets The Crowd, will include Robert Vail, Kelly Wright, Olivia Stoker, and James Koroni.
Liberated One-Acts will be presented at Liberated Fitness NYC at 1005 Columbus Ave, New York, NY Admission is free, but it is recommended that one make a reservation at UptownWorksProductions@gmail.com.
The text of Jan Kultura, Substitute Teacher, Meets The Crowd is available on The New Play Exchange.
My one-act play, The Second Annual Administration Building Takeover And Slumber Party, will be be receiving a staged reading as part of Arts Resources for the Tri-State's New Works festival in Huntington, West Virginia on Saturday, December 5, 2015 at 7:00 pm.
The reading will be directed by Stephen Vance and feature a cast of Michael Naglee, Joanna Murdock, Nora Ankrom, Dylan Clark and will be followed by a staged reading of Mike Murdock's Brighter Days. Tickets for the paired reading will be $10.
Arts Resources for the Tri-State is located at 900 8th Ave, Huntington, WV.
The text of The Second Annual Administration Building Takeover And Slumber Party is available on The New Play Exchange.
N.B.: Arts Resources for the Tri-State has created a Facebook page for the New Works 2015 festival.
Tonight, November 20, I will be moderating a panel discussion after a performance of Ilan Stavans' The Oven at Charlestown Working Theater. My panelists will be Stavans, who wrote and performs in the show, and director Matthew Glassman.
The Oven is an autobiographical piece about Stavans' experience of an ecstatic ritual as a guest of an indigenous religious group in the Columbian Amazon.
Stavans is a professor of Latin American and Latino cultures at Amherst College, and a prolific translator of English, Spanish, Yiddish and Hebrew literature.
Matthew Glassman is an actor, director, and playwright affiliated with Double Edge Theatre in Ashfield, Massachusetts.
On The Arts Fuse I review New Repertory Theatre's production of Broken Glass, a play by the major American playwright, Arthur Miller, that first premiered in 1994 had to wait until his centenary before it was ever presented in the Boston-area.
A major theme of the play is anti-Semitism: Both the violent anti-Semitism that erupted in Germany in November 1938, in a pogrom now known as Kristallnacht and the more polite form it takes in America. Most radical is Miller's treatment of the internalized anti-Semitism exemplified in the figure known as the "self-hating Jew":
Today’s dramas about identity politics are usually confident tales of empowerment. Miller goes in a far more radical direction: he creates a harrowing portrait of Jewish self-hatred. “Self-hating Jew” is a charge that has been leveled by and against Jews from a number of directions — religious and secular, the ideological left and right. Typically, this involves Jews adopting or excusing the attitudes, beliefs, rhetoric, and behaviors of anti-Semites – often with the benefit of increasing their status as individuals amongst anti-Semites.
Philip works as the head of the mortgage department at the Brooklyn Guarantee & Trust Company. (He brags he is the only Jew employed at a company owned and operated by what would later be known as White Anglo-Saxon Protestants.) However, when Philip first meets Margaret Hyman (Eve Passeltiner), he is offended when she mistakenly addresses him as Goldberg; he even goes so far as to insist that he’s not Jewish, but Finnish. He will only affirm his Jewish identity when it confers special status: he is not just the only Jew at Brooklyn Guarantee, but the only one to set foot on the yacht owned by his boss, Stanton Case (Michael Kaye). Philip imagines that his son, an Army captain and West Point graduate, will someday become the first Jewish general in the U.S. Army (in truth, that title may belong to Civil War-era Brigadier General Frederick Knefler).
On The Arts Fuse I review Maiden Phoenix Theatre Company's all-female outdoor production of Shakespeare's The Winter's Tale that closes on August 30:
While I do note that there are at points where the production is uneven (some of this reflects more on the difficulty in staging any of Shakespeare's "problem plays" than it does on the company), it has many aspects that make it worth seeing, including how director Sarah Gazdowicz makes use of the landscape of Somerville's Nathan Tufts Park:
Sarah Gazdowicz bridges the shift in genre by shifting the playing space during the intermission. The tragedy is staged at the peak of Nathan Tufts Park by the historic colonial-era Powder House that gives the neighboring square its name. The comedy transpires by the cyclopean-style masonry that separates the upper and lower parts of the park. The stone Powder House is a wonderful backdrop, but the steeply sloping foot path and the large stones that challenge the leg muscles of kids and adults make for a more inspired setting. Gazdowicz’s tableau work is far more intriguing in the latter two acts. Her actors are sometimes half-hidden in crevasses, perched on irregular ledges, or have to adapt their stance to the incline — particularly during the festivities that are part of the sheep sheering ceremony.
Juliet Bowler is a powerful Leontes. Her vocal precision heightens the paranoia of the King in his madness; his carefully constructed walls of words are impregnable to any voice of reason. But she also does a fine job of portraying Leontes’ grief when he finally realizes what he has done, as well as well as his inability to forgive himself, even in the end, when others have forgiven at least some of his sins.
In my previous post, I described the New Play Exchange in terms of some of the problems in "the new play sector" that I believe it may help resolve, noting how playwrights simply upload their plays and allow them to be searched by those seeking new plays to develop or produce.
A key tool that makes it possible for directors, literary managers, and dramaturgs to search for new plays is metadata. Some of that metadata is simply information about the themes, genre, and cast breakdown of the play -- data attached by the playwright. But there is also data added by the playwright's colleagues; other registered members of the Exchange: Recommendations.
Yesterday, I shared recommendations I have given to other playwrights' work. Today I share some recommendations that I've received.
Playwright Claudia Haas wrote the following about my as-of-yet unproduced one act play, Jan Kultura, Substitute Teacher, Meets the Crowd:
This is one high-octane, verbally rich play. The barbs and creative reasoning (appropriate for the "creative economics" debated here) kept me riveted to the page with huge smiles and chuckles. All four characters have the smarts and are engaging and you cannot wait to hear what comes next. As the play draws to a close, you are left with, "Wait? Satire? Or is this a truth about our current economic climate?" Theatres, universities and high schools would all serve this play well. And leave everyone discussing the play.
A great play for community colleges and universities or theatres that want to produce a historical drama that is not written by Shakespeare and his contemporaries. A captivating continuation of the Shylock story that is both comedic and tragic, with lines that capture the grandiose personality of each character. Great parts for actresses (esp. Gessica) and actors (esp. Shylock and the hilarious Capitano and Launcelot). The playwright's knowledge of the period, the alliterative power of the poetry, the rhetorical strategizing, the spectacle, the largeness of the world on the page and (hopefully) the stage is...breathtaking.
Hey student actors! Are you disenchanted with academic administration? Then read this comedy, and perform it! This comedy is an intelligent, probing satire and criticism of administrative politics--- and it will certainly ruffle some feathers in administration. Honest, necessary political theatre just right for a daring group of actors. It's a lot of fun, with quick witty dialog. There's a pillow fight!!! The statement on student activism at the end of the play is powerful. There's no play like this.
Arlecchino of Bergamo is an unforgettable, larger-than-life buffoon. From Heaven to Hell, from auto-cannibalism to clowning, the actor must showcase near madness, an animation and athleticism that is kind of like commedia del'arte to the power of 10. The playwright's logophilia -- the specificity, onomatopoeia and rhythm of Arlecchino's thought-process-in-action -- reminds me of wacky Mac Wellman.
What's in Ian Thal's Kool-Aid? Whatever it is, I want to drink it. Cats & a bat in an attic -- Thal's images are wonderfully child-like. A perfect piece for puppeteers or costumers seeking a one-of-a-kind challenge. Fabulous, freaky, f-d up -- read it, perform it, direct it.
Earlier this year, I joined the New Play Exchange, a platform that may end up radically changing the new play sector of the theater industry.
Under the old model, playwrights would submit their work to theaters and hope to get someone interested in the work they had labored upon. On the other end of this submission process developed a class of of theater professionals whose duties included the appraisal of new theatrical texts -- often known as dramaturgs or literary managers. For playwrights, the experience is something I have elsewhere called "the dramaturgical black box." On top of this process is the natural tendency amongst those making the selections to privilege the cohort with which they are affiliated, meaning that often attempts to reform widely perceived biases within the system reaffirm the privilege of social capital that comes from attending the right school with the right people, writing plays that neatly fit into the right genre, living in the right metropolitan area at the right point in one's career, and receiving prestigious fellowships and awards (often chosen by other people with associated with the right schools.) In short, the social capital of the people associated with the play often ends up being more important than the play itself.
The New Play Exchange serves as an alternative model in which playwrights upload their plays to a database, affix metadata about the genre, themes, and cast breakdowns. The metadata then allows directors, dramaturgs, and producers to search out and discover plays rather than wait for one to come in over the transom, or rely primarily on their professional cohort.
Other metadata are recommendations posted by users. Since most of my current writing about theater has been in my capacity as a critic, I have not yet posted a great many recommendations to the New Play Exchange, but I will share those I have posted thus far, and soon, I will post some of the recommendations I've received.
This year, I reviewed two plays by Cassie M. Seinuk. Last week it was Wax Wings' production of her Eyes Shut. Door Open. which is described as a modern update to the Cain and Abel story (my full review can be read here.):
Seinuk knows her mythology, and drawing upon not just Genesis but also Greek and Norse mythology. Her allusions to and repetitions of mythological violence elevates Eyes Shut. Door Open. above the popular plot formula of dark domestic secrets revealed at a family reunion.
From the Deep manages to be psychologically realistic despite being set in a rule-bound imaginary space. Seinuk deftly acknowledges the political and social realities off-stage without taking the focus off of the struggle that Ilan and Andrew face as they attempt to maintain their sanity.
ALLEGRA GRAY treats the protagonist's decision to either keep or abort a pregnancy as a very personal drama: As a local celebrity, she is forced not only consider how her decision will affect her family, but her career, and ability to live in her city, as she becomes the target both of well-wishers and advocacy groups unafraid to engage in public shaming. Wyndham's play avoids simple moralizing, rather dealing with how individuals must navigate the myriad balance ethical demands they can only face on their own.
Speaking as a long-time denizen of LambdaMOO (though my time began a few years after the events of 1993), I find that "If You Can Get To Buffalo" captures the creative approaches to identity (and in many cases, ethics) that marked the milieu -- as well as the trouble that people had articulating just what life was like in this new frontier -- not just to those for whom the internet was still unexplored, but even to those who were experiencing it daily.
"Burning Up The Dictionary" very cleverly tells its story of a couple negotiating the intimacy of their private language after their break-up. Particularly smart is the final scene actually forces the audience to question whether they may need to reevaluate their understanding of what had been said and done; it's not a plot twist, so much as a semantic twist.
Last week, I travelled to the rural town of Ashfield, Massachusetts, to review Double Edge Theatre's summer spectacle, Once a Blue Moon (Cada Luna Azul).
What sets Double Edge Theatre apart from other troupes is that it has always forged an intimate link between the world of physical theater and the world of literature and ideas.
Those who have thrilled by Double Edge’s performances in conventional theater spaces have had a glimpse of director Stacy Klein’s expansive imagination. (My first encounter was a 2007 production of Republic of Dreams at the Charlestown Working Theater). But you don’t really know just what she is capable of unless you see Klein working on her home turf. She uses music, sound effects, dialogue, and the movements of actors and puppets to guide the attention and focus of audience members. In some ways, Klein is like a highly skilled filmmaker who uses camera pans and zooms to control what appears on the screen. Of course, in the theater Klein is working in real time, in three-dimensional space. There’s no editing room here.
Of course, Klein knows that the human visual cortex remains a far more powerful instrument than Hollywood’s most expensive cameras.
I haven't blogged about the last few reviews I did for The Arts Fuse in part because they came out so close to their closing date.
My latest review is of Wax Wings Productions presentation of Cassie M. Seinuk's Eyes Shut. Door Open. -- a Cain and Abel story set on the SoHo arts scene:
Seinuk, of course, knows her mythology, and the allusion to and repetition of mythological violence elevates Eyes Shut. Door Open. above the popular plot formula of dark domestic secrets revealed at a family reunion.
Lighting designer Christopher Bocchiaro (whose work I generally admire — particularly in ASP’s recent production of Measure for Measure, and Apollinaire’s Blood Wedding) and sound designer Patrick Greene made some messy missteps here. Turner’s PTSD flashbacks were conveyed through a number of unsubtle and clichéd choices: Red-lit chiaroscuro, voices slowed down, distorted, and pitch-shifted down an octave or more. The upshot was memories of trauma made campy rather than cathartic – the episodes were suited to a straight-to-cable horror movie.
On The Arts Fuse, I review Emily Kaye Lazzaro's Three currently running at the Boston Center for the Arts. The play, directed by A. Nora Long, and presented by Boston Public Works, is, sadly, a huge disappointment. For several months, I have championed the mission of Boston Public Works, a theater company centered around a collective of playwrights producing their own work (see my 2014 interview with four of BPW's member playwrights), however, with Three I saw what may be the weakest script I have ever seen receive a full, professional production. Prior experience is that similarly bad scripts never get further than a staged reading or student production, so even though I had seen my share of bad plays this season, nothing prepared me for the cheap plot devices, characters who are no more than one-dimensional stereotypes, and pretensions to social relevance.
In truth, Three is not much of a play at all, but an anthology of “very special episodes” (possibly season finales) of an unproduced television or web series. Many young playwrights seem to be going this route. It may be too soon to tell if this trend is good for television or the web, but it’s certainly not good for the stage, even though Lazzaro has a good ear for turning the vernacular of her generation into pseudo-naturalistic dialogue.
[...]Lazzaro makes an effort to label Three a feminist work, but she sets the bar pretty low – this is feminism as brand identity with little political or social commitment. Yes, the play is about three women and was written by a woman, but the three characters are passive. They never take an active role – they don’t even take a reactive role; life just happens to them. Maybe there are people who would be shocked to learn that there are women who enjoy both alcohol and penises, but I doubt they attend fringe theater productions. Moreover, I know of 20-something women in my immediate social circles who are quirkier, wittier, funnier, more socially aware, and who lead more interesting lives than the females in Three Perhaps Gen-Xers and baby boomers will come away thinking that they have learned something about the millennial generation, but it is like going to an Olive Garden restaurant for authentic Italian cuisine. There are excellent contemporary plays written by women, featuring all-female, or mostly female, casts – I’ve reviewed some – but Three isn’t one of them.
@IanThal saying that she wrote the play to pad out her CV feels unnecessarily mean. She has an mfa. This is her primary art form.— Andy Boyd (@andyboydtalks) June 15, 2015@andyboydtalks I am paid to write 30K+ words of theater criticism per year & I'm a playwright. I know a vanity project when I see it.— Ian Thal (@IanThal) June 15, 2015@IanThal that doesn't mean you have to like it or even that it's good, but her writing is not a vanity project to pad out her main thing.— Andy Boyd (@andyboydtalks) June 15, 2015@andyboydtalks Sorry you feel that way. Maybe the MFA was to pad out the CV. It's the worst script I've seen get a professional production.— Ian Thal (@IanThal) June 15, 2015@andyboydtalks Seeing plays like this once more leaves me incredulous as to whether MFAs signify dedication to craft.— Ian Thal (@IanThal) June 15, 2015@andyboydtalks I'm aware of her MFA & mentioned it in first draft of review; dropped in the final draft. MFAs are not special snowflakes.— Ian Thal (@IanThal) June 15, 2015@andyboydtalks That's not my problem. The question is only "Did I make a fair and reasoned evaluation of the play on its own terms"?— Ian Thal (@IanThal) June 15, 2015@andyboydtalks Also not my problem. My job as a critic is to defend the art form against its worst practitioners, not coddle them.— Ian Thal (@IanThal) June 15, 2015@andyboydtalks Simple. Read my review and see why I call it a "vanity project." Decide if I made my case. It's not about being "mean."— Ian Thal (@IanThal) June 15, 2015@IanThal also I respect that sometimes loving an art form means hating bad versions of that art form.
— Andy Boyd (@andyboydtalks) June 15, 2015On The Arts Fuse, I review Actors' Shakespeare Project's production of Henry VI, Part 2, which despite being the origin of the oft-quoted line, "The first thing we do, let’s kill all the lawyers", is rarely performed. This presentation, currently running at The Modern Theatre at Suffolk University through June 7, is masterfully directed by Tina Packer. I was particularly taken with the character of Jack Cade, the villain of Act IV, played by Allyn Burrows:
However far he may depart from his ‘real life’ inspiration, Cade (Burrows) is unprecedented amongst Shakespeare’s characters: a truly lethal clown – through much of Act IV he and his followers ravage England, lopping off the heads of one nobleman after another to great comic effect. He even has his own convoluted claim on the crown, reciting his questionable pedigree — a parody of York’s own claims — even as he strikes the figure of a lord of misrule, espousing an incoherent philosophy that is alternately a parody of anarchy and communism (Shakespeare’s distrusted the hoi polloi as a political class). Behind the mayhem (York’s and Cade’s) is a thirst for absolute dictatorship – the famous line about killing all the lawyers (an ambiguous rallying cry for both tyrant and anarchist) comes from one of Cade’s followers. The historical Cade might have been less of a clown, but the theatrical one comes off as an unacknowledged forerunner of Alfred Jarry’s famous Père Ubu (as well as Mister Punch and Fredrico García Lorca’s Don Cristóbal) He is also a prescient parody of the political extremists and tyrants who have shaped the past century for the worse. Burrows’ portrayal of an ignorant but bloodthirsty imp of perversity is a rip-roaring joy.
Given the current pop-culture climate in which audiences thrill to stories of cynical realpolitik handily trumping the virtues and idealism of public service (as in the case of popular series such as House of Cards, and Game of Thrones) – the zeitgeist is ripe for Henry VI, Part 2 to be revived – and perhaps, with the taste for long form storytelling so prevalent, Parts 1 & 3 may deserve some love as well. Nonetheless, Part 2 is sufficiently self-contained, beginning with the marriage of Henry and Margaret and ending with the First Battle of St. Albans and start of the Wars of the Roses. Familiarity with the oft-staged Henry V and Richard III provide more than adequate background on what happened before and what happens next.
On The Arts Fuse, I reviewed Bridge Repertory Theater of Boston's production of Shakespeare's Julius Caesar. While I admire the visual style and the sonic rawness of this interpretation, I feel much of the story and political subtext is buried in the breakneck pacing.
Julius Caesar has long been the best known of Shakespeare’s Roman plays: its plot and the historical events that inspired it are common knowledge, and Marc Antony’s funeral oration has long been used as an object lesson in the rhetorical use of irony and sarcasm. Shakespeare’s Titus Andronicus and Coriolanus are beginning to generate some more productions and interest, but for the time being, Caesar still reigns.
The Bridge Repertory Theater of Boston is currently offering a stripped-down, modern dress production that clocks in at about 100 minutes without an intermission. Director Olivia D’Ambrosio is due some praise for helming a visually distinctive minimalist presentation, but her breakneck ‘fast and furious” pacing ends up leaving the Bard’s poetry and the subtleties of the realpolitik narrative in the dust.
Back in February I reviewed Albatross, a theatrical adaptation of Samuel Taylor Coleridge's narrative poem, Rime of the Ancient Mariner. I judged the play, written by Matthew Spangler and Benjamin Evett, performed by Evett, directed by Rick Lombardo and produced by The Poets' Theater quite highly, noting its all around excellence, and I expressed hope that it could be remounted (preferably elsewhere, as a representation of what Boston's theater scene can offer.)
My hope has born some fruit, and Albatross is bing remounted at New Repertory Theater, May 21-24.
Read my review on The Arts Fuse!
On The Arts Fuse I review Zeitgeist Stage Company's current production of Jeff Talbott's play, The Submission a dark and transgressive comedy directed by David J. Miller about a playwright who hires an actress to hide the fact that his play about an alcoholic African-American woman and her card-shark son was actually written by a middle-class gay white man:
Today, many dramatists feel under pressure to represent a more diverse cast of characters, while questioning whether they (or others) have the right to write about people whose experiences are unlike their own. And if they do attempt to jump into other shoes, will it be seen as legitimate or will it be condemned as exploitation? In this script, playwright Jeff Talbott argues that “some guy [sitting] in his middle-class apartment” is capable of imagining other lives, even if there are questions (political, artistic) about whether he has that right.
The catch is that The Submission is saddled with too many implausibilities that go well beyond what can be tolerated in either a farce or a satire. It’s one thing to turn a reasonably protective dramatist into a bullying control freak. But Danny is so incurious and dismissive of other people’s experiences, so unaware of the racial coding of the language he uses, that it is hard to imagine he could write anything credible about working-class African-American families. Indeed, all the listicles and YouTube videos with such titles as “Ten Things White People Need To Stop Saying To Their Black Friends” are written for people just like him. How could Emilie, the literary office at Humana, or anyone working on the production possibly conclude that a play written by Danny was an “authentic” portrait of African-American life? Is everybody in the theater world brainwashed to the point that their notion of ‘the real” is rooted in the same pop culture cliches and political correctness strictures absorbed by Danny and Trevor? If that’s the case, Talbott’s script never considers a possibility that darkly and daringly comic. Is Danny really that much of an emotional idiot savant, or does Talbott imagine that the staff of the Humana Festival is haplessly gullible?
Note to the Reader: The following account of the June 26-29, 2014 Literary Managers and Dramaturgs of the Americas conference in Boston was originally written for The Arts Fuse, to which I am a senior contributor but for various reasons, was not used.
-I.T.
