May 28th: SomerVaudeVille @ Johnny D's

As well as everything else for which I am rehearsing (this being but one example) I'm currently preparing for SomerVaudeVille, presented by Theatre @ First, a Somerville based group with whom I haven't worked before. Most of the folk are new to me, but it has been a chance to renew acquaintances with fellow mime, Justin Werfel, whom I first met back in 2004 when I sat in with MIMEtype the MIT mime troupe, as well as with Matt Samolis (AKA Uncle Shoe.)

As Uncle Shoe, Matt is a banjo playing conservator of the American Tin Pan Alley repertoire. As Matt Samolis, he is a rather eclectic multi-instrumentalist. He and I have known each other for years and this time, decided to use the opportunity to collaborate. While one piece we rehearsed together had to be dropped due to time constraints (we will find a way to perform it elsewhere and elsewhen) we have something in mind for this show.

The other acts show include: Jessica Almeida, Ari Herbstman, Erica Schultz, The Pluto Tapes (Andy Hicks), Can-Can Revolution, Heisenberg's Mezzos (Andrea Humez, Erica Schultz, Jessica Raine, and Gilly Rosenthol), and Gilana and her Hula Hips (Gilly Rosenthol).

See SomerVaudeVille on May 28th, at Johnny D's Uptown at 17 Holland Street, Davis Square, Somerville. Show begins at 8:30pm.

February 9th: An evening of mime, poetry and masks at Willoughby and Baltic

On February 9th at 8pm I'll be performing an evening's worth of original work at Willoughby and Baltic in Davis Square.

The show will include mime, mime and poetry compositions, and a one man commedia dell'arte scenario inspired by Dario Fo's performance of the classic lazzo "the starving zanni."

Willoughby and Baltic
195g Elm Street
Somerville, MA
617-501-0197

$7

Willoughby and Baltic is in the alley between Benjapon's and Subway Sandwich Shop on Elm Street, just follow the dots!



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Meredith Garniss Interview

I do so digg an interview where I am the answer to the question. The interviewer was Pagan Kennedy and the interviewee was Meredith Garniss, painter, puppeteer, engineer and head honcho of Willoughby & Baltic, an automata and art gallery and marionette theatre where I performed this past July and where the ill-fated production of Macbeth rehearsed.

In the Ideas Section of The Boston Sunday Globe, Kennedy asks Garniss:

I hear you also became the home to one of the world's only "talking mimes."

To which Garniss responds:

The talking mime [who] performed in the gallery this summer was Ian Thal. He's multitalented and does mime, dance, poetry, and puppetry. I think it's OK if the mime talks as long as he leaves the audience speechless.

Garniss has a lot to say about running an art space, combining engineering with art, and working with artists of many media.

I already covered the issue of "talking mimes" with my students in Gloucester but I take issue with the idea that I am "one of the world's only"-- there are plenty of mimes whose work is against the stereotype-- and most of us are chatterboxes off-stage.

Willoughby & Baltic is hosting the Dorkbot Haunted Parlor this Halloween week at 195g Elm Street, Somerville, MA in Davis Square.

An evening with Ian Thal and the String Theory Marionettes @ Willoughby and Baltic

I'll be performing an evening of my original work, which incorporates poetry, mime, and and theatrical clowning, at Willoughby and Baltic on Saturday, July 21st. Also appearing will be the String Theory Marionettes who will be performing in the Teeny Lounge. The marionettes will be joined by the voice of Jimmy Tingle.

Coffee, chocolates, and mocktails will be available at the refreshment stand. Show starts at 8pm. Admission is $5

Willoughby & Baltic
195g Elm Street
Davis Square
Somerville, MA 02144
617-501-0197

Rehearsals begin for Macbeth

Last night a large group of actors whose heads I forgot to count met crowded into the Somerville art space, Willoughby and Baltic, a former ambulance garage converted into an art gallery and marionette theatre, and sat down along a long train of café tables. It was first time the full cast of the Lallygagging Players' production of Macbeth met to rehearse. Our director and producer, David Letendre and Brigid Battell (who is also playing Lady Macbeth) introduced the concept, unlike most productions of Shakespeare's plays, we are working directly from the unmodernized text of the first folio with close attention to the scansion of the original text and its eccentric spelling conventions of the early seventeenth century. That so close attention is being paid to Shakespeare's poetic language adds to my confidence in a production that is to be staged in such a non-traditional venue with a new company. (Of course both Letendre and Battell have already been active in local theatre, directing and acting in numerous plays in more traditional venues with other theatre companies.)

I am playing the characters of the Captain who recounts Macbeth's victory over MacDonwald and King Sweno, the Old Man who first speaks of such perversions of nature as horses eating one another, a number of unnamed Lords, and Seyton, Macbeth's aid in the final act. These are my first roles in a Shakespeare play-- something I had been actively working towards this past year. (I auditoned with Sonnet 28-- which I had recited at the Shakespeare Sonnet-athon his past April.)

Interestingly enough it's not my first time this year involved with some piece of theatre that originally served as political propaganda for the reign of King James I of England and Scotland as earlier this year i Sebastiani had performed an anti-masque to Samuel Daniel's court-masque, The Vision of the Twelve Goddesses.

I play four characters because I'm such a character

I've just been cast in the Lallygagging Players' production of Macbeth which will be presented at Willoughy and Baltic on August 17, 18, 19, 24 and 25 in Somerville, Massachusetts. That is all for now.

May 17th: "I Refused to Die" Reading at McIntyre and Moore

On the evening of May 17th, after my stroll through Boston City Hall, I attended a reading for Susie Davidson's anthology, I Refused to Die at McIntyre & Moore Booksellers in Davis Square. The book is a collection of essays oral histories by Holocaust survivors and camp liberators living in the Boston metropolitan area.

Typically, Davidson's appearances are with Kovno ghetto survivor, Rosian Zerner, and Dachau camp liberator, Cranston "Chan" Rogers. Zerner was unable to attend that evening and Rogers was running late, so Davidson spent time describing the process of putting together the book, (which included a cross country trip on a Greyhound bus to organize her assembled notes without the distraction of home) and read excerpts from the tales of other survivors. In addition, as the book also includes contributions from local poets, she asked Rafael Woolf and me to read. Woolf's poem was a polemic directed at Holocaust denier, Bradley Smith.

Because there are so many accounts of great literary merit written by actual survivors and I am not a trained historian, I have thus far avoided writing directly on the subject, but this sublimation appears to manifests itself in confronting theological anti-Judaism, exposing Holocaust denial, such as the play I am currently developing. Somehow, in the process, I've also written a couple of poems.

The first, "Numbers" is one I wrote because I had been invited to participate in a poetry reading at The New England Holocaust Memorial for no particular reason beyond the fact that I am Jewish. It was in memory of a cousin of mine who had survived Auschwitz-Birkenau. I long considered it an act of pretentiousness on my part, so I read it so infrequently, but editors keep asking permission to reprint it, so I must be the one in error. The second is entitled "Metathesis of the Books" and was inspired by a series of paintings by Samuel Bak, a child survivor of the Vilna ghetto, whose allegorical works have inspired me for many years.

Chan Rogers, a native of Florida, arrived and spoke informally in a gravelly Southern accent about his experiences as a sergeant in the 45th Infantry Division often taking questions. After the war, he went on to study at MIT and became a civil engineer who designed many features in the Boston area including the Cambridge Street underpass that goes under the Harvard University campus. He explained that he and other veterans never spoke much about their World War II experiences for years since after the war, so many of them ended up going to school and working with other men who had had similar experiences, and it was a matter of passing these stories on to other generations that has caused him to speak.

Rogers spoke of April 29, 1945, the day when 45th Thunderbird Division entered the Dachau concentration camp by way of a railroad bridge after a surrender had been arranged by the Red Cross. (In 2001 I was present to hear a friendly disagreement between a veteran of the 45th and one from the 42nd Rainbow Division over whose division was the first into Dachau as the 42nd had entered the camp from the other direction.) Rogers explained that while he had already seen much carnage already in the war, he was unprepared for Dachau, having only been told that it was a prison where "Hitler kept his enemies." Senior SS officers had abandoned the camp in advance of the surrender, leaving their underlings to be captured by advancing American forces.

He also made mention of the Dachau massacre that occurred that day after troops from both the 45th and 42nd discovered not only the starvation, disease, and overcrowding of the 32,000 prisoners, but thousands of corpses, including the 39 rail cars each filled with over 100 bodies. Rogers' own research indicates that trains had come from the Buchenwald concentration camp and that the prisoners had died primarily of starvation having been shipped out without food in advance of American troops who liberated the camp on April 11th. The Dachau massacre resulted in the death of 35 captured SS "Death's Head" guards, for which several American soldiers faced court-martial, though General Patton decided they deserved no further punishment.

Rogers made a number of parallels to current events, most notably the recent Holocaust denial conference hosted by Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, noting that the deniers' agenda in this particular was clearly to de-legitimize Israel's right to exist.

Given the informality of the event Rogers also recounted a number of anecdotes, including an encounter with the daughter of German-American Bund leader, Fritz Kuhn, who taunted Rogers and his troops with threats that the German Army would return to rout the Americans out. He grinned as he quipped, "That never happened."