Israel Horovitz' Lebensraum

As well as adjusting to my new day-job, I have also been busy working with one of Boston's newest fringe-theatre companies: The Hub Theatre Company of Boston. The company's inaugural production is Israel Horovitz' Lebensraum. I have been serving as dramaturg and puppetry coach on this production. It's been a joy working at different stages and aspects of the production.

The production is directed by John Geoffrion, who along with Lauren Elias, co-founded Hub Theatre Company of Boston just a few months ago.

The play is a fantasy in which the Chancellor of an early 21st century Germany invites six-million Jews to come reside in Germany-- the play is all about how ordinary people, both Germans and Jews, respond to that invitation (written late night during tech rehearsals.)

As I say in my dramaturgical notes:

A key theme of Israel Horovitz' Lebensraum is the role that ordinary people have in determining the future, whether they choose to love, hate, forgive, or take vengeance.

Almost contemporary to the play's composition (the introduction is dated to 1997) was the 1996 publication of Daniel Jonah Goldhagen's controversial book, Hitler's Willing Executioners: Ordinary Germans and the Holocaust.

Previous studies of the Holocaust had largely concentrated on the scale, organization, engineering, and its top decision-makers. Goldhagen, instead, asked what had motivated so many ordinary Germans to participate in the “Final Solution” to “The Jewish Question.”

Goldhagen's thesis was that the ordinary Germans of the Nazi era were willing participants in the Holocaust because they were already prone to seeing Jews as something they needed to be rid of. The National Socialist German Workers' Party simply offered the the most decisive solution.

In Lebensraum, Chancellor Stroiber boldly invites six-million Jews to live in Germany (incidentally, Germany's Jewish population was never more that 525,000-- most of the six-million killed in the Holocaust had been citizens of other countries.) It is up to individual Germans and Jews to decide whether Stroiber is acting to undo or complete the work of an earlier Chancellor; whether they will cooperate, or resist; and whether they will do so on principle or opportunistically.

In Horovitz' play, neither the German nor Jewish characters passively allow their fate to be determined for them-- and in the years since the play was written, both Jews and Germans have made a somewhat different set of choices.

Lebensraum runs to April 14th at the First Church of Boston at 66 Marlborough Street in Boston. All tickets are pay-what-you-can.

#OccupyTCG or How I Finally Discovered the Utility of Twitter, Part 2

[Part of a short series that will likely be expanded upon in The Clyde Fitch Report]

Read Part 1.

On Friday, June 22nd, I had dinner with John Geoffrion, president of the Small Theatre Alliance and member of the Boston Host Committee for the TCG conference before we caught a workshop presentation of a new work by Mike Daisey. He had been drafting a letter to the TCG staff to voice his displeasure at the treatment of volunteers at the conference and the embarrassing position it had placed him in as a member of the Volunteer Sub-Committee.

All throughout the conference, TCG staff had been bragging during the plenary sessions that the #tcg12 hashtag was one of the trending topics on twitter. So on the morning of June 23rd, despite my frequently stated distaste for the medium, I too, turned to twitter, first tweeting:

Last night the volunteers were allowed to approach the bar like real adults; Maybe today they will be allowed to speak. #tcg12 #nethtr

I followed with a new hashtag #OccupyTCG. Note that the following is not a complete transcript:

#tcg12 volunteers promised full participation in return for work-hours then ordered not to speak or ask questions. #OccupyTCG #NEthtr

#tcg12 Are volunteers also barred from tweeting about theatre? #OccupyTCG #NEthtr

#tcg12 Model the Movement: if you don't pony up $300 you can't possibly have anything relevant to say about theatre. #OccupyTCG #NEthtr

Model the Movement: Low income theatre artists should be seen (volunteering) and not heard at #tcg12 #OccupyTCG #NEthtr

Ironically, I began tweeting #OccupyTCG during a plenary session entitled "Ensuring the Sustainability of Our Field" that largely addressed topics of diversity in terms of race, ethnicity, and gender in American theatre with only lip service to issues of class.

Eventually, after others began to retweeted my initial posts and started asking questions, I received a series of tweets from August Shulenburg playwright, actor, and Associate Director of Communications for TCG:

@IanThal Worried there's been a miscommunication re: volunteer participation at #TCG12. Email me at gschulenburg@tcg.org w/what happened

@madbusch @JohnGeoffrion @ianthal (1/3) I've looked more into this & I'm hearing there was some confusion during volunteer meeting... #TCG12

@madbusch @JohnGeoffrion @ianthal (2/3) ...but the volunteer packet should state "If you're not assigned a role, you're welcome..." _#TCG12

@madbusch @JohnGeoffrion @ianthal (3/3)...to attend another session." It asks volunteers 2 prioritize care of attendees,but no barr. #TCG12

To which I responded:

@GusSchulenburg I have volunteer recruitment emails going back to April from the host committee for #tcg12 #OccupyTCG

@GusSchulenburg @madbusch @JohnGeoffrion That's not in the packet and email that #tcg12 volunteers received. #OccupyTCG

Schulenburg:

@madbusch @JohnGeoffrion @IanThal Now I'm being told something different about the packets. REALLY sorry about this. Will have answers soon

@madbusch @JohnGeoffrion Again, my apologies. I now have my hands on full packet & @IanThal is right Clearly, this is an issue &... _#TCG12

@madbusch @JohnGeoffrion @ianthal ...I'll look more into the cause of comm. breakdown. Very sorry not in time to make a difference #TCG12

There appeared to be multiple layers of miscommunication: not only had TCG not communicated to the Host Committee the status of volunteers until a day or two before the conference, but Schulenburg, as the tweets reveal, had somehow been issued a completely different volunteer policy than what was presented in the volunteer guide and had been defended by TCG staff at the June 20th orientation..

As of this writing August Schulenburg, to his credit, is the only TCG staff member to either respond to the concerns raised in my tweets or reply to my emails.

[To Be Continued...]

Open Mic Night: Act II, Scenes 2 and 4

Pictured: Ron Pullins as Capitano Spavento, John Geoffrion as Shylock, and Corianna Hunt Swartz of Flat Earth Theatre as Gessica. Not pictured: Diana Durham who read stage directions. Both Diana and Ron also presented work that night.

November 21, 2011. The Small Theatre Alliance of Boston's Open Mic Night, this time hosted by Fort Point Theatre Channel presented a scene and talk back for my work-in-progress, The Conversos of Venice.

I had presented an earlier scene at the inaugural Open Mic Night and the misgivings I had afterwards did not manifest this time around. Indeed, of the times I have heard actors read my words since I began, this was the time where what I heard was exactly what I had hoped to hear and we had some lively discussion before we moved on to the next playwright's work.

Still there's the rest of the play to write, and ever more research to be done!