Auditioning

I've got a new Podcast up on TheatreInChicago.com. Basically I crashed The Plagiarists' auditions for The Wreck of The Medussa and talked to the producers and a few actors about the audition process. It's a really interesting talk with some surprising bits thrown in. Check it out here, and for a complete picture of auditioning check out Anne Nicholson Weber's podcast from a while back with Casting Directors.

Full Storefrontal: Theater Oobleck

The newest Full Storefrontal is up on TheatreInChicago.com, this one on Theater Oobleck. Also, check out Anne Nicholson Weber's interesting podcast with the composer and the lyricist of A Minister's Wife that deals with adaptation, style, and what goes into the creation of a musical.

Full Storefrontal: Strawdog

The second in my series profiling small companies at Theatre In Chicago is now online, this one about Strawdog. My warmest thanks to Anne Nicholson Weber for her invaluable and patient criticism, and to Miranda for coming up with the perfect name for the series.  

UPDATE: The link to Strawdog Theatre Company's website above has been fixed.  If you still want to visit Strawdog.com feel free.  It's not a particularly useful site, but as far as random websites go, it's mercifully unpornographic.  

Dog & Pony

The first in a new series I'm writing for TheatreInChicago on small theater companies around town is now available online here.  Also, if you missed Anne Nicholson Weber's fantastic podcast on Sound Designers from last week, you should check that out here.

Political Theater is the Best Theater

This week Anne Nicholson Weber and I discuss the cliché that Theater is only achieving its highest form when it is overtly political. There's a lot going on in this one.  My weakness for the old stuff confronts the laziness of hierarchies, and Anne finds the error in embodied discussion with evident partisanship.  Enjoy.

Multimedia Announcement The First

Anne Nicholson Weber's latest podcast at Theatre In Chicago is all about the O'Neill Festival.  It features Robert Falls and Greg Allen talking with Anne about the festival in general and Strange Interlude.  Very good stuff (and it includes a generous reference to my reactions at the end). Check it out.

Conspiracy and Theatricality

Anne Nicholson Weber reminded me of this great excerpt from her interview with the great Nicholas Hytner in Upstaged.  

Throughout the history of the theatre, theatre artists have wanted to provoke their audience using alienating devices such as masks, boys playing girls, dance, verse dialogue -- devices which quite plainly do not produce a literal image of the world outside. They say, “This isn’t the real world, this is a poetic image of the real world through which we can agree to discover stuff about the real world” -- exactly the same way as if I am a Shakespeare heroine, I have to put on man’s clothes, to be not myself, in order to discover who I am and where I fit in the world. What we’re doing here is conspiring together: let’s make our world not the real world in order to discover what the real world is like.

I don’t think this is a feature of film as a form, but it is of the stage. And over and over again, you see theatre artists pushing this as hard as they can. What flashes in my mind is an example from the play I’m working on at the moment, The Winter’s Tale. I’ve not counted them, but seven or eight times in the last act, in preparation for his final coup when the statue of Hermione comes to life, Shakespeare has someone say, “This is like an old tale”, “This is a mouldy old tale”, “This is like an old tale still”, “If this were shown you on the stage you’d hoot at it.” He keeps insisting, “What I’m showing doesn’t make any sense, it’s not real,” drawing attention to the unreality of it, because he’s written 35 plays by now and he knows that we will believe, and in fact that the more that he tells us that we won’t believe, the bigger the shock and the huger and more resonant the thrill when we do. And at the end of an evening, the more you feel that you’ve achieved something -- that something has been required of your imagination and you’ve given it -- the better you feel.

Always.

It's interesting to me that he uses the terms "alienation" and "conspiracy" in such close proximity and in some sense to refer to the same thing.  What gets alienated in this context is the story, the actors reinforce their relationship with the audience at the expense of their relationship with the narrative.  Fantastic. 

Crossing Downstage

The Cliché Watch this week is a good one.  I like it because it's directorly.  It recently took the concerted and combined efforts of Miranda and Anne Nicholson Weber to talk me out of rejecting directing altogether for politico-aesthetic (i.e. benno-is-a-high-falutin-jerk-head) reasons. Directing really is an art and it is a field that is separate from acting.  

However, one of the reasons (aside from mere excellence) that I like Theater Oobleck so much is that they are asserting the primacy of the actor.  Too much is too frequently taken from actors and given to directors and I really think this is, as I say in the post, a waste of resources.  

This week also offers a brief respite of harping on the role of the audience, which perhaps might come as a relief to loyal readers.

Audience Participation, Cont'd

Anne Nicholson Weber responded to my post at The New Colony about audience participation by suggesting I listen to another of her excellent interviews, this one with two members of 500 Clown. Money quote: “Oh, what I’m doing in the room matters.” This realization is, as it should be, the goal of the honest brand of audience participation employed by 500 Clown.

It really sounds great, and I’m sad I’ll have to wait until June to see them, though I’ve seen similar performances to what they describe. What I like about their conception of “audience participation” in their own performances is that it is utterly organic. A person sneezes and the show can stop and acknowledge that. People walk in late and that is a concrete fact to confront — this matters, and this is a kind of performative realism (separate from that theatrical realism) that is the part of the experience of live theater that we too often struggle to sweep under the rug in service of some silly trap we’ve built for ourselves. The fourth wall is a lie. I’m sorry.

Bonus Points: Also brought up in the interview is what an excellent example of “the clown” Stephen Colbert offered at his now infamous speech for the White House Correspondents’ Dinner. The best part of this is near the beginning when he looks right at the president and says “We both go from the gut. Right, Sir? That’s where the truth lies.” If only we could all remember the danger and the thrill and the guts of this confrontation in every production of King Lear for the next twenty years.

Listen to this right now

An interview with Anne Nicholson Weber, Sean Graney and members of the cast of Edward II from last fall's production at Chicago Shakes.  The show was promenade style, and these are some interesting reflections on the ins and outs of making that production work, from director, actor and audience points of view.  Very interesting.  More on this soon.  Hear more interviews in the mean time here.