Murray Ross

Hard times

The other night after the show, a long time subscriber told me he hoped THEATREWORKS would do some comedy next season.  "But," I said, "We just did a comedy---The Lying Kind--and people seemed to think that was very funny.  We already do comedy!"  "Oh yes," he said, "but this year most of the shows have been so heavy."  And so we parted.

If I could rewind that moment I might have gone on to say, "Hey, most of our shows have been pretty light.  What about As You Like It---four weddings and a clown--wasn't that a comedy?  And love and lust soaked Venus and Adonis was an entertainment, wasn't it? The truth is we've done three comedies this season so far and only two plays that weren't comedies. Besides, we just came back from London and there wasn't a comedy in sight.  How about next year we do what we saw in London: No Man's Land (late night drinking, impasse, death around the corner), Oedipus Rex (laugh out loud self mutiliation and doom), August, Osage County (incest, booze, drugs and massive dysfunction up and downstairs), The Family Reunion (sterility and the furies at a country house)?  Now there's a heavy season for you. And we loved it---or I did, anyway."

But of course I didn't say that and wouldn't say that, because the truth is always in the beholder.  And I could see that the two serious dramas that we've offered this season, Wit and The Grapes of Wrath, have indeed far outweighed everything else in his mind.  And both these plays are heavy--one with cancer, the other with oppression and the destruction of a family--you can't get much heavier than terminal cancer and family destruction.  No matter that both plays offer vivid images of redemption at their ends: Rose of Sharon nursing the starving man, the choral salvation of Vivian Bearing finding the light.  Our subscriber felt weighted down and burdened, heavy with care.

These are hard times now, here and everywhere.  We feel the weight.  In normal times, I would argue, tragedy lifts us up.  We are stronger for enduring the unendurable, we are enlarged and lifted by feeling so much.  But in hard times, what we're looking for is relief and escape and hope.  Life is hard enough, too hard. And hard life makes us smaller; it can diminish our capacities. Heavy drama in these circumstances is just punishing. 

Does this mean next season we should do comedy and nothing but?  What do you think?

Warming Up

I dropped by our theater yesterday to see how our new season was coming along.  In the Bon Vivant theater, the cast of A Midsummer Night's Dream were getting acquainted with the woods near Athens.  Oberon and Puck were already making their plans.  Hermia was lying on the forest floor, taking notes:

 

Bottom was already transformed into an ass (some would say he was born that way) and was adored by Titania.  And by her fairies too.  Meanwhile, downstairs in the Osborne, the intergalactic crew of Return to the Forbidden Planet were learning to sing some good old rock and roll under the dubious direction of the leader of the band Head Full of Zombies, who wanted no part of paparazzi.  I stayed long enough to remember one thing: Amy Sue Hardy sure can sing.  I have it on excellent authority she was the clearly the best voice in the late lamented CFWT's Singing with the Stars contest last year, even though, inexplicably, she did not win. You may have heard her before, and I promise you will want to hear her again.  Her back-up group ain't bad either--they are goofy cute too. Looks like it's going to be a summer full of invention and good cheer--exactly what we need!

Out of the rain

We've been having auditions for our fall show, OUR TOWN.  I've seen lots of terrific people who'd like to live in Grovers Corners for awhile, including one young man I have in mind for George Gibbs.  He's one of the best young actors I've seen here in thirty years.  He's a bonfide natural. I watched him read the famous soda fountain scene with many promising Emilys, and all the while part of me was thinking I love him but maybe he's going too fast; he's too pretty, too cute, too adorable, he doesn't look like farmer, or a ballplayer even if I could see him as president of his high shool class. Even so I left the theater on Sunday afternoon feeling pretty well satisfied about the ways things were going. I know this actor can give the part what it needs---but it would help if I had a clue or two.  I was going to get one.

When I walked outside the sky had clouded up and it had started to rain.  There was that sharp and dangerous looking lightning zapping overhead.  I ran for my van, and pulled out of the parking lot. I saw I young man I did not recognize walking all by himself up the sidewalk that runs along the steep hill, and thinking this was, as Shakespeare's fool says,  "a naughty night to swim in", I offered him a ride. Turns out he had just gotten into town for a two week workshop at the university and he was finding his way to the dorms way across campus, so we had a short little ride together, just long enough for me to notice how alert he was but also slower of speech, noo hurry anywhere. Very fresh but not a glamour boy; and he looked like he'd spent a little time in the outfield. A very clear eye, very open and appreciative (he called me "sir" which hardly even happens). In almost no time I realized I was riding with the real George Gibbs. He was a high school teacher now, from Murfreesboro--- the Grover's Corners of  Arkansas (and also, I gather, the home of a diamond mine). He liked the place well enough.  Three minutes later he was out of the car. I  didn't learn his name. But that's all right, because I knew what he really was was a manifestation from Thornton Wilder and the place beyond showing me George Gibbs.  I knew if I hadn't stopped to help him out of the rain (you'll remember it's raining in the cemetary in Gover's Corners, whre we last see George), I would have missed this moment, which I would not have missed for the world. So I felt good about that; I felt good about the whole thing.  The show might be the better for it, too.

A new rule

Do we need new rules for the theatergoing?  You could argue audiences these days are almost too well behaved--certainly we are by Elizabethan standards, when spectators listened to Shakespeare while cracking hazlenuts, fending off pickpockets and picking up girls--or so we are told.  But things are different now, and that's a good thing.  Theaters themselves are different. We have such things as comfortable seats and intricate theater lighting. We have much more nuance than Shakespeare did in his Globe. We have done an awful lot to eliminate anything that separates the play from the audience, and audiences have been taught to behave rather differently than they did 400 yeas ago.  Most regular theatregoers know the two rules of being a good audience member.  #1) Turn off your cell phone; #2) Do your best  not to disturb others around you.  Quite simple, and for the most part audiences behave very well in theaters these days--though there are exceptions.  Recently I flew to New York to see a star studded production of The Cherry Orchard, and suffered through its delicate finale accompanied by a young woman three seats over unwrapping her crinkly papered candy for what seemed like a good five minutes. Several others heard her too; I watched them whipping their heads around in alarm. What are you doing!!! When the performance was over the candy woman was raked with hard glares as she left--but she sailed up the stairs fancy free, happily oblivious to our disapproval just as she been to her own bad behavior during the show.  I really believe audience members like this have no reason to live.  But they are, thankfully, very much the exceptions.  Yesterday afternoon I went to the Philharmonic's performance of Mahler's 'Ninth Symphony--nearly two hours of uninterrupted music, and the large audience was quiet and attentive throughout.  Very impressive, I thought---and Mahler's music faced no interference or competition.  The famous last movement is all about getting to silence---all those notes, that huge orchestra, the blaring brass, and then, at the end, only a few violins, a few cellos, and then . . . nothing.  A marvellous nothing.

Silence in concert halls is much more concentrated than it is in theaters,and for good reasons.  Theater invites audience particpation--laughter, gasps, groans. The classical concert invites absolute alert attention, and very quiet attention.  I vividly remember sitting in the balcony of Wigmore hall listening to a Schubert recital with a Gap bag sitting quietly on my lap, or so I thought.  But when the first song ended the woman in front of me turned around indignantly and with incomparable British contempt said, "Please put away your bag!" She was absolutely right.  I had no reason to live.

As I say--getting to silence is requried in the recital hall and not in the theater, where generally we don't like audiences who sit on their hands and turn to stone. On the other hand, there is at least one point in a performance where very often the silence of the audience is a very good thing, and that is the place where you would think it's least required.  This is what prompts proposing my third rule of theatregoing. It's quite a simple rule, though apparently counter-intuitive.  Here it is:  when the play is done, hold your applause. What's  that, you say?  Must I restrain my enthusiasm, my whole hearted approval, the welling joy flooding my heart as the curtain falls?  Well, no, not always--just sometimes,and juts for a moment.  Not at most musicals or shows that end with a bang, shows that send you signals to start beating your hands right away and earlier if possible. On those occasions, and they are difficult to miss, by all means go for it: jump our of your seat, throw bouquets and make as much noise as you can.  But there are many other occasions where this rush to applaud is just not a good idea.

Very often this is how a great play ends: The last words have been spoken, the curtain falls, the lights fade to black and the play disappears in the dark, leaving behind a little silence, a little space.  This is a moment in between. It is a space like no other--- the life of the play we have seen still fills us even though the play itself has vanished.  This brief moment of silence is precious, charged and magical.  We are doing nothing.  But these days we all too often we are robbed of this moment because some enthusiast just can't wait to clap, and then of course we must all join in. A moment the entire play has labored to achieve is regularly cut off before its time.  Nothing lingers in the air. Of course the shattering applause is well intended, but it's a spoiler.  Surely we can all remember occasions in the theater when people did not immediately beat their hands, and those occasions are very special and much rarer than they should be; even in England at the temples of theatre, they are still rare.  I was speaking about this with a friend in New York who understood this perfectly as I am sure you do too. The problem, she said, could be easily solved if audiences followed this simple rule: Don't be the first to clap.

I think that's the answer. When the dying light fades on the last falling leaf in Cyrano de Bergerac, let there be a moment of silence.  When the dying Hamlet says, "the rest is silence," silence is called for. At the end of The Grapes of Wrath, Rose of Sharon brings a starving man's face to her breast, saying, "There. There."  It is a very, very quiet moment. When the lights fade on Spooner and Hirst we are in Harold Pinter's no man's land, "which never moves, which never changes, which never grows older, but which remains forever, icy and silent." Let us linger for a moment in that no man's land, silent and unmoving. At the end of Ibsen's The Doll House, Nora Helmar walks out of her home and slams the door--and the finality of that doorslam only be realized in the deafening silence that follows. At the end of The Cherry Orchard there is the sound of a snapped string mournfully dying away---the subsequent silence, the final nothingness, is as resonant as the mysterious sound.  Over and over again the greatest plays we have end quietly.  They invite our silence. Their invitation is well worth accepting.

So again, here's my theater rule #3:  Don't be the first to clap.

Pass it on. We'll all be glad you did, and that's a promise.

Words in space

A professor of mine once called theatre "words in space." He was a poet himself, so naturally he had his own bias. But still, this sometimes describes what goes on in a playhouse, and especially in the two greatest balcony scenes ever written, where the lovers are separated in space, exchanging words in the dark.  Or rather the lover/poet is in the dark, and the beloved is upstairs on her balcony glowing beautifully. Both scenes are played in moonlight, and in both scenes the beloved is herself a moon, illuminated by catching and reflecting the light of the ardent words flung across the darkness into her waiting ear.  As for the words themselves, Shakespeare beats Rostand hands down--he beats everyone hands down. But Rostand's scene is just as good, and partly because his balcony scene is a menage a trois, enriched by Christian's tongue -tied yearning presence under the balcony, listening to Cyrano give love wings and voice.  It's wonderful how Cyrano and Christian have become the perfect lover, the one contributing the beauty of physical form, the other of poetic soul, to form, as Cyrano says, "one hero for the storybook."  And in the event--this particular event--the separation of faculties has become virtually absolute.  In the dark, Cyrano has become disembodied--only his words exist. But these words have acquired potency.  Christian's words "limp out, trickle out" and very soon they even cease to exist.  Cyrano's words are abundant, they rise up, they defy gravity, and it is his words that make Roxane temble--they take complete possession of her.  True, Christian climbs the balcony ("mount, you animal!" Cyrano says) and gets the kiss---but the kiss is only granted because Cyrano's words have already penetrated Roxane's soul--Cyrano has already kissed her with his words, and this is the kiss we in the audience feel, "the eternity in the instant the bee sips."

Later in the play, after floods of letters from the battlefield, Roxane aplogizes to Christian for having loved him first for his beauty, which she now finds only a distraction.  Cyrano's language has completely trumped Christian's good looks---Roxane even wishes him ugly so she could love him even more. It's fair to say Roxane retreats to her convent for fifteen years because she is faithful to the language of love.  She wears her lover's last letter (written by Cyrano of course) in her bosom. She tells a visitor that her lover isn't really dead--that they still meet in a "special region," where she finds "love between the living."  That region is the realm of poetry; her lover's words live on next to her heart, both burning.  Is this hokum? Yes, of course it is.  But it's hokum of the most theatrical kind---words have been given body in space.  Now that' s theatre love for you---and love doesn't get much more ravishing than that.

This Nose is for kids too . . .

I wrote recently about Pinocchio and Cyrano, the two most famous noses in literature.  What I didn't say was that Pinocchio isn't the only story loved by young people.  I took my two grandchildren to the show on Sunday, thinking to give Mom and Grandma a Mother's Day break.  Helen is 10, Henry is 8, and I thought they might just get through three hours with maybe a little snooze when Cyrano went into his fifth act swan song.  Three hours, they said?  Wow.  But mostly to my surprise they hung in there all the way without an eye lowered and pronounced afterwards that it was the very best show I had ever taken them to.  They said it was great.  They were with it from beginning to end.  They liked the swordfight, the love story, the nose jokes, the battle, and especially the man in the moon.  They liked Cyrano, Roxane, Christian, all the Gascons, everyone.  They understood it perfectly--kids always understand;they are the best audiences for Shakespeare summer in and summer out.  Neither Helen or Henry will have a career in the theatre, unlike their grandfather who also fell in love with Cyrano when he was 8.  But they will now forever have Cyrano de Bergerac as a life memory.  And that's worth something.  Afterwards, Helen told me, "I wish there was a THEATREWORKS in Boulder."  I told her I was glad there was only one THEATREWORKS and that it was in my home town, because that meant she would have to come here to see the show, and then I could see her too. I think she was all right with that. 

Two Noses

I realized the other day the two most famous noses in literature were created at roughly the same time. There's Cyrano's, of course, first shadowed on the garden wall in 1897 when Edmond Rostand wrote his wonderful play.  But before Cyrano, there was the equally legendary nose belonging to Pinocchio, first created in serial form by Carlo Collodi in 1881.  The world's two most famous noses belong to entirely opposite characters: one is a boy, the other a man; one is a puppet, the other a hero. Like everyone else, I first met Pinocchio in the wonderful Disney cartoon, which has just be re-released on the occasion of its 75th birthday.  He was my favorite cartoon character, and the cartoon is wonderful partly because at times it was really scary and because I too was sometimes a liar.  But Disney's Pinocchio is a much sweetened version of the original.  Collodi seems to have alternately loved and very much disliked the puppet who made his heavy drinming womanizing author famour.  Collodi's Pinocchio is often generous and good hearted, but he is just as likely to be a selfish little jerk--in the original he actually kills the talking cricket.  Fed up with getting so much good advice, he hurls a hammer at his guardian angel and squashes him on the wall. Pinocchio is one of the least heroic characters in fiction, and one of the most susceptible to petty temptation.  Cyrano dines on a single grape, Pincocchio is caught stealing bunches in a farmyard.  Cyrano's nose, as he himself says, is "an index of a great soul--affable, kind,endowed/With with and liberality and courage ..." His nose matches his outsized, larger than life personality. It's a mark of his uncompromising dedication to principle and truth. Pinocchio's is the nose of a liar, a perpetual liar, and a habitual shirker of duty and responsibility--it's a nose designed, as Collodi says, for policemen to grab ahold of.  It is a badge of shame. Yet Pinocchio is the character with a happy future--despite his many flaws he has a good heart, and eventually he gets to become a real boy.  Cyrano, precisely because of his many virtues, gives up his greatest passion and dies a tragi-comic death.  Though of course Cyrano also wins out in the end because, as he says, his panache lives on, waving its white plume into eternity.

Wouldn't it be wonderful if we could run these two fabulous late nineteenth noses in repertory?  First a night of Pinocchio, then of Cyrano, both played by the same actor (the wonderful Khris Lewin), one night a puppet boy, the next a romantic hero, both wearing exactly the same nose.  No, two noses: Cyrano's is the bigger, Pinocchio's is the longer; the boy's nose can change; the man is stuck with his, from birth to death.

Truly a theatre of dreams.

Cyrano de Bergerac: rehearsal diary

Week One.  First impressions: oh no, what the hell are we doing?  This play is beyond huge! We have less than a month. I haven't a good idea in my head!  What were we thinking when our little theatre  that could said we we could do Cyrano de Bergerac, one of the great poetic epics,sprawling over fifteen years in five acts?  I mostly dislike everything at our first reading.Cyrano sounds airy fairy, Roxane like a Texas gal, The Comte De Guiche is a nasal twit and Christian is a fourteen year old. We're missing three cast members, a bad omen. I'm not happy with the drawings for the backdrops. The poetry seems inflated and incomprehensible. OMG.

Week Two: We're past table work and on our feet--we're even onstage thanks to the extraordinary Roy Ballard who has somehow managed to get our deck, designed by the redoubtable Michael Stansbury, into the theatre.  I still haven't a real clue about the show; I'm taking it step by step, beat by beat, and there are a lot of beats. There's an awful lot of story telling to do--more story than I can ever remember.  And of course there's all that high flying poetry. Much too much to do, and exhausting already---yet Mark Hennessy, who has been with me on many a show over the last decade, tells me he hasn't seen me this enthusiastic about a play in a very long time.  Could this be so?  The play has a way of energizing everyone.  It seems to me that everyone--fruitseller, cadet, poet, baker--is ready to go, fired up.  Of course Khris Lewin,our Cyrano, has something to do with this.  He radiates good cheer, dedication and competence--he's the best cast bonding agent you could ever hope for in a leading man, leading by example and vey modestly too. Even so, our first run through all looks very community theatre to me.  At then end of the week I am positively desperate, and I wonder why we are all working so hard to compete with Cyranos we can never hope to match--the films of Jose Ferrar, Gerard Depardieu, Steve Martin, Derek Jacobi and Kevin Kline.  At rehearsal I propose a new brilliant idea for a post-modern production: the entire play as something the actor playing Cyrano remembers at his dressing table.  The image was provided by looking at the seven noses we had made from a mold on Cyrano's dressing table, and also watching him put on his prodigious proboscus, which takes a good 20 minutes.  So we put his dressing table onstage and began the play as if it were happening around him, the cast oblivious of him and yet all emanating from him.  Brtilliant idea.  Hopeless in practice.

I ask Khris if he'd try wearing his nose out on the street, in his street clothes. Khris is always game for a challenge.  Five years ago when he was playing Hamlet with me in Virginia, I suggested he spend a few midnight hours in the town cemetary, a very spooky place, and he did it (and he was spooked, too). He told me he went for a walk with his Cyrano nose, along with his baseball cap and sunglasses, and the results were vey disturbing.  People either refused to notice him, or else did so to excess--and even to the point of mockery.  He started to try to hide his nose by tucking his face into his body, but then said no, to hell with that, and thrust himself and his nose up, out and forward.  How very very Cyrano!

The show is looking better in at least two or three places.

Week Three. The week of costumes and lights, which begin to make themselves known piece by piece.  By the end of the week we have an idea of what the show might look like, and it's a revelation.  It's beautiful!  Old fashioned in the best sense--even in the Bon Vivant, it reminds me of theatre of a century ago--a grand and stirring spectacle.  The costumes,  some rented, some made, are extraordinary.  The moonlight is glowing on Roxane's shoulders, on her golden hair.  Cyrano in his wig and nose suddenly looks like a baroque beatnik, a man posseesed.  Christian is endearing and so so handsome too. The Comte de Guiche purrs like a French Machiavel.  In the last act I look around and I notice people are actually crying.  What an idiot I was to think of refashioning this play in a month--it needs no reinvention.  It throws its lantern on why we loved the theatre for the first time.  I had wondered how and why we should be doing Cyrano when so many others had done it before, so very well, and with so many more resources, and permantently, on film.  But seeing our second run-thorugh I realize it's even better here, right here in the Bon Vivant, because it actually was written for the stage.  It's fuller, more real, more immediate. Above all, Cyrano is a play! Such a remarkable discovery. I am already dedicating the show to my grandaughter, age 10, who reads Black Beauty.  I'm thinking Cyrano will imprint itself on her tender and impressionable soul as it did mine when I saw Jose Ferrar when I too was 10 years old.  Welcome to romance!  Nothing like it!

We've spent 24 hours this weekend in tech---a long weekend of son et lumiere.  My favorite moment: rehearsing the love soaked balcony scene, Cyrano pouring out his soul to the enraptured Roxane on her balcony, I see an arm and a hand poke through the black curtain upstage, turning on a little star light.  Now that's poetry!

Spirits remain high, including my own.  On Sunday, the robots performing downstairs brought in a cake for three cast and crew members having mid-April birthdays.  We sat around in our theatre kitchen, robots and baroque nobility,children (playing semi-musical pages) and crew, in the midde of theatre paraphrenila--swords, pikes, plastic grapes, lighting instruments-- eating cake and ce cream.  Looking around I remembered just what it is I so much like about getting to do what I do.

Bob Pinney

We deeply regret the passing of Bob Pinney, who died at home on Saturday, April 11.  Bob was the principal actor at  THEATREWORKS for more than two decades, an iconic figure, and a beloved friend.  His work and art deepened and broadened with age.  As he grew older he came fully into his own on stage, in roles such as Amundson in Terra Nova, Jim Casey in the Grapes of Wrath, Polonious in Hamlet, the title roles in King Lear and Krapp's Last Tape, Firs in The Cherry Orchard. Bob as Ebenezer Scrooge in a dozen different variations of A Christmas Carol, a role in whiche was virtually definitive--there has never been a more squeezing, grasping, wrenching old miser than Bob Pinney, not one who more enjoyed his own misanthropy, and not one so utterly transformed at the end into joy, generosity and the true spirit of Chrismas.  Bob was admired by his peers for his dignity, his humor, and his passion for his craft.  He taught voice and diction at UCCS for many years. Bob was a force.  No actor has given so much pleasure to his community for so long, and no actor has left us wth a deeper appreciation for the art of acting. We will not see his like again.

THEATREWORKS will hold a memorial gathering in his memory on Monday, 4 May, at 6:00 p.m. in the Bon Vivant Theater on the UCCS campus.  Everyone is welcome.  Please note the date is Monday, May 4, and not this coming monday as was announced in the Gazette article this week.

http://www.gazette.com/entertainment/actor_51730___article.html/local_king.html

There are some moving tributes here:

http://csartsblog.freedomblogging.com/2009/04/13/bob-pinney-a-friends-farewell/981/

Urination

i took a walk today with a Native American student of mine in a humanities class I am teaching. She has started going to our theater now and then, and I asked if she had seen the new student show.  O" she said, "you mean Urination" "No, no" I said, "Urinetown." "Right," she said, "I knew it had urine in it."

Actually there's not much urine in Urinetown which is quite a clean if black little musical, but now that I think about it, Urination is almost a better title for our production because in its way its kind of a revelation.  This is the first all student musical we have ever produced--student actors and student musicians.  That sounds like we're just asking for trouble, or at least for high school (no disrespect intended).  None of our students have had an experience like this before.  And the wonder of it is not that they are doing it, but that they are doing it very well, as I found out for myself last weekend.  There are no Broadway voices in this show--but in our theatre you don't need them.  But there are a dozen and more student singer/actors and they all look like they belong in the roles they are playing. They are supported very well by the student band under Cynthia Fox's direction. Roy Ballard's urban rubble set is a wonder.  The melodramatic lights serve the  lurid show very well.  The costumes are a kind of miracle. And every single element looks like it belongs with every other element.  This is a completely coherent production. The singing is fine, the dancing (choreographed by Michael Gold) is first rate, and Susan Dawn Carson's direction is detailed, lucid and inventive.  The students, thanks to us, got the support of a fully professional and very gifted creative team.  But in the end it is the students themselves who deliver this show, each one of them well out of a comfort zone, but getting more comfortable all the time.  This is just as it should be.

I strongly you suggest you go see the student production of Urinetown, which plays only through this weekend. I am proud of everyone in this show.  The students have become a real ensemble, a tribe, a Urine nation. You'll be so happy you went!

Narrow Escape and a New Tour

We learned this weekend the stimulus package will actually help the arts too, at least a little bit. While funding for arts in schools has been axed (what else is new?), the package includes $50 million for the National Endowment of the Arts, a not insignifcant amount since the total budget for the NEA is only $145 million.  What does that mean for THEATREWORKS?  Possibly nothing ---but possibly a good deal.  It might well have an effect on our summer Shakespeare tour, which has been regularly sponsored in part by funding from the Colorado Council on the Arts. We also have pending a large NEA grant application to colloborate with Ping Chong and company (www.undesirableelements.org) to create a theatre event focused on and around the disability community of Colorado Springs. We can't say with any confidence this grant will be awarded, but we like our chances better when funding is at least available.

Arts funding in the stimulus package narrowly escaped an amendment proposed by Senator Tom Coburn (R Oklahama), who proposed excluding any funding for the arts as wasteful and unneccessary.   Senator Coburn linked the arts with casinos, golf courses and swimming pools as inappropriate benefactors of goverment funding.  We confess we are glad his amendment was defeated.  But out of respect for the Senator, we are creating a weekend Coburn Amendment Tour next season.  Tour participants will first see our Friday night production of Undesirable Elements, a world premiere of Ping Chongs production featuring stories told by disabled members of our community. On Saturday morning, they''ll  play nine holes on a federally sponsored golf course before being shuttled down to Trinidad or some other Colorado community to see our free Shakespeare performances.  From there, they'll be whisked to a government sponsored casino to spend the night in communal celebration. After a Sunday breakfast with the Senator (who will will certainly be invited) or a sympathizer, and a refreshing pkunge in a federally sponsored swimming pool, our guests will be sent home with first hand experience of all these potentially wasteful government giveaways.  We feel there will be a huge market for the Coburn tour, since these cultural events share such a profound natural afflnity. Tour prices start at $36,000 per person, which includes a $35K contribution to THEATREWORKS.  Just one tour member will more than offset theyear's deficit created by our diminished endowment's returns. Interested parties should contact our executive director or just comment on this blog.  The rest of you can read the rest of the story here:

http://artsbeat.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/02/13/stimulus-bill-retains-nea-funding/?scp=1&sq=NEA&st=cse