Murray Ross

the solo show

Some of the bravest and most peculiar theatre artists in the world these days belong to genre of the one person  show.  These people are out there all on their own, traveling light, propelled by their own wit, will and invention.  Every now and then one of them hits it big--- Hal Holbrook was Mark Twain, and filling huge auditoriums all over the country.  And Rick Miller, coming to THEATREWORKS this week with his hilarious hybrid, MacHomer, has a show you really don't want to miss. It starts strong, stays alive, and the finale is a staggering display of virtuosity--- as a fellow theatregoer said to me after the show last night:" Now that's talent!"

Miller and Holbrook are the exceptions. Most solo theater performers don't hit it so big.  Partly because they are too peculiar--I mean you have to be an odd bird to want to make a living going around from town to town setting up your own one man carnival,turning on the lights, running your show, and then taking it all down again and moving on.  You are a one person travelling circus. And most of the time your act will lack the mass appeal and instant recognition of Mark Twain or Bart Simpson.  The odds are against you--how long can a theatre audience endure a performance by just one actor, no matter how great?  Even Thespis, the Greek Tragedian  credited with introducing the first actor, had a back-up chorus going for him.  Ninety minutes is a stretch, just  about as far as a single actor, no matter how charistmatic or protean, can go.  Your sets have to be minimal too.  So a one person show can wear an audience out very quickly, and usually does.

And yet, a few of the very best nights I have spent in the theater have been at one person shows, three of them in our theater: Wanda McCaddon in Happy Days, Karen Slack in The Syringa Tree, and Bob Pinney's Christmas Carol were all indelible performances.  At an even higher level of risk--actors who are also the authors and creators of their own material--we've seen Mike Daisey, and the greatest of them all, Spalding Gray in a shaky appearance here recovering from a serious automobile accident. Jim Jackson, across town at MAT, has done two wonderful one  person shows based on his own life. There have been more. Many years ago I saw John O'Keefe in a little theatre in Los Angeles performing in his autobiographical play, Shimmer, and it was a transcendent experience.  A short time later I saw Fred Curchack's one man Tempest, and was stunned by its invention.  I thought I need these guys.  I invited John to play Odysseus and Fred to created puppet shadows in the Smokebrush adaptation of Homer's Odyssey twenty years ago.  Bad idea. Solo performers are solo artists for a reason--they are meant to play more with themselves than with others. That production was the most harrowing in my long memory---though not entirely without reward (a woman walked into our theater a year later and told me she was still dreaming about it).

Last weekend Betty and I went up to Denver to see a solo show created by Thaddeus Phillips.

Thaddeus grew up in Colorado Springs, and for a summer was in a children's theater company with my son Orion. He went to Colorado College,and studied with Encho Avramov, my mad man friend from Bulgaria (who will be having his own show at Smokebrush next week).  Thaddeus has become a distinguished solo theatre artist (with the excellent collaboration of his wife, Tatiana), living the life of an avant-garde theatre guy, creating shows, playing festivals, touring Europe, South America--and now--for a moment, Colorado.  His new show is called Microworld, pt. 1. It is an hour and fifteen minutes of extraordinary invention and charm.  It plays one more weekend at the Buntport theater and is absolutely worth the trip.  We stopped to eat lunch at the the Peruvian buffet at Los Cabos II downtown--a restaurant full of strange dishes  (was I eating dog?) and a wonderful ethnic texture you don't find in our town (blacks, latinos and my two white grandchildren). The buffet prepped us for thinking globally,as Thaddeus wants us to do in his new show, which is set in a pod cubicle in the Toyko Nagakin tower, designated for destruction--the pod turns out to be magician's box with many rabbits and one adorable rubber duck.  Here's John Moore's Denver Post review (a rave):

http://www.denverpost.com/theater/ci_13612132

It's theatre for the 21st century for sure. See it if you can.  My grandkids can't wait for part two, which arrives in the spring.

"Be cheerful, sir. . .

says the magician Prospero, after his son and daughter have witnessed his violent dispersal of theatrical masque he had arranged to celebrate their engagement.   He continues, famously,

Our revels now are ended.  These our actors,

As I foretold you were all spirits, and

Are melted into air, into thin air;

And like the baseless fabric of this vision,

The cloud capped towers, the grogeous palaces,

The solemn temples, the great globe itself,

Yes, all which it inherit, shall dissolve;

And leaqve not a rack behind.  We are such stuff

as dreams are made on, and our little life

Is rounded with a sleep."

So it goes in life, and so it goes in the theatre---and in the theatre the ending of revels is almost always followed by a spasm of violence as the scenery is cleared, making way for the next new show. Here is what our theatre looked like 24 hours after our last performance.  The remains of a dream.

 

But no such violence will follow the end of our next show in the Bon Vivant.  That's because our next show is set in Grover's Corners, where there are no no cloud capped towers, no gorgeous palaces, no solemn temples, no white woods; not even a patch of green astroturf.  In Grover's Corners there is no set at all.  BBut it is quite a place all the same.  Here is it's address:  Grover's Corners, Sutton County, New Hampshire, United States of America, continent of North America, Western Hemisphere, the Earth; the Solar System, the Universe; The Mind of God.

working girls

Today's post is a little tribute to a few of the working girls ofTHEATREWORKS-- mostly the ones you'll see soon lost in a forest or on a planet near you.  Right now they are all works in progress.

Here's the lovely Melissa Scher, playing Hermia, saying a fond girl farewell to Helena, her best friend (not for long), before running off to the woods to get married (or so she thinks):

 

And here's that best friend, the beautiful and baffled Sofia Lauwers, wondering why she has been so unlucky in love (there's no good reason as you can see):

 

Here's the fabulous Adrienne Kapstein, Queen of the Fairies, and her estranged husband (the fairy in the fur hat--we're losing that hat).

 

And here she is with her hot new boyfriend (some would say he's an ass):

Meanwhile, over on Planet D'Illyria, Amy Sue Harding is a Science Officer you'd better be wary of experimenting with (though you kill to get into her laboratory):

 

 Carrie Clark (the blond on the left) is a spaceship crew member and a doo-wop girl (she looks like she's from Disney, and she is, but she has a wicked side too, thank heaven). Kayla Rae Jackson (on the right) is our teenager in love.  She doth teach the torches to burn bright, or, as another not so Shakespearean teenager says, "Jeepers, what a hon!"

 

And lest you think the working girls of THEATREWORKS only light up the stage,consider the fair Molly Earle (grrrr) and the adorable Amanda Eno, Planet's stage and assistant stage managers respectively.

And these are just eight reasons why THEATREWORKS is the best place in America to go to work and play.

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.

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?