Khris Lewin, formerly a swordsman with a very large nose, was kind enough to send me a holoiday greeting from Greenwich Village, featuring Mark Hennessy, formerly the Comte de Guiche, with the following message: "This is not a comment about your direction of Cyrano--well, not necessarily . ...." Such is my golden age, the life of an eminence grise, surrounding by flattery, gifts, and loving care:
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.
We all know Grover's Corner's, New Hampshire--or at least we think we do. It's the best known fictional small town in America. We know what it looks like and what it feels like. It's a cozy,modest place, quiet, ordinary, population at the moment of 2,642 with the recent of arrival of twins over in Polish town. The town is very specifically laid out for us: five churches, a railroad station, a main street, a town hall, a bank, post office, a grocery store and a drug store most people stop in every day. Very nice town if you ask me. And we know what the town feels like too: there's a general ongoing easiness about the place that comes with people doing the same things every day and in no great hurry. There's an abundance of good will, good feeling and good humor. Grover's Corners, in fact, is as detailed and as benign as a Norman Rockwell illustration--he seemed to have spent his whole productive life painting our town. But as familiar and specific as Grover's Corners is, Our Town has something quite strange about it. There is actually very little there. Almost nothing. Mrs Gibbs and Mrs. Webbs come down to fix breakfast of every morning of every performance of the play, and they are lighting their stoves and setting their tables and making coffee and bacon without a stove, plate, knife, fork or coffee pot on the premises. The families who sit down to dinner together every evening lead double lives. They look simultaneously entirely recogonizable, down to every last detail, and also like ghosts, impermanent and temporary. They represent themselves and also all the families who have ever taken meals together, millions of them, and without leaving a trace behind. Grover's Corners, likewise, is a very particular little town, just over the border from Massachusetts. But it is also nowhere, barely a speck in the galaxy, a light in a vast dark universe that's going to go out one day.
To my mind it is this juxtaposition of the small the large, the known and the unknown, the here and now and the eternity of time past and future, all of them present simultaneously, that makes OUR TOWN such an extraodinary theatrical experience. Very quietly, and without any hint of aggression, Thornton Wilder has managed to create a world that is both comforting and supernatural. It seems to me the play, like nearly all great plays, is an expansive one. We find ourselves in a place that is our home that we've never seen quite this way before. You are here.
As most of you know, this is Puck's name for the group of amateur thespians who are rehearsing a play in the woods. They to please their Duke with a performance on his wedding day at night. "Rude" means "crude," and "mechanicals" refers to those who do manual labor. The Athenian gang includes a master carpenter, a weaver, a specialist carpenter (a "joiner'), a tinker, and a bellows-mender. There's is a name, like so many in Shakespeare, that sticks in the mind--especially in the minds of theatre folk. The Rude Mechanicals is the name of at least three working American theatre companies: one in New York, one in Michigan, one in Austin. Of course the Rude Mechanicals can''t compete with THEATREWORKS--a friend tells me there are 17 of those right now. We weren't the first when we came up with the name over 30 years ago, but we thought we were. A group of us were sitting around our kitchen on Tejon street thinking about starting a theatre company. We had no idea what to call it, and rejected any number of possibilities before THEATREWORKS flashed up and took us all by storm. Straightforward, industrial, hardworking, reliable, profitable and necessary as the Colorado Springs Utilities. Almost as soon as we had our name we had our first image: Shakespeare in a hard hat. No doubt this kind of spontaneous combustion occured nearly simultaneously in 17 other kitchens in America in 1975. If we had thought of the Rude Mechanicals we might have gone there too. Our production meetings often raise exactly the same questions as Shakespeare's gang: How are we going to make moonshine? How can we bring in a wall? Wouldn't a real lion on stage be too scary? Well, actually the lion hasn't come up yet. I won't say our mechanicals look exactly like our staff though they are about the same size and some would say they bear a famiuly resemblance--but I think the mechanicals are far too alert and enterprising a group to pass for a regional theatre company, don't you?
And believe it or not, this gang puts on a really good show, too.
Titania's miniature bedroom is Shakespeare's masterpiece of garden decoration. Capability Brown could not have done it better. It is beautifully situated on "a bank where the wild thyme blows"
And "where oxlips and the noddding violet grows."
It is protected from the hot sun by a canopy of "luscious woodbine, with sweet musk roses, and with eglantine."
In this delicate and ultra feminine bower, the fairy queen sleeps, "lulled in these flowers with dances and delights." And when she sleeps, she's wrapped in the "enamelled skin" of a snake, just wide enough to wrap a fairy in"---something like this, perhaps:
Titania has a bedtime routine. She issues orders to her fairy servants, then bids them sing her now asleep. This they do, with an enchanting lullaby. If you could bottle this routine and sell it, ambien would be out of business.
Their duty done, the fairies take their leave -- "one aloof stand sentinel."
Alas, the sentry is overpowered and someone approaches. A man. A husband. Beware!
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!
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.
