How to Do O’Neill, Sans Dialogue
NEW YORK CITY & WASHINGTON, D.C.: Eugene O’Neill was a dark, intense, obsessive man who wrote dark, intense, obsessive plays with dark, intense, obsessive stage directions.
New York Neo-Futurists member Christopher Loar delved into O’Neill’s works and found the funny. Loar’s riotous The Complete & Condensed Stage Directions of Eugene O’Neill Volume 1: Early Plays/Lost Plays, which was a smash Off Broadway last fall, plays at Arena Stage’s Eugene O’Neill Festival in Washington, D.C., an event that kicks off this month. (The Neo-Futurists production plays April 19–22.)
“The surprise we got in transforming the stage directions into plays is that there was kind of a story there,” Loar says. His concept reduces the plays (most of which you won’t be familiar with) to all action, no dialogue. In The Web, two men spar for a consumptive woman, with violent consequences. “There’s a sense of narrative, so it’s like watching a film without sound.”
He believes that’s no accident: “O’Neill probably made sure it would happen.” Of course, Loar did edit the stage directions—a “daunting” process he likens to chipping away at marble in search of a sculpture. It was a highly collaborative process with his fellow Neo-Futurists.
The trickiest decision came with Now I Ask You, which ends with a gunshot and, before the epilogue, “An interval of three minutes during which the theatre remains darkened,” according to O’Neill.
“We sort of just skipped that in rehearsal, and then we were worried about how it would play,” Loar says, about forcing audiences to sit quietly for so long in the dark. “But we had to at least try it. It’s a unique and odd thing, and now it’s one of my favorite parts.” (Most audiences remained largely silent, with the exception of nervous giggling—but for one night, when a man called out “Marco,” and someone responded “Polo.”)
Loar plans to return to O’Neill for more. “Volumes 2-6 are in the works right now,” he says.
—Stuart Miller
Havana Royalty
SARASOTA, FLA.: Michael Donald Edwards knows that his latest Shakespeare project—a retooled Hamlet, with the subtitle Prince of Cuba, performed in English and Spanish—“is a little lunatic. But,” he adds, “it’s a passionate lunacy.”
During his five years as producing artistic director of Asolo Repertory Theatre in Sarasota, Fla., Edwards says he has realized the theatre needs to do more to serve the state’s Spanish-speaking audience. These are people “who may not go to the theatre now, but should have something to see. In a few years, they are going to be the majority in Florida.”
Edwards characterizes the production as a “bridge between communities and cultures” and a way to reach the Spanish-speaking communities of Sarasota, Tampa Bay and Miami. “Hopefully, they will hear the theatre’s name, know the doors are open, and find that they can come in and take a pride of ownership.”
Hamlet, Prince of Cuba will feature members of the Asolo resident acting company and bilingual guest artists, including Frankie J. Alvarez as Hamlet, Mercedes Herrero as Gertrude and Emilio Delgado as Claudius. Edwards has worked closely with Pulitzer-winning playwright Nilo Cruz, who has written the Spanish translation that will be performed several times during the March 23-May 6 run in Sarasota and at a subsequent May 11-13 run at the new South Miami Dade Cultural Arts Center (where Asolo Rep presented Lynn Nottage’s Las Meninas last season).
“We will rehearse and open the play in English in Sarasota, and then go back into rehearsal in Spanish,” Edwards reports. “This will be a first for our company.”
Translator Cruz has been “incredibly rigorous,” Edwards avows. During a weekend in Miami, “He had me act out all the parts of my adaptation and explain why I’ve cut this or moved that. He challenged me and made me justify the decisions I had made.”
The production is meant to evoke Cuba in 1895, around the time of the invasion of the island led by José Martí. “It was the beginning of the American presence in Cuba,” the director points out. Costume designer Clint Ramos and scenic designer Dane Laffrey have used the time frame as “their starting-off point. It’s fairly abstract and not literal,” Edwards notes. “The Cuban idea is a point of entry.”
—Jay Handelman
Painting Again
NEW YORK CITY: Playwright Tina Howe chose Keen Company with enthusiasm for the Off-Broadway revival of her Pulitzer-nominated Painting Churches. Nearly 30 years after its debut, Howe says she views her three-character play—about an artist returning home to paint a portrait of her parents—with a more wistful eye. “Now the pathos of the situation is much closer to me and more moving,” Howe says. “Before they were difficult, aging parents—now I see some of myself in them.”
Keen’s artistic director Carl Forsman, who revived Howe’s Museum in 2002 (in a production she considered “impeccable”), will direct Painting Churches, which runs through April 7 at the Clurman Theatre, with John Cunningham, Kathleen Chalfant and Kate Turnbull comprising the cast.
“This is exactly how I wanted it done—an intimate theatre, real stage actors, the best designers,” Howe attests. “Not reintroduced with a trumpet volley, but a single, graceful violin.”
—Lauren Smart
A Chef of One’s Own
CHICAGO: Like any chef worth his salt these days, Rick Bayless has had to master the medium: television. And while he is not as bouncy as Giada De Laurentiis nor as in-your-face as Gordon Ramsay, he’s at ease on camera, singularly persuasive in his ability to share his enthusiasm for Mexican cuisine. This month he takes to the stage in Cascabel, which he cooked up with Tony Hernandez and Heidi Stillman of Chicago’s Lookingglass Theatre Company.
Running March 21–April 22, the show concerns the owner of a Mexican boarding house who has lost all interest in life. Even food doesn’t excite her—that is, until a mysterious new chef arrives. Bayless, whose culinary empire includes restaurants, cookbooks and condiments, sees Cascabel as “a pure piece of theatre that explores emotion and history and food and how they all intertwine.” Bayless actually cooks on stage for the cast—a three-course meal with dishes Bayless devised to be “transformative” experiences in the lives of the characters on stage. “It’s not as much about the finished dishes,” he explains, “as it is about the roles those dishes play.”
Bayless initially studied drama in college, but shifted his focus to Spanish and Latin American studies. And while it’s been years since he’s picked up anything published by Samuel French, he sees this Lookingglass outing as akin to his regular work. “It’s not a big step for me. I perform all the time. On my television shows and in front of groups, I’m performing. But I am also creating a story about food. So when people taste the food I’ve made, they’re not just tasting the individual ingredients—they’re tasting the tradition it comes from. I always think of it like when you walk into an art museum and say, ‘Oh, I kind of like that piece.’ Then you view the same piece with a curator and suddenly your appreciation is off the charts. That’s what I do with food, and that’s what this whole piece is about.”
—Thomas B. Connors
Felder, Not Alone Anymore
PASADENA, CALIF.: The man behind the piano is stepping out to take center stage—and this time, there’s an orchestra behind him.
“You could call it oratorio-like, but I am actually acting out the story and running around while the music plays,” says Hershey Felder, the playwright, composer and lead performer of the unique theatrical/musical event Lincoln—An American Story for Actor and Symphony Orchestra, slated March 28–April 7 at the Pasadena Playhouse.
Lincoln is the first of Felder’s many solo shows (George Gershwin Alone; Maestro: The Art of Leonard Bernstein; Monsieur Chopin and Beethoven, As I Knew Him) that doesn’t limn the life of a great musician. Instead, Lincoln tells the story of the 16th president’s assassination from the perspective of Charles Augustus Leale, a young army surgeon. In fact, Felder says, the musician series for which he’s known was a departure for him; Lincoln represents a return to original plans.
“Composing is really where my ambitions began, but I had to do stuff about other people’s music first, so people would come see it,” Felder says. “Other people’s music” proved a profitable detour: George Gershwin Alone has been more or less continually touring the country (including a brief stop on Broadway in 2001, and a long run at San Diego’s Old Globe Theatre last summer) since 1995. And Lincoln’s run at the Pasadena Playhouse is accompanied by engagements of Monsieur Chopin (through March 7) and Maestro (March 10-18).
As if that’s not enough on his plate, Felder will also adapt and direct The Pianist of Willesden Lane, based on the post-Holocaust family story of musician Mona Golabek, at the Geffen Playhouse in Los Angeles, opening April 25. Golabek herself will perform and act from the piano, with Felder making his directorial debut.
Continual work, at the keyboard or behind the scenes, seems to be a Felder leitmotif. “I can still walk,” he says when asked about his workload. “I’ll retire when I’m dead.”
Who’s next in the great composer series—Brahms, say?
“No,” Felder responds. “Too fat.”
—Rob Weinert-Kendt
The Job That Got Away
CHICAGO: “The two things I like writing about are the two things that you’re not supposed to bring up,” says Chicago-based playwright Jayme McGhan. “Religion and politics.”
But with The Fisherman, now premiering at Stage Left Theatre (a 30-year-old company that has mostly been dedicated to new work with a sociopolitical bent), McGhan has hit the sweet spot of timeliness.
Set on the shores of the Minnesota River, where brothers Carl and Chucky have been casting fishing lines since they were boys, the story follows the drastic action that Carl, a laid-off union airline mechanic, takes against both the corporate and union bosses. It’s a play that seems tailor-made for the populist unrest unleashed by the Occupy movement and the union protests in Madison, Wisc., last winter.
The Fisherman started more modestly as a 10-minute short written by McGhan, a Minnesota native, when he was a graduate student at University of Nevada–Las Vegas. (A May 2011 production of Mother Bear, McGhan’s play about conflicts between long-haul union truckers and thugs in the Utah desert, by
the Mortar Theatre Company, marked McGhan’s first full run in Chicago.) Stage Left presented The Fisherman as part of its 2008 developmental “LeapFest” of new work.
Director Drew Martin, a former Stage Left artistic director who has been with McGhan’s project since LeapFest, underscores the importance of the play’s homey, yet symbolic, setting. Shores, he points out, are “places of transition between water and earth, life and death.”
Will audiences see Carl strictly as a terrorist, or will they empathize with his rage? McGhan emphasizes the play is not advocating violence, but he notes that The Fishermangrows out of one vital question: “When you spend your entire life working hard and following the rules and doing what you’re supposed to do—what happens when somebody sweeps you under the rug and you decide not to take it anymore?”
—Kerry Reid
Almanac
145 years ago (1867)
Florenz Ziegfield Jr. is born into a musical family in Chicago. He will go on to become the father of the musical revue. Throughout his lifetime Ziegfeld will produce numerous Follies, which he will model after the Folies Bergère of Paris. He will also produce and stage such successes as Show Boat (1927).
55 years ago (1957)
The final Ziegfeld Follies opens at the Winter Garden Theatre, 25 years after its namesake’s death. The show will run 123 performances, featuring songs of Sammy Fain and Howard Dietz, among others.
50 years ago (1962)
Construction starts on the Mark Taper Forum in Los Angeles. The playhouse, named for a Southern California financier, will house Center Theatre Group, a troupe committed to producing new work. Five years later, CTG’s debut production will be The Devils starring Frank Langella and Ed Flanders.
15 years ago (1997)
Paula Vogel’s How I Learned to Drive opens Off Broadway at the Vineyard Theatre. Mary-Louise Parker and David Morse star. The play, which candidly addresses pedophilia, will go on to win the 1998 Pulitzer Prize for Drama.
