A Rock Musical, A New Play and A Reimagined Classic: One weekend, three shows

This weekend I was all over the Metroplex seeing three very different shows by three very different companies. Thursday night I was at Theatre 3 for BLOODY BLOODY ANDREW JACKSON, Friday night I was down at Nouveau 47 for The Vanguard Players world premier of THE BLOODLINE written and directed by Michael Ward and Saturday evening saw me in Fort Worth for Pantagleize Theatre's WOYZECK by Georg Buchner, adapted and directed by Kami Rogers. Each of the three plays had it's strong moments but here is the breakdown, show by show!

BLOODY BLOODY ANDREW JACKSON at Theatre 3

About a year ago, I was helping Dan out around Theatre 3 where he is the TD and I noticed a poster advertising BLOODY BLOODY ANDREW JACKSON in the summer of 2012. No offense to Theatre 3, but this is not at all what I expected given the previous shows produced on their arena stage. I had been to THE DROWSY CHAPERONE at T3 and a couple of shows down in Theatre Too but this musical, this middle finger in the face of the establishment, didn’t really seem to be the kind of show that would cater to the audience that Theatre 3 has built over the last 50 seasons. Regardless, I was excited to see what Bruce Coleman, director, would do with the hot hot hot property coming out of NYC with a polarizing figure like Andrew Jackson at its center. I knew all about Jackson from growing up in Montana (where there is a healthy Native American presence) and reading Sara Vowell’s Trail of Tears memoir and when my wife asked me about him, I said that basically, he would get along well with Hitler (little did I know that this would come in to play in the show). 

This show, for me, was centered on Cameron Cobb, obviously as Andrew Jackson, but what made the show click for me was the ensemble. Cobb captured the complex and contradictary nature of Jackson expertly and with Austin Struckmeyer backing him up as "The Bandleader" the force was enough to carry the show through its most depressed and slow moments (moslty in the second act). When Cobb sang alone, backed only by the band, it felt as though one of the older patrons of the theatre had called ahead and asked them to turn down that damn rock and roll music; the volume of the band was too low to carry the Rock aspect of the rock musical. With the ensemble the group of voices was strong enough to allow the band to let go of the reins and not worry about drowning out the voices. In speaking with some of the crew after the show, they said that the speakers couldn’t handle much more volume which is a shame. This group of musicians and singers would have been much better served with strong, loud sound from the PA and for that to be the overriding impression is sad. The intense moments were lacking because of the volume, mics went out forcing Cobb to sing over the rocking band. The actors compensated as much as they could for these problems but without adequate voltage behind them, they were forced to pull back. A comment was made during the curtain speech about how much the actors wanted to bring this story and show to the audience, the earnestness of the company cannot be denied. Neither can one fault the talent level of the group, solid performances were turned in by the majority of the group. For me, the disconnect came from the lack of oomph, the ambience that should have been created by the overwhelming music was lacking and caused me to sit back and analyze where I should have been caught up in the emotion of the piece. 

The other standout in this strong production was the design. Set design by David Walsh was impeccable and Coleman’s costumes were at moments inspired and at other moments adequate. The set, as in the NYC version of the play, was littered with the detritus of the early 19th century and the details in the set are what gave the production as a whole the push over the top in my estimation. Lighting by Paul Arnold was nuanced and effective, and at the same time it captured the rock show vibe that the production calls for.

Check out BLOODY BLOODY ANDREW JACKSON at Theatre 3 through 7 July.

More information can be found at www.theatre3dallas.com.

THE BLOODLINE by Michael Ward, Produced by The Vanguard Players, Presented by Nouveau 47.

A few years ago, when I made my first trip down to TETA in Dallas, I caught up with a colleague from university who, as it happened, was having a reading of his play as part of the proceedings. Michael Ward and I overlapped at UT-Tyler briefly when he came back for some graduate work while I was finishing undergraduate work in theatre and he asked me to read in his hour-long cutting of his award winning play, THE BLOODLINE. When I found out that he was going to be presenting his play in its entirety at Nouveau 47 this weekend, I made a point of going down to catch the show.

The script follows two interconnected stories, one taking place in the late '90s and one taking place during WWII. Rachel and Jeremy are about to be married and as a wedding gift, Rachel researches Jeremy's genealogy and finds out that he is the grandson of Ivan Metzger, a stand in for Josef Mengele. Rachel, a Jewess, has also just received the memoirs of her grandmother and as she reads, discovers that her grandmother knew Metzger in Auschwitz as a horrid war criminal. The plot continues to examine the story in the concentration camp and in the present day as the two lovers try to figure out how they will either move past the device or split from each other and let the past destroy their future together. 

The Vanguard Players, mostly current and former students of Tyler Junior College, put their hearts into this production. They traveled back and forth from Tyler to bring their production to the Metroplex and their earnest attention to the piece cannot be denied. They all turned in solid performances and did their best to bring the world of the play to life in the two hour performance. I couldn't help but feel like the production hit one note, over and over. Actors played at one level and seldom moved into nuance, allowing the drama of the piece to stain every moment. The actress playing the grandmother in the concentration camp played the anguish of her moment in time at the same level leaving her little room to go. One could write off the underdeveloped characters to the age of the actors, but that would be doing a disservice to the age. Rachel's mother spoke with all of the words of a Yiddish mother but the actress missed the cadence of the speech rendering the possibly comic moments flat and lifeless. The same with Rachel's good friend Tina. Her line readings left little of her character to be seen, she was a device not a fully developed character. In spite of the shortcomings, the majority of the actors presented their roles to the best of their ability and that can't be ignored. I only hope that with this round of performances under their belts, they will continue to explore the depths of the characters in their run in Tyler. 

Ward's script is fraught with "you know I..." and "I know you know...", something that I found tiring after a while. Show us what they know, don't have the characters tell us what they know! The driving theme of forgiveness did not get in the way of some truly dark and harrowing moments, particularly in the concentration camp. I heard gasps from the audience during scenes of rape, murder and torture that couldn't be faked. 

I sat down with Ward and talked with him after the show, enjoy the interview below:

If you are in the Tyler area, check out their performances next weekend at the Tyler Civic Theatre.

http://tylercivictheatre.com/production/2012-2013/the-bloodline

You can find out more information about The Vanguard Players at their Facebook page.

https://www.facebook.com/thevanguardplayers

WOYZECK at Pantaglieze Theatre, Fort Worth

Having never been down to Pantaglieze to see a show, I was excited to see something there. Again, I knew a number of people involved in the production from grad school at TWU and I was interested to see what they were up to. Walking into the space, I was reminded of some of the venues I saw in Edinburgh in 2008 as part of the Festival Fringe, intimate, slightly cobbled together but nonetheless and excellent space to see theatre in. Exposed grid, lighting instruments and a curtain drawn across the proscenium were elements that spoke to the fringey quality of the work. This is not a bad thing, it is something that I have come to prize in work that I see and participate in, it would not be unheard of to see some great theatre in such a space. WOYZECK did not disappoint. In this adaptation, director Kami Rogers places the action in the "indeterminate past" and as part of a traveling freak show. I am not familiar with the original script so I was able to evaluate what I saw on its own merits and it certainly exceeded my expectations. 

Elizabeth Lambert as The Ringleader was at points terrifying and yet one felt that she was in control of the action, she was somehow manipulating the action and the actors to portray for the audience the darkness that resides in the human condition. The title character portrayed by Michael Muller was complex and railing against the fate laid out for him as one of the poor. His lady love, Marie, portrayed by Madeleine Bourgeois, had the vacant, beguiling attitude of one who has seen much of the world and yet continues to try and see the good in people. The company was rounded out by the sinister Seth Johnston as The Knife Thrower, Billy Ayers as the boorish Strongman and Timothy Crabb as the put upon voice of reason as Andres the Clown.

Situating the action of the play in the Carnival was a brilliant stroke by Rogers because all of the action we saw took place "backstage" while the carnival continued in shadow behind the curtain. In essence, the behind the scenes action was more important than what was happening on stage. The characters either fought against their role in the traveling company or accepted it and Woyzeck was trapped in between, neither a part of the act nor accepted as part of the company. 

The actors in this production were almost all young and yet they were able to pull complex characters and motivations out of lightly drawn renderings. Muller and Bourgeois were a believable couple and brought the only sympathy of the company. This show, while portraying rape and murder, succeeded in giving a glimpse of possibility before falling under the hopeless veil that pervades much of the drama of the period Buchner wrote in. 

Pantaglieze has a gem in this production, something that perfectly fits the space and mission of the company while creating something new and engaging. It is a shame that the show has closed, if it was still running I would be lining up to see the freak show.

Check out pictures and more information about upcoming Pantaglieze Theatre:

http://www.pantatheatre.org/

Nouveau 47: Nouveau Exchanges ORPHAN ECHOES

Yesterday I met up with Olivia Emile, 1/3 of the writing team behind AS WE LIE STILL and a good friend, to head down to Nouveau 47 for the penultimate night of the Nouveau Exchanges festival the closes tonight with a performance by FTP Comedy and a big ol’ party (which I will not be at, unfortunately). The reading last night was ORPHAN ECHOES by Bezachin Jifar, an Ethiopian playwright studying at the Actors Studio of Drama in NYC and it was both enjoyable and consternating. The story revolves around the relationship of Amsalu and Jade, a couple whose relationship unfolds over a series of phone conversations that take place from 2001-2012. We enter the action at the climax of the piece, Amsalu is stuck in a cave on top of Half Dome in Yosemite National Park at the height of a storm and Jade is stuck outside their home, evicted and living in the car; the storm and disaster of eviction both heralding the markers of the couple’s relationship. The cave, whether the playwright realizes or not, is a perfect allusion to the story of Elijah and the Cave. Elijah goes to a mountain cave to wait for Yaweh and waits through a storm and fire and other forces of nature only to find him in a still small voice. If I were to say one thing to the playwright, it would be along the lines of finding the tropes or mythologies that echo/mirror your story and exploit the hell out of them! This doesn’t happen in the play, but it could. 

Jifar, a tall, well spoken man, was present at the reading and it was interesting to see his reactions to hearing the work read aloud by two such gifted actors. Diana Gonzalez and Brandon Potter were both delightful and nuanced in their portrayals of the characters. Director Christopher Eastlund did an admirable job of finding the meaning behind sometimes troubling dialogue and navigating the cognitive leaps that forced into a relationship talk some kind of philosophizing about digital echoes of conversations. The topics in the play cover religion, relationships, faith, love, disasters, technology and recession; herein lies the challenge. As this festival highlights new work, the play in question is clearly in development, there is a lot of room to grow and a lot of editing that needs to take place before the play is ready for a full production. The story is almost exclusively focused on Amsalu, he is the empathetic, artistic young man and his foil is Jade, a poet who peppers her conversation with poems, her own and tidbits memorized from other poets. Jifar’s play, at this point, contains many good moments but lacks the clarity of vision that could turn this play into a successful production. The cell phone conceit is neither here nor there; I enjoy seeing characters interact with each other and over the phone it is difficult to build the kind of chemistry between to character that one wants when relationships are the focus of the play. Or if religion is the focus of the play. Or if disasters are the focus of the play... You get the point. 

Nouveau 47 has done a fantastic job of building an environment where young playwrights have a space to see their work take a few steps out of the nest and test the wind. The panel last night was decidedly more focused on the text and on the further development of the playwright than was the panel I was on last week. Hopefully Jifar walked away with some insights into his own play that he can funnel into something worthwhile.

If you can make it down for tonight, there is a reading at 5:00 and a party at 7:00. Go and have a good time celebrating the new works that have had their first readings, hoping they aren’t the last and looking to the future of new works in DFW. 

http://www.nouveau47.com/exchanges2012/

The Daisey Question: Truth in Art? Also: Review of WHEN PEOPLE LEAD at Art 6 Coffee House, Denton, TX.

Alan Bounville in WHEN PEOPLE LEAD

Mike Daisey in THE AGONY AND ECSTACY OF STEVE JOBS

On Sunday night, I went up to Art 6 in Denton to work on the musical I am writing with a couple of the owners of the shop. I didn’t expect to run into a production happening in the back room but when I arrived, there was something being set up in the back room. Beginning Spring Break is always a challenge, I almost always end up wasting the time and not completing the stack of tasks that I have set for myself. One of the tasks was to have a new blog post and the week wasn’t looking like it was going to bring anything my way. Then, a couple of things happened; Mike Daisey, the revered monologuist cum activist was deposed from his throne by his own hand and I found myself as the member of a small audience sitting in on WHEN PEOPLE LEAD. Alan Bounville wrote the play from a collection of interviews and claimed “verbatim” theatre in that respect. He is involved in a movement called Into The Light which supports people sharing their stories regarding the LGBTQ movement and Bounville is walking across the country sharing his story and trying to build awareness for the struggle for equal rights. Pushing a large cart with a rainbow flag, he began his walk in Seattle and came through Denton on Sunday with little promotion around his production. The play itself is a loose narrative that shares interviews and his own experience as “local color.” Bounville is first an activist and his acting showed commitment if little depth. There were a couple of the monologues, mostly from older men who participated in actions years ago that were quite moving; the story of one man caring for his dying partner and trying to find an apartment was the highlight of the evening for me. I can’t characterize the piece as anything but agitprop, there was a moment when video from a die-in in Grand Central played behind Bounville shouting “Civil Rights Now!!” repeatedly that perfectly captured the essence of the piece. Within the stories, the undercurrent of activism was never far below the surface. While I understand, and fully support, the quest for rights that many LGBTQ people struggle for daily, as a straight audience member, I felt out of place. Many of the issues that Bounville talked about and showed in performance were so specifically tailored to a queer audience that I felt like an oppressor sitting in the audience. I had planned to talk to him after the show but many of the audience (7 in all) were talking to him about their own experiences and I didn’t feel that my “talk to me about your process” had a place in the discussion. Bounville wore his activist flag on his sleeve and bragged about his own hunger strikes and familial problems within the wider context of the struggle. The art was sublimated to his own experience.

“Why is this a problem?” you might ask. 

It isn’t, for Bounville. Would be my answer. For Bounville. 

Now to the larger issue. I have been listening to This American Life since at least 1997 and have missed very few episodes. Running, cycling or working around the house, TAL has been the soundtrack of a good portion of my life. I also listen to Studio 360 and the episode about Nikola Tesla was the first time that I hear of Mike Daisey. The story that he told in that episode was compelling and laced with historical details. History aside, I never thought about the veracity of his points; history is falsifiable not subjective (arguably) and so the stories he told were not something I spent a lot of time thinking about. Then, sometime last week, I heard about the retraction episode. Retraction. Newspapers, magazines and websites are where I have encountered retractions, TAL didn’t seem like the kind of place where a retraction makes sense. Then I did some research into the story. If you haven’t followed the story here it is, in brief. 

Mike Daisey, one day, decided to look deeply into where his favorite devices come from when he saw some pictures on a website that were found on an iPhone that had been taken in the factory where they were made. He booked a trip to China and spent some time in and around the Foxconn plant where many Apple devices are built. He painted a bleak picture of overwork, underage workers, unsafe working conditions, repetitive motion injuries, illegal unions and a police state-style surveillance system set up in the factor. Foxconn, you may remember, was where there were a number of suicides by workers in the recent past. Daisey and his interpreter, Cathy Lee, went all around Shenzhen talking to “hundreds” of workers to corroborate the story that Daisey was sure was there. He created a monologue called “The Agony and Ecstasy of Steve Jobs” which had an amazing impact for a solo performer. Daisey put himself front and center (as in all of his shows) and was suddenly the poster child for Apple abuse, not nearly as salacious as it sounds. He even had part of his show broadcast on TAL in January and it seemed like things couldn’t get better for him. Then the debunking began. Between January and last week, reporters from all over the NPR universe found problems with Daisey’s account, billed at the Public Theatre as “non-fiction”. It was fiction. Lots of it. Moments that killed on stage were completely fabricated and Daisey was called to the carpet by Ira Glass on the Retraction Episode in a public and painful way. I don’t need to talk about the history of fabricated stories, if you have been paying attention they are all over the place. I’m not interested in jumping on the Daisey bashing bandwagon, what I am interested in is posing a question. Daisey said that his work in the theatre, fabricated or not, was effective and he stood by what he called the strongest work he had ever done. Lying, in the theatre, wasn’t an issue because the theatre is concerned with creating real, human moments. The emotional narrative that Daisey continues to tell, though in slightly altered form, is acceptable and good because he understood that his experiences in China did not add up to what he thinks of as a powerful show. 

Reduced: As long as you create a strong, satisfying emotional narrative, regardless of whether you bill it as non-fiction or fiction, you have succeeded. What does this say for other performers who present something close to truth? With this story in my head, Bounville’s performance caused questions of the “verbatim” quality of his work. Was it really verbatim? Did it matter? 

I talked last night with Brad McEntire about what he thought, as a solo performer, about the issue. Hopefully in the next installment we will have some of his thoughts about it. I think what came from the discussion last night that really stuck with me is that Daisey has become more of an activist and less of a playwright of late. His work has taken on a victim mentality, a holier than thou mentality that can clearly be understood by looking at some of his more recent work. I watched a video on Slate.com that showed an audience member leaving (along with a large group) and pouring water on Daisey’s papers. His response, indignation, is telling. He called on the audience member to explain himself and when he didn’t, he read into the man’s motivations for injuring him in such a personal way. Interesting to hear him on the other side of the table. 

Listening to the retraction, one of the most powerful and painful moments was when Daisey came back into the studio after recording some other moments of the show and tried to point out that some of the experiences he had were real. Glass pointedly said “I don’t believe you, I can’t believe you.” Now, I don’t believe in the willing suspension of disbelief. I believe in something called “the blend” which I will not go into here. Belief in a performer and story are intertwined in my mind. If the performer doesn’t believe it, I don’t believe it. If I am supposed to be listening to something that is purported to be true and it isn’t, I don’t believe it. It doesn’t change the truth of the issue (global labor struggle) but it does affect my view of the performer/writer as a reliable narrator. If one is unreliable, doubt is cast. 

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So that is the question. Does it matter? I’m conflicted about it. Surely when one agrees to be held to the highest journalistic standard, as Daisey did in having his work presented on TAL, it does matter. In the theatre, I don’t know that it does. I always go in to a performance with the expectation of at least some artistic license. In an academic lecture or news conference, not so much.