(thank you Jason Grote and Caridad Svich)

November 4, 2008 - From Hyde Park, Chicago

I am writing on election morning in Hyde Park, Chicago, Barack Obama’s very own neighborhood. We are in tech today, Election Day, for Radio Macbeth at the beautiful Court Theatre on the campus of the University of Chicago. I am full of thoughts and feelings about the world we inhabit and where we are headed. How will we function productively in the future, this very particular future we are headed into? The disorienting sensation of these past weeks is oddly familiar. In the wake of shattering worldwide economic and political events we find a certain silence emerging from what the French psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan calls “the real.” Our ship has slammed up against the shores of “the real.” The real is what lies behind our daily busyness, our symbols and our imaginative flights. Markets dive, jobs are cut, consumers stop
consuming and the assumptions that we carved out to describe our futures are in jeopardy. Silence arrives because familiar words, sentences and paragraphs are suddenly not sufficient to quell our anxieties.

The market culture and its manufactured desires and materialistic promises have failed miserably. The unregulated markets resulted in a ravaged landscape of unpaid for despair. In this uncertain and cataclysmic climate, the creative impulse and the art experience is essential. In art we find a direction. The capacity to see, to perceive the world through another’s eyes, to empathize, is a vital sign of a civilized
culture. To touch upon the unsaid and find articulate shapes for our present anxieties is the goal of our work together. The myth of economic progress as the answer to our baseline problems is simply not true. What else can there be?

I have come to understand that the creative act is ultimately action against natural human tendencies. Left to natural devices, human energy and endeavor moves towards entropy and disintegration. Our lives lead inevitably to decay and death. In the morning we are weighted down by the burden of sleep, requiring a supreme effort to arise and join the world. The end of a gesture, when not treated with an artistic attack of acceleration, tends to die out. The artistic impulse, in contrast to the entropic direction of a life cycle, rises above the tendency towards death and negation. The artist searches for lightness and for exactitude in the face of rot and decay. Fueled by curiosity, energy and hope, we enter the darkness. We accept the darkness and in that acceptance sometimes we discover a thin vein of light.

-Anne Bogart

Theatre de la Jeune Lune, Innovative Tony-Winning Regional Troupe, to Shut Down

By Kenneth Jones
June 23, 2008

In the great wilderness of non-traditional theatre in the United States, a tree has fallen. The board of directors of the ambitious, Tony Award-winning Theatre de la Jeune Lune in Minneapolis, MN, voted to list the theatre’s headquarters for sale and to shut down the arts group as currently organized.

The announcement was made June 22. Included in the decision is a planned significant reduction in artistic and administrative staff, effective July 31, 2008.

“We have reached these decisions with great regret,” stated board president Bruce Neary. “However, our fiduciary responsibilities to our artists, our staff, our donors and our creditors dictate this action. We are listing the building for sale in order to fully satisfy our creditors.”

Neary added, “The board is committed to an orderly shutdown, including satisfying all existing rental obligations through Sept. 30, 2008.”

Jeune Lune has provided Minneapolis-St. Paul audiences with visually stunning, mind-stirring work — often movement-oriented, projection-kissed and theatrically multi-disciplinary — since 1978. Among popular or lauded titles were its early comedy hit Yang Zen Froggs and the nationally acclaimed Children of Paradise: Shooting a Dream, plus popular re-imaginings of operas, including The Magic Flute, Carmen, Maria de Buenos Aires, Don Juan Giovanni and Figaro.
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Melissa Bailey’s May breakdown of all the bids the city received in response to its Request for Qualification (RFQ): here. Enjoy…

The artist’s statement:

In my current work in kinetic sculpture, I am trying to concentrate on the movement, rather than the object. I take it as an article of faith that the air around us moves in ways which are organic, whimsical, and unpredictable. I therefore assume that if I were to abdicate the design to the wind, the work would take on these same qualities.

The engineer in me wants to minimize friction and inertia to make the air visible. The architect studies matters of scale and proportion. The navigator and sailor want to know the strength and direction of the wind. The artist wants to understand its changing shape.

Meanwhile, the child wants to play.

Who is Tim Prentice, you may ask. Well, if you don’t know, merely look outside of Long Wharf’s mainstage lobby at the kinetic sculpture carving shape and light against the wind. Click on for a bio, or just go straight to Tim’s website. (Thanks to Keith Hyatt for the heads up on this one…)

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Up and Then Down

The lives of elevators.

by Nick Paumgarten

The longest smoke break of Nicholas White’s life began at around eleven o’clock on a Friday night in October, 1999. White, a thirty-four-year-old production manager at Business Week, working late on a special supplement, had just watched the Braves beat the Mets on a television in the office pantry. Now he wanted a cigarette. He told a colleague he’d be right back and, leaving behind his jacket, headed downstairs.

The magazine’s offices were on the forty-third floor of the McGraw-Hill Building, an unadorned tower added to Rockefeller Center in 1972. When White finished his cigarette, he returned to the lobby and, waved along by a janitor buffing the terrazzo floors, got into Car No. 30 and pressed the button marked 43. The car accelerated. It was an express elevator, with no stops below the thirty-ninth floor, and the building was deserted. But after a moment White felt a jolt. The lights went out and immediately flashed on again. And then the elevator stopped.

The control panel made a beep, and White waited a moment, expecting a voice to offer information or instructions. None came. He pressed the intercom button, but there was no response. He hit it again, and then began pacing around the elevator. After a time, he pressed the emergency button, setting off an alarm bell, mounted on the roof of the elevator car, but he could tell that its range was limited. Still, he rang it a few more times and eventually pulled the button out, so that the alarm was continuous. Some time passed, although he was not sure
how much, because he had no watch or cell phone. He occupied himself with thoughts of remaining calm and decided that he’d better not do anything drastic, because, whatever the malfunction, he thought it unwise to jostle the car, and because he wanted to be (as he thought, chuckling to himself) a model trapped employee. He hoped, once someone
came to get him, to appear calm and collected. He did not want to be scolded for endangering himself or harming company property. Nor did he want to be caught smoking, should the doors suddenly open, so he didn’t touch his cigarettes. He still had three, plus two Rolaids, which he worried might dehydrate him, so he left them alone. As the emergency bell rang and rang, he began to fear that it might somehow—electricity? friction? heat?—start a fire. Recently, there had been a small fire in the building, rendering the elevators unusable. The Business Week
staff had walked down forty-three stories. He also began hearing unlikely oscillations in the ringing: aural hallucinations. Before long, he began to contemplate death.

[Read on.]

Spain may be my new favorite country in the world. And would I be kicking myself in the teeth to congratulate the socialists? And finally, might I indulge in some childishness by crying out with joy “girls rule! boys drool!”? Why such silliness? Well, silliness, in my case comes from excitement, and excitement from this article I read yesterday. See what it inspires in you.

Spain’s ‘Mum’ minister takes critics by storm

By Elizabeth Nash in Madrid
Monday, 21 April 2008

Carme Chacon, Spain’s first female defence minister, appointed controversially last week when seven months’ pregnant, silenced her critics at the weekend by making a surprise 24-hour visit to meet Spanish troops in Afghanistan.

The unannounced trip was criticised by some for potentially putting her child at risk. But Ms Chacon said her pregnancy was an easy one, and told journalists during a two-hour stopover in Kuwait “that she would never put her child’s future at risk”. Asked if she was tired by the 10-hour flight from Madrid, she replied; “The election campaign was harder, and longer”.

Last week, the Socialist Prime Minister, Jose Luis Rodriguez Zapatero, appointed a mostly female cabinet.

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It seems as if the theme of family dynamics has been everywhere lately. I recently saw two compelling movies: “Everything is Illuminated” and “51 Birch Street.” (An aside: the former has a really incredible soundtrack). 51 Birch Street tells the story of the Block family through the eyes of the son Doug, a documentary filmmaker. During the making of the film his mother suddenly dies. And then the real story begins, told through her journals and her husband, who marries again 3 months after her death. It seems as no one in the family really knew anyone else at all. Sound familiar? Everything is Illuminated is the film version of the Jonathan Safran Foer book, in which he travels to the Ukraine to find the woman who supposedly saved his grandfather from the Nazis. Again, the truth is nothing anyone could have imagined. Along with the great soundtrack, this film also gets my vote for one of the most beautiful and surreal scene ever filmed: an old stone house with lines of billowing laundry out front, set in an enormous field of sunflowers.

As I stated in my last blog entry, it was my objective to provide some insight into our rehearsal room during my tenure at Long Wharf.  The frequency with which I composed these updates did not happen as often as I desired; in fact, it didn’t happen at all.  Now that THE PRICE has opened to wide critical acclaim, I’m taking the time today to reflect back on those wonderful days in Rehearsal Hall B.  I hope it’s still of some interest.

On the first day of rehearsal, Gordon described a metaphor for approaching a play which has resonated with me since.  He encouraged us to imagine an onion and, more importantly, the process of peeling an onion.  Each layer is contained within the intact vegetable.  We are uninterested in the hurried bite or the careless open-mouthed chomp.  Instead, it is the careful discovery and exploration of each layer that becomes most illuminating.  That is, in effect, how we proceeded each day though this dense, memory-leaden play.  There was a patience and flexibility in the unraveling of layers and a recognition that the peeling isn’t always positive.  After all, let’s not forget the tears associated with peeling onions.  Needless to say, that patient and flexible approach is due, in large part, to Gordon’s inherent trust of these four powerhouse actors.  He trusts their interpretation of the text and the resulting choices.  Mr. Edelstein often states, “It’ll all come together.” 

In my humble opinion, it most definitely came together.  The set design crafted by Eugene Lee and our amazingly gifted Props department made a significant contribution to this sense of completion.  These talented artists crafted a space piled high to the ceiling with objects – furniture, fencing foils, mirrors, chiffoniers, boxes and ice skates.  Each object contains a memory; for some, it is even a chain of memories which produce a snapshot or short-film of life at one moment in time.  I mention this set design in the context of rehearsal because it became our storage space for the memories we sought out to explore.  It served as a constant reminder of the Franz family’s dense and conflicted past.  Anne Bogart states, in her new book And Then You Act: Making Art in an Unpredictable World, “If you recognize that your voice contains all the voices that came before you, then you will realize that when you speak you do not speak alone.”  The voices of the past scream loudly from these objects and, in our processing of that voice in the rehearsal room, we managed to address our lives.

Once the play opened, it became clear that there are moments when our emotional investment in a particular object and slice of time resonates with both artist and observer.  This is the moment when life truly becomes art, when we find ourselves simultaneously attached to both a moment on stage and a memory.  We own it.

And why else do we go to the theatre but to be empowered and enlightened?  The theatre forces us to go to these unexplored and cavernous places in our minds, guiding us towards some sense of catharsis.  It is my hope that this cathartic exploration of memory is experienced by our audience, as it has been experienced by us in Rehearsal Room B.  From the general critical response and the success of our talkbacks, I believe it has been achieved.  The voices of the past have connected to the voices of the present moment and, through the power of live performance, we come to understand that we’re never in it alone.

I look forward to sharing the rehearsal room with you again as we proceed into the process for LET ME DOWN EASY.  Until next time, friend.