Category Archives: NYC Theater

Welcome, Molly Ballerstein!!!!!!

SO! It has been an inSANE summer. I cannot believe that it is mid-September and that we are already moving into the cooler months of the year…I know, I know, this is what EVERYONE says as the fall begins, but really? Where did the last 6 months go?!?! For people who read this blog religiously (Hi, Mom!) you know that Bella’s Dream took up a fair portion of GTTP’s time from February to July but, I guess that doesn’t really explain where we’ve been for July and August and the first half of September. And, you’re right, you deserve to know. The one thing I will say is that, though I haven’t been particularly on top of blogging and website updates and keeping you all up to speed, that does NOT mean that I have been idly twiddling my thumbs and eating bon bons.

What I have been doing instead is strategizing and re-organizing the very existence of Going to Tahiti Productions – I know, you minds are totally blown, right? You were all – “hmph, Jessica’s just been sitting on the couch all summer eating bon bons” but now you know the truth – and the truth is, GTTP has some news, Peeps! We got us some genuine bona fide news! And that news has a name – Molly Ballerstein.

A little history – when I started GTTP, I always intended for it to be an ensemble and I always wanted a partner to help me run the company. I mean, although I’m capable of doing it on my own, it’s really more fun to have a like-minded buddy to bounce ideas off of and help run the show and…the shows… So, for years, I’ve been asearching high and low for that like-minded buddy but it wasn’t until I found multi-hyphenate Molly, that I began to really see how a partnership would work. So I asked if she’d like to take an extened trip to Tahiti, and lo and behold, she said yes!

So now, finally, I’m officially announcing that Molly Ballerstein – Director, Writer, Stage Manager, Lighting Designer, Costume Designer, and all around fantastic human being has agreed to join GTTP as Co-Managing Director and Co-Executive Producer with yours truly. As you know from previous blog posts, Molly first landed on our island when she agreed to stage manage Bella’s Dream. Although I initially had some hesitation in bringing a fellow director on as stage manager (“what if she decided she wanted to direct instead of stage manage and started challenging everything I was doing?”, “what if she saw things differently than I did and tried for some sort of power play?”, or even “what if she’s not all around awesome?”), those fears were quickly dispatched about 30 seconds after I met her and realised that she might be that “like-minded buddy” of which I spoke earlier. After a particularly challenging tech week, (which found Molly and me pulling an all-nighter in the theater), my realization that she IS all around awesome was permanently cemented. It also turns out that Molly has a very similar directing style to me and we just generally hit it off really well…so well, in fact, that I couldn’t NOT ask her if she wanted to help me run GTTP. I get a partner, she gets a company, and our audience gets shows from two directors instead of just one. How awesome is that? Talk about a win-win-win.

And so, as you may have seen from our home page, we’re jumping into our 2013-14 season with The Sandman’s Coming. A show conceived and directed by Molly. The Sandman’s Coming marks a bit of a change for GTTP – a dance/theater piece that explores issues of identity and addiction – you’re about to see a whole new voice and vision from GTTP because it’s a whole new director. Don’t get me wrong, this is still GTTP so you’re still going to get innovative female-driven work, but make no mistake, GTTP’s got some fresh new blood. And I don’t know if you’ve heard but fresh new blood ain’t just good for vampires – it’s good for audiences too. There will be lots more on the production itself in the days and weeks to come, including a few blog posts directly from Molly as we move into rehearsals; but, in the meantime, mark your calendars - The Sandman’s Coming opens October 24th and runs through November 3rd at Shetler Studios in Manhattan. Tickets will go on sale next week.

So, please join me in welcoming Molly into the GTTP world!!!

Check back next week for a blog post from Molly herself…

Four weeks down…and ONLY ONE to go!!!!!

…and so it begins…

When I was little and still thinking I would ultimately have to have real babies (as opposed to the theater babies that my shows always are) I remember asking my mom what pregnancy was like and she answered “long”. I said, “but it’s only 9 months, right?” (Seriously, my 7 year old brain couldn’t really process 9 months, I mean to me – I thought years were long, months were short). And my mom said, “nope, first of all, technically pregnancy is 10 months, not 9, AND it feels like 9 months and a year! That last month goes on forever!” Of course then she said, “and yet, there’s still never enough time.” Again something my 7 year old brain couldn’t process (too long but also not enough time) so off I went to make my Barbie dolls re-enact scenes from Sesame Street. Ok, ok, I know, you’re all thinking why is she telling us this story? I thought this was a theater blog. I’m getting there, hang with me.  Whenever I go into a tech week I always always think of my mom saying “9 months and a year…and…never enough time.” As an adult, of course, I totally understand how something can be both things-too long and too short-and every time I do a show, as the first performance approaches, I feel that pressure – too long/too short – building in my entire system. Now, at last, I get to the point. Tech week is about to begin – my own final month/year of pregnancy with this particular show-baby.

So, for everyone keeping track, here’s a quick recap of this past week. The week began with the last of the scene work. It’s always amazing to me how the closer you get to the end of the rehearsal process, the more you find in the work. All of the actors start to come off book and as scripts leave hands and actors are free to really connect and communicate on stage, the discoveries start to flow. The moments come together and the show really starts to take shape. We spent the first half of this week finishing scene work. On Thursday I also got the chance to work individually with the actors who have monologues during the show-a chance to really delve and play with those moments. On Friday we did a line-through with the actors (basically everyone sits in a rehearsal room, and runs the show for lines. The stage manager, in our case, the luminous Molly Ballerstein, is on book and at the ready when an actor calls “line” to feed them their text and we cruise through the show). In my experience a line-through right before tech can be extremely helpful for getting everyone ready for the runs that are about to begin…and then, and then, and gentlemen and then…(sorry, a little PIPPIN moment there. I promise, that review is coming soon. ANYWHO I digress (big surprise, I know)). And then! This past weekend we jumped in to run-throughs. Finally we got a chance to see if our running time is anywhere close to the run time we quoted on all of our promotional materials (turns out it is) and we got to see a glimmer of what the show will be.

It’s also during this last week before tech when the slow hand off of the play begins. Although, as a director, I am of course needed through opening night, this subtle shift in control and responsibility starts in that last week before tech where, with each passing rehearsal the show becomes less and less mine and more and more the actors’ and Stage Manager’s production. As producer and director I’m always still up to my ears in the production until the end – it is not a rare occurence that I’m at every single performance, but officially, I start handing my baby over to others to let it find its legs. It’s always an exciting time in the life of a show (and also a teensy bit sad).

So, now, we head into tech week and I get back to that pregnancy story-too long and yet too short. So, for those of you not particularly familiar with theater…how to describe tech week? Organized chaos? The definition of chaos theory? Chaotic? (Are you sensing a theme?) I can’t speak to what it is like on Broadway, or even Off-Broadway (though I suspect, that though there’s more money in those worlds, it’s not that different from the off-off-Broadway environment) in low-budget, independent theater it’s like this: You remember finals week from school? The lack of sleep, the intense studying, the feeling like at any moment some little thing will go wrong and you’ll ruin your entire future in one fell swoop? Remember the fear but also the exhilaration that a screw up, as bad as it would be, would launch your life in a totally new and unexpected direction? Remember the stress building up so much that sometimes you needed a primal scream or two to get you through the day? That’s amateur hour compared to tech week. Pfft. Child’s play. And the director/producer keeps all the plates spinning; makes sure all the decisions get made – God I love this job.

My tech week will (most likely) look like this:

It will begin with load-in. VERY early in the morning, I’ll make my way to the space and open up the theater and get my first good look since we booked it. I’ll realize exactly how big a playing area it is and start to envision what the final

The hat in the foreground as the owner of the hat (Molly) hangs lights in the background (on the ladder – I guess less backgound than mid-ground).

product will actually look like. If possible, I’ll sit for a minute, on the stage, by myself, before anyone else arrives, and just soak in the empty-theater-ness of the place – that feeling of potential magic that an empty theater practically oozes. Then, I’ll meet up with the tech director and start unloading the set from the truck. Soon after that, or during that, some helpers will arrive, as will the order from the lighting rental house. We’ll hang lights, and put set together and throughout the day we’ll prep the dressing room, and clean the space. The costume designer will drop off costumes and the projections designer will start testing images in the space. We’ll have some sound tests of the speakers and slowly but surely, an empty open space will turn into the world of Bella’s Dream. And then we’ll do it all again (well not the unloading the set part, just the turning the empty space into Bella’s Dream part) the next day. Tuesday, Molly and I will test out every set piece and walk the pathways of the show for safety – as a director, I’ve always said, I won’t ask any actor to do something I wouldn’t feel 100% safe doing myself and as a stage manager, Molly would say the same so only after we test everything and know it’s safe will we hand set pieces off to actors. We’ll also glow tape the crap out of everything so that the backstage looks like the game grid from TRON. Then, Tuesday night, the actors will arrive and we’ll have our first walk through of the show in the actual space. Wednesday will be a long tech day, doing recordings and filmings for elements that are featured within the show, costume fittings, and general tech stuff before we start to really look at the lights and hear the sounds and see the projections, projected larger than life on the screen. Thursday is our cue to cue. For those not familiar with a cue to cue, it is exactly that, it is the whole show but just going from technical cue to technical cue. It is an absolute necessity but usually a hard and tiring day for all. Friday will be run throughs, Saturday will be run throughs and dress rehearsal and then Sunday – we’re off to the races with our preview!

…and in the end, though everything will somehow get done, none of it will happen exactly the way I’ve planned or expected – it’s the nature of the beast – and I’ll have to shift plans on the fly…but, either way, Sunday night, we will have a show…speaking of which, have you bought tickets yet? Preview tickets are only $12! All other tickets $18. Be sure to pick up your tickets ASAP – only 15 performances.

So, yeah, that’s tech week. I’ll do another blog post as soon as I can to let you all know how it went but the best way to know for certain is to come see the show. See you at the theater!

 

Three weeks down and (Holy Good Lord) two to go…

That’s right folks – we are only two weeks from opening (two weeks and 4 hours to be exact). Actually, technically, our first performance is our preview on June 16th (special discounted tickets available here) so really we have less than two weeks until we open but the official opening night is June 18th.

I can’t believe that we’re already done with three weeks of rehearsal. This has been an incredibly exciting week. We did our first run though on Saturday which allowed designers to really see what we’re doing with the show. I’m so please I managed not to cause any heart attacks, particularly from Sam, the Lighting Designer, as he realized exactly how much of the very large playing area I’m using and therefore he will need to light. He took it like a champ, truly. :) And Amanda, Costume, and Andre, Projections also were able to see, respectively, how the costumes would need to move on the actors and dancers, and how and when the actors and dancers would be moving in front of the projection screen. But for me, the most exciting thing was to see the whole show, from start to finish, as I haven’t seen it (or at least haven’t heard it) since our very first read through a whole 3 weeks ago…And it’s extraordinary to see it come together, (if in fits and starts considering it was our first run through) and more importantly see how it will come together over the next two weeks as props, costumes, sets, and other tech elements begin to get added in.

For anyone not interested in my musings about the directing process – feel free to skip this and the next paragraphs. For everyone else, enjoy: Recently I was accepted to an SDC Symposium on Play Directing, which will be happening a week from Monday and as part of the symposium, I was asked to send in a bio and think about my directing style and that exercise gave me the opportunity to try to observe, “what exactly it is that I do when I direct.” It was a really interesting exercise for me. It turns out I do in fact have a method, it’s just so ingrained in how I do this whole theater thing that I never realized it was a method. I already talked about my process during the first week of rehearsals which is usually a lot of discussion and some improv centered around who the characters are and what their relationships are to the other folks in the play. And then we move into blocking and that’s really just me figuring out where exactly I want everyone to go on stage. Sometimes that’s instinctual and sometimes it’s not but it always eventually comes. The really nice thing about blocking is that usually, when it doesn’t look right, it also doesn’t feel right for the actors and before I say anything about it they sort of self adjust – or stop what they’re doing, look me in the eye and say “dude, this is crazysauce – not gonna work,” and we fix it together. So the blocking and character stuff is usually pretty straightforward. Kind of the utility work of the process. But scene work? Ah, scene work is where the magic happens. Scene work is the art…at least to me.

When it comes to scene work, turns out I have a method here too but this method is a little different (or maybe it’s not. Sidney Lumet has a famous line that I absolutely love and agree with: “directing is like sex. Everybody does it, but you’re not quite sure you’re doing it right, and you’re always curious about how other people are doing it.” It’s totally true, so maybe my method isn’t different at all but whether it is or not, this is how I do it.) Basically, I have the actors do the scene and I observe it. I ask them how they’re feeling with it. If it feels right to them. And then, if it doesn’t feel like it’s working for me, I change something. Usually working outward from the periphery characters in to the main character in the scene. Basically, I just keep changing things. Kind of like throwing a bunch of stuff at the wall and seeing what sticks. Shifts, adjustments, suggestions, notes, until the scene starts to take shape. Usually I see something. One of the many times through the scene I see that spark and know in my gut – “ooh, that! Do that!” and then I usually jump up and down a little and actually say – “ooh, that! Do that!” Somewhere during that process the final scene really takes shape. It’s amazing to watch it happen. And, although it always follows a particular format, it’s different every time because each actor and each role and each experience is always different from whatever came before. The other thing is that, with all this work, even when it’s Right-with-a-capital-R, things will change, things will continue to grow. Because, theater is organic. Theater is alive. Theater changes with each performance and each experience. It’s one of those things I love soooooo much about theater. And it’s a joy to be a part of.

But, I digress (I seem to do that alot but then again, I guess that’s kind of how blogs work, right?) ANYWHO…so THIS WEEK, we will continue with scene work and we’ll have a chance to do nitpicky fixes of moments that aren’t quite working but by the weekend we’ll be into full run-throughs and our chance to fix major moments will be over. It’s fast. Every show I marvel at how fast it goes. But I digress aGAIN. Monday, S**T gets real! – we load in to the Flamboyan at CSV and the sets and costumes and lights and sound and projections and everything technical starts to come together. Tech officially begins and though I’m hoping I’ll find a way to do the “4 weeks down…1 to go” blog post – I’m saying it now, don’t hold your breath waiting for it. It will most likely not come until the night before we open. :)

Also, there’s still two weeks left on our Rockethub campaign. Thank you to everyone who has donated so far and for everyone else out there be sure to check out the sight and join the Bella’s Dream family. Get cool rewards, watch the awesome teaser video (put together by yours truly – I know, I’m so modest), read updates on the project from me and Dana Boll – (multi-hyphenate extraordinaire) playwright, choreographer, actor and co-producer and support the show even before we open.

Speaking of opening night – TICKETS ARE ON SALE NOW!!!!! Be sure to snap up your tickets as soon as you can. They’re selling like…well not quite like hotcakes…but what’s the next fastest seller? And, if the $18 ticket price is a bit too steep, keep in mind there are discounted $12 preview tickets available for June 16th at 5pm.

See you at the theater!

 

Two Weeks (and a BBQ) Down…

It is hard to believe that we’re already two weeks into rehearsals for Bella’s Dream. I feel like I blinked and went from “oh, the play is MONTHS away” to “OMG, the play opens in 3 weeks!” This week has been extraordinary! We spent the beginning of the week finishing our character work/discussions. I was reminded, once again, that there’s never enough time. When I was scheduling the “one-on-ones” with the actors – sometimes an hour, sometimes 45 minutes – I would think to myself, “oh, there’s no way we’re going to find an hour’s worth of stuff to delve into with this character(s). Man was I wrong. Every discussion was interesting and engaging and showed the depth of these charcters and each actor’s process of understanding them. Add to that that the majority of the actors are playing multiple characters and there was a LOT to discuss.

In addition to the one-on-ones we also had meetings/rehearsals with pairs or small groups of actors, which allowed us to discuss the relationships these characters have with each other and what they mean to each other. On a show like this, with many, short scenes, an enormous cast, and multiple actors playing multiple characters, I find the discussions incredibly helpful for finding a way in to the show.

After character discussions were done, we dove in to the blocking. Having the full ensemble at rehearsal and starting to figure out where everyone is going on the ENORMOUS stage? Well, it is alternately, exciting, moving, thrilling, frustrating, and, to be honest, exhausting. After all, it’s 14 bodies to move around an atypical space with some visual obstructions for some members of the audience. I’m still not sure how I’ll make it work, but this team is so amazing. Giving, and experimental, excited and really REALLY fun! Throughout the process it’s been so exhillerating to find those little moments when what I had in my head translates into a goose-bump inducing moment on stage…then again, sometimes it’s only through putting the actors on the stage that the I realize the moment I had carefully choreographed in my head looks like crap and I have to start from scratch. What I’m loving with this group though is that in those moments, when my initial thoughts turn out to be not-so-brilliant and I throw it out to the cast and say “this is what I’m trying to achieve” it’s just wonderful to see them jump in with suggestions – to all put our heads together to “solve it.” I was going to say, “It’s moments like that when I truly love my job,” but honestly, I can’t think of many times when I don’t truly love this job.

A word about warm ups – I’ve been doing something new on this show and actually leading a warm up circle at the start of most of the full ensemble rehearsals. Normally, I just let the actors warm up (or not, whatever they prefer) on their own time, but with a cast this large I’m finding it’s great to get everyone moving and shake out the cobwebs together. It also seems to be a nice bonding tool and it builds energy and it acts as this really nice sort of line of demarcation between the world we’re in every day and the world of Bella’s Dream…Oh, and also, it gives us, as the production team, the opportunity to thank our Rockethub donors for their contributions!

Speaking of Rockethub, have you checked out our preview on the Rockethub site? No? Oh my goodness, let me be sure to give you the link: http://www.rockethub.com/projects/24082-bella-s-dream We’re cruising along with our fundraising and are already 30% funded but we could still use your help. Please check out the video, read the production updates, support the show and/or tell your friends. I’ve said this repeatedly on my Facebook posts but it bears repeating here – as I do with most of my projects, I see this show as a very special, unique little family and I want our audience, our supporters to be a part of that family. So, please join the Bella’s Dream family. Donations at any level will help us make this show everything it can be!

Ok, plug over. But I digress, where was I? Right, warm-ups. Although I don’t usually lead warm ups, on this show, it’s been really fun to watch the actors explore movement and sound expression within the warm-ups and it’s led to some great discoveries that filter down into the rest of the rehearsal process…oh, and I can’t thank Stevenson Carlebach enough for introducing me to the theater game “Pass the Trash”. So, Stevenson, if you are reading this – THANK YOU!

Friday night we had our second full production meeting. Brian, our set designer, brought out the scale model of the set (no pictures folks, sorry. Come on, y’all know how spoiler-averse I am. I want it to be a surprise) and everyone jumped in to discussions about what will be where and power supply issues, and how do we light the stage, and where does the projector screen go, and what are we doing with the costumes, and on, and on, and then an amazing thing happened – Dan, our technical director, kept us all on task with simple statements like “Ok, that’s what set needs. Moving on to Lights.” It is an absolute thrill to see this team of talented, amazing designers and technicians doing their thing.

A sad note: our original costume designer had a family emergency and needed to drop out of the project. After frantic emails to all of my theater friends, I was able to find the amazing, Amanda Jenks, an extraordinary costume designer, who was available to step in to take Scott’s place. Scott has been wonderful helping get Amanda up to speed and continuing to help the production where he can (all I’m going to say is The Caspian Sea and y’all will see what that means when you see the show) and Amanda has been amazing about just jumping in and running with it. We were very sad to lose Scott but so thrilled to have Amanda, and her assistant Maria, stepping in.

Although we didn’t finish blocking the show (that’s for this week), we rounded out the week of rehearsals with a little Memorial Day BBQ. And though this was not strictly a Bella’s Dream affair, members of the cast and crew came to party it up, eat the delicous grilled foods, the vegan coconut macaroons (don’t let the “vegan” fool you – those things are awesome!) and kick back and just socialize without much talk of the show. If only we had the time, I would seriously round out every week of rehearsals with a massive BBQ in my backyard. It was such fun.

For the week coming up, we have lots planned – we finish blocking the show (actually, we’ll be doing that in about an hour so I should probably go get ready for rehearsal) and then we jump in to scene work. I usually try very hard not to give any sort of acting notes in blocking rehearsals. Since, for me, blocking rehearsals are really about, “this is where you enter the stage and this is where you exit,” it’s not important to delve into, “are you going to do the line like that?” kind of discussions. That’s for scene work, which I’m so excited to begin!

So, two weeks down and three to go…and I can’t wait to see what this week brings!

Tickets for Bella’s Dream are on sale now on our main page: www.goingtotahitiproductions.com

See you at the theater!

 

One Week Down…

So! The first week of Bella’s Dream rehearsals has officially concluded…and what a week it has been.

The week started off, last Sunday, (a beautiful Mother’s Day afternoon), with the Bella’s Dream cast and crew stuck inside for our first read-through.

As I believe I mentioned on Facebook last week (and I know I mentioned to mom when I called her that night to wish her a Happy Mother’s Day), it was an absolute thrill to listen to the actors read the script out loud. Dana and I have been working on this iteration of the project without actors for the past 3 months, so, to hear the words read out loud in voices other than those in our heads, was truly a thrill. As a director, I already started seeing the ways I want to stage the show.

The team is a fantastic group of people and it is a joy to see my newest family forming. Immediately after the read-through and discussion, the designers and Dana and I sat down and started the ball rolling on our design discussion. I love many many things about my job, but there is little I love more than that first official day of a new project, when everyone is excited, the juices are flowing, and the ideas begin to take shape. I’m not exaggerating when I say that I floated home on a cloud that night…

The rest of the week was spent delving into character-work with the actors. We spent several days in discussion and improvisation finding who these people are and how we want to play them. With a project like Bella’s Dream, it’s particularly exciting because, not only are most of the actors playing real people, almost every performer is also playing more than one character. During these first rehearsals, not only are the actors starting to find their characters, we, as an ensemble, as a team, are beginning to find each other as a family. That experience is always exciting but particularly in a case like this, where the project is so personal, (it is based on the true-life experiences of Dana’s grandparents during World War 2) finding the group that will be your family for the next two months is a unique and wonderful experience.

Sadly, in the beginning of the week, we discovered that one of the actors would need to drop out of the production. We said goodbye to Doug and welcomed Dean Linnard as Man #2.

We had an exciting rehearsal on Tuesday (our first “on-our-feet” rehearsal) that was filled with physical improv. The cast danced, and laughed and cried (OK, maybe it was only me crying because of the poignant scene we were working on where Bella and Raymond tell Bella’s parents that they are leaving Gombin) and made delicious headway into our understanding not only of who these people were in real life, but who they are in our production.

Thursday, Friday and Saturday were three intense days of character-work as we delved into each character individually and made sure we were all on the same page before we start blocking the action of the play which we’ll jump in to on Wednesday night. While Molly and I were doing character-work with the actors, Dana was hard at work on dance rehearsals with the Movement Chorus. For both Dana and I rehearsals have been filled with new discoveries and a nearly constant appreciation of exciting insights that come about when performers enter the mix.

In addition to the actor and dancer work we did this past week, Dana and I also had individual design meetings. So far we’ve met with Scott (Costume),Sam (Lights) and Brian (Set) – (Projections and Sound are tomorrow) and we’ve started to zero in on our overriding design themes – neutral costumes, 4 light environments, movement within the set. Each meeting was enlightening and filled with those “ooh, ooh, ooh, what if we did this?!” moments that are the reason I do theater. And the discussions continue. To the right is the model that Dana and I were playing with at our set design meeting with Brian. I cannot fully explain the joy of having little (to scale) pieces to play around with and use to help clarify the picture I have in my head. I still remember last year at this time when Becky brought in my “Persuasion blocks” – little (to scale) cubes that represented the major set pieces for that show. It was after that meeting that I thought, “Oh, THAT’s what I’m doing with the set!” And I had a similar feeling after our set design meeting yesterday.

You know, any play has a lot of aspects that are balanced with each other and, kind of like a Jenga tower, you can’t just pull one out and deal with it – you need to look at the entire pile before making a move; but, particularly with a play like this – 9 actors, 5 dancers, music, sound, lights, projections, rolling set pieces – there are a LOT of moving parts and finding an anchor on which to secure your vision/design/ideas etc. is CRUCIAL. For me, that anchor started to form in the beginning of the week – hearing the actors say their lines, discussing the characters and what we want to do with them – and then it became clearer in the discussions about costume and lights as I began to really visualize what we’re going for here – but it crystallized in our set meeting.

As I begin to envision the set and what it will be able to do, I start to see how to move my playing pieces around the board. It is indescribably thrilling, and, in the end, it’s this feeling that I’m always chasing. It’s why I do this…And? I REALLY can not wait to see what this week brings…

Bella’s Dream opens June 18th for a two week run at The Flamboyan Theater at The Clemente Soto Velez Cultural and Educational Center. For tickets and further details go to our Shows and Events page above or just click here.

 

The Joys of Talented Friends…

So, I’ve spent the last couple of posts kinda complaining about things that are tough about this business so today I wanted to talk about one of the wonderful things – through chatting with, working with people, networking and the general “birds of a feather flock together”-ness of theater folks – it’s very easy in this business to make friends with and establish connections to an incredible network of talented, like-minded folks. One of those people (in my tribe) is Jake Lipman, Actress and Artistic Director/Producer of Tongue In Cheek Theater Productions. We met through a mutual acquaintance who thought, “huh, you both are women with theater companies who have similar views on the world and are, like 5′ tall, y’all should meet” and introduced us. I know what your thinking, you’re thinking, “well, I don’t know if that’s really enough similarities to base a lasting friendship on, there must be thousands of women with theater companies out there.” In response to you I say 1) frighteningly, there actually aren’t all that many women-run theater companies out there so we’ll flock together whenever we can AND, more importantly, 2) one of my mother’s best and longest friendships (we’re talking like 40 years here) came about because a mutual friend of theirs noticed they were both pregnant at the same time and so “would have a lot in common” and that acquaintance turned into a life-long friendship (see the 40 years thing). So clearly, if the universe wants you to be friends with someone, it will find a way to push y’all together, even if, at first glance, the similarities are only on the surface.

But, as usual, I digress… Tongue in Cheek is the same company that brought us last October’s terrific production of Our Town and, after that experience, you can imagine, how excited I was when Jake invited me to see Tongue In Cheek’s latest production, The Mistakes Madeline Made by Elizabeth Meriwether at The Bridge Theater at Shetler Studios. As I’m coming to expect from TIC Theater, this dark comedy was a great evening of theater, the only major drawback of which was the short run – only 7 performances. The play follows the story of recent grad Edna who takes a job assisting a wealthy family. She is visited by visions of her late brother Buddy and micromanaged by an insipid boss, Beth, compelling her to rebel with the help of quirky co-worker, Wilson. As she tries to find her way, throughout the play, Edna dates a series of pompous writers.

The play was filled with very funny/slightly surreal moments, which in and of itself was not much of a surprise considering the playwright would go on to create and produce the Fox television show New Girl, starring Zooey Deschanel. But what did surprise me was how moving the play managed to be in the midst of some “wackiness” and though I’m sure that was a factor of the writing, it was also due to the direction by Brock H. Hill and the work of the extraordinary cast.

Speaking of that cast – to be honest, the entire ensemble was wonderful. As Drake/Jake/Blake, Joe Mullen, with very little stage time, managed to create 3 entirely different characters while still portraying a clear archetype – “the pompous writer”. As Buddy, Jeremy Patrick Hamilton found the grounded reality of the “ghost” character, making him seem both a figure we completely know and a cipher we could never hope to know at the same time. Jake Lipman (and yes, I said she’s my friend so I’m a bit biased, but I’m also a director, I know real talent when I see it, and perhaps that is one of the reasons she IS my friend) Jake Lipman was hilarious as the insipid boss Beth, but she also played her in that way that only truly good comic actresses have of making sure that the character isn’t aware of the joke. Ms. Lipman’s Beth was so real that I actually broke out in a cold sweat at one point flashing back to conversations with those pointlessly irritating and particular bosses I’ve had in the past. Those bosses who’ve attended management seminars and read leadership self-help books and think, think, they are brilliant, people-managers. They think they’re the exact person who knows how to get the best out of talented people but instead are just completely clueless as to how to inspire committment, loyalty, and talent from their staff. And yet, in the midst of that very real portrait, Jake also gave us these little glimpses into the fact that as irritating and insipid as Beth is, she’s also a real person with feelings of her own-feelings that can easily be hurt. A.J. Heekin took a role that could have just been irritating or self-conciously quirky and turned Wilson into another real person, struggling with idiosyncracies and tics. Because of Mr. Heekin’s deft touch, very subtly and very quietly, Wilson moved from what seemed to be peripheral character to become the very heart of this little show. And Shelley Little – what to say about Ms. Little? I mentioned Shelley Little in my review of Our Town as I had been impressed with her work there but particularly in The Mistakes Madeline Made, I was blown away by her portrayal of Edna. We easily caught Edna’s wry humor and sarcastic shell holding everyone at arms length, but it was Shelley’s extremely moving portrayal of Edna’s inner weakness that, when exposed, became quietly devestating. By the end of the play, much to my surprise, I found myself reaching for tissue after tissue. (And, because it’s one of my pet peeves when an actress can’t do this, I want to specifically applaud Shelley Little for crying actual tears instead of just scrunching up her face and being “sad”. I’m a sympathetic crier from way back, so the actual tears were truly moving. )

As with Our Town, TIC once again was able to bring me humor interspersed with really moving, and emotionally effecting drama. Although The Mistakes Madeline Made has finished its run, I would like to HIGHLY recommend that you get yourself on their mailing list and be sure to catch whatever project they next have up their sleeves. You won’t be disappointed!

For more details on Tongue In Cheek Theater be sure to check their website here.

Perseverance (The Importance Of)

Disclaimer: I couldn’t come up with a good picture that really went along with this post. Sorry, just a whole lotta words and heads up, a couple of them are naughty…

Except for the occasional theater review, you may have noticed GTTP has been a little bit absent from the Blogosphere. (I’m sure you’ve all been breathlessly waiting for an explanation of where Jessica and GTTP has been). Well, lucky you, I feel like it is time to explain my absence. My other blog post today is all shiny happy with very exciting updates and, if you’d like to read that go ahead and skip this post entirely and see the shiny happy post here (ah the joys of simultaneous posting). But for those of you brave enough to embrace the darkness (heh. How ominous does that sound?), here’s the deal.

As you know from previous posting, last year was a bit of a crazy year (in a good way). GTTP (and in this instance the GTTP I’m referring to is yours truly) was up to its ears in productions. Starting with my directing gig at The Secret Theater, I went directly from directing The Day Job by Julia Blauvelt, into co-producing Cat Lady Without A Cat by Carrie Keskinen and then into directing and producing Jane Austen’s Persuasion by Laura Bultman, and right into directing and producing In The Ebb by Camilla Ammirati at the NY International Fringe Festival. Let me just say, that for as crazy as the schedule was, there is nothing quite as awesome as going from gig to gig to gig. It gives meaning to your life (or, in this case, my life) and it’s wonderful to know that you’re devoting all of your time and energy to the one thing that you know – completely know down in your boney bone bones – you were put on this earth to do. So that? Was awesome! …end of post.

Heh. Ok, not end of post. There was a downside. And here it is, gentle readers. Just because I know that I was put on this earth to direct (and produce) it doesn’t mean the universe recognizes it. And there was this tricky little thing with going from gig to gig to gig…and it’s that same tricky little thing that plagues all of us “starving” artists. That’s right, folks. Say it with me. Money. In that, there is none. No that’s not true. I have the most AMAZING supporters, which is to say all of you. I am WELL aware and INCREDIBLY appreciative of the way all of you have pitched in with money, time, encouragement and general support over the years. There’s nothing quite so wonderful as saying, “huh, how am I going to come up with x amount of money for this show?” and then checking Rockethub and seeing that x amount money has showed up from donors. It is a wonderful and amazing thing. But, unfortunately, for what I’m trying to do, it’s not enough. Don’t get me wrong, I know your hard earned cash is exactly that and you need to give what you’re comfortable giving and I’m not trying to imply that your generosity isn’t appreciated. No, on the contrary, it is EVERYTHING and it is a perfect launching off point. But, what I’ve been realizing, the longer I do this, is that we need more and we need bigger. Money and audiences, that is. In order to get to the place that I might one day make a living at this, we need to make that jump from small company surviving on individual donations into a company that makes its money through grants, or corporate sponsorship, or investors or all of the above…we need to jump.

This need was particularly noticeable last fall when I was hoping we were making that jump. I finished The Fringe Festival, completely ready for one of two things to happen, either – some variation of the pipe dream – someone of influence, someone with money, would have seen In the Ebb and decided he or she wanted to be GTTP’s patron or I’d get a directing agent who would launch me into a world of gigs for which I would get recognition and get paid a real salary and that salary would, in turn, enable me to subsidize my GTTP work or we’d get so noticed and so well reviewed that we would be instantly skyrocketed to fame and success (or at least to a budget level that would allow for a decent salary for all involved) and I’d get help in making GTTP really happen – OR – (more likely) I would go back to my 4 day jobs for 4 months, make some money, expand the ensemble, and come back in the spring for our next show, which would be a contributing factor to that jump happening, like now.

But here’s what happened…nada. No, that’s not exactly true, I did expand the company and we are now an ensemble of 28 artists and technicians and you can read about that in the other blog post (you know, the shiny happy one). But, except for that, nothing happened. No pipe dream, and no day job (there just wasn’t much work for me last fall). So I spent a few months trying to figure out what I should have done differently and what I could do differently in the future to make sure that that jump I was talking about earlier, would — no, will — happen.

Because, here’s the thing, I’m tired. I mean it. It’s exhausting to keep pushing, to keep going. It’s tiring to keep telling yourself, “no no, it WILL happen.” Leading up to Fringe, (as I have with every single production) I REALLY tried not to get my hopes up. I really tried not to let myself even imagine the pipe dream stuff. I REALLY REALLY did (and in my family when you say “really really” you can not lie). I kept telling myself, “Jessica, pipe dreams don’t happen in real life. This ain’t an episode of Smash. If you want something to happen you need to put in the work. You need to keep pushing. You need to persevere and, in the end you need to MAKE it happen. Because no one is going to give it to you. No one is going to do it for you.” I can’t tell you how many times over the past five years I’ve told myself some variation of exactly that. Seriously, it’s like a daily affirmation. Because you need to keep that pipe dream shit in check. So I stomped down on any of the, “but maybe what will happen is Steven Spielberg will be in NY and decide he wants to take in a Fringe show and he’ll see In the Ebb, and he’ll think, “wow, this show is something! This director is SOMETHING! Let me see what else she’s got!”" I stomped down HARD. At least I thought I did.

What actually happened though – Deep down, way way down deep, there was this Little Dreamer who just kept holding on to that pipe dream. Eyes screwed shut, shaking her head, knuckles white with holding on so hard, she just kept whispering, “I know all of that stuff Ms. Strong Realistic Conscious Mind. But you’re wrong, because I’ve been doing this for awhile and sooner or later, pipe dream has to happen. Sooner or later something’s going to give and the end result will be pipe dream. I know it.” It turns out that Little Dreamer is kind of an asshole, because what happened in September, and then October, and then November, when I realized that no manifestation of pipe dream was actually going to happen, I shut down and crawled into a state of hibernation. I didn’t realize it at the time, when I kept telling my friends and family, “yeah, I’m a little bit blue, but really I’m fine” that I was lying. It turns out that I wasn’t just a little bit blue, I was a little bit broken.

And it turns out I needed the last five months (WOW, I can not beLIEVE I wasted five whole months) to let that stuff work itself out. So that’s where I’ve been…that’s where GTTP has been…working stuff out. Sometimes, working stuff out looked like watching crap TV shows on my computer while playing video games on the TV. And sometimes working stuff out looked like playing on Facebook. And sometimes working stuff out looked like reading the final book of a fantasy series 20 years in the making, but whatever form of escape it looked like, it really really was working stuff out, because just within the last few weeks? I feel better. I feel eager. I feel recharged. I have to do lists and tasks and half started projects (which I rotate through daily) all over my desktop. I’m not really sure what I did to fix it, or heal or whatever, but the one thing I did do, as I sat there thinking, “Geez, Jess, you have GOT to get working again. You have to update your blog. or Work on your next project. or Get a new fundraising drive going. or SOMETHING!” The one thing I did do was listen once again to that Little Dreamer who said, “wait. Not yet. Lick your wounds. Heal. Listen to the dream again. Find the strength to keep going.” Because, she may be an asshole, and she may be melodramatic, but also? She knows of what she speaks.

Keep going on this journey. It will be worth it. Keep going on this path. There are rewards to come. Keep going. Keep going. Keep going. So I will. You wanna come too?

 

Meditations on Strong Women…and Wanting to be One – a Review of ANN

Recently I had the opportunity to see a dress rehearsal of ANN which opened for previews a week ago at Lincoln Center’s Vivian Beaumont Theater. An exploration of Ann Richards, the one-woman-show was created by Holland Taylor from a compilation of speeches, interviews and discussions with people who knew the former Texas Governor. As you can see from the image above, the show is subtitled “Tough as nails. Funny as hell.” and it seems to be a perfect encapsulation of the woman herself.

The play is bookended with a speech the governor is giving to a graduating class and the speech gives us an entry into and an exit out of Ms. Richards story — how her life began, how she became a mom and housewife, how she decided to get into politics, how she gave a keynote speech at the 1988 democratic convention that put her on a national stage and how she eventually became the governor of Texas. Partway through the play the set changes and we get a glimpse of Ann in her governor’s office, conducting the business of running the second largest state in the country.

Even if you don’t care for politics, this show is something you should see. I am not a particularly political person – don’t get me wrong, I have a political point of view and (honestly) very strong opinions about the political scene in this country but, beyond the occasional Facebook post, I don’t usually have much to say about the political world. The whole thing gives me a headache and makes me tired at the same time, so I usually don’t wade into that morass. And, when considering seeing ANN, my immediate reaction was that I didn’t really care about politics so why would I want to see a show all about politics. What’s more, going in to the play, I knew very little about Ann Richards beyond that she was a former governor of Texas. And, although I have always liked Holland Taylor, my experience of her as an actress has always been enjoyable but limited to the strong but supporting roles in movies and television that she has gravitated to. Basically, I had no idea if the subject matter would be particularly interesting or enlightening or entertaining and I had no idea if the actress/playwright would be able to carry the execution of an entire solo show…It turns out, an all counts, I shouldn’t have worried, I was in expert hands.

ANN is hilarious and touching, moving and fascinating. I was impressed with many things about the show — Ms. Taylor’s impeccable timing, her grace and her intelligence which shone clearly in her performance, but what really impressed me was the sense I got of Ann Richards as a woman — a funny, intelligent, balls-to-the-wall woman. Watching her have conversations with her secretary (an off stage presence you never see but instead hear through the phone’s intercom), various people on the phone (ranging from dignitaries like Bill Clinton, to her staff, to her children) and even herself, we see a woman who barrels through and gets the job done. She is a woman who is confident, sharp and witty, fiercely intelligent and in control, even when she’s not. And she’s one of those women who, as a woman watching, you want to be like. I can see why Ms. Taylor was drawn to her subject matter. Ann Richards was someone who was extremely capable, full of love for her children, her job, and her country. She devoted her life to public service and we were all the better for having had her in the world.

As a woman with a theater company dedicated to giving more opportunities to women, I am drawn to strong women, as characters and as people. So it is no surprise that watching ANN, I to was drawn to Ann. I found myself wanting to be like her a bit more in my life. Don’t get me wrong, I’m a pretty confident, sharp and witty, intelligent and in control woman myself; but, watching the play you can’t help but want to be that confident and that capable all the time. To the point that you don’t care what people think of you as long as you gets the job done and done right. Ann Richards clearly had a strong personality but she also clearly had a strong moral center and a clear idea of what needed doing and how to get it done. And though I’m sure there were times when that confidence and competence pushed the scale towards difficult and maybe even unlikable to the people around her, it’s clear from the play that she never wavered in who she was. I wished I had known her while she lived and I’m honored that I got to know her through this show. Holland Taylor gives an extraordinary performance that brings the audience in and lets us all get to know Ann Richards a little better.

ANN is in previews now at Lincoln Center’s Vivian Beaumont Theater. It opens for its limited Broadway run starting March 7th. For tickets and more details go to http://www.theAnnRichardsPlay.com/index.php

Don’t miss your chance to meet and spend some time with these extraordinary women.

Jokes Really Can Come True

Ensemble member, Kiwi Callahan, guest blogs about her upcoming cabaret:

How the Ugly Christmas Sweater Cabaret Came To Be

 

This cabaret started as a joke. My friend Alison Rose Munn and I were sitting in some dance studio in NYC waiting to audition for some musical at some regional theatre somewhere, when she said, “You know, this year, instead of auditioning for Christmas shows, we should just put on ugly Christmas sweaters and sing whatever we want.” We both laughed out loud. What a preposterous idea! Who were we to decide when and if we performed? Three days later I got a text from Alison: “You know, if you actually wanted to do an ugly sweater cabaret or something, I’d be totally down.” My reply? “Me too! Let’s do it.”

This will be the first production I’ve ever been in that I have also co-built from the ground up. I’ve always just performed in the shows that I’ve been cast in, but recently I’ve been starting to come around to the idea of creating my own work. Everyone I know has been telling me for years to “just put on a show” or “get together with your friends and just perform!” But I always shied away from doing it, because inwardly I thought, “I don’t really have anything to say. How do you build a show around that?” But of course that’s not true. We all have things to say, messages we’d like to spread, ideas about our place in the world.

For me, this process of realizing my own ideas began with a need to decide what kind of artist I wanted to be. I’d spent so much time trying to shove myself into everyone else’s ideas that I’d completely lost track of why I was even in this business in the first place. I was waiting for someone to tell me what to do. Unfortunately, in grown-up land no one can really tell you what to do. You have to figure it out yourself. I’ve started to do that, and while I’m still not exactly sure what kind of artist I want to be, one thing has become utterly clear: I want to make a difference. I want to entertain people, and I also want to help people. Such a basic idea, but already it has inspired me over and over again to create projects that have been incredibly rewarding to work on and that I am proud to show the world.

The Ugly Christmas Sweater Cabaret is one of those projects. Alison and I paired with one of New York’s most well-known charities, New York Cares, to create a Christmas concert that will not only be fun and entertaining, it will also help New York Cares reach their goal of 200,000 coats. We have decided to collect coats and non-perishable food items at the door instead of having a cover charge. It’s been amazing to see it coming together, and I can’t wait to get into the theatre with all of my friends and see how this plays out. The tag line on all of our marketing materials has been, “Carols, Cocktails and Charity.” I don’t think it can be bad.

Kiwi Callahan is an Ensemble Member with Going to Tahiti Productions, and was most recently seen with them in Ruth McKee’s one-woman show, Full Disclosure. For a real introduction to Kiwi Callahan and Alison Rose Munn, check out their promo video:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JHa0UKMcYW8

The Ugly Christmas Sweater Cabaret and Coat Drive to Benefit NYCares

Tuesday, December 4th, 7:00pm

Laurie Beechman Theater

407 W. 42nd Street

Call 212-695-6909 for Reservations

NO COVER CHARGE

The Laurie Beechman Theater has a $15 food/beverage minimum

www.uglysweaterproductions.com

 

Ten things I learned doing The NY International Fringe Festival…

Ok, so I have owed my trusty readers (hi, Mom!) a post for about a month now. I do apologize for being so absent from the blogosphere but it turns out Fringe took a lot more out of me then expected and when the past few Mondays rolled around I just didn’t have it in me to compose something witty and exciting for a post and so I didn’t … I actually did start 4 different posts and if I could figure out a way to back date them I would totally post them but since I can’t I’ll just say they started like this:

POST 1 (that didn’t get posted) – so, we’re about to open In the Ebb at HERE Mainstage and I can’t wait for you all to see it.

POST 2 (that didn’t get posted) – so, we just opened In the Ebb at HERE Mainstage and I think you guys will love it!

POST 3 (that didn’t get posted) – so, the reviewer from nytheatre.com didn’t get it. Though he thought In the Ebb was beautifully written, Camilla “has a poetic soul” and I have “a true talent for staging”, he thought the show was boring and he didn’t find the themes universal or connectable (yes, I made up that word but that’s the gist of the review – fear of loss apparently isn’t a universal theme – oops, I guess that makes the worrier in me a bit of a freak). ANYway, I would have said in the post (had I gotten around to posting it) that I would be worried that the review would have kept folks away, but I can now say in hindsight that we had decent audiences (not Jane Austen’s Persuasion sized audiences but decent all the same) and everyone I talked to seemed to love it so, to quote Mrs. DiSalvo in Act II – “I guess we did ok.”

POST 4 (that didn’t get posted) – so, the reviewer from California Litereary Review TOTALLY got it. Now THAT’s what I call a review. I found this one much more reflective of the work we did on stage. Though there were a couple of typos in the review (Saul Steinberg instead of Stewart and Ian DeNio instead of Ien) I felt that this reviewer actually got what we were saying. He caught the beauty in the words and the performances, and he ALSO understood Camilla’s humor finding much of the play “extremely funny even as it peers into the abyss.” I do wish that the people who “got me” were the only ones who also got to review me, but again to quote Mrs. DiSalvo, “you don’t get to pick.”

which brings me to this post:

POST 5 (that WILL get posted) – So now Fringe is over. It has been such a whirlwind. Going from Persuasion directly into In the Ebb is not necessarily the way I’d recommend doing the Festival for the first time, but on the flip side, it was nice to just go from show to show instead of hanging around waiting for my next project to begin. It means I completely bypassed my “post show depression” after Persuasion. Of course that could also mean that I’m due for a double whammy on the depression front now that In the Ebb is over, but hopefully I’ll slide into something else really exciting – like adapting Within Arm’s Reach for the stage. Anywho, here’s what I learned in Fringe:

1) Before you have a cast, reading the play out loud at a very slow speed is NOT going to give you an accurate representation of how long the play will run in performance.

- Fringe requires you to give a running time in your application, and though you still have time to change that after you get accepted to the festival, the date when you do have to give them a hard – set-in-stone – run time will most likely be at least a month before you’ve cast the show, let alone done a first run through and have an accurate sense of the run time. I had originally thought the run time of the two one acts (one fewer act than the first time I did this show) would be 75 minutes INCLUDING a 10 minute intermission. I discovered 2 days before my tech that we were running about 95 minutes WITHOUT an intermission. That was a weekend of frantic cuts trying not to cut scenes but still lose 20 minutes from the show. One day, I vow that I will do this show in its entirety.

2) A certified Flameproofer is your best friend!

- Fringe requires that all set pieces be certified flameproof. Although my set was stuff that was most likely already flameproofed (Ikea chairs and rehearsal cubes) I needed proof and that means tags from purchase (which ain’t an option since I purchased the chairs years ago for use in the first production of In the Ebb). One option was to cart the stuff out to New Jersey and have the Fringe-recommended vendor test the stuff and if it wasn’t fireproof then I could leave it there for 3 DAYS – yup DAYS – and then head back out there and pick it up. Then I found someone who was Manhattan-based and let me tell you – finding someone who can come to you and flameproof your set and give you a certificate proving that it’s flameproofed is a whole helluva lot better than having to cart your entire set out to Jersey.

3) Get yourself some good, talented, reliable friends.

- Throughout the years I have connected with some people who I can’t imagine stumbling through life without. Sarah and Ian, for example, not only said I could borrow one of their DINING ROOM chairs for a WHOLE MONTH, they didn’t bat an eye when I said I would have to chemically treat the chair so that it was officially flame proofed. When I asked if I could rent his rehearsal cubes for 3 weeks, Richard was all “why don’t you just borrow them” and, Jen, once again, offered up the Chevy Blazer to be used and abused for whatever I needed, which it turned out was a lot of set, prop and costume transportation.

4) Work with talented people you trust and love – again and again and again.

- My crazy talented sound designer, Ien DeNio, crazy talented lighting designer, Sam Gordon, crazy talented projections designer, Zeljka Blaksic, and crazy talented company manager, Carrie Keskinen, all re-upped with GTTP and I literally could NOT have done this show without them. Their talent, skill, and professionalism made this show work! And their ability to roll with the punches (see Number 6) meant that we were able to function within the stressful time-compressed world of Fringe.

5) Make sure you cast riDONKulously capable and talented actors who work well together!

- I’ve known for awhile that I’m pretty good at casting. I can usually see in an audition what an actor will be capable of and I usually have a sense of whether a group of actors will work together well. It’s a wonderful thing, a real honor, to get the opportunity to bring together 7 strangers and watch them, through rehearsals, turn into a family. This most recent family included: Crawford M. Collins, Leah Gabriel, Mary Goggin, Michael Komala, Stewart Steinberg, Montgomery Sutton, and Lisa Crosby Wipperling.

6) Hook up with a group that is calm under pressure and be ready to figure out technical aspects on the fly…

- So, for those of you who don’t know, the way Fringe works (in fact the way most theater festivals work) is that you are really assigned only one chance to be in the venue before your show opens and that chance is your tech rehearsal. In the case of Fringe, your tech rehearsal is only 2 times the length of your running time (see point #1 in this list and the importance of determining that run time well in advance of rehearsals) and you must must must run through the entire show without stop so that the Fringe folks can time you (with a stopwatch) and know for certain that you’ll fit in your allotted time. Since tech for a normal show is usually at least 3 days and often as long as a week (it’s called Tech WEEK for a reason, folks) having only 2 and a half hours in the venue to tech your show can make for a tricky situation. Add to that the complication that, because of Fringe scheduling, our tech day was actually a full week before our first performance, there was a high amount of stress on that particular 2.5 hours. What’s more, because we were the first group to tech in the space, we spent what should have been our hour and 15 minutes that was set aside for a cue to cue (where we actually go through the entire play just looking at and listening to each lighting, sound and projection cue) figuring out why the projector wasn’t working and how lights in the theater (whose layout we were supposed to be given in advance but weren’t) were going to run our lighting design. SO, having the cast and crew that I had – a group of people who just went with the flow and didn’t pull any diva crap (though it was well within their rights to do so) and just buckled down and did the job – what’s that Friday Night Lights phrase – “git ‘er done” – well this group GOT ‘ER DONE!

7) Get assigned the prettiest venue at the festival and luck out on the awesomest, chillest, terrific-est venue director on the planet.

- So, as a Fringe show, you get no say in the venue you’re assigned. Basically, the festival organizers have to figure out how to get 187 shows into 19 different venues for at least 5 performances each in a 16 day span. Each venue has to be technically capable of sustaining each show (does a show have projections, does it need fly space to drop set pieces in and out, does it need a proscenium arch, etc.) They also have to account for scheduling issues (for example, is the production company coming from Japan and not arriving in the states until 4 days after the festival has started). It’s a lot to juggle, so basically what you get is what you get and you make due. Well, somehow, I lucked into the most beautiful venue. HERE Arts Mainstage is a theater that if I were just renting, I honestly couldn’t afford for years to come. It’s a 99 seat house with a stage so big that an actor actually has to cross it (like take several steps) when moving from stage left to stage right, instead of just turning around. And the lighting grid allows for different areas of the stage to be lit while other areas are in darkness – giving actual areas of playing space instead of having the whole stage lit by default because the stage is so big that once you turn on a light you see everything. And then, as if the performance venue weren’t enough of a gift from the Fringe Gods, we were lucky enough to get assigned a venue director (a liason (supplied by Fringe) between the production company (in this case, GTTP) and the theater) who was amazing, supportive and super chill. I can not say enough good things about Christian De Gre, Artistic Director of Mind the Art Entertainment, who, while being such a terrific venue director was also overseeing his own production at the festival. The only bad thing about working with Christian, was that the nature of Fringe meant I didn’t get any time to just sit and chat with the guy – a problem I hope to remedy soon.

8) 15 minutes is a both a lot longer and a lot shorter than you think it is.

- So, because there are 187 shows in 19 venues in 16 days, on any given day, you are never the only show performing in your venue. What that means is that there is often as little as 30 minutes in between shows. Because 15 minutes before any given show has to be spent getting audience in and sitting down and 15 minutes after any show has to be spent getting audience out, as a production company you only have 15 minutes to bring everything you need into the space before and clear everything out after. We were lucky in that our set pieces (my trusty ikea chairs and our 3 rehearsal cubes) were being shared with other shows in the venue so we were able to leave them in the space, but all of our props, costumes and, you know, 7 actors, had to get in and set up in the 15 minutes before and taken down, stored and out in the 15 minutes after. I did purposefully keep the set as minimal as possible, but that first time, in tech, when we literally had a stopwatch on us, the chaos of setting everything up and taking everything down was nervewracking…then again, it turns out that even that first time when no-one knew what they were doing (“someone grab that chair and stow it”, “who grabbed the ice tea”, “where did the nun’s veil go? Do you have it?”) we were done and out the door in 6 minutes, so we got really good at running that load-in and load-out like clockwork. Again, it helped that I had the cast and crew that I did (see points 4 and 5 above).

9) Simplify more than you think is possible and then simplify some more.

- So, as I mentioned above, we only had the 15 minutes to get in and out and our tech rehearsal was…not as thorough as I would have liked, and…the script was longer than I realized. In the end we cut a lot – from lines in the script, to number of props, to complexity of set design, to lighting, sound and projection cues. And just when I thought, “I can’t possibly cut more, I can’t possibly make it more minimal,” I went through a whole other round of cuts and, to be honest, it was still an amazing, wonderful, vivid show. I always go back to that first time I saw Patrick Stewart do A Christmas Carol on Broadway – one guy, a chair, a table, a stool and a podium – he created a world that we as the audience got to live in for a couple of hours. It really is true that if the writing is there and the performances are there, you really don’t need anything else. This world ofIn the Ebb, was vivid and alive even without matching chairs and that one additional sound cue or lighting change. The audience still got it (well, except for that one reviewer but you can’t win ‘em all, right?) and it was still a captivating – Tahiti – Production.

10) When you’re at your most certain that everything will fall to s**t, it somehow all works out.

- My favorite, favorite, favorite quote about theater comes from the movie Shakespeare in Love. The exchange goes like this:

Henslowe: Allow me to explain about the theatre business. The natural condition is one of insurmountable obstacles on the road to imminent disaster.

Fennyman: So what do we do?

Henslowe: Nothing. Strangely enough, it all turns out well.

Fennyman: How?

Henslowe: I don’t know. It’s a mystery.

If I have learned one thing in my years in professionial theater it is the truth of that exchange. It’s not that you don’t do the work and it’s not that you don’t plan and prepare and rehearse, but in the end you have to trust in the magic of theater because how imminent disaster turns into live performance is truly a mystery but, no kidding? 99 times out of 100 it really does…and on that hundredth time? Well that’s what you plan and prepare and rehearse for – Anyone can have an off day.

Oh, and along those lines I also want to quote one more movie for point number 10.5. This one from Galazy Quest – “Never give up. Never surrender.” In other words, in this case, I mean:

10.5) Perserverence is everything.

- There are so many times in this business when it would be so easy to just say, “that’s it, I’m outta here.” It’s a tough business, which so far, has not paid any bills for me (and thank you to the people in my life who support me in all different ways (emotionally, spiritually, physically and monetarily) and allow me to continue doing it – I literally couldn’t do it without you), and so often it would just be easier to throw up your hands and walk, but I swear, it’s worth it. You struggle, and you strive and sometimes you fail but sometimes you succeed and every once in awhile, someone comes up to you and says, “are you involved in this production? Well, I just want to tell you, that was WONDERFUL! I was so moved.” Or you’re sitting in the audience watching a show you created and an audience member who you don’t know, who is not connected to you in any way shape or form, who walked in off the street, and spent his hard-earned money to see your show, he starts to applaud and gets to his feet to give you a standing ovation! And in that moment you want to cry because all is right with the world, because your life makes sense and what you’ve been put on this earth for is absolutely 100% crystal clear…of course sometimes they don’t clap at all, sometimes they come up to you and say, “I didn’t get it” – you want to cry then too but for a whole different reason. But no kidding, if you stick with it, you’ll get used to walking away from the latter and you’ll be able to fully appreciate the former. I say this a lot but – no kidding – never give up. never surrender…it’s worth it in the end.

 

IN THE EBB at FringeNYC

In 2008 Going to Tahiti Productions launched wtih a production of In the Ebb, a play of three one acts based on short stories, written and adapted for the stage, by my little sister, Camilla. The production ran for 3 weeks and put GTTP on the map. Four years, four theaters and six productions later, we decided to re-visit a shorter version (2 one-acts instead of 3) of In the Ebb and we applied for the 2012 NY International Fringe Festival. As readers of this blog already know, that application was successful and we were accepted into this prestigious festival…

Of course, what I didn’t realize when we applied for FringeNYC (and I’m not sure why I didn’t realize this because it’s not like I’ve never had a busy schedule before) was that I would go directly from directing and producing Jane Austen’s Persuasion right into casting, directing and producing In the Ebb. So, my dear readers, the last few weeks have been…uh…hectic, yes, hectic would be the right word. Also, as if that wasn’t hectic enough, sandwiched in between the close of Persuasion and the start of rehearsals for In the Ebb was my family’s yearly, week-long trip to Cape Cod.

And though this was a mostly relaxing time which enabled me to catch my breath, and though it was wonderful and amazing to be staying in a house on a bluff overlooking Nantucket Sound, with the ocean breezes a blowing, and though I got the chance to bond with my niece and nephews, sisters, brothers-in-law, parents, cousins, aunts, uncles and friends, though I enjoyed the clam chowder from The Chatham Squire, Aunt Irene’s homemade pizza and meatballs, and my once-a-year indulgence of all the Oreo’s I can eat…I worked both more and less than I should have and had several days of not doing my blog posts or marketing stuff and also several days of working on rehearsal schedules and prep for In the Ebb not even looking up from my computer, despite the utter adorableness of this face: 

 

 

However, I’m back from the Cape and knee deep in the show. We’ve actually just completed our first week of rehearsals and have blocked all of Act II – the one-act, St. James in the Field of Stars. Tomorrow we delve into Act I – the one-act, The Ebb (yes, I know, we’re doing things a little backwards this time around, it’s kinda fun). I am blessed with a wonderful cast and an amazing crew and I’m absolutely thrilled with what we’ve got so far. And, as always, I’m LOVING the process.

You know, despite having never planned to be a producer, I’ve come to really love the producing parts of my theater work but it still doesn’t hold a candle to my feelings for directing. The directing, that’s where I live. There is something truly amazing about waking up in the morning and heading out to a job that is rewarding, fun, interesting, challenging, entertaining, amazing and, well, just doesn’t feel at all like work. Now, if I can only find a way to make it pay my bills too I’d be a truly happy…that being said, the first step to that whole paying the bills thing, is making sure people turn up to see the show. And, the first step to making sure people turn up to see the show, is making sure they (that’s y’all by the way) know all the details like when the show is, where the show is and how to buy tickets. So, please see below for details and join us in August for In the Ebb

Performance dates:

Tuesday, August 14th @ 2pm

Wednesday, August 15th @ 9pm

Friday, August 17th @ 7pm

Saturday, August 25th @ 4:30pm

Sunday, August 26th @ 12pm

Performance location:

HERE Mainstage

145 Sixth Avenue, NY, NY

Enter on Dominick Street
(6th Avenue and Varick)

Tickets are $15 in advance or $18 at the door and are on sale now at www.fringenyc.org, on our very own Shows & Events Page, and by clicking the specific performance dates above!

 

All good things must come to an end…for now…

Clockwise from left, Shanae Brown, Costa Nicholas, Brad Thomason, Patrick Daniel Smith, Laura Bultman, Dina Ann Comolli, Ashley Wickett, Jenny Strassburg, Katharine McLeod, Jessica Ammirati, and Mark Montague

So, sadly, the bamboo fans have been folded up, the Empire waist dresses have been hung, the cravats untied…Jane Austen’s Persuasion is over for now. We had an amazing 14 performance, two week run, at The Secret Theatre!

We had an important first on this production – our first Sold Out Show – and on a holiday no less! I’ve already talked here about the amazing cast and crew that was a part of Persuasion and, amazing they were and continue to be. But now I’d like to take a moment to thank all of you – everone who came out to see the show – some of you twice! And all of you who support what we do. I’ve had a few people tell me how much they like our work at GTTP and I wanted to say that we couldn’t keep doing what we do here without the support of all of you out there. Thank you for coming out to our events, thank you for your donations, thank you for your kind words and THANK YOU for being a part of the GTTP family!

To be honest, I’m not sure where Jane Austen’s Persuasion will go from here. I’m hoping this isn’t the last you’ll see of this group, this show, this particular production…but whether we re-mount the show in a couple of months or years, or we let it go into that ether into which closed shows drift, you’ll definitely be seeing GTTP again sooner rather than later…in fact, if you’re around in August, come check us out at the NY International Fringe Festival. Keep an eye out for details on In the Ebb which will be posted soon.

If you haven’t had a chance, while there’s still time, please go to the NY Innovative Theatre Awards website and cast your vote for our show. Thank you again for being persuaded to hang with us here at GTTP for the last two weeks. We hope to see you in August!

One Week Down…

…and one to go. We’ve had an INCREDIBLE week at The Secret Theatre. The show has been going really well and the production is really coming into its own. My baby’s all grow’d up.

Ok, so here’s the part of the blog post where I get personal. Are you ready? Here it is: So, I don’t have any children of my own. Although I have a pretty decent maternal instinct, and I love my niece and nephews more than anything, I probably won’t be entering into motherhood (which is probably a good thing because, you know, no college tuition bills for me). The thing is, I think I get my fill of parenting with my work. Being a director (and a producer) is like parenting a child who is growing at an accelerated rate. Each and every thing I’ve directed has been, at least for the time I’m working on it, one of my babies. A baby that is born, grows up and moves on all in a matter of weeks – months at the most. And for those weeks or months I’m working on a show, that show is more precious to me than anything else in the world.

Every show starts the same way, you look at all the possibilities. Each show, like a newborn baby, is a blank slate just waiting to be imprinted on or impressed upon. Anything can happen. He can learn to love the color blue or she can learn to hate broccoli. She can become an astronaut or he can drop out of school to follow his favorite jam band around the world. For me it’s the same way, he can tell us about a woman in Cairo in the 1920′s (DREAMERS OF THE DAY) or she can show us a cantilevered house in upstate New York (SKIN FLESH BONE). She can bring us to a real estate open house (FULL DISCLOSURE) or he can take us to Regency England (PERSUASION). But whatever path the show takes it’s bound to be full of expected outcomes and completely unexpected surprises. Each show gives me something different, just as each child brings something different to his or her mother’s table. You watch that baby full of promise take its first steps out into the world and with each step it grows stronger until one day it’s strong enough to walk away from you. For a real parent it’s the goodbye you say when you drop your baby off at school and know nothing will ever be the same again. For me, it’s somewhere around the midpoint of a run. There comes a moment when you just know it’s not yours anymore. That moment when I’ve watched my baby walk away from me – strong and proud but not mine. Now my baby belongs to the cast and to the stage manager, to the running crew and to the audience. I just have to trust, as I watch it find its way without me, that the hands I give it to are good and solid and that while I held my show in my hands, I laid a strong enough foundation in its upbringing for him or her to find a way home.

…and I’m left with the realization that I have only one bittersweet choice ahead of me. It’s getting close to time to say goodbye to this baby and start again with a new one – it’s time for a new show to go on…so I’ll move on to In the Ebb with auditions this week. And I’ll start raising my newest baby, but, in the meantime, I won’t forget this one and I’m sure I’ll have more to say as the week goes on…I mean, who are we kidding, the baby may be growing up but it’s not going to college in Minnesota or anything. It is still right down the street from me, at least for another week. ;)

There are still 7 more shows of Jane Austen’s Persuasion to be seen. Join us at the Secret Theatre this week…before this baby walks away for good.

And, before you celebrate our independence from the British, celebrate the British themselves. Join us for special 1/2 price 4th of July matinee tickets – All seats $9! Go to the ticket purchase page and enter the code “4JUL” to take advantage of the reduced price tickets.

JANE AUSTEN’S PERSUASION has Opened and the Silent Auction has returned!!!!

Jenny Strassburg as Anne Elliot in JANE AUSTEN'S PERSUASION

 

Jane Austen’s Persuasion has opened!!!


Katharine McLeod as Elizabeth, Dina Ann Comolli as Lady Russell, Jenny Strassburg as Anne and Mark Montague as Sir Walter

…and, I know I’m biased and all but, Guys? Seriously? It’s a beautiful show! I couldn’t be happier with the script, the cast, the tech, the performances and the general spirit of the show. We’ve done three performances so far and the audiences are really enjoying it. Tonight begins our first crazy weekend – four shows in three days and we hope we get to see you all and that you get to see us!

I did want to give you a heads up that we have limited seating for this show – only 36 seats per performance so if you’re thinking of seeing the show this weekend, I HIGHLY recommend you get your tickets online beforehand. If there are seats available, tickets will be available at the box office, but with so few seats, there’s no guarantee.

Watching these first few performances I have been struck by the thought that I have been truly blessed with one of the best casts and crews in professional theater. Throughout the rehearsal process they didn’t bat an eye through crazy blocking choices, dance lessons, tiny backstage space, auxilliary dressing rooms…and any number of little issues that came up during the last 5 weeks…blessed I tell you, absolutely blessed!

Ashley Wickett as Mary Musgrove, Mark Montague as Charles Musgrove and Jenny Strassburg as Anne

I also wanted to mention the return of the silent auction! We still have some items which we are auctioning off (silently) during the run of the show both, in the lobby of the theater and online. If you’d like to take a gander at (or even bid on) an item, take a look at our silent auction page above, or take in the show and bid during intermission. I’ll continue to post updates online and the silent auction will close on the evening of the day of our last show (July 8th). So come on by the theater and take in Jane Austen’s Persuasion!

We’re looking forward to seeing you at The Secret Theatre! To buy tickets for Jane Austen’s Persuasion go here.

Patrick Daniel Smith as Captain Wentworth and Katharine McLeod as Louisa Musgrove

 

Another Opening, Another Show…

 

So, we open tomorrow – actually, by the time I post this it will actually be today that we open. But, before we do, I wanted to share some “day before opening” thoughts I had earlier today…

I’m sitting in an empty theater-no actors today since its equity day off-and I’m waiting for a few different crew members to arrive to take care of some last minute things before opening night. A couple of costumes that were being altered are getting dropped off, some finishes to the set are being, well, finished, the programs are being proofed…but in this moment of quiet before the storm, this pause for breath before the opening adrenaline kicks in, one thought keeps going through my head. And that is this – an empty theater is my temple, my church, my holy shrine. It is the place I’m most at home, most comfortable, most peaceful, and most me.

I remember when I was in college, my favorite place on campus was the theater. It was a massive 1500 seat auditorium but when no one was in it and there was just a bare stage with a ghost light, I could sit for hours and soak up the smell of backstage – that mixture of saw dust,  residual hairspray and, yes, sweat–the remnants of thousands of shows, thousands of possibilities and oh how I loved it! I’m not a religious person but there I could pray.

And? It turns out it doesn’t have to be an enormous auditorium for me to feel it. In this little empty black box tonight, with our 36 seats, we’re about to create something (actually we’ve been creating it for 5 weeks) and now we get to show it to you. It’s a rush, it’s a thrill, but more importantly, for me at least, it’s the reason I’m here. Nothing in the world makes quite as much sense to me as this does and I’m pretty sure that’s how most of my cast and crew feel too.

You see, I was thinking the other day that working on a show, if you’re doing it right, is like being on the island of misfit toys. We, none of us, fit in perfectly anywhere as well as we fit in with each other. And we particularly fit in when we create something for you. So we gather in darkened theaters, turn on the lights, and try to make a little magic happen, try to take you, our audience, to Tahiti…or Regency England as the case may be tomorrow. So come on out to The Secret Theatre tomorrow night and for the next two weeks and take the trip with us. This particular misfit thinks you’ll be glad you did.

Jane Austen’s Persuasion opens tomorrow (or actually probably tonight by the time you see this post – either way June 26th) and runs until July 8th. Tickets and details available on the Show and Events Page above or you can buy them here.

Also, if you want a little glimpse of (or more appropriately a listen to) Jane Austen’s Persuasion, check out my interview with the cast and adaptor of the play on the latest episode of Tahiti Dispatches (GTTP’s Podcast Series).

Loaded In…

Before I get into this week’s post, I wanted to just thanks everyone for showing up at our girst gala last weekend. It was a fantastic event filled with food, wine, live music, good company and great dancing…or, at least, enthusiastic dancing. :) And thank you to all of our sponsors. The event was a success because of your generosity!

So, now, on to tech week.

Day started with a realization of how to make a stale bagel taste almost fresh. Here’s how to do it*: Take your stale bagel and microwave it for 15 seconds. Flip it and microwave it again for 15 seconds. Take the bagel out of the microwave, cut it and toast it to desired done-ness. Put whatever topping on it you like and though it has a little bit of that rubbery texture, I challenge you to notice a huge difference between it and a fresh one…that being said, you have to start with a good, high quality bagel. Don’t grab one from dunkin donuts and expect this to work.

*this only works if you like toasted bagels.

Alas, but I digress. No actors today so we just focused on load-in, which went really well:

Costumes came first and have been set up on their rack, ready to be tried on and adjusted at the costume parade tomorrow.

Laura and I cleaned out the backstage and set up the audience into it’s performance configuration (we’re doing something a little different with the seats and we needed to test it out today.) Test went well, looking forward to bringing in the actors.

Sam arrived to start the lighting hang and focus. I’m always amazed watching lighting designers scramble up and down ladders as if there’s nothing remotely uncomfortable about being 15 feet in the air.

Then came Zeljka. We tested the projector and went over notes to make sure we’re all on the same page. It’s getting exciting, people.

Jane came around 5 to pick up costumes that need repairs and alterations and we went through costume stuff together. Tomorrow, she’ll have a new batch of alterations to contend with but we should be in pretty decent shape.

After Jane, in came Ien. She buckled down with Qlab to start getting the cues loaded in. We were doing really well until the speakers turned themselves off, so that’s a problem for tomorrow, definitely.

And finally, Becky arrived, most of the set pieces in hand.  We tested out some paint for the set and got the pieces in place.

All in all, a VERY productive day.

Looking forward to the costume parade and the movement work with Dana tomorrow…not to mention the advances each department will make in their individual techs. And with that…to bed I’m away.

Will try to post another update tomorrow. It’s wild to have so much time for tech…wild and wonderful…but I guess tech is just one of those things – no matter how much time you have, you always want one day more…

Updates on Jane’s June…

Ok, so this blog post is a week late. I know I know – you’ve all been breathlessly anticipating an update on all things Tahiti. I can only excuse my absence from the interwebs last week by saying that in the midst of rehearsals for a show based on a book written by the queen of romance I took a week off from fictional romance to participate in real romance. Basically, last week, we added a new member to the Tahiti family – my younger sister Camilla, (whom many of you Tahiti followers know as the playwright of both In the Ebb and Skin Flesh Bone), got married last week and while I was reminiscing about (read: recovering from) an amazing party, I wasn’t in my Persuasion head space. However, a week of rehearsals and gala prep have brought me back to reality and I’m here to give you all some exciting updates!

First off – The Gala

photo by David Green

We have received an RSVP from our very own Jane Austen (actress, writer, teacher, director and producer, Karen Eterovich). Karen, whose production company Love Arm’d Productions focuses on promoting the work of Jane Austen, has written a solo show called Cheer from Chawton: A Jane Austen Family Theatrical.

Karen (seen in the photo here arriving at a different Jane Austen evening) has graciously agreed to step into Jane’s Empire Waist dress for the evening and entertain our gala attendees as Jane Austen. Personally, I’m very excited to see how Jane herself reacts to our modern age and, more interestingly, how we smartphone-toting, twitter-tweeting, facebook-posting moderns are able to blend into Jane’s world.

If you’re interested in learning more about Karen’s performances outside of our Evening with Her, hop on over to her website, here.

Everyone at GTTP, hopes you will join us and Jane for food, drinks, and dancing at our June 16th gala – it may possibly be the event of the season! Although the early bird discount has expired, tickets are still on sale online here and at the door (124 Washington Avenue in Ft. Greene Brooklyn. More details (including directions) on the event itself can be found here. AND, for those of you who really really want to come to the gala but are hesitant because you don’t have a Regency Period outfit in your wardrobe, stay tuned for an upcoming blog post where I show everyone how to dress like a Jane Austen character using clothes you already have in your closet.

Which brings me to:

The show has been cast and rehearsals have begun. The play will feature (in alphabetical order):

Dina Ann Comolli*, Katharine McLeod*, Mark Montague*, Costa Nicholas, Patrick Daniel Smith,

Jenny Strassburg*, Brad Thomason*, Ashley Wickett*

*denotes members of Actors’ Equity Association appearing in an AEA Approved Showcase.

This past week we’ve done a rough block of the whole show and tomorrow we head into a week of character work. I’m excited, with a Jane Austen story so dependent on both relationships and the unspoken, to really delve into what makes these characters tick and see how those little (and I’m sure in some cases big) discoveries affect how we play the scenes when we return to the text next week.

The other big news on the Jane Austen’s Persuasion front is that tickets for the June 26th-July 8th run, are now on sale. As with all of our shows, tickets can be purchased online at our home page, our shows and events page, or by clicking here, by phone at 866-811-4111 and at The Secret Theatre Box Office at 44-02 23rd Street, Long Island City, NY 11101. This production will mark GTTP’s fourth production at The Secret Theatre and our first in the space known as The Little Secret. Can’t wait for y’all to see it.

And, just because I think it’s so awesome and our designer Christine Diaz did SUCH an amazing job on our images, I’d like to leave you with our Jane Austen-ized version of the tahiti logo. Enjoy!

 

getting unFRAMED…

So, as I believe I’ve mentioned before, thanks to TRU, I have been interning for Broadway Producer, Jane Dubin. Jane is one of the producers on current hit play, PETER AND THE STARCATCHER. And let me just say, if you haven’t seen this 9-Tony-Award-Nominated play, you should get out there and see it – it’s MAGICAL!!! Anyway, in addition to being a producer on PatSC, Jane is also the Executive Producer of the powerful one-man-show, unFRAMED – A Man In Progress, about poet, painter and playwright Iyaba Ibo Mandingo.

unFRAMED is Jane’s show that I have been helping out on and it is has been amazing to be a part of the experience. “So, what’s the show about?” you ask. I’ll let the website tell you:

“Meet Iyaba Ibo Mandingo, formerly Kenny Athel George DeCruise – painter, poet, husband, father, son, and undocumented immigrant from Antigua.  At the age of eleven, Iyaba is plucked from the tropical comfort of his boyhood and taken to life in America where he must navigate his way to manhood without the guidance of a father.  Using canvas, paint, poetry, prose and song, Iyaba tells us a story of his transformation from “Mommy Me No Wanna Go Merrica”- a prophetic piece that hints at the many trials he will face in a new land – to his powerful political poetry that would lead to his arrest and attempted deportation in post 9/11 America.  Throughout the play Iyaba shares his rage, his determination, and his hope while he paints his self portrait and successfully struggles to redefine his humanity, rediscover his smile, and truly accept himself for the first time.”

In the last few years, I’ve become a real fan of solo performances. As I’m sure you’re aware, what I love most about theater are the possibilities the medium allows for. With words and movement and not much else, a theater artist can create whatever he or she wants on stage. And, in some ways I feel that solo perfomances are theater in its purest form. You can’t get much more pure than one person on a stage, just telling a story. During the course of unFRAMED, Iyaba doesn’t just tell a powerful story that draws you in, he paints a picture for you…I mean he literally paints a picture – a self portrait – right before your eyes. Watching the play is like getting a glimpse into the creative process at the same time you get to just sit back and listen to a riveting story. It’s an incredible experience and one I highly recommend partaking in. And, thanks to unFRAMED‘s place in the soloNOVA Festival running 6/4-6/16 you have 5 chances to see it. unFRAMED will have performances on June 4th, 9th, 10th, 13th and 16th – though I know no one reading this blog will be able to make the last performance as you will all be at GTTP’s Gala Event – An Evening with Jane Austen. Luckily there are still 4 other opportunities to see unFRAMED. For tickets go to www.unframedtheplay.com.

I’ll be back in a couple of days with an update on Jane Austen’s Persuasion. We have a cast, who I’d like you all to meet, and we will be starting rehearsals today! Actually in about 2.5 hours. Gala tickets are still available at the early bird rate.

Get your tix now!

 

 

 

 

An Exciting Announcement…

Ok, so I’m going to take a short break from Persuasion news to make an exciting announcement but first I wanted to remind everyone that the early bird discount for tickets to our gala will be in effect for TWO more days. Get your tickets here.

So, on to the exciting announcement: This has been in the works for awhile now but I can FINALLY announce our next mainstage show. So, first we have Jane Austen’s Persuasion which will run in late June (hey, did I mention there’s a gala too? Tickets are available here) and then we’ve got In The Ebb, our Fringe show (read about that here).

Then, our next mainstage production will be (I feel like there should be a drumroll here so imagine that’s happening) an original adaptation of the novel Within Arm’s Reach by Ann Napolitano.

From Ms. Napolitano’s website: “Within Arm’s Reach charts the emotional life of three generations of an Irish Catholic family. Shaken reluctantly into self-examination by the unexpected pregnancy of its youngest member, the McLaughlin family is forced to confront ghosts of both past and present, and to re-appraise its values in a world of rapid change.

Narrated through six subjective first person accounts – the pregnant Gracie, her sister Lila, their parents, their matriarchal grandmother, and a family outsider with a curious connection – the novel dissects the markedly variant responses that such supposedly similar people can have to the same events.

An honest tale of interconnected lives, Within Arm’s Reach shows us that the ‘ties that bind’ are a source of both solace and of pain – at once a curse, a lifeline, an irritant and a cure – they are ultimately unavoidable and indelible.”

It’s a gorgeous novel, beautifully written, and I highly recommend picking it up and taking a look for yourself before we get the adaptation up on its feet. (In fact, I recommend you do that now so that it won’t be quite so fresh in your mind when you see the show and you notice all those little things I needed to change while adapting it for the stage). I am THRILLED to start working on the adaptation and delve into the lives of these amazing, intriguing, flawed, relatable, lovely, fascinating characters. Also worth a read is Ann’s second novel A Good Hard Look. The adaptation of that novel would have been much more difficult though, as I don’t have the budget to put live peacocks on stage…see, now you’re totally intriqued, right? That was my intention. Get thee to Ann’s website to get clarification and to pick up some great reading material.

And, hand in hand with our Within Arm’s Reach announcement (and I do want to apologize in advance if during the next 6 months of promotion that apostrophe ends up after the ‘s’ – I’ve caught myself putting it in the wrong place several times during grant applications and I live in terror of sending something out with it in the wrong place. That, and adding an ‘e’ to Ann’s name. Another thing I live in horror of doing because right now, I’m working on a show (Jane Austen’s Persuasion (gala tickets here)) where the main character’s name is Anne with an ‘e’ so with all the stuff floating in my head I’m concerned I’ll mix up the Anne/Anns or put that apostrophe at the end of Arms – Arms’. I’m probably guaranteed to do it but writing this here will hopefully keep it from happening. And, although I’m gonna try my best not to allow it to happen, just in case, I do want to apologize in advance to Ann if it does.)

ANYWHO…hand in hand with our Within Arm’s Reach announcement I would also like to announce that Going to Tahiti Productions has been awarded its first grant! Thank you Puffin Foundation for your support of Within Arm’s Reach. PuffinFoundation is a wonderful organization that, well, they say it best themselves…from www.puffinfoundation.org: “The Puffin Foundation Ltd. has sought to open the doors of artistic expression by providing grants to artists and art organizations who are often excluded from mainstream opportunities due to their race, gender, or social philosophy. Why the Puffin? The Puffin, once endangered in the northeastern United States, was returned to its native habitats through the efforts of a concerned citizenry. Our name is a metaphor for how we perceive our mission in the arts: to join with other concerned groups and individuals to ensure that the arts not merely survive, but flourish at all levels of our society.” Within Arm’s Reach will now definitely happen because funding has been made possible by the Puffin Foundation. Thank you thank you thank you, Puffin! And can I just say, after growing up with PBS and hearing that phrase “funding has been made possible” during so many broadcasts I don’t think I can fully describe the thrill it gives me to be able to say that for one of my projects “funding has been made possible” by someone who doesn’t even know me but who read my proposal and thought, “yeah, that sounds cool. Let’s give her some money.” Seriously?!?! THANK YOU THANK YOU THANK YOU, Puffin!!!

Phew! Ok, so, yeah, that’s the news. I promised you exciting so there you have it. I’ll be back next week with the cast announcements for Jane Austen’s Persuasion. Oh, and did I mention our gala? An Evening with Jane Austen? On June 16th at 7pm at MIMA Brooklyn? No? Well you can get tickets here and for two more days the early bird ticket price is still available. Buy Tickets Now!

 

“Catch” PETER AND THE STARCATCHER…

Yeah, sorry, I couldn’t resist using that blog title. Also, I’m sorry this post is so late. I blame it on the wonderful Easter weekend at home. AMAZING time but it meant I spent the weekend hanging with my family instead of writing this post…enough with excuses, Ammirati, on to the review…

Ok, so just a Spoiler Alert – heads up. If you don’t want to know anything at all about the show, you may not want to read the full review below. I mean it’s not like I’m giving a blow by blow of the plot or anything (the butler did it. Heh.) but I do discuss some detials that you might want to avoid. So, if you hate anything with even a whisp of a spoiler about it you’ll want to stop reading after this paragraph. If you want the spoiler-free version of the review here it is: Go see Peter and the Star Catcher!!!! It’s awesome and magical and well worth your time and money. Tickets available here. For the less spoiler-averse read on…

So, as part of my association with TRU, I have been interning with Broadway producer Jane Dubin, on her off-Broadway show, unFRAMED (which after a short successful run in Philly, is returning to NY June 4th – 16th as part of the soloNOVA Festival. For details and tickets go here.) In addition to her work on unFRAMED, Jane is also one of the Co-Producers for the new Broadway show, Peter and the Star Catcher and she was able to get me a ticket to see one of the preview performances last week. Written by Rick Elice and based on the novel by Dave Barry and Ridley Pearson, Peter and the Star Catcher tells the story of how a sad orphan boy becomes Peter Pan. Peter and the Star Catcher is directed by Roger Rees and Alex Timbers and stars Christian Borle (Black Stache), Celia Kennan-Bolger (Molly) and Adam Chanler-Berat (Boy/Peter) and it is a wonderful, hilarious, and thoroughly enjoyable show. Similar to the experience of a Pixar movie, the play is appropriate for young audiences (10 and up) but is also a hilarious and moving experience for adults as well.

The play is great fun from start to finish but the thing that stood out the most for me was the inventiveness and originality of the staging. I’ve seen my share of both theater and movies and I love both mediums for their ability to entertain in completely different ways. But, what I love most about theater is that, necessity being the mother of all invention, theater requires an audience to use their imaginations in ways that film does not. In my own directing, I love, during a rehearsal, when a moment that seemed all but impossible on the page, comes to life in an unexpected and beautiful way. Like turning 5 actors and 2 chairs into a mob attacking a car on a Cairo street as we did in Dreamers of the Day, or turning a stack of used books and 5 actors into a slow motion book ballet as we did in Skin Flesh Bone. Peter and the Star Catcher is filled with moments like these. Without any high tech tricks or special effects, the creative team manages to bring the audience onto 3 separate ships sailing the high seas (both on deck and below), to the forest of a tropical island (complete with trees and sandy beaches), and into the depths of a magical pond (populated by mermaids). Using simple sets and props the cast members believably create a sense of movement and space at the same time they’re able to clearly define the various locations the story takes them to. And, all of the “special effects” in the play are executed not by feats of engineering but by choreographed movement, lighting and sound effects. Ingenius and yet simple techniques that make the play come to life create the magic of theater making the audience believe – fully believe – what they’re seeing on stage. The Peter and the Star Catcher team even manages to levitate an actress during the show – it’s a pretty cool effect (the secret of which I will not reveal here) – and though I figured it out, my knowledge of how they did it in no way diminished my enjoyment of watching it be done. Along the way the 12 actors introduce close to 100 different characters some of whom are familiar to fans of the original Peter Pan (I myself couldn’t wait to meet Tinkerbell and I wasn’t disappointed). The creativity of the staging isn’t just amazing, it’s inspiring (especially for this director).

The performers (actors and musicians, as there is some music in the play) are all clearly having a good time and their fun is infectious as they draw the audience into the party. All of the actors in the show are amazing, but I’d like to call specific attention to Celia Keenan-Bolger and Christian Borle. Celia Keenan-Bolger plays the precocious 13 year old, Molly. Learning to be a Star Catcher like her father, Molly befriends young Peter and is the first to play the “mothering” role for The Lost Boys that will, in later incarnations of the Peter Pan story, be played by the character Wendy. The Molly character requires a very difficult mixture of youth and maturity balancing moments of childish excitement and wonder with the strength and drive of an older woman and Ms. Keenan-Bolger strikes that balance with skill and grace. And, Christian Borle (in my opinion criminally underused in the television show SMASH) revels in the devilish fun of playing Black Stache (the pirate villain who will become Captain Hook) and takes the audience along for the hilarious ride. He tears into the role with great enthusiasm and it is an absolute blast to watch. Top to bottom, the play is a joy but don’t think that means it’s light on substance. As with the Peter Pan story the themes of abandonment and loss and fear of growing up are present and very real. They’re just a little hidden for the younger members of the audience and I only wish my niece and nephew (the 9 year old not the 18 month old) lived closer so that I could take them along to join in the fun. And it is great fun…for ALL ages. So, yeah, in case you can’t tell Peter and the Star Catcher is an INCREDIBLY entertaining show and I HIGHLY recommend seeing it.

Peter and the Star Catcher currently in previews, opens April 15th at The Brooks Atkinson Theatre 256 West 47th Street. For tickets and more details go to the show’s website here.