"Downton Arby's"

Doing Justice

Bobbie Steinbach and Jeanine Kane

It is an interesting challenge to be faced with, to portray a character based on the life of an actual living breathing human being. In the case of my character Varter in Joyce Van Dyke's Deported / a dream play, the woman I am portraying happens to be the survivor of many horrors and losses that are unimaginable to most of us. To live through the kidnapping and killing of her husband and the deportation from her home; to watch in horror the deaths of her seven children; to be kidnapped and sold.... how does one bring this kind of experience to the stage? 

I was late coming into the process of the development of Deported. I came on board in August 2011, at which time the script was pretty much completed and the workshops and improvisations had already happened. I participated in a few readings, but other than that I was new to the play when we started rehearsal in February. My primary goal was to create a character who did justice to the spirit of the woman I represent. I had the great pleasure of meeting Varter's son, Martin Deranian, and he was infinitely helpful in providing photos and information about his mother. I wanted to be sure to do justice to her memory, for his sake.

World Theatre Day 2012

And may the best of you - for it will only be the best of you, and even then only in the rarest and briefest moments - succeed in framing that most basic of questions, "how do we live?"

— John Malkovich, excerpt from his 2012 World Theatre Day speech

Read more about World Theatre Day -- including its history, a map of events, and suggested ways to participate -- here.

Alumni news, in brief:

Demonio and Cha Cha celebrate Monica Bauer

The world premiere of Becoming Cuba, by Melinda Lopez, will be part of San Diego's North Coast Repertory Theatre's 2012-13 season...

John Kuntz's Miss Price (revisited) will be presented as part of Gloucester Stage Company's Play Reading Series in July...

Check out Molly Smith Metzler at yesterday's "The Scribes Speak" panel at the 36th Annual Humana Festival of New American Plays at the Actors Theatre of Louisville...

Here's a wonderful review of Karmo Sander's short Face It, which played at the Vancouver Women in Film Festival earlier this month...

Now playing at Central Square Theatre: Underground Railway Theater's production of Deborah Lake Fortson's ABIYOYO (based on the story song by Pete Seeger), and next up will be Wesley Savick's Yesterday Happened: Remembering H.M. produced by Catalyst Collaborative@MIT, a science theater collaboration between Underground Railway Theater & MIT...

Gregory Fletcher is directing Shooting Crows, by Jack Rushen, for Davenport Theatrical's Developmental Reading Series on April 2... 

Sinan Ünel's A Mad Person's Chronicle of a Miserable Marriage is part of the lineup of Stage Left Studio's Left Out Festival April 14-25... 

When you see Joyce Van Dyke's Deported/a dream play, don't miss the photo display in the lobby...

74 Sargent Avenue

For fans of Joyce Van Dyke's Deported/a dream play, here is the house at 74 Sargent Avenue, Providence, which is the setting for the opening scenes of the play. If you're a future fan (because you haven't seen it yet), maybe you should check it out this weekend!

I asked Joyce to share a little bit about the house, and this is what she had to say:

I was told the house was built by Harry Boyajian, my grandfather.  He was a carpenter/builder, just as he is in the play. My grandmother wrote the line that she says in the play, that she intended to "live here forever, with the blessing of our heavenly Father."  It didn't work out that way. But for years during her later life in California, she would often refer to "when we lived 74 Sargent Avenue."

The address sounded like a mantra.

A Little of This and a Little of That: Writing Collaboratively about Jackson Heights

Patricia Becker and Arlene Chico-Lugo in You Are Now The Owner Of This Suitcase. Photo by Joel Webber.

Alum Les Hunter shares what it was like to collaborate with a team of writers to create a trilogy of plays about his Queens, New York neighborhood. This is an amazing example not just of teamwork among artists, but of the myriad ways a specific setting can reveal itself through character and story. A more than two-year venture, the final play in the trilogy hit New York stages earlier this year.

Collaborative writing was something to which, before working on the Jackson Heights Trilogy, I never gave much thought. As a playwright, I thought of a play as something that I wrote, and, in development, maybe things would change a little based on actor feedback, or maybe a dramaturg or director would suggest a few changes.  But I never realized the challenges and rewards presented in the process of truly open collaborative writing until I experienced them while working on this project.

How to keep the past alive...

Bobbie Steinbach and Jeanine Kane

We are about to begin the third week of Joyce Van Dyke's intimate and epic Deported/a dream play. Dreams, music, beautiful and terrible memories, nightmares, dances, haunting songs, weddings, lost babies, new babies, violence, stories that can't be told, compassion, traditions and so many more elements are part of this many-layered phantasmagorical flying carpet ride. 

I play Joyce's grandmother Victoria in the play. Deported is Victoria's story and the story of her best friend Varter, played by Jeanine Kane, a wonderful new face in town (she is a long-time company member at the Gamm Theatre in Rhode Island). The amazing ensemble includes Ken Baltin, Marya Lowry, Rob Najarian, Liz Hayes and Marc Cohen, all playing a number of different roles, as well as six students from Suffolk who are the Dreamers and the beautiful Dancers.

Alumni news, in brief:

Demonio at Deported

Great press: Joyce Van Dyke's Deported/a dream play in The Armenian Mirror-Spectator and on The Arts Fuse blog...

Lydia R. Diamond's Stick Fly will be part of Park Square Theatre's 2012-2013 season...

Ginger Lazarus will grace the stage in Theatre@First's Pride and Prejudice, which opens this week...

All hail The Mayor...

Jinxed, by K. Alexa Mavromatis, will be included in Looking Glass Theatre's Writer/Director Forum this spring...

"Bess, you is my guest now!"

And then, this happened:

The Colbert Report
Get More: Colbert Report Full Episodes,Political Humor & Satire Blog,Video Archive

Steal Like an Artist

 

 

Previews to begin for Bauer's 'My Occasion of Sin' at Urban Stages this Friday

Monica Bauer’s award-winning My Occasion of Sin opens in previews this Friday at NYC’s Urban Stages. This off-Broadway production – which as already been extended(!) – represents the most recent leg of an adventure we have followed here. Tickets are available through SmartTix; Dramatists Guild members can use the discount code DRAMAP for $15 tickets during previews, and DRAMA1 for $24 tickets during the March 23-April 15 run.

And, of course, this kind of event means I had to torture Monica with some questions. Thanks for being a sport during such a busy time, Monica, and congratulations!

KAM: You’ve been working hard for this moment in your playwriting life – your Off-Broadway debut – for a long time, toiling in the off-off and Fringe worlds. What’s been the most exciting part about preparing for the Urban Stages production of My Occasion of Sin so far?

MEB: Casting is so crucial. It helps when there is agreement in the room, when the callbacks are over and decisions have to be made. I’ve been very lucky here, in that my director, Frances Hill, and my producer, Peter Napolitano, have agreed with me on every role. The day the cast is announced to the press is a special day; it’s the official kick-off to the production. So when the press release went out, I was able to see it go up on Broadway World and TheaterMania, and see the announcement of our cast and creative team bounce around the interwebs, and around various Facebook pages as actors announced to their friends, that was a moment when I really felt that we were on our way, on a good journey.

'Deported' - The Moving Parts

Ken Baltin, Bobbie Steinbach, Liz Hayes and Jeanine Kane.

Having just weathered a more than rigorous rehearsal process, tech week, previews and opening for Deported/ a dream play, I am astounded by how far we have come. Given the state of the piece in later rehearsals of this incredibly complex play full of leaps from 1938 to 1915 to 1978 to 1915 to beyond 2015 to 1915, I was unsure what we would discover in our last week (customarily a very fruitful time) but was sure that the nature of the dreams in this dream play would begin to take more tangible shape, the many dances would get tighter and livelier and the words of the play would become more and more vibrant, unpredictable and integral to the story we were attempting to tell: the story of an Armenian woman who couldn’t tell her story.

Alumni news, in brief:

It was a sold-out weekend for Joyce Van Dyke's Deported/a dream play! Get your tickets...

M. Lynda Robinson's Wife of Bobbo and Monica Bauer's House Broken are on the bill at Image Theater Company's Femnoire Festival of Women Playwrights, March 30 and 31...

Check out Werner Trieschmann on Tales From the South...

Walt McGough says we playwrights need to make sure the stage directions we include in our scripts belong there in the first place...

Molly Smith Metzler is the recipient of this year's Outstanding Young Alumni Award at SUNY Geneseo...

MJ Halberstadt's one-act w4m will be featured in Boston Actors Theater's Summer Play Festival this July, and his ten-min Peggy's Properties (watch it here) won the "Drunken Judges" Award at StrangeDog Theatre's First Annual Beer Battered Play Festival...

Cliff Odle on Central Square Theater's blog, discussing his latest play Our Girl In Trenton...

K. Alexa Mavromatis' The Quiz will be part of the morning critique group at Our Voices 6 on March 24...

Here come the Jets?

   When you're a Jet, you're the top cat in town...

Friends and fans

Melinda Lopez

Friends and fans. After a wonderful and satisfying twenty-five years in the theatre, I have decided it's time to spread my wings! The success of my last musical Dante in Abu Ghraib has allowed me the financial stability to finally pursue my lifelong dream of investment banking.

I know you are all thinking this is a crazy whim. But the truth is, I’ve been dabbling in finance my whole life. Sometimes, during rehearsals in the back of the theatre, when I knew I was supposed to be feeling the magic, instead, I’d fiddle with adjustable rate mortgage numbers, just for fun. And I found it (secretly) thrilling to read The Wall Street Journal. It started from loneliness -- I was in production in Berlin, and I found the familiarity of the numbers comforting. I thought, I’ll stop as soon as I'm home. I never wanted my kids to know. But lately, with a smart phone, and down time between acts…well you see where this is going.

Final adjustments...

Joyce Van Dyke

Deported is about to open on March 8^th and I feel like I’m in a dream state most of the time.  We’ve moved into the Modern and every day more and more of the set appears onstage.  I’m sitting at one of the tables – where the front rows will soon be installed – making notes and cuts and changes as we do a run-through of the play.

And I’m amazed as I always am at the amount of labor going on all around me by the stage management, set builder, director, actors, costume and lighting and sound and set designers, props person, marketing people and producers, those responsible for the venue at Suffolk, and so many others.  I wish the ticket buyers could have even a glimpse of the astonishing number of tasks that have to be accomplished to pull the play together.  I think it’s also amazing how tightly organized the process is, down to the smallest details – how the daily reports and notes and scheduling coordinate so much, how everybody incorporates the changes overnight.  It’s a level of organization that would be impressive in an established business – and here it’s happening with a group that’s just come together for this one voyage.  As I write this, I’m looking forward to tech – which I love because I get to watch everything getting stitched together.  

- Joyce Van Dyke, Playwright

Alumni news, in brief:

A national tour is on the horizon for Lydia Diamond's Stick Fly!... 

M. Lynda Robinson's short play An Egg is an Egg will be on the bill to celebrate SWAN Day (Support Women Artists Now) at the 6th annual Our Voices Festival at Regis College on March 24... 

The Provincetown Theatre Company's 16th annual winter reading series will feature John Greiner-Ferris' Highland Center, Indiana on March 28...

Molly Smith Metzler's Carve is part of the Geva Theatre Center's Plays in Progress reading series tonight...

And here's a lovely feature from The Boston Globe about the story behind the story of Joyce Van Dyke's Deported/a dream play, which opens in previews this Thursday!

Rewind.

Maybe it’s Peter Floyd’s excellent KCACTF news this week or the "unusual" wintery weather. Either way, I’m thinking back to December and remembering the exquisite musical tribute (especially the finale) to Broadway legend Barbara Cook at the Kennedy Center Honors – which features some ladies I fully expect to be sitting up there in the balcony with the President themselves one day. I meant to post this long before now, but as they say, better late than never.

Just around the corner: New Noises 2012

Next month, fledgling playwrights from all over the Boston Metro will converge on BPT for the annual New Noises festival of ten-minute plays. New Noises showcases work developed in the Massachusetts Young Playwrights' Project (MYPP), which sends mentor playwrights into area high schools; student playwrights whose plays are selected for the festival are partnered with professional directors and actors. Technically, the result of these collaborations is two days of staged readings...but really, the result is two days of magic.

I look forward to MYPP each year, and always find myself energized by the intense creative spirit, enthusiasm,  and sheer talent of the high school students involved. Alum Michael Towers agreed to share a little about his experience working with students at Revere High School this year:

It was nearly 5:00 on Thursday, February 9^th when the school day ended for eight Revere High School students. They weren’t in detention. They weren’t in rehearsal for an upcoming production or at practice for a varsity sport. They weren’t even receiving course credit for the extra work hours behind a desk. The students seated in Ms. Rice’s third floor classroom for an extended school day were there for one reason alone: they want to be playwrights.