What are we going to perform? What kinds of things would it be possible to offer audiences? Go to the comments and list to your heart’s content. Make this list kinds of performances. See the post above for specific scripts you’d like to tackle.
16 thoughts on “So what we’re going to do is…”
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Shakespeare, of course.
I truly yearn for our old Readings: you would take a text not written for performance, and you would perform it. Some marvelous stuff came out of those.
Noel and I joked about doing a puppet version of Kate (Because of Winn-Dixie) DiCamillo’s new book The Miraculous Journey of Edward Tulane, but why not?
I’m going to beat both Marc and Craig to the punch and say that of course the puppetry style we’d have to use for this story of a china-doll rabbit would be…
…wait for it…
…bunnie-raku.
Thank you very much. I’ll be here all week. Try the veal.
Is straight improv off the table? It certainly gets the brain/instincts working…
Can you do a French farce improv? Hmmm
Nothing’s off the table. And talk to Marc about improvising a French farce.
In the little booklet I composed for GHP drama students, I have a couple of sections where I propose structures for improvising farce. They are hypothetical and untested; we so far haven’t had the guts. Why not let Lacuna have a go? I’ll figure out a way to make the booklet accesible from our site. Straight improv is certainly delightful, but for me the result tends to be somewhat conservative. Which is OK. Farce, however, I love. Don’t you love farce?
How about paintings? Seriously. What about picking a painting, famous or otherwise, and developing ideas and scenarios around what happened before or after that snapshot in time? This would obviously be more complicated with the fruit bowl sort of thing, but I suppose even that could work.
Why not? It worked for Stephen Sondheim. It worked for Robert Browning. It worked for Wallace Stevens. It can work for us.
Is it Kismet that Marvel gave Dale a Pre-Raphaelite print? I have always wanted to play with the PRB and their…pre-occupations. A piece, a piece inspired by the Pre-Raphaelites, Christina included. Let us be occluded by kitsch and occulted by red-heads.
We could start working on William Blake’s Inn tomorrow, ya know.
Don’t think I haven’t thought about it. I’m one-third through the final piece, but at the rate I’m going, it may be summer before it’s finished.
I have to really watch my time today. Stuff’s piling up.
There are many educators in our group. What about taking Gogol’s*The Inspector General*(also titled sometimes *The Government Inspector*) and re-working it to portray a Federal Education Official who is coming to a local school system to evaluate the implementation of the Federal Government’s Education Plan. Not only do we have the farce of the original play (a drifter is mistaken by the locals for the “Government Inspector”) but we also have the farce which teachers live every day trying to contend with “No child…” and mandated testing and the “failure of our schools.” I’d also like to further complicate the plot by having a background situation in which certain teachers and parents are trying to stop Halloween and a teacher who disagrees being accused of practicing witchcraft (based on a true event–a friend of mine who teaches jokingly told a student once “you better straigten up or I’ll cast a spell on you; I’m a witch, you know”–later she had to talk with the principal, who needed to find out if she was, in fact, a witch). She wasn’t. But she does grow herbs.
Dale, what composer of musicals actually completely finishes a piece before mushing around parts in a rehearsal room?
Memory Lane. 1982. The top floor of the UGA Student Union. The maiden voyage of Athens Poor Theatre. We did a triple bill, and our first piece was a production of Wallace Stevens’ “play” *Bowl, Cat and Broomstick*. How obscure is that?
I recognize a few names, but I am unknown to most of you. So I will introduce myself here before giving my suggestion. I started with the Newnan Theater Company in 1979, working back stage and performing. I must add that my wife (Dawn Putney) is also a dedicated theater person, but prefers the back stage side of things like costumes and sets at which she is wonderful. Neither of us have a theatrical background other than what we have done with the theater groups we have worked with wherever we have lived. Theater life (especially with Dale) is glorious, enriching, inspiring and all those other adjectives people used about why they like Theater, but I must warn you it is also dangerous. I almost lost a crucial body part while working on one of his shows. I moved in 1982 but returned to Carrollton in the early 90’s in time to catch Dale’s departing years with the Theater group. By then I had discovered I had several serious ailments, which have disabled me and seriously limited what I can do physically (and mentally sometimes). So we (my wife and I) could only watch the shows, although she did do some emergency work now and then. And I did write and perform a short skit written for someone in a wheelchair at one of the yearly “Inauguration Balls”, but other than that I have been reduced to a spectator.
My condition makes travel difficult so I have not made it to the meetings, although they sound fascinating and great fun. But thanks to the wonders of the Internet I can participate. Here is my suggestion for a performance, whatever the performance chosen may be. Each of the actors in the play assumes two roles: the one he (I use he with apologies to the females in the group) has in the play and a character with some major disability. Ideally they assume the disability first, be it physical or mental, and stay in that character all the while they rehearse and perform the show. And I am talking about more than just getting a few wheel chairs and pretending you can’t walk. I would like to see people with MS, Polio, maybe even a paraplegic. And you could also have schizophrenics, manic depressives, and all sorts of other metal illnesses. Once the actor enters the theater he takes on the characteristics of the condition he has chosen and all rehearsals and performances are done with those on full display. And they should affect the performance, as maybe the Polio person in the wheel chair knocks over a piece of the set, and gets angry or embarrassed about it, but the show goes on.. Or the manic depressive suddenly refuses to go stage and the audience hears the rest of the cast backstage trying to get him out there.
I realize some of the audience would know some of the actors and realize they were “acting” their disability. Those actors would just have to work harder to sell it to them to believe. The idea is that the audience thinks these people have handicaps.
I think you can see where I am heading in regard to the audience and their reactions. This idea could explore their feelings about the play and the players on many levels, depending on how each show turned out. I imagine each performance would be different depending on how much the actors identified with the conditions they had chosen.
This would offer an extreme challenge to the group as just getting into the disabled character would be a real challenge. And then to stay in that character and become the person in the play they are portraying would present a double challenge. And seeing the two merge might be the most interesting. (At this point Dale will probably say what is new about this: he has been working with casts like this for years.)
I hope to be able to get to a meeting sometime and meet this most interesting and creative group.
Call it “The Show Goes On”– it would be a profound provocation, and provoke profound reflection.
It’s an unavoidably political situation, isn’t it. And also asks us to think about the “meaning ” of Art, particularly performed art.
There’s always fascism lurking in the appeal of the Spectacle. And if you interfere with giving the people their spectacle… It’s okay to perform a heartfelt play about the handicapped which allows the spectators to wrap their consciences in soft linen. But when the presence of the handicapped interferes with the illusion…
“The Show Goes On” is a an ethical statement.
Could I also request that one of the actors play it as if he or she cannot speak English.