Open Rehearsal: The Court Theatre Blog
August 19, 2009
Literary events of note
Two literary events in Hyde Park you should know about:
1. Every Wednesday, the Dean’s Men (the university’s resident Shakespeare troupe) holds court over “Shakes and Shakespeare.” Grab a $1 milkshake from the C-Shop and see a free Shakespeare performance on Bartlett Quad at high noon. UChiBLOGo has the story. The few times I’ve seen the Dean’s Men perform, I’ve always had a blast. This week: Antony and Cleopatra, part 1.
2. 57th Street Books hosts the single best thing I’ve ever heard of: the H.P. Lovecraft Memorial Ice Cream Social! “Hear tales of unspeakable horror, see (and possibly win) forbidden tomes and strange artifacts, and partake of frozen confections colder than the howling void.” This is why some of us never leave Hyde Park. Saturday, August 22nd at 2pm.
August 18, 2009
First Rehearsal
This morning, after a long dark summer, Court Theatre crawled out of dormancy for the first rehearsal of Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom! A few quick pictures below (I forgot a decent digital camera so these are from my phone):
Director Ron OJ Parson (center) and actor James T. Alfred (right) discuss the set model, as scenic designer John Culbert looks on.
John Culbert’s set model for Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom
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L to R: Actors Terrence Mosley (Understudy), Kelvin Roston (Sylvester), James T. Alfred (Levee), and A.C. Smith (Slow Drag) perform the first read-through of the play.
August 12, 2009
Economics of the Curtain Call
Chris Jones doesn’t like the money-back guarantee policy that came with Collaboraction and Teatro Visto’s El Grito del Bronx at the Goodman:
I hope the money-back guarantee dies a quick death, never to return. It’s not that I’m opposed to money-back guarantees in general—I recently took Home Depot up on a similar offer. But a piece of art is not a light fixture. And I think that such a speech [offering money back at the end of the show] is beneath the dignity of a fine artist like Torres.
It’s a bit like watching an actor leap down from the stage and start clearing tables. Those in the audience know about economic realities, but it still makes us uncomfortable. We don’t like to see those who bare their souls for an audience’s edification and enjoyment have to stoop to such things.
And although I had my problems with “El Grito del Bronx,” which I did not recommend, no reasonable person could have failed to see the effort, heart and craft behind that show. Nobody was making much money. Indeed, this wasn’t about the making of money. Demonstrably, this was a very personal endeavor on the part of everyone involved. Any thus I think anyone demanding a refund was being unreasonable.
Chris’s aversion to the money-back guarantee (and it does, understandably, seem to be a visceral aversion for him) reminds me Nicholas Ridout’s study on curtain calls—the social exchange at the end of a performance where the actors emerge to accept the applause of the audience. Ridout, a British performance theorist, writes about curtain calls as an economic exchange, but an exchange founded on gift-giving, which seeks to cloak its commodity-values in a social ritual
The audience is trying to figure itself as the recipient of a gift. Its applause is a paradoxical return, because it wishes to establish a relationship in which excess is preserved, in which the economics of exchange are somehow suspended. It wants to feel something extra, garner some ‘affecting surplus’ from the encounter…. A further indication of the affective force of the desire for this experience of the gift might be adduced from the sense of disappointment felt by an audience when actors do not take a curtain call at all. Applause that is offered, but no, as it were, accepted, with good grace, fails to satisfy, because it deprives an audience of the gain it has set out to win for itself through the gift of applause. (p. 165-6)
Is El Grito‘s money-back guarantee the same as receiving, say, a gift receipt with a birthday gift from your friend? Are you offended when the gift-giver says: “If you don’t like it, you can exchange it”? What if your boss says it? What if your child says it? I suppose it depends on the social configuration. For Chris, the appearance of actor Eddie Torres to offer the audience’s money back was a disruption, an offensive disruption, of a social pact, like forgetting to take the price tag off of a sweater you give to your mother. It’s tacky, it’s a faux-pas, it ruins the meaning of the act, to expose the economics of your gift. Ridout again:
...in the theatre the repudiation of the curtain call tends to signify a conviction that both actors and audience share something in their reasons for attending that transcends the theatre, and with it the comparable triviality of the market economy. (p.166)
On the one hand, my instinct is to agree with Chris that, no, theater is not a light fixture. On the other hand, to ignore the ways in which the theater we produce is a commodity bought and sold on a very particular marketplace leaves a lot out of the whole picture. Sure, American theater artists put in a lot of extra unpaid time because they love their craft, but that doesn’t mean that money, what little money there is that circulates in this industry, doesn’t have a very real effect, not only on theater workers but on the way we experience the work, too. It’s a tension, it’s a tension. A lot of my friends in theater ask themselves: what’s the tipping point where I stop giving my free labor to this company/director?
Pierre Corneille’s L’Illusion Comique ends with a comic scene depicting the actors dividing up the money from the night’s proceeds (curiously enough, the scene is cut from the Tony Kushner adaptation we’re staging early next year). Not to go all Marxist on Chris Jones, but if we can raise consciousness about what it is we do here, won’t our audiences be richer for it? My sense is that if we take a challenging piece of theater to an audience and say, “Look. We’re predicting this isn’t going to make a lot of money. It’s long/weird/offensive/unpopular/confusing/uncomfortable. Despite that, we’re convinced that it’s worth your $32 and two hours of your time. Please join us,” then audiences will come along for the ride. If a money-back guarantee can make risk more palatable, then let’s go for it.
(Source: Nicholas Ridout, Stage fright, animals, and other theatrical problems. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2006.)
August 10, 2009
Court in ‘63
We found some old poster-programs from the early 1960’s when Court was an outdoor festival in Hutch Courtyard on the university campus. Here’s one:
On the back is a sampling of Hyde Park advertisements, circa 1963:
Still the one.
Proof that, at one point, someone served late night food in Hyde Park.
A distant ancestor of Calypso Cafe, according to the Law of Conservation of Tiki.
A distant ancestor of What the Traveler Saw. Clearly? Clearly.
August 6, 2009
What I’m Reading
-The Complete Plays by Georges Feydeau
-Trouble in Mind: Black Southerners in the Age of Jim Crow by Leon F. Litwack
-Blue Chicago: The Search for Authenticity in Urban Blues Clubs by John Grazian
-A Dybbuk by S. Ansky, Translated by Tony Kushner
-The Unquiet Mind: A Memoir of Moods and Madness by Kay Jamison
-Orpheus Descending by Tennessee Williams
-The Man Who Turned into a Stick by Kōbō Abe
