Open Rehearsal: The Court Theatre Blog
January 29, 2010
Sixty Five and Older
The Guardian asks: are audiences just too old?
Walters is particularly angered by the assumption that just because an audience is old, it’s reactionary: “Those people in your audience who are currently 60, the ones who get hammered as ‘conservative’ and ‘unimaginative’? They were born in 1950, which means they were graduating from high school in 1968. Maybe you’ve read about 1968 ... it was the year America was on fire.”
The real reason why older audiences are not so interested by some younger writers, he suggests, is because they’ve seen it all before.“Being shocked isn’t that big of a thrill anymore,” he writes. “Tell us something important about life. Something with some depth and complexity. Something with some heart and soul, some deep understanding.”
Walters’s attitude is a refreshing counterblast to a society that often seems in thrall to the cult of youth. But as Isaac Butler argues, it’s not entirely fair. Butler describes how one artistic director he knows did some market research into the baby-boom generation – people who are now 60-plus – and what he found shocked and depressed him: “Boomers, by and large, dislike surprise,” writes Butler, “which is why many previews now intentionally ruin the plots of movies. Boomers are among the least loyal of customers and it takes very little to lose their business etc.”
Full article here.
January 22, 2010
Notes on The Year of Magical Thinking
I’m sitting in a Saturday morning tech rehearsal for The Year of Magical Thinking and, as usual, I’m trying not to make too much noise. Across the house from me is the design team, the director, and the technical staff, their faces ghostly from the light of their personal computer screens. They’re all watching the stage as Josh, the assistant director, marks out a simple, elegant choreography with a half-smirk on his face as Mary Beth Fisher, the actor playing the character of Joan, delivers her lines from a seat in the house. It’s an exercise designed so that Mary Beth can comprehend the new context of light, space, sound, and (yes) video projection that she’s been recently loaded-into this weekend. Josh, for the moment, is her sole understudy, carefully reconstructing her blocking down to the inch as Mary Beth speaks the lines to herself. It’s a strange piece of performance art, but an oddly fitting embodiment of Joan Didion’s prose: formal, structural, a kind of dire game of Twister. “Half-step downstage, Josh,” directs Jennifer Tipton, the lighting designer. He moves.
In late 2004, Joan Didion began writing about the recent death of her husband, John Gregory Dunne, and the ongoing illness of her daughter, Quintana. Those early notes—some composed at the height of bewildering grief—became the book The Year of Magical Thinking. The manuscript was already finished and sent to the printers when Didion’s daughter passed away in August 2005. Published barely over a month later, the book became an immediate bestseller and garnered a National Book Award and a Pulitzer Prize for Biography/Autobiography. In late 2006, at the encouragement of producer Scott Rudin, Didion began work on a play based on The Year of Magical Thinking. The play retained certain passages from the book, but it also included certain new material, including an account of Quintana’s death and the aftermath. For Didion, an author of five novels, eleven works of nonfiction, and a handful of Hollywood screenplays, it was her first piece of writing for the theater. Produced in London in 2007 with David Hare directing and Vanessa Redgrave in the role of Joan, The Year of Magical Thinking: The Play has been produced on Broadway and at regional theaters throughout the United States.
January 22, 2010
Fugard Chicago 2010
Fugard Chicago 2010 marks the rare occasion for Chicago audiences to encounter a wide breadth of work by South African playwright Athol Fugard. It begins with TimeLine Theatre Company’s production of “Master Harold” ...And the Boys (opened January 20), continues with Remy Bumppo’s The Island (opens January 27), and concludes with Court Theatre’s Sizwe Banzi is Dead (opens May 13). At Remy Bumppo’s thinkTalk blog, there’s a fabulous interview by Kelli Marino with each play’s director: James Bohnen, Jonathan Wilson, and our own Resident Artist Ron OJ Parson. Here’s a sample:
KM: How can these three Fugard works affect or reflect today’s society?
JW: All three, on one level or another, deal with racial issues. All three plays are having productions in Chicago, one of the most polarized cities in the nation. I think it would be most beneficial if we utilized the productions as a vehicle for discussing black/white relations in Chicago.
ROP: We always need to know where we came from to know where we are going. Of course racism still exists, and South African history can even reflect our own history. We have to make sure there are reminders so we will never repeat the atrocities that took place during apartheid.
JB: I think these shows collectively are a somber reminder that man will be inhumane in new ways and old ways, and that these stories must serve as sentinels, reminding us that evil is always dancing somewhere. But more importantly, these plays are a study, and reminder, in the power of a compassionate response within dire circumstances.
Read the full interview here.
Sizwe Banzi is Dead opens May 13 at Court Theatre
January 19, 2010
Preview Weekend
What a difference an audience makes! We just finished our first weekend of preview performances for The Year of Magical Thinking, and so far I’ve learned so much from our audience’s reaction. Each night, in talk backs, I get the chance to listen directly to audience feedback, to hear some of our artistic choices validated, to hear some called into question. I’ve been stunned by the number of people who are staying to talk to us about this show. I can’t remember the last time I saw an audience so hungry to verbalize their experience and share their own personal memories. It’s a play that actively encourages a response.
This week, Mary Beth and I are still working most closely on the last quarter of the play. It’s a difficult section. Without giving too much away, the character of Joan has a subtle but distinct change of intention three-quarters into the play, and we’ve been taking our time figuring out what that new intention really is. Joan Didion, who has been enormously helpful in talking openly about the play with Mary Beth and I, took the time to email me a few responses to some questions I’d asked of her play. I’m thrilled to put some of these new thoughts to action in our next few nights of previews. Please join us as we continue to discover the complexities of this piece!
January 11, 2010
Tech Weekend
And that, ladies and gentlemen, was the most pleasant weekend of tech I’ve experienced in recent memory. So often we’re racing against time to assemble all the moving parts and production elements of a show just so that the thing can stand on its own two feet by the final dress rehearsal. Because of the simple, elegant design of The Year of Magical Thinking, that stress was largely alleviated, allowing Mary Beth and I and the design team the opportunity to spend the weekend honing specific moments in the story.
The design team for this play has been a veritable dream team. We have Jennifer Tipton designing lights, Susan Hilferty designing clothes, my long-time collaborator John Culbert on the set, and Andre Pluess on sound. I’m also working for the first time with Mike Tutaj, who has created a startling and sublime video design for the production. Much of this weekend was given over to orchestrating what we’ve come to call the “magical thinking” moments of the play: moments where the character of Joan slips into a non-rational understanding of the traumatic events surrounding her. Mary Beth has continued to play an important role as co-collaborator, to the point where she often sits in the house to study her own light, sound, and video cues and offer her feedback.
Officially we have three more working days until the first preview, and there’s still much work to be done. Striking the right tone at the opening and the closing of the play are of the utmost importance (“How do we start? How do we end?”) and those are the moments that Mary Beth and I are still fine-tuning. In this show more than most, divinity is all in the details. There’s always the possibility that some of our thinking will completely change when we get our first audience—but that’s a thrill I look forward to with every show!
