Open Rehearsal: The Court Theatre Blog
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March 8, 2010
Announcing Court’s 56th Season of Classic Plays
Friends and loyal readers of Open Rehearsal, I’m pleased to announce Court Theatre’s fifty-sixth season of classic plays for 2010-11. I couldn’t be prouder of this new slate of plays, which promises to continue taking Court to the next level as a center for classic theatre. Allow me to take you on a short tour of the season.
William Shakespeare’s The Comedy of Errors
Directed by Sean Graney
September 16, 2010 - October 17, 2010
Sean Graney has directed two classic farces at Court Theatre, 2007’s What the Butler Saw and 2009’s The Mystery of Irma Vep. In both productions, I saw Sean challenge himself and push his craft to find a solution for each new problem that these deceptively difficult plays posed for him. Now, as a next step in Sean’s exploration of comedy, as well as his playful inquiry into themes of identity and disguise, he’ll be taking on William Shakespeare’s classic farce about two sets of twins separated at birth, The Comedy of Errors. As a formal challenge to himself, Sean intends to perform the play with only six actors, requiring each actor to play three different characters—often at the same time!
Home by Samm-Art Williams
Directed by Ron OJ Parson, Resident Artist
November 11, 2010 - December 12, 2010
Our resident artist Ron OJ Parson (directing Sizwe Banzi is Dead this spring at Court Theatre) returns to direct a modern classic, Home. First produced by the Negro Ensemble Company in 1981, Home tells the story of Cephus Miles and his life’s journey out and back from his small town in North Carolina. Spanning the tumultuous decades of the 50s, 60s, and 70s, Williams’s play is an intimate, enduring story told with charm and poetry. Based in part on his early life in North Carolina, and inspired by his longing for home while living in New York, Williams envisioned the play’s form as something simple, something that could be performed in the street “if push comes to shove.” Ron OJ Parson directed Home at Signature Theatre Company to critical and popular acclaim in New York in 2008, for which he won New York’s Audelco Award.
Play Three
Directed by Charles Newell
January 13 - February 13, 2011
I can’t tell you any details just yet, but we’re finalizing the plans for me to direct a classic play in our third slot of the season. I’m very excited about what this is going to be. Check this blog in the next few weeks for updates!
Virginia Woolf’s Orlando
Adapted by Sarah Ruhl
Directed by Jessica Thebus
March 10, 2011 - April 10, 2011
For some time now I’ve been fascinated by Virginia Woolf’s gender-bending novel Orlando, the story of an English nobleman who falls asleep and wakes up as a woman. An “imaginative biography” of Woolf’s intimate friend Vita Sackville-West that takes place over four centuries and different continents, Orlando seemed to me impossible to adapt to the stage until I discovered acclaimed American playwright Sarah Ruhl’s treatment of it. Her adaptation captures Woolf’s biting whimsy while rendering the story of Orlando energetically theatrical. I’m overjoyed that we’ve been able to invite Jessica Thebus to direct for the very first time at Court Theatre. Jessica has directed a number of Ruhl’s plays (Dead Man’s Cell Phone, The Clean House), and I can’t wait to see her staging of Orlando.
The Gershwins’ Porgy and Bess
By George Gershwin, DuBose and Dorothy Heyward, and Ira Gershwin
Directed by Charles Newell
Music Direction by Doug Peck
Artistic Consultant Ron OJ Parson
May 12, 2011 - June 19, 2011
Considered to be George Gershwin’s magnum opus, Porgy and Bess is a “folk opera” with a score that features unforgettable songs like “Summertime,” later recorded time and again by pop, blues, and jazz musicians. Similar to Gershwin’s Rhapsody in Blue, Porgy and Bess was meant to combine the “high” and “low” idioms of classical opera and contemporary jazz and blues, this time to tell DuBose Heyward’s story of Porgy, a disabled man living in a slum of Charleston, South Carolina who falls in love with an itinerant woman named Bess. In 1935, the opera premiered on Broadway with an all-African-American cast, still rare at the time. Since then, it has risen in status as a legitimate American opera while diminishing as a legitimate piece of African-American theater, in large part due to charges of insensitivity in its romanticizing portrayal of poor African-Americans. In collaboration with Doug Peck (Caroline, or Change) and resident artist Ron OJ Parson, we will address the checkered past of Porgy and Bess and return to the original intentions of the authors to create a “true serious picture” of the inhabitants of Catfish Row. A longstanding Everest in my mind, the Gershwins’ Porgy and Bess is a new and exhilarating challenge for me as a director.
It’s time now for me to disappear back into technical rehearsals for The Illusion (opening March 11), but I hope you’ll join me for all five of next season’s plays by becoming a subscriber to Court Theatre. It’s the best and cheapest way to get the most out of what Court has to offer. Until then, see you at the theater!
March 3, 2010
Cave of Illusions #2
To supplement Benno’s post on Plato’s cave, here are some illustrations I found that depict the allegory:
March 2, 2010
Cave of Illusions
Like the pictures Drew posted below show, The Illusion takes place in a Magician’s cave. In the center of the cave on a great slab, the Magician Alcandre conjures a representation of life for his customer Pridamant. It’s been difficult when working on this play not to think of one of the most famous caves in the history of Philosophy: Plato’s Allegory of the cave from The Republic. In this Plato equates the difference between the truth and what we perceive, with a person chained in a cave able only to see shadows on a wall. Without giving too much away, it’s certain that the images that Alcandre creates in his cave are not the truth - they are a representation. Still, they have much to teach Pridamant as you can see when we open. And opening is scarily close!
Check out the Allegory of the Cave in Allan Bloom’s translation below, and be sure to check back for more updates as we go into Technical rehearsals this weekend!
March 1, 2010
Mysterium Mechanicum
T minus 3 days until the actors enter the space, the set for The Illusion is starting to see some color and finish. At this point any wide-angle photographs would spoil your experience of the show, but here are some scenes from around the sidelines:
An array of lanterns congregates in the lobby, waiting to be hung.
The iconic table and chair from The Year of Magical Thinking still sits in the back of the house, now demoted to a work bench for our electricians.
Often spotting in the theater during construction time: the shop gnome.
February 25, 2010
Kushner’s ILLUSION: Production History
By Zachary Moull, Dramaturgy Assistant
Zachary is a graduate student at the University of Chicago in the Master of Arts Program in the Humanities (MAPH)
Tony Kushner’s Adaptation of Corneille’s L’Illusion Comique was first performed as a reading at the New York Theater Workshop in 1988, and received its premiere at the Hartford Stage Company in 1989. It has since been popular in theatres across the country, and gained international notice following Kushner’s rise to fame with the success of Angels in America in 1993-94.
Features of the two initial productions neatly illustrate the common concerns of many productions of this play: the desire to create a stage environment suitable to the conjuring of illusion, and the need to work through the complex transhistorical resonances between Kushner, Corneille, and their works.
The New York Theater Workshop performance took place in front of a set consisting of perspective drawings of classical pillars. This can be read as a comment on illusion—a sort of visual pun playing on the use of forced perspective in stage design that pithily suggests theatrical distortion. But the design choice also contains a statement on the mode of adaptation used in the work itself, insofar as Kushner makes a classic play present on stage in a mediated form—he is working, the stage suggests, from Corneille’s design if not always from his realization of that design.
Legend has it that the Hartford production was more overtly haunted by Corneille. As Sylviane Gold describes in the New York Times, the production was beset by technical difficulties until Kushner and director Mark Lamos decided to reprint the program to say not “The Illusion by Tony Kushner, based on a play by Pierre Corneille” but “The Illusion by Pierre Corneille, freely adapted by Tony Kushner.” All the technical glitches stopped on cue, save for one: Kushner’s name was mysteriously wiped from the marquee on the night before the show opened. The play continues to be performed and published under this revised heading, lest the original author return to seek his due. Kushner, perhaps in light of this experience, told the Times that after he is dead his plays are “fair game” for those who might wish to adapt his work as he adapted Corneille’s.
