Open Rehearsal: The Court Theatre Blog
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March 9, 2010
Winsor McCay and Georges Méliès
Spending a few hours in tech for The Illusion this weekend, contemplating the design of the production (which is really beautiful and mysterious), the play started evoking images to me from Little Nemo in Slumberland (by comic strip artist Winsor McCay) and The Trip to the Moon (by filmmaker Georges Méliès)
I wish I could explain more about what I mean by these images, but I’d have to spoil the play. Suffice to say that there’s a dreamlike quality to some of this production that I’ve never quite seen in theater before.
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!
