ourtube.com: "Zombie-Zombie"

At Playlab NYC we like to spend our time surfing the internet like everyone else. Sometimes we stumble across a video that strikes a chord and we just have to share.

On August first, movie news website joblo.com posted a short stop-motion remake of John Carpenter's The Thing using 1980's G.I. Joe action figures. The project was directed by Simon Gesrel and Xavier Ehretsmann, and it seems to be a music video for a French electronica team called Zombie-Zombie.

Enjoy.

Field Trip: Much Ado About Nothing

As part of Playlab NYC’s desire for community outreach and to support our local theater companies, we venture out from time to time for a Field Trip.

On Saturday August 24th, Kevin and I took our son, Edison to Astoria Park. As we were walking toward the playground, chalk advertisements along the way told us of some free Shakespeare later that afternoon. I love watching Park Theater, so we decided that after Edison’s nap we would go, which is perfect because he gets up about 3:30 and that would get us to the 4:00 show. I packed up a picnic of peanut butter and jelly sandwiches and we were on our way.

There was already a crowd full of little families as we walked to the North Lawn. Curious Frog Theatre Company Executive Director Reneé Racan Rodriguez adapted and directed the 90-minute show with a cast of eight. From the difficulties of different terrain in all our city parks, the staging worked well. The actors used the audience for wing space and entrances. Edison is only 2 and he got antsy about a half hour into the show - about the moment we were out of sandwiches. Kevin diverted his attention further back behind the audience so Edison could run around like a crazy person. This allowed me to watch the show better anyway. It was at this time I realized that the whole concept of the show was based around the US Open, for example the watchmen were tennis ball catchers. The cast showed a sense of closeness with each other, for they really seemed comfortable in each role the actors were playing. I loved the scenes with the night watchmen, Dogberry and Verges. Alvin Chan and Devin Moriarity who play the latter two characters were great having fun with the uppity-british English accent.

Curious Frog Theatre Company is an Astoria based company that started in 2007, and it looks like they already have a great core group of actors. Reading their website they are looking to develop an annual Shakespeare Festival that showcases a more diverse group of actors in major Shakespearean roles. They also hope to perform throughout more communities that don’t have an easy access to theatre, and that’s a great feat - congratulations to CFTC for their valiant efforts!

Check out Curious Frog at www.curiousfrog.org.

In the Works: Improbable Plays

About ten days ago Playlab NYC got a group of friends together to have an informal reading of a collection of short plays by our Lab Assistant Jon Steinhagen.

Titled THE IMPROBABLE PLAYS, the collection includes eight short plays:

“Everything But…”

An unhappily married couple have their daily antagonism kicked up a notch when their crafty kitchen sink let’s its special knowledge overflow.

“The Last of the Intruder”

The story of Goldilocks gains a new perspective when Papa Bear and Mama Bear tell their side of the story to a nosy reporter.

“Layers”

A dieting woman at a fancy restaurant has the misfortune to order Jell-O for dessert while in the presence of all her favorite sweet treats sitting on a nearby dessert cart.

“Panda Expressed”

New methods for increasing the world population of pandas lead to the sordid humiliation of a panda porn star.

“Reunion of the Reserve Heads”

Solid limestone reserve heads over five thousand years old are discovered in an Egyptian tomb and end up reacquainting themselves to life in the British Museum.

“Typical Abnormal Behavior”

An adulterous couple is treated to a shocking display of giraffe hi-jinx while having a rendezvous at the local zoo.

“Second Line of Defense”

A Southern belle and a queen bee relate the mysterious events leading up to a Yankee’s death during the Civil War.

“The Tempest Prognosticators“

Six leeches find themselves trapped in a mid-19th Century device for predicting storms and begin to question the meaning of life.

We had a last minute addition to our informal get together in a form a new play titled “Shelf Life.” In shelf life three movies on a shelf, including a silent movie, an early talkie, and blockbuster action film try to figure out what they have in common.

Reading for us were: Kirsta Peterson, who played Lady Macbeth in the Red Door Theater production of Macbeth that I had directed back in October; long time friend John Pieza, who was a part of April’s Loss Breath workshop; and from Playlab NYC’s inaugural production The Tempest, Bob Stack and Jonathan Weiner. And because we lost an actress at the last minute our own Managing Director, Jennifer Wilcox joined in the reading.

The reading while cold was very productive and we received great feedback from the actors. Of the nine titles, the highlights of the evening were “Layers,” “Panda Expressed,” and “Second Line of Defense.” Playlab NYC is passing along the actors’ notes and questions to the author. I’m sure this isn’t the last we have heard of Jon Steinhagen’s IMPROBABLE PLAYS.

Theatrical Piracy: Beautiful Stories

So over the Fourth of July weekend my wife Jessica and I took the girls to my parents’ house in Ohio. A visit Gran’ma and Gran’pa sort of thing.

I was in the basement looking though my warped water stained comic collection. A side note to comic collectors: Don’t store you comics in the basement, especially basements prone to flooding during summer rainstorms. Fortunately the “important” comics, the Daredevil Born Again arc, Watchmen, Electra: Assassin, and Ronin had long since left my parents’ house. So I was left quietly mourning for my Spiderman issues of the Kraven’s Last Hunt storyline, and Secret Wars. It was a pity about the loss of GI Joe issue 21 though.

It was in the basement that I reconnected with the inspiration for one of my first forays into the dark underbelly of theatrical plagiarism: Beautiful Stories for Ugly Children. Written by Dave Louapre and drawn by Dan Sweetman, BSFUG was not a very traditional comic. The two dozen or so issues published in the early 1990’s were self contained short stories with illustrations, published in comic book form.

It has probably been fifteen years since I looked at those comics. Looking back on them, I see that what appealed to me about the stories were that most of the issues felt like little one acts. Single set, and only a couple people. So that is exactly what I did with an unauthorized (Do I have any other kind?) adaptation of a couple of issues of the comic back in college.

Issue #12: “Beneath the Useless Universe” was a variation on Death Takes a Holiday. With Death becoming a houseguest who over stays his welcome in the home of an elderly African-American man with the weathered face of a Delta Blues musician. Death learns to use a yo-yo and tries to name the old man’s pet goldfish.

Of course we didn’t have any male African-American students in the theater department let alone elderly ones, so you would have had to use your imagination watching the show.

Issue #14: “Dangerous Prayers” was the story of a woman who wakes up one day and decided that she isn’t going to get out of bed anymore because the world is too…well, I don’t really remember why she didn’t feel like getting out of bed.

The illustration that really drove the shape of the “Dangerous Prayers” script was a picture of the woman in bed surrounded by a bunch of men with leaf blowers. The illustrations made the outside world such an intrusion in her interior world. I conceived of a Greek chorus that was ever present in her bedroom acting as her answering machine, her radio, the people at her job, etc…

BSFUC was the first and last directing effort, to the best of my knowledge, of Playlab NYC's Managing Director, Jennifer Wilcox. The show’s ensemble cast included in its numbers Playlab NYC Artistic Director, Kevin Hale, who gave up acting shortly after the show. Come to think of it, in retrospect it seems to have nearly driven both Jennifer and Kevin right out of theater all together.

The show ran for two performances, and there doesn’t seem to be much incriminating evidence that survives. Nothing I could find, no pictures, no scripts. I did come across a program though…written on a typewriter.

I recall toying with doing a second night of one-acts the next year. I was pretty keen to tackle Issue #10: “Where the Tarantulas Play.” A love story set against a failing petting zoo in the desert was a personal favorite. But it wasn’t to be.

Gosh looking back at these I wouldn’t mind tackling the adaptations again…

What We Eat: The Artistic Home

This is intended to be the first in what I hope will grow to be a series of entries about the works that have influenced the direction in which I am working to take Playlab NYC. My attempt to share the books, movie, and plays I have consumed.

The Artistic Home:
Discussions with Artistic Directors of America's Institutional Theatres
by Todd London

Published by Theatre Communications Group in 1988, The Artistic Home was written by Todd London, the current artistic director of New Dramatists. The slim volume is a summary of 13 meetings between the artistic directors of more than a hundred of America’s non-profit professional theatre companies. Peter Zeisler, who passed away in 2005, wrote the foreword. Mr. Zeisler was long associated with TCG, and was instrumental in the founding of the Guthrie Theatre. The introduction by Lloyd Richards, who passed away the year following Peter Zeisler, is perhaps best remembered for his work as dean of the Yale School of Drama in the 1980’s and his close collaboration with August Wilson.

The Artistic Home is split into five sections that examine a number of issues that regional theaters are facing: artists, audience, and day-to-day operations. We often read about the struggles of individual artists, the daily rejection, but here Todd London offers us a look into the struggles of theaters trying to find new directions. Directions where they can better nurture artists, and bring audiences to them. New directions that will allow the theatres to not only survive themselves, but flourish.

This is not a how to book for running theatre. Rather it is a book stuffed with ideas. A book that works for me much like my favorite issues of TCG’s American Theatre Magazine. They both serve me best as a jumping off point for my imagination. It is a book of “What If’s”

I have read reviews of the book that claim that the book is only useful if you are running a large theatre company, I couldn’t disagree more. To my thinking some of the approaches and ideas that are discussed are probably impossible to pull off encumbered with a forty-year history and a large board. However if you are at the very beginning at the birth of a new company there is some flexibility in trying out the ideas thrown around in these pages. Also, there isn’t a board member at any theatre to whom I wouldn’t give a copy of this book.

The best description of The Artistic Home comes from Peter Zeisler. He says in his introduction that reading the book “is like walking in on a high-powered brainstorming session” with the leaders of the regional theatre movement in this country. He goes on to say that the book exists as a starting point for further conversations.

I would love to see a new edition of the book. If not a whole new book then I think at the very least the time has come for a revised edition. Every several years, American Theatre Magazine publishes a kind of regional theatre check in, with a large articles devoted to conversations that follow the same format as Mr. London’s book. Why not compile those into a series of appendix that allow us to see the evolution to where things are now, twenty years later? I would also like to see the model of the books approach applied to Off-Off-Broadway companies.

My copy is becoming dog-eared and filled with marginalia. It is something that I dip into every few years for inspiration of what my theatre company could be.