Category: theater

Openings & Closings, Beginnings & Endings

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CLOSINGS
Yesterday, last meeting of the Ma-Yi Writers Lab’s season.  We still operate on a school year schedule/theater production company schedule, so it’s summer and school’s out.  As a kid, I was always sad when summer arrived because I’d be bored as anything.  Now, I’ll miss the company and comradeship as I soldier through these two new plays by myself during the desert of summer.

Also, today, was my last gig at a school for the year.  A meeting to debrief with the teachers after a semester long residency.  I walked up to the classroom teacher’s door and she had her wallet and keys in hand.  She locked eyes with me and said, “I forgot.”

Deep breath.  “That’s okay.”  Unlocks the door.  She seems upset.

Are you alright?  She says that she’s just got a billion things to do.  Has to prep for next class, buy supplies for a capioera workshop later that afternoon and she has ten things more to do.  She’s the team leader.  It’s the end of the year.  She says, “I’m so stressed out I’m about to start crying.  In nine years, I’ve never been so stressed out.”

I feel for her.  I ask if there is anything I can do.  She tells me about why it’s so hard right now.  End of year.  Behavioral issues.  Too many duties for too few staff.  I listen and I think she’s starting to feel better because someone hears.

I’ve been there.  Seven years ago, I was  a classroom teacher and I was there.

The other teachers filter in and we talk about our program and what worked and what could be better in our partnership next year.  And she lights up with ideas and anecdotes about our work together this year.

And I think about how all our hardworking, incredible teachers need more support, more time.  They need not to feel alone with the weight of the world on their shoulders and a classroom of students who need so much.  Students need a teacher, yes, but often they also need a mother, a father, a counselor, someone to draw a hard line, a coach, an artist, an inspiration, a citizen, a dreamer, a realist.  They need all these things.  Each teacher has 45 kids that need all these things (and it is a small ratio here, at my last teaching gig, i had 145 students).

How can we help them to stand under all that weight?
How can we hold them up?
How can we thank them for what they carry?
(Have you ever read “the things they carried?”)

They carry us all.

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OPENINGS
This opens next wednesday.  I’ve written a new 10-minute play for them called “Closing Up Shop.”  It’s a lovely evening of 7 eleven minute plays that take place in a convenience store.  Please come by if you can.  Some crackling plays, sharp direction and a fantastic cast.

Desipina & Co Logo

Desipina & Company
Rehana Mirza, Artistic Director & Rohi Mirza Pandya, Producing Director
presents
Seven.11 Convenience Theatre 2009: The Final Year

Directed by RJ Tolan, Kel Haney and Robert Ross Parker
Musical Director Samrat Chakrabarti
Only for 10 Performances
Opening Night Wednesday, June 17, 2009
At Center Stage, NY
48 W. 21St Street, 4th Floor, NYC
June 17th – June 28th, 2009
Wednesday to Saturday at 8 pm and Sunday at 3 pm
With: Andrew Guilarte, Kavi Ladnier, Cindy Cheung*, Sam Ghosh, Tim Cain*, Jay Lee and Christopher Larkin*

The final Seven plays:
Soonderella by Samrat Chakrabarti and Sanjiv Jhaveri
A new pop musical involving a fairy tale of a different colour.

Color Me Desi by Rishi Chowdhary
A liquor-run to the convenience store before the big desi party uncovers that there are more shades of brown than there are colors to Holi.

One Dollar Box  by Eugene Oh
A provocative tribute about anybody’s father, anybody’s son and the desperate measures that arise when life boxes you in. Working man, work it man.

A Very Desi Christmas by Samrat Chakrabarti and Sanjiv Jhaveri
An original pop musical that illuminates the true meaning of rice.

Closing Up Shop by Carla Ching
A look at what happens when it’s time to move on to the next generation.

What’s in Store by Rehana Mirza
A run-in at the convenience store leaves its manager with the keys to closing up.

Raj Against the Machine by Vishakan Jeyakumar
A Sri Lankan immigrant questions his life in the convenience store, with his best customer by his side.

Production Team
Production Stage Manager – Nick Tochelli
Assistant Stage Manager- Shannon O’Connor
Set – Jason Simms
Asst Set/Props – Amy Lee
Costumes – Jenny Fisher
Lights – Jeff McCrum
Sound – len DeNiro
Choreographer – Sandhya Jain
Graphic/website design Nilou Moochhala
Technical supervisor Enayet Rasul
Original 7-11 logo and t-shirt graphic design Atif Toor

Poetry, Found Text and Birthdays in America

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I promised I would try to start getting to things before they close so that I could tell people about them.  I missed it this time, and I’m sad about that, but you can still check out Jenny Holzer’s Protect Protect, if virtually.  She has always wowed me with her truths and aphorisms, but now she is working with found text, heavily redacted, declassified documents she found at the National Security Archive.

I also saw the lovely Pious Poetic Pie from Fluid Motion last week and it was good to see poetry onstage again.  Beautifully directed by Denyse Owens and beautifully rendered  remake of Medea by poet Yubelky Rodriguez.  And, this guy’s post-show performance was also a revelation.  Makes me wanna write in verse again.  His band, the Mighty Third Rail, violinist, bassist and voice, was mighty fine.

And I hear some people are keeping their birthdays quiet.  Happy Birthday, Ed Lin.  Keep taking down the man.

Oh, and speaking of birthdays, you’ve got one more week to see American Hwangap, Lloyd Suh’s newest directed by Trip Cullman at the Wild Project.  A touching, heartbreaking, very funny play about what happens when a Korean American man comes home after deserting his family 15 years before.  And it’s his birthday.  But don’t trust me.  Variety, Theatermania, the NY Times, Time Out, they all friggin’ love it.

Imagination

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In an interesting confluence of events:

I saw Crystal Skillman’s reading of The Sleeping World at Rattlestick this week, on the set of That Pretty Pretty with one of the actors from That Pretty Pretty in it.  So, I was watching this deep, sad, funny play about four friends coming together to read the unfinished play of their friend who took his own life the year before.  But at the beginning, I show up and I’m in  the hotel room from That Pretty Pretty.

And the ghost of Jane Fonda was in the air.  And I’m half waiting for jello wrestling to begin.  But, the actors are insistent, Crystal’s words are good, and I am lucky enough to have seen a lot of plays, so I know that this is the part where I turn on my imagination.  And so I close my eyes and shift my brain and the hotel room melts away and instead, we’re in The Sleeping World.  On a cold, snowy night at New Dramatists. And I’m in the world of the play.  And I’ll follow them anywhere.

I had to ask my students to do this today as well.  We brought a performance to their school.  There was but a stool, a desk, a chair, one costume piece and a pair of shoes.  And they had to believe we are in Chicago, on Mango Street and Esperanza is about to share her journal and her dreams with us.

https://i0.wp.com/upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/e/ec/MangoStreet.jpg

They did pretty well for the first theatrical performance for some of them.  They were a little squirmy.  I think they found it challenging to sit for more than an hour and focus.

The beauty of theater is that it can happen anywhere.  With very little.  But what we ask of our audiences is hard.  To be in the moment.  To imagine.  To believe.  But, when all the magic is in order, we are all there, imagining, together.

I am trying to figure out how to make it easier for people that aren’t regular theater goers.  Children and adults.  How do we get them to lean in and believe?

The Good Negro, Joe Turner’s and That Pretty Pretty

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Been a busy couple of weeks teaching.  One of the benefits to what I do for a living is that I get to see some great theater for free, sometimes things I wouldn’t afford to be able to see on my own.  Working for TDF,  I saw The Good Negro, Tracy Scott Wilson’s new play about the civil rights movement and loosely based on the life of Martin Luther King, Jr.  She brings the man down off his pedestal and humanizes him for sure.  And in these Obama days, it’s an interesting reflection on the power of rhetoric.  I was also blown away by the magic and craftsmanship of Joe Turner’s Come and Gone, Lincoln Center’s new production with Ernie Hudson (Yes, that’s right.  Ernie Hudson of Ghostbusters, Ernie Hudson.  I think he’s great in this.).  A forgotten song.  A missing woman.  A shower of gold.  A magic man who binds people together.  It’s 3 hours long and it seemed like a mere moments.

It’s the kind of play that makes a playwright envious and awestruck and hungry to see it again and wondering if she’ll ever get the mastery and imagination necessary to build something like that.  I am ashamed to say this is only the second of his plays that I’ve encountered.  Now I have to read the other 8.

Also saw, That Pretty Pretty at Rattlestick.  Man.  She broke all the rules.  I was telling my Pace kids this week that if you’re going to be artmakers, you need to be seeing thing as much as humanly possible.  I had them read Harold Pinter’s Nobel Prize Address.  It is sort of all over the place but he talks about the real and the unreal, chasing the truth in artmaking, but more than anything, being aware of the world around you and the implications of the deeds being done.  I think the thing about Sheila Callaghan’s play is that she’s somehow capturing the way that we are thinking right now.  She deals with gender and the mess of making art, stealing and borrowing other people’s stories and messing with people because you are stronger.  The narrative is fractured, but I think it reflects these times of piecemeal narratives and stories told, then re-told, then reinterpreted, then broken and re-ordered and turned into bricolage.  Pretty cool.

On another note, some success yesterday with a class in a long term residency that I have that had not really taken to writing or performing so much yet.  But, I did some Teacher in Role work with them and let them ask questions of the character and suddenly, all they wanted to do is be involved and give the character advice on how to be an agent of change in her own life.  It really stunned me and affirmed the power of this kind of work.  It just works.

Oh, and have you seen Electric Company lately?