My review of Hotel Savant's production of Artaud's The Cenci.
 photo by Dixie Sheridan
[F]or theatre history enthusiasts, Hotel Savant’s production represents a unique opportunity. It is unlikely that another rendition of Artaud’s play will pass our way any time soon. It is well-worth the $18 price of admission to witness a skilled and enthusiastic ensemble grappling with one of theatre’s most ambitious failures.
full review here.
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My review of Richard Foreman's Deep Trance Behavior in Potatoland.
For the first several minutes of the performance came the signature Foreman audience response: knowing smiles and uncomfortable giggles coupled with furrowed brows; few attendees at Foreman’s shows pretend to “understand” the work, with its densely layered philosophical references and its aversion to both narrative and character. Still, there is generally something fun about the experience. Tonight, though, the laughter died down fairly quickly, the furrowed brows accompanied more by shuffling feet than knowing smiles. Foreman was up to something different this time, and not everyone was sure they liked it. Full review here.
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my review of Wakka Wakka's Fabrik.
 photo credit: Nordland Visual Theatre
The spin on this iteration of the Holocaust tale, aside from its Norwegian setting, is the medium of the performance. Wakka Wakka’s inventive staging techniques, built around their Henson-ish puppets, supply a great deal of the charm of the production. The playfulness and virtuosity with which they explore the aesthetic and technical tools at their disposal make the story itself seem more unique than it otherwise might.
Full review here.
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The next time Chris Matthews or whoever describes some bullshit thing Congress is doing as a "kabuki dance," remember the video below. That's what a Kabuki dance (shosagoto) actually looks like. Just like C-Span, huh? I don't see the parallel...
Pretty, huh? That's Tamasaburo Bando V performing; he's amazing. do a youtube search on "Tamasaburo" for more videos.
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My nephew was in his THIRD play today as part of a youth theatre class he takes. I wasn't able to make it, but Angela sent along a photo of him in costume...
Apparently he played Flash Flannigan, an ace reporter for the Fairy Tale Times..
 Gabriel as Flash Flannigan December 9, 2007 photo by Angela Episale
My reviews of Tarrel Alvin McCraney's The Brothers Size at The Public Theater and Ahrens and Flaherty's The Glorious Ones at Lincoln Center.
[A]s much as you might turn your nose up at the bourgeois charms of these institutions, the fact that you subscribe to the podcast edition of This American Life and do your best to keep up with Democracy Now! indicates that you are in fact part of the target demographic of both LCT and the Public. Full review(s) here.
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My review of Karen Finley's Wake Up!.
Despite Finley’s image as a polarizing figure, a reputation born from her famous court battle with the NEA in the early nineties, there is very little polemicism on display in Wake Up! Instead, it is a show by and about someone who is trying to make sense of our baffling political and cultural present[,] an artist trying to work in a narrative form when the world she’s portraying seems to have lost its coherency. Full review here.
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My review of Maggie Smith's Good Heif, produced by New Georges and directed by Sarah Cameron Sunde.
Unfortunately, generally strong staging and admirable performances cannot save the text from its undercurrent of condescension and self-congratulation. full review here.
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My review(s) of Dan Hoyle's Tings Dey Happen and Danny Hoch's Till the Break of Dawn.
(There are a couple of ugly sentences, one of which is an outright editorial error, but my editor and I were both running on a tight deadline this time around.)
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PLEASE DISTRIBUTE TO ANYONE WHO MIGHT BE INTERESTED
CALL FOR PAPERS: Theatrical Representations of Prisons and Imprisonment.
ATHE CONFERENCE July 31 – August 3, 2008
Grand Hyat Hotel; Denver, Colorado, USA.
In April, 1910, British Home Secretary Winston Churchill attended a performance of John Galsworthy’s Justice, a play focusing on the criminal justice system in general and the psychological results of solitary confinement in particular. The following July, Churchill, in a fiery speech to the House of Commons, proposed a complete overhaul of the UK penal system.
John Herbert’s Fortune and Men’s Eyes opened in New York on February 23, 1967. During one Tuesday night post-show discussion, an audience member challenged the play’s accuracy, claiming that prison life could not be as brutal and degrading as depicted in the play. Another audience member, former convict Peter McGarry responded with a description of prison life that lasted more than half an hour, painting a picture at least as bleak as that in the play. Producer David Rothenberg shortly thereafter founded The Fortune Society, an organization devoted to giving former offenders a public voice and to helping them rebuild their post-prison lives. Today, The Fortune Society serves over 4,000 ex-prisoners annually and employs a staff of 175 people, seventy percent of whom are former offenders.
The Culture Project’s 2002 production of The Exonerated, Jessica Blank and Erika Jensen’s docudrama about wrongfully convicted death row inmates, enjoyed sold-out houses in New York and toured the United States. Less than a month after seeing the production, Governor George Ryan commuted all existing death row sentences in the state of Illinois and instituted a statewide moratorium on the death penalty. The National Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers presented the writers, director and producer of the play their Champion of Justice Award.
In these and other (sometimes less uplifting) instances, prison plays have attempted to render the invisible visible by representing the usually hidden world of prison life under the glare of stage lights. Given the theme of this year’s ATHE conference (Difficult Dialogues: Theatre and the Art of Engagement), I am interested in forming a panel focusing on representations of prison, imprisonment, and incarceration in drama, theatre, and performance. How do these texts engage, catalyze, or simulate a “dialogue” about incarceration? How do theatrical representations of imprisonment vary from cinematic and televised representations? How are identity processes impacted, interrupted, and reconfigured by prisons, theatres, and prisons-within-theatres? What are the potential pitfalls of these representations?
Other possible topics/questions include:
- The efficacy of prison plays.
- Metatheatrical prison plays.
- Prison and theatre as “queer spaces.”
- The panopticon and the theatron
- The exoticization of the prisoner.
- Theatrical responses to Abu Ghraib and/or Guantanamo.
- “Western” representations of “other” prison systems (Latin America, Turkey, the Middle East, Africa)
- Prison musicals and/or operas.
- Prisons as tourist attractions.
- Representations of rehabilitation.
- Geopolitical prison plays.
- Prison as a function of national identity.
- Traveling prison plays: how does a play about a specific prison or prison system change when it is performed for an audience unfamiliar with that system?
- Giving voice to prisoners: Who can, or should be able to, claim that right?
- Etc. There are myriad possibilities.
Please submit an abstract, brief bio, and contact information by October 20, 2007 to frankepi [at] gmail.com or fepisale [at] gc.cuny.edu
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the thing is, yeah Jennifer Hudson can sing and everything, but the disco version of "One Night Only" is better than the "earnest" version...
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my review(s) of Christopher Shinn's Dying City at Lincoln Center, and the "mini-festival" fuckplays downtown.
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i'm participating (as an actor) in a performance-creating project this weekend, culminating in an evening of readings and an open forum on Monday night. i can't speak to the quality of the work yet because we only met briefly last night and begin rehearsing in earnest this evening. the process is pretty typical Viewpoints-style content creation, for those of you who are familiar with that. not usually how i work, but the people are interesting and the themes worthwhile. feel free to stop by Monday if you're interested.
details below.
Please join us for a unique collaboration between the School of
International and Public Affairs (SIPA), and the School of the Arts at
Columbia University (SOA) for:
SIPA's first New Play Collaboration: Insurgency/Counterinsurgency
a joint project of local NYC artists, activists,
and the Columbia University Forum on Political Violence
Art meets Politics in this Festival of 10-minute plays.......
In a collaboration taking place April 20-23, In/Co brings together five
teams of playwrights, directors, dramaturgs, and actors over a single weekend to create five new ten-minute plays based on the theme of insurgency
and counterinsurgency.
Event Organizers: Alex Beech, Cynthia Croot,
Cary McClelland, and Dan McSweeney.
Participating Artists: Lies Becker, Claire Brownell, Jill Campbell, Daniel Carlton, Frank Episale, Bridgit Evans, Harold K. German, Janna Gjesdal, Siobhan Glennon, Joanne Hudson, Birgit Huppuch, Jon Kern, Garin Marschall, Wendy McClellan, Deanna McGovern, Ken Prestininzi, Akin Salawu, Ken Schmoll, Michele Travis, Zisan Ugurlu, Deborah Wallace and Mark Watson
TIME
Monday, April 23, 7:30PM
PLACE
The Columbia School of International and Public Affairs (SIPA)
118th and Amsterdam, 15th floor
http://www.sipa.columbia.edu/about_sipa/visitor_info.html
The evening includes a post-show dialogue with the cast, crew, and
interested members of the community. Please join us for this unique forum
connecting politcs and art at SIPA!
This event is FREE - no reservations required.
For more information, email Cynthia Croot at cynthiacroot@earthlink.net.
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"Theater can be a mobile unit in a journey across new geographies, a place that doesn't center the discourse in white male hegemony, but a space that can be filled and moved, by and to the margins, perpetually decentered as it explores various identity configurations of production and reception. University theater, in particular, has the potential to teach spectators how to be moved by difference, to encourage them to experience emotion not as acquiescent, but as passionate, and motivating toward social change."
--Jill Dolan, Geographies of Learning: Theory and Practice, Activism and Performance. (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 2001), 84.
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i was going to write some stuff about Seung-Hui Cho, but i feel like the story is too fresh and details are still in flux and too much of what i had to say could have been taken as either a defense of him or a criticism of some of those who dealt with him. i do have some thoughts about him and about his writing, but i'm going to keep them limited to private conversations and correspondences for now.
i do think that reports about the contents of his ten-minute plays have been misleading. read them here if you're interested.
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my piece for the May issue of PAJ: A Journal of Performance and Art is up on their website as of today, which I imagine means the journal will be in stores and libraries soon, and available via Project Muse soon after that.
it's been retitled "The Emerging Puppetry Renaissance," which makes it sound quite a bit broader than it really is, but the title i submitted was pretty lame, so it's no surprise that they changed it.
anyway: yay me.
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sometimes i am just not in the mood to be within 100 yards of any text that includes words like "illocutionary" and "perlocutionary."
i just want the warm embrace of a manipulative narrative.
somebody tell me a story.
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there's still time to change my mind, but here's what i'm thinking for next semester (in addition to teaching two sections of something-or-other at Brooklyn and holding on to one of the other two jobs i have this semester and continuing to write reviews and possibly editing the theatre section of offoffoff.com and starting to learn a new language....)
Seminar in Comparative Drama: Theatre and Drama of the Middle East (Professor Marvin Carlson): Although the Arab world is thought by many Westerners to possess little or no theatre, a complex and thriving international drama has in fact developed there since the middle of the nineteenth century, anticipated by medieval passion plays in Persia and by shadow and puppet plays from as early as the eleventh century. Pre-state theatres were established by the 1930s in Israel, and a major theatre has developed in that nation since statehood. This course will provide a brief survey of theatre in this region since the middle ages, and will the focus on the twentieth-century theatre of the major traditions in the area, in Egypt, Syria, and Israel. Major dramatists from these countries such as Tawfik al-Hakim, Sadallah Wannus, and Yehohua Sobol will be read, along with representative dramas from other states in the region such as Lebanon, Iraq, Iran, Palestine, Tunisia, and Kuwait. The course will consider how socio-political concerns, from colonialism to current conflicts, have operated on the theatre of this region, and such matters as levels of language and the use of history, religion, mythology, and folk material in this drama will also be considered. All material for the course will be read in English translation. Required texts: Jayyusi and Allen, Modern Arabic Drama, 1995; Michael Taub, Modern Israeli Drama in Translation, 1993. 2 papers will be required.
Mondays, 4:15pm to 6:15pm.
Seminar in Film Studies: Documenting the Self: Performance in Nonfiction Film (Professor Edward D. Miller): This seminar examines the significance of performance in nonfiction film. We pay particular attention to cinema vérité and direct cinema, new styles of filmmaking that emerged in the early 1960s. Filmmakers such as D.A. Pennebaker, the Maysles Brothers, and Fred Wiseman did away with the artifice of voice-over, interviews, archival footage, and incidental music—and made use of new lightweight equipment—in order to create a more authentic documentary. They were especially drawn to capturing backstage views of rock stars (such as Bob Dylan, The Rolling Stones, David Bowie) as well as gaining access to interactions of ordinary people in extraordinary situations (such as in mental institutions, on the road selling bibles, working in political campaigns, and attending high school). We trace a selective history of nonfiction film since 1960, beginning with the paradigm shift in documentary inspired by the assembling of distinctive--and talkative--Parisians in Edgar Morin and Jean Rouch’s Chronicle of a Summer (1961). We conclude with Jonathan Caouette’s aesthetics of self-preservation in Tarnation (2004) and YouTube’s videos of self-display. We pay particular attention to on-screen performances of gender and race due to the influence of identity politics on many of the key nonfiction works of the 80s and 90s. Course Requirements: The student works on a research topic throughout the semester. Class participation includes presentation of a reading as well as a conference-like talk that conveys the student’s research findings.In addition, the final class is constructed as a series of conference panels. Attendance in all classes and arriving on time is expected. If you have more than three absences you'll be required to drop the class or take a failing grade; multiple lateness will lower your final grade. (Syllabus available in the Certificate Program's Office, Room 5109.)
Wednesdays, 11:45am to 3:45pm.
Seminar in a National Theatre: Japanese Traditional Theatre: Nô, Kyôgen, Bunraku, and Kabuki (Professor Samuel Leiter): This course examines the four major forms of Japanese traditional theatre. It covers their history, dramatic literature and theory, and performance practice. Attention will be paid to theatrical conventions, including acting, makeup and masks, costumes, music, scenery, and theatre architecture. The relation of Japanese theatre to Japanese culture will be discussed. Readings will include selected plays in translation from each theatre form as well as writings by major Japanese and Western specialists. Videos of each form will be shown. The course also will examine influences of Japanese traditional theatre on Western performance. Attendance at local Japanese theatre-related events will be encouraged.
Tuesdays, 2:00pm to 4:00pm.
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