Most of the New Leaf and Curse of the Starving Class team met up recently at one of our favorite haunts for a fantastic first read through  together.  We gathered ourselves around some good food and a few drinks and listened to these incredible actors breathe life into the dangerously beautiful words of Sam Shepard.  Rehearsals start on March 2nd and we can’t wait to roll up our sleeves and dig.

Special thanks to the awesome folks at Rocco’s Cafe & Pizzeria ( http://www.roccoschicago.com/)

I heart New Leaf Theatre.  They simply rock socks and I’m thrilled to be a part of their process.  To avoid this post becoming an all-out unadulterated love-fest to the Leaf, I will make an effort to provide a tempered behind the scenes look at the experience of bringing Bilal Dardai’s adaptation of G.K. Chesterton’s The Man Who Was Thursday to life.  That way things won’t get too graphic and the kids at home can continue to read along.

In Thursday I play Comrade Buttons, the original Professor DeWorms, the French Colonel, and one of Sunday’s “goons”.  As we have developed this process, the “goon” characters have taken on a life of their own and dramatically increased my work load through the show.  The “goons” serve a dual purpose as a kind of shepherd for the audience and for all intents and purposes as the running crew for the show.  The “goons” help move the audience from one room to another, stand and sit, and move from bench to bench.  Intrigued?  Come see for yourself.

But the creation of these “goon” characters is a great example of what I have been most pleasantly surprised by working with New Leaf:  their absolute insistence on collaboration.  Jess has always been open to hearing ideas and will always give them due consideration, if not direct incorporation into the show.  I believe this approach has really fostered a tight ensemble and given everyone a little more personal investment in the show. Thursday has many daunting aspects to it, and in order to pull it off, everyone from the director, actors, designers, stage and production managers, have to have a little more skin in the game.  What are some of those daunting aspects you ask?  First, come see for yourself.  We open this Thursday night and all opening weekend is pay what you will.

Let’s start with the words themselves.  There are lots and lots of them.  Bilal has done an excellent job of taking Chesterton’s novel and compressing it into a roughly 90 page play.  But there are lots and lots of words on those pages.  Then we have the accents.  There are English (and the many variations that accompany the Kings), German, Polish, and French.  Next we have the locations.  We start in a park, move to bar, then to an underground lair, a darkened room, the balcony of a rooftop cafe, back to another bar, a bridge, a cafe in France, a meadow, a train depot, back to the rooftop cafe, a country road, and then back to a park.  Finally, we have some of the action.  You will see navigation of darkened secret tunnels, a cat and mouse game, a swashbuckling duel, an all out farcical chase sequence, and a hot-air balloon.  All of this will happen not in a traditional theatre space, but rather the unique Lincoln Park Cultural Center that New Leaf calls home.  Needless to say, in order to make all this happen, everyone involved had to put on their creative pants.  And the result has been one of the finest pair of pants I have donned.  Think we will be able to pull all this off?  Tickets are available from $10 to $18 at www.newleaftheatre.org.

Bilal has been a consistent presence throughout our process.  He has made many of the inevitable cuts and additions that come with a new adaptation.  The fact that he has been with us from the get go has been an enormous help as he has provided insight to the actors and been open to suggestions when needed on what works best for the story.  Lindsey Bartlett, our fantastic dialect coach, has helped ensure that we Yanks don’t sound like complete jackasses when speaking in our various accents.  She has been patient, supportive, and kind, but as we near the home stretch we will begin to see her tyrannical side.  She has threatened to start throwing pencils at us upon hearing mistakes.  I can speak for the cast that we are all very partial to our eyeballs and fear is a great motivating factor.  Any trepidations I had about how in the hell we would pull this show off were quickly quieted as we began to add the design elements to the show and New Leaf started flexing their design muscles.  Nick Keenan’s sound design is nuanced and lovely and his score furthers the action of the play.  He somehow moves seamlessly from Wagner to Blur’s Think Tank.  I’m not sure how, but he does, and I find it best not to ask too many questions.  Jared Moore’s lights are, well, let’s just say totally kick-ass for lack of a more suitable description.  Both these fellas and their respective designs have made the nigh impossible locations and actions great additions to Thursday rather than high-potential detractions.  Then we have our fearless director Jess.  Sweet, sweet Jessie H.  Not only has she helmed this entire beast of a show, but she has done so with ten dudes.  And we are dudes.  And do dude things.  You know, dudes bein’ dudes, as dudes are wont to do.  She had guided us through the maze of this story and pretended to be impressed with our exhaustive knowledge of obscure Star Wars battles.  She has given us the opportunity to fully explore our characters while tolerating our penchant to pounce on any and all double entendres and our endless material on the subject of poop. No small feat.  But she has assembled some of the most talented mo-fo’s I have had the pleasure to work with and we hope that you the audience will enjoy Thursday as much as we have enjoyed bringing it to life.  If you think you might, you can call (773) 516-3546 to reserve tickets with the box office.

We are now neck-deep in tech week and are juggling scenes, costumes, props, and where the hell the lampost goes.  I feel really good about the shape of the show and we are ready to give it to the masses to continue this conversation.  We run October 15th-November 21st and have shows Thursday, Friday, and Saturday at 8pm.  We’d love to have you.

Damn.  I said I wasn’t going to write a love letter and I fear that is exactly what I’ve done.  I don’t care.  I’ll fist-fight you if you have beef.

It’s only a day before we open The Man Who Was Thursday and I am sitting at home fully dressed but wearing slippers, fuzzy robe and winter hat. I have been a victim of the common cold-the one that always strikes in October because it’s still fall, yet the winter weather has already started outside. I was fortunate enough to be able to work at home this week so I may spend all of my available hours dedicated to tech.

I am a little sad that the rehearsal process is over. This may sound strange to some of you, but I like the rehearsal process better than the performance process. Though, granted, it is most satisfying and wonderful to have a beautiful show, drama or comedy, I like watching the rehearsals. Seeing the first read through to the final dress, even the final show (because as we all know, opening does not stop the discovery) is amazing. As a stage manager, I get to see that process. I may be in the heart of the production, but I can take a step back and see what directors and actors cannot sometimes. I can see the discoveries. I watch as one actor makes the discovery on his own or with the skills of the director.

Thursday will be no different. Instead of finding tear-jerking, heart-breaking moments that make life seem so beautiful as I saw in Touch and Six Years, Thursday makes me bust out laughing. Belly laughs, giggles, even cackles of laughter. The work I have seen these gentlemen do under the wise direction of Ms. Hutchinson has been hilarious (yes, sometimes I laughed so hard I cried). Not all of these hilarious moments are due to the fantastic and witty script written by Bilal Dardai, they were spontaneous and meant for rehearsal only situations. But regardless, I was witness to the hilarity, and, therefore, will be laughing when no one else is. New Leaf encourages the actors to get involved, keep discovering and play. These 10 men took the word “play” and ran with it.

So as I sit here with my box of tissues and Purel, drudging along all day in a job that pays the bills, I am itching to get to the theatre. Yes, I have lots of things to do when I get there (including wipe down the light and sound board so the designers don’t get sick) but also because I cannot wait to be in the room again with the possibilities of what they will find today. Today will be the final addition to all things tech and tonight my friends (as is the way with New Leaf) tech is where the best ideas and collaboration happens. For not only do I get to watch the actors now play, I get to watch the designers.

The Man Who Was Thursday opens tomorrow. I shall be the one in corner laughing.

G.K. Chesterton

New Leaf posed How do the stories we tell rewrite what we become? as its season question. The first play of the season is adapted from the G.K. Chesterton’s novel, The Man Who Was Thursday. This begs the question: how did Chesterton hope to rewrite the world with his novel, and how does the company hope to rewrite Chesterton in this production?

Considering Chesterton has an entry in Richard S. Levy’s encyclopedia of antisemitism, we might do well to worry about his intentions. Indeed, Chesterton is on record writing about “the Jewish problem” in Europe, about the “real England” which did not include “cringing Jews” with “bright dead alien eyes,” and that he could tolerate Jews in England only if they were “compelled to wear ‘Arab’ clothing, to show that they are an alien nation.” While Chesterton died in 1936, it is difficult to hear him demand Jews wear clothing to show their “alien” nature without thinking of Hitler’s yellow stars. But, say some of Chesterton’s devoted followers, he didn’t want Jews killed; he wrote in 1934 that “Today, although I still think there is a Jewish problem, I am appalled by the Hitlerite atrocities.” And it’s true: Chesterton didn’t support the Nazi’s solution to what he called “the Jewish problem.” In fact, he suggested a Jewish homeland as an answer and some Zionists saw him as an ally. This proposed resolution to the supposed “Jewish problem” becomes problematic when you consider that, while speaking of “the Jewish International” that is “unsympathetic” to the demands of antisemites, Chesterton writes, “I allow for your position more than most men will allow for it in the darker days that yet may come. It is utterly false to suggest that … I … desired this disaster for you and yours. I wish you no such ghastly retribution. Daniel, son of Isaac, Go in peace; but go.” Does that quote sound sympathetic (you deserve a home!), or antisemitic (get out of here!)? Some argue that Chesterton’s antisemitism was simply a product of the times; but how many people, besides extreme antisemites, wanted Jews to wear clothing marking them as such? Chesterton’s was no casual antisemitism.

But The Man Who Was Thursday was written early in Chesterton’s career (1908), and surely its farcical, dystopic espionage romp doesn’t include these 1930s politics? That’s more or less what Adam Gopnik seems to want to argue—though he can’t quite bring himself to do so—in a well-balanced biographical piece in the New Yorker. Reading the novel with Chesterton’s politics in mind, one cannot help but notice, as Gopnik does, Chesterton’s “suspicion of the alien, extreme localism, favoritism of national instinct over rational thought, distaste for ‘parasitic’ middlemen, preference for the simple folk and their ‘organ grinding’ music, and a desire for an anti-capitalist agricultural state overseen by the Church and regulated by the military. In 2009, historians and political scientists would say these beliefs sound an awful lot like Fascism, and though Chesterton would write, “I am no Fascist,” he also said in 1934 that Fascism was “in some ways a healthy reaction against the irresponsible treason of corrupt politics.” About The Man Who Was Thursday, Chesterton “claimed afterwards that he wrote this book as an unusual affirmation that goodness and right were at the heart of every aspect of the world.” It seems Chesterton was explicitly telling a story to rewrite what he became, and what he hoped England and Europe would become: a land of localism, hierarchy, and “simple folk” without any “parasitic middlemen,” which, of course, is code for Jews.

What, then, is New Leaf doing in retelling Chesterton? It is impossible to read Chesterton against the season’s question without having severe doubts about what he wanted to achieve by telling his tale; but if it is possible to put aside his prejudices, one can appreciate the quality of his prose. It is also notable that his work addresses his era’s fear of anarchists to question what measures we will take to preserve order from chaos. As Gopnik writes, “anarchism” in The Man Who Was Thursday “has the same resonance that ‘terrorism’ has… exactly a century later: it represents a kind of vengeful, all-devouring nihilism that is assumed to be pervasive and—this is the crucial thing—profoundly seductive.” Bilal Dardai’s adaptation of Chesterton’s novel is not so crude that it uses anarchism as an allegory for terrorism, but neither does it further Chesterton’s prejudices. While Chesterton showed his characters as absurd caricatures of anarchists to point the way towards authoritarianism, Dardai skillfully manages to simultaneously point out the ridiculous nature of play’s political world and the deadly consequences of not taking it seriously enough. In so doing, he chastises extremism on either side of the political spectrum. Further, he points out that anarchy is not the only seductive ideology in the play; authoritarianism is shown to be equally appealing, and, ultimately, destructive.

Dardai rewrites Chesterton for the twenty-first century, removing what’s worst about Chesterton while leaving what’s best: the wit, the surreal, and the nightmare dreamscape. And since Dardai retells the tale, he fills it with himself: the metatheatrical, the curiosity about others, and the suspicion of radical politics of any persuasion. As spectators view the play, they will fill it with themselves and retell it once again. It is only then, in conversation with audiences, that New Leaf can really begin to answer its question, How do the stories we tell rewrite what we become?

—Jacob Juntunen, Dramaturg

image by w.johnson

“Always be comic in tragedy I say.  Find the comedy in tragedy and there you shall find the truth.” – The Man Who Was Thursday

It’s been a good stretch since I’ve worked on a comedy.  There have been comic elements in my projects of late, but in The Man Who Was Thursday, I have a chance to jump inside a real farce.  The comedy in this play is so multi-faceted: from witty banter to sight gags, to a nigh-impossible chase, the jokes and reveals and reversals are a lot of fun to play with.  But it’s very different from staging drama.

When you’ve been away from pure comedy for a while, I think it’s easy to forget the kind of precision, the specificity, the meticulous ways you need to craft each moment in order for jokes to land, for the words to hit, the elbows to just past noses instead of into them.  Luckily, my casting streak is holding and I have managed to assemble a team of 10 very funny men who are doing a great deal of the funny heavy lifting.

It’s interesting to me that while working on a show like Six Years or Touch it was an important and very conscious goal to keep a positive, light-as-possible-given-the-circumstances environment in the rehearsal room.  I think there’s an assumption that working on comedy will be easy, fun, simpler somehow.  But it’s true what they say in the movies – comedy’s tough.  It requires a specific kind of focus, and different kind of ensemble, a totally different sort of trust – as does working with an ensemble of only fellas.

We’ve been finding our footing and refining our focus together for the past couple weeks – and crafting a language together that I’m eager to watch evolve – and become even more hilarious.

There is something to be said by intellectualizing your way through a piece of art, especially if you are a critic. To be able to take something, usually intangible, and pull it apart and analyze every piece down to the last detail. In theater, its all about staging, production, set, lighting, sound, setting, time period, costumes, actor types, delivery, blocking, plot devises, language, audience relationship; all things that must be specific and require definition and clarity.

The truth is, even me trying to explain this by writing it in a blog is almost going against the point, seeing as written communication is almost purely intellectual, except for the emotional meaning that you, the reader, places on each word, sentence, and idea. If only, I had a sort of body-blog, where you could simply log on at anytime and witness feelings, expression, movement, breath, sound, energy, and emotion.

At rehearsal for the Long Count, we (an ensemble of eight, and other company members) were given the task of staging a very complex and scene. A scene in which the main character would have to make her way through a maze, along the way, facing challenges. To say it sounds easy, to face a challenge or a riddle is only half of it. In life, when we solve a riddle, or crack a code, all we need to do is simply solve it, but we rarely have to encode the code, or make the riddle, which is a task that is completely taken for granted.

Since this piece is being built from basic texts, and skeleton scripts, and heavy viewpoints; exercises that I believe to be all about leaving your brain at the door and using only your subconscious, known for being impulsive and perceptive in a 360 degree heightened awareness. It is a task that, as a performer, encourages you to use the bodies and environment around you to affect you and the ideas that you have. It is on par with a flock of sparrows that seem to change direction on a dime and, with that, change leaders just as quickly. They swoop low to the ground and between buildings and all decide to land and rest in a tree together. When the decisions are made and who they are made by is usually unclear and it is almost better to think of each decision being made by the whole of the flock and by each member simultaneously at the in the same instant. The idea of a group mind. We take it step further than a group mind to a group imagination, where we, as a flock, explore the environment around us by filling and absorbing space and touching, smelling, feeling, hearing, and speaking, but also change that environment or travel to a new environment in our group imagination.

To me, viewpoints can serve as a tool just as any other, where, blocking a scene and scoring your scripts, or even doing repeat-Meisner-based exercises are tools as well. The interesting thing that I have found to come out of viewpoints, though, is that almost every time, the product of these exercises are purely human. In what is becoming a “green,” organic friendly, tree-hugging, air-cleansing culture, we are able to deliver a product (piece) that is naturally, purely, organically, human. Not only that, but it is a process all about the act of itself. Instead of “tell me what you think,” or “tell me your story,” its more of “Show me,” or “do it.” That’s the only way it can be communicated and how cool is that?

That being said, when we sat down to try and choreograph a maze full of riddles and puzzles, the first instinct was to hash it all out intellectually by planning what would happen in the maze: Why did she have to enter the maze? How would she get out of the maze? What would she learn inside? What did the maze look like? The ideas and questions were pouring out, but none of us had any concrete or unarguable answers. We may have spent nearly an hour on this process of deliberating and “yes, but..” and “Or it could…” After a while, we started to get too far inside our heads and started to conflict on ideas. We just didn’t have the answers. The group mind started to become fractured and separated, and we began breaking those subconscious connections that we had with each other in order to step into our conscious, brainstorming minds.

Finally, we reached a point where we needed to just get up and do it. How do you make a maze using nothing but bodies and imagination? How do you give up all those little brilliant ideas that you have of how it is supposed to look and function now? How do you cease control and begin to emit and receive without discrimination now?

Once we got it on our feet. We failed here and there, but only in the “well, that doesn’t work…” sort of way, and finally, within only an hour or so, the answer came to us all at the same time without a spoken word. It was something that we all wanted but never thought it would be, and may have never found any other way. To be able to find that answer with that calabur of complexity using a group consciousness is something absolutely remarkable to say the least. I have found it to be a force easily underestimated.

Alyse Kittner is a member of 

At Saturday’s rehearsal we were finally able to combine the three primary tools of acting: movement, text, and voice. These may seem like basic theatrical principles, but they can always come with the unexpected. Over the first few weeks of rehearsal there has been a strong focus on the creation of trust and intimacy (not that way) among the cast. We have crawled all over each other. Grabbed things not knowing what the “things” were until after – but then keeping hold of them because it was the only way to keep them in the air and safe. I don’t want to describe rehearsal as a big orgy – it isn’t – but the ensemble has created a closeness in a very quick manner.

But Saturday I crossed a line, rounded a base, or created a bond that will never be broken. I drooled on a fellow cast member. I did not spit, I did not have spittle as a spoke. I opened my mouth and drool fell out of it onto a cast member’s back. I guess this requires a bit of a back story…

We were exploring the way sound resonates in the room. A cast member was on his knees investigating the resonance of the tile. I see his hunched back and I say in my mind, “I wonder what resonance with another body would be like. I should walk over, crouch down by him and vocalize into his back. Great use of extreme proximity and shape. Great kinetic response, as my first impulse after seeing him was to go near him.”

I approached him. I start my “ahhhh” at a medium volume and tone. I lean down with the anticipation of having a really unique sound…and I drool. And not a little. A fair amount of drool that had built up from the length of the exercises left my mouth and dripped down onto the back of his t-shirt.

DISGUSTING!

I am mortified. I break out of the exercise and say I am sorry. He gives a wave that I can only interpret as “that’s cool – all part of the process.” What? Seriously? After knowing each other for 2 weeks we can now drool on each other? The first rehearsal we rolled around on the floor. Last week we crossed the “eat off the same sandwich” line. I guess the drool line was bound to be crossed.

After the exercise we debriefed. “What did we learn? Any questions?” I had one concrete thing I learned – when looking at the resonance of sound against a human body – always have both parties vertical.

And a big thank you to the dude who I drooled on – you are a man among men – an Actor among actors – and the most understanding person – I promise to really try to not drool on anyone else…

This concept was first introduced to me in college during my brief time as an improvisor (and a proud member of Lincoln, Nebraska’s Huge Embarrassing Failures) by Timmy Horner, who I now sometimes see on television.  We quickly learned that a strong group mind was the diference between life and death on stage.  While we spent our Sunday mornings cultivating that state of being among the Failures, it seems to be something that we as humans seek whether we’re doing it conciously or not.  When one investor ran from the 1% interest offered by the Fed, a whole herd of them followed.  When one banker made a fortune from selling CDO’s (watch the video linked above. seriously.), they all did – even the ones who were pretty sure they knew better at the time.  We are pack animals, afterall.  And we can get ourselves into a lot of trouble by following the flock.

Or – as I witnessed wide-eyed in rehearsal last Saturday – sometimes we use our group mind to build one dragon out of seven people.   Sometimes we build a forest out of them, too.  Sometimes we turn the LPCC into a musical instrument.  Sometimes we lift each other up – figuratively and literally.  Sometimes we transform the mundane into the magical.  That human brain – that group mind, man.  It’ll wow me every time.

 photo by duchamp used with Creative Commons permissions

For the last few months, we at New Leaf have been working (frantically, distractedly, doggedly) to construct this ship that is The Long Count.  We have talked through story and structure, looking for whimsy and wonder, following our instincts and our impulses.  Our only blueprint thus far has been the question: How do we build a future from a present we didn’t expect? 

Along the way, we’ve already made some difficult discoveries. We invested time and energy in story ideas that we ultimately scrapped.  We felt the push and pull of our very, very, different ways of approaching the work, learning how to voice our frustrations, how to hang on through moments of feeling lost or left out, and how to bring everyone back on to the same page.   More or less.

So far, it’s just been the seven of us working on this ship.  Until now.

Our stage manager Rebecca joined us for last week’s auditions. And now our cast is confirmed. And we start rehearsals this week. We are essentially doubling the number of people on the boat, just like that. And I could not be more excited.

Even as we meet tonight to do some last-minute clean-up before we invite our guests on board, it strikes me that the ship has started to have a voice of its own. For example: we talked all along about casting an ensemble of seven — a nice, resonant number, not too big, not too small, good stage pictures, echoes the seven company members.  So yeah, seven people.

Our audition workshops were filled with wonderful people.  Talented actors with open minds and open hearts who jumped in with both feet — I would be proud to invite any of them to work with us. But when we talked about who belonged on the ship, who needed to be on the ship, we found there were eight.  Eight people. So we invited eight, thinking that one may turn us down, and then we’d have our magical seven.   They all said yes.  So I guess The Long Count wants eight people.

As we set sail this week, I hope we can continue to listen to what the ship/show wants from us. There will be rough waters, I’m sure.  Some seasickness, at least until we get our legs under us.  Maybe even a sea serpent or a dragon!  But there will also be sunrises on the horizon, the smell of salt water, the wind at our backs.  We expect to find land in mid-April, and we do hope you’ll join us there.  In the meantime, we’ll keep sharing the adventure.