TNC Street Theater Launches Today!
22 hours ago
Thursday, September 09, 2010
linkies
- For the baby who has everything: a vampire pacifier
- A Matrix-Lebowski mashup. Just because.
- Who knew you could do THAT with a typewriter?
- What you missed on the Playa.
- Talk about everything happening for a reason. Rodney King is engaged to a woman who sat on the jury at his trial.
- The salary most likely to make you happy? 75 grand, apparently.
- I feel a new reality show coming on: the Poseidon Adventure.
- A fire tornado. I don't think you wanna know.
- Deep down, Barack Obama is an imp.
- A Hello Kitty Cthulhu tattoo. If don't know who Cthulhu is, nevermind.
- This steampunk cellphone that actually works so wants to be in a Uranium Madhouse production.
- The furniture of the future is here: roombots. George Jetson, eat your heart out.
Wednesday, September 08, 2010
end-of-the-cycle thoughts
I had been teaching for three or four years before I figured out that it was a good idea to have students "warm up" their scenes on Friends and Family Night, that is, do them once for me alone, before the guests arrived. I found that it made a huge difference for people to be able to walk through the scene once, say their lines, and remember where the furniture was. I would give some encouragement and a tiny piece of feedback, to give them a little challenge for the final presentation and keep them on their toes.
This past cycle, doing the warm-up round in both cities, I noticed that the note that I seemed to need to give time and again was "remember to connect to the need". It's a little ironic, since the whole course is about the need and how everything emanates from that, that THAT was the thing that students would forget to bring on stage with them, but there it is. In most cases, once I reminded them, they brought it the next time. But I found myself thinking about the fact that so often that was what they initially left behind.
I suppose nerves is part of it. And then there is the damned complexity of the scene. The practical complexity, such as costumes, setup, props, etc. And also the complexity of the unfolding give-and-take with the partner. The actor can get fixated on all of this complexity, and forget to see the proverbial forest for the trees. The irony is that if the need has been uncovered and rehearsal has been used well, then the need acts as an organizer of all of this complexity, if the actor just remembers to focus on it and to allow it to guide them. This is what Stanislavsky refers to as the "channel" of the scene. If the actor can allow herself to be guided by the channel, the rest will mostly take care of itself.
Tuesday, September 07, 2010
rockstar set designer Erik Flatmo joins Uranium Madhouse
California audiences know Erik Flatmo from his work at theaters like Southcoast Rep, ACT, Berkeley Repertory Theater and the California Shakespeare Festival. He is a faculty member in the theater department at Stanford University, and is an alumnus of the world-renowned design program at the Yale School of Drama. I am very pleased to announce that Erik has elected to become a member of Uranium Madhouse, the new theater company I am starting in Los Angeles. Welcome Erik!
Monday, September 06, 2010
Thursday, September 02, 2010
theater company mission statement: a work in progress
URANIUM MADHOUSE
URANIUM:
The prospect of a madman obtaining the power that this potent metal can confer has led this country into at least one war, and that same prospect threatens to involve us in another. As theater artists, we see ourselves as the custodians of spiritual uranium: through our command of our empathic and critical faculties, we have the potential to unleash chain reactions of personal and social transformation. We acknowledge the awesome responsibility this entails, and set ourselves the task of creating work that honors and harnesses this potential.
MADHOUSE:
Recognizing, at the same time, the poet's injunction that "much madness is divinest sense", we see the theater as a place for madness; that is, for passionate vitality, radical freedom from constraint, and the willingness to see what others cannot or will not. We see the actor as one who is ready to surrender her whole being to the passions, cares and extreme circumstances of another, effectively inducing a kind of madness in herself, a radioactive madness. Having entered this altered state, the actor lures her audience into temporarily abandoning their immediate personal concerns and following her into the space between habits, a centrifuge wherein new forms of life can be glimpsed. We further celebrate the destabilizing power of laughter, which can expose the rigid postures that a debased culture offers as models of fulfillment.
THEREFORE: we see both the world and the theater as a URANIUM MADHOUSE, and seek to make a home for ourselves in both. To that end, we produce plays, both contemporary and classical, that attest to the challenge and difficulty of living in such a world. We produce plays that dramatize the bombardment of the fragile, unstable isotope that is human well-being and belonging by relentless rapaciousness, aggression and cruelty. In short, we produce plays that manifest the virtue of spiritual ambition, especially in the defense of the promise of civilization.
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