Thursday, December 09, 2010
BOOYEAH!!: Uranium Madhouse Gets A Fiscal Sponsor
Here is a full list of benefits that Fractured Atlas provides:
- Online donations by credit card (up to $5,000 per transaction) with no additional fee for credit card processing
- Donors can make automatic recurring monthly credit card donations
- We can accept and process non-cash donations of equipment and materials
- Create dynamic fundraising campaigns, including through integration with cutting-edge crowdsourcing platforms like IndieGoGo.
- Fund release checks are issued weekly or through ACH (electronic fund transfer) at the sponsored artist's request
- Complete set of online tools for managing your sponsored fund (check your fund balance, view donation and fund release history, look up donor contact information, process new donations, etc.)
- Access to a variety of fundraising templates
- Online profile and website link featured on our website
- Program is structured to ensure that you should never owe any taxes on money we disburse. Funds are disbursed only when you have project-related expenses, which ensures that any "income" from the fiscal sponsorship will be 100% offset by deductible expenses.
- Access to Volunteermatch, Materials for the Arts, the TDF Costume Collection, nonprofit rates and sales tax exemption in the State of New York
- Subsidized fundraising assistance is available for research assistance, grant applications, individual campaigns, events etc.
- Fractured Atlas staff is friendly, helpful, and knowledgeable — a great ally as you pursue your work!
It's a beautiful thing! I'll say it again:
YYYYYYYYYEEEEEEEEAAAAAAAAHHRRRRRGHHHHHHH!
Uranium Madhouse Associate Artist: David Bauman
David Bauman is an actor, writer, and teacher in Los Angeles. Originally from Wisconsin, he received his B.A. in Theater and Advertising from the University of Wisconsin, and his M.F.A from U.C.L.A. In Los Angeles Bauman has worked with the Will Geer Theatricum Botanicum, Evidence Room Theater, Buzzworks Theater, The Blank, Theater Company's Young Playwrights' Festival and Living Room Series, and Sacred Fools, in classic and contemporary productions. Bauman has taught acting at UCLA, StageCoach School at CrossRoads, YADA (The Youth Academy of Dramatic Arts) in Los Angeles, and is currently a member of the faculty at Idyllwild Arts Summer Conservatory, where he has been writing and directing original and adapted works for more than ten years, including his adaptation of Heinrich Hoffman's Shockheaded Peter, The Red-Legged Scissorman, his musical adaptation of A League of Their Own, and his original musicals Down the Block, and The Scrugg Sisters. Bauman is currently preoccupied with the group SomeComedyThing, creating short films and webisodes.
Catch David in the hilarious holiday bacchanal Bob's Holiday Office Party.
And check out David's recent writing and directing work with a comedy troupe he works with (it comes after the commercial):
Dumpster Baby - watch more funny videos
Welcome David!
Wednesday, December 08, 2010
Tuesday, December 07, 2010
on serving two masters
Wow.
But it is Jacobi's Lear that drives the production. And what is truly astonishing is the way he combines Lear's spiritual trajectory from blind arrogance to impotent wisdom with a sense of the character's tumultuous contradictions. Even the rubicund features and close-cropped white hair suggest a mix of military autocrat and merry patriarch. And, having entered genially cuddling his adored Cordelia, Jacobi quickly unleashes a monumental fury. That's in the text. But what strikes one is the disproportionate nature of the rage. When Jacobi threatens Goneril by saying, of her sister Regan, that "with her nails she'll flay thy wolvish visage", he pictures the scene with vindictive savagery.
Jacobi's special quality, however, has always been his ability to forge a bond of sympathy with the audience: one thinks of his Cyrano, Peer Gynt or Philip II...It is a tremendous Lear, to be ranked with those of Paul Scofield and John Wood.
That's from the Guardian's review of the production of King Lear currently running at the Donmar Warehouse in London, starring Derek Jacobi. Read the whole review. And this show is coming to New York!
The Guardian was not so kind to the recent Wooster Group show, Vieux Carre, that visited London:
Played boldly but unsympathetically by the six-strong cast, they never transcend their status as standard-issue deadbeats. Their stories may have lit a flame in Williams, but they only smoulder here.
This show is currently playing in Los Angeles. As big a fan as I am of the Wooster Group, I won't be going. I'm currently engaged in my own personal financial austerity program, and $55 theater tickets don't belong to it. However, I have been following the press about it with interest. Variety agreed with the Guardian critic, only denounced the acting more emphatically:
whereas Tom in Gordon Edelstein's stunning Taper "Glass Menagerie" was emotionally invested in the events he both lived and scribed, this guy is in a dreamy absinthe haze, a cut-rate Baudelaire spouting inchoate imagery amped up by the microphone attached to his jock. Bits of text are hazily projected against the rear wall, though inconsistently and sometimes rapid-fire, suggesting the production can't really be bothered with anything the man has to say.
In spite of my fondness for the Wooster Group, I cannot say I am surprised by these pronouncements. My first Wooster Group show was Brace-up!, the Group's scrambled rendition of Three Sisters. It was astounding, for all the reasons their shows usually are, but it revolved around Ron Vawter, who played Vershinin. Vawter is one of the greatest actors I have ever seen. Sadly, he passed away from AIDS in the nineties.
I have always found the acting of the rest of the company to be serviceable at best, and pushed at worst. Kate Valk was delightful as the narrator in Brace-up!, but her Emperor Jones was all flash and no smash. She could do the blackface dialect perfectly, but we got none of the sense of midnight-hour desperation that is the play's subject. Willem Dafoe in North Atlantic initially shone, but as the evening wore on, he became noisome. Bottom line: I think LeCompte the company's director, understands the cool side of acting perfectly. The hot side? Not so much.
This places me, a bit, on the horns of a dilemma. I love the coolness of the Wooster Group, and if I could bring even a modicum of that kind of dash to my work as a director, I would be infinitely grateful. Maybe someday I will. But I serve another god in addition to the god of cool, and that is the god of heat. I want acting to be impassioned, truthful and compelling. In my experience, it is fairly rare to come across the kind of cerebral sophistication and attitude of playfulness towards the theatrical apparatus, usually a staple of what we might call good "director's theater", AND the kind of acting I describe.
But bringing those two values together is what I hope to do with Uranium Madhouse. I want to bring a strong directorial imagination and sense of possibility together with the aesthetic of acting that I acquired from the master teachers I worked with at Yale and have continued to refine and deepen over my six years of teaching acting. Doing the first depends on my ability to challenge myself to recognize my own assumptions about theater and interrogate them on an ongoing basis, and the second depends on extreme judiciousness in selecting actors to work with, and conducting the work with them in such a way that simultaneously challenges and nurtures them.
Tall order. But then again, I'm feeling pretty tall these days. Stay tuned.
Uranium Madhouse gets a Managing Director
Combining a passion for theater with experience in contract administration and entertainment business affairs, Yolanda Seabourne brings to Uranium Madhouse two distinct sides in a single, integrated personality. Formerly with the Business and Legal Affairs Department at Vin Di Bona Productions, Yolanda's business side assisted in launching the licensing division for one of primetime's longest running entertainment programs. As Director of Licensing for FishBowl Worldwide Media, Yolanda is responsible for licensing and strategic repurposing of television's largest library of user- generated content for use across various platforms, including feature films, national commercials and new media. Yolanda's actor side has appeared in productions of Hay Fever, The Chairs, The Bald Soprano, Nero Fiddles, The Tinker's Wedding and The House of Bernarda Alba. Yolanda is a graduate of the Theater Arts program at California State University, Fullerton and currently studies with Andrew Utter at The Mother of Invention Acting School. Yolanda's two sides peacefully coexist in a 101-year old house in the Echo Park section of Los Angeles.
Welcome Yolanda! To quote Howard Dean: YYYYYYYYYEEEEEEEEAAAAAAAAHHRRRRRGHHHHHHH!
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