Tuesday, November 28, 2006

The Creche Collector Design by Kent Landrum The Christmas Musical at the Northwest Church is not really a musical this year, though everyone keeps referring to it that way. I wrote about 10 different starts to songs just to see if I could get musical juices flowing, but in the end, we decided to do a straight play with some choral music surrounding it. The synopsis runs like this: When Will Callus, a seventeen-year-old foster child brings his crèche collection to the Leffermann home, Cole Davis, a cynical newspaperman with a weakness for a good story, gets curious about Will's past. As the Leffermanns and their small church community prepare for another Living Nativity, Cole traces the mystery of this young boy's obsession with Christ's birth through a menagerie of offbeat characters, and in the process finds what both he and Will have been searching for all along. A couple of rewrites later, that's the basic idea, but things have changed a bit. And as I tell them everyday, the play needs one more major rewrite, but we're out of time. So hopefully, I'll revisit it and get it right after the first of the year. But I've said that before... Rehearsals have been a real joy. I've been working with these actors for several years now, and we are starting to see great improvement in the ability to speak and play action. The set design has created a bit of a stir just because it's a thrust stage that takes up a huge amount of room, costing us chairs in the audience, but in the end, the relationship between actor and audience is going to be pretty magical because of the space. We run December 7, 8, and 9, with both a matinee and an evening performance on the 9th. Evening performances are at 7:30, and the Saturday Matinee is at 2:00. Come if you can, but get there early, because seating is going to be somewhat limited. The Northwest Church 15555 15th Ave NE. Shoreline, WA I think it will be worth your time. 8:22:01 AM    comment []

Tuesday, October 24, 2006

Doubt II "Doubt": Heather Goldenhersh, left, as Sister James and Cherry Jones as Sister Aloysius. From the New York Production. Photo by Joan Marcus The play itself was brilliant. As a playwright, to see each scene so clearly and passionately drawn, with clear, high stakes, conflicts straight-forward and deeply rooted in character, is to get a clinic in the craft. John Patrick Shanley says he started with a title: Doubt. In a play about the virtues of doubt, there must be its opposite, namely certainty. Sister Aloysius, played at Seattle Rep by Candice Chappell, is certainty personified. As head of a Catholic school, she is sure of her fierce and rigid character, as well as the necessity of it. She rails at Sister James (Melissa D. Brown), a sensitive young teacher who obviously, according to Sister Aloysius, coddles her charges far too much. When Sister Aloysius begins to suspect that the local priest, Father Flynn (Corey Brill), is sexually abusing one of the boys, she quickly becomes certain of his guilt and swears to use every inch of her power to run him out of the parish. To her credit, there seems to be little doubt (ha!) that Sister Aloysius' primary motivation is the protection of the children in the school. She is not out to get Father Flynn for personal, vindictive reasons, although she explicitly understands that the patriarichal nature of her world will stand against her when she makes her accusations. But after she bolsters her case against Father Flynn with the flimsiest of circumstantial evidence, her own conviction, and the reaction of Father Flynn to a lie Sister Aloysius concocts to trap him, she finally comes to see the flaws in her own fundamental certainty. The play ends with Sister Aloysius bending in pain at the flood of doubt that is finally assailing her. The brilliance of the play is that Shanley leaves the audience just where the characters are: wanting to know whether or Father Flynn is guilty. And of course, Shanley doesn't tell us. With the sex scandals of recent years coming to light, it is easy to want to lump Father Flynn in with the guilty, but Shanley doesn't give us enough hard evidence to know. And here's the point: the uncertainty that tortures us as we seek justice for these wronged boys is what makes us human. Shanley is arguing that it is our doubt that brings us together. Certainty divides. It seems obvious that the religious wars of history tell us that plainly. We know it even in our own small circumstances. Shanley wants us to see that in acknowledging our doubt, by giving it voice, by making our decisions with doubt plainly in sight, we join the human race in humility. As Father Flynn says in the play (and I'm paraphrasing here), "When you doubt, you are not alone." I left the theatre feeling better than I had when I entered it. It's not that I like my doubts...I'd gladly give them up to know evidentially of all I hope for. But there is a reality in voicing our doubts and misgivings. How the faith to move mountains and the doubt that keeps us humble intersect in our souls is a mystery to me, but in my doubt, I suppose God understands. What do we do with Jamesm who says, "...he who doubts is like a wave of the sea, blown and tossed by the wind..." 8:14:11 AM    comment []

Monday, October 23, 2006

Doubt Kandiss Chappell and Corey Brill in Seattle Repertory Theatre's Doubt, from the Seattle Weekly's Review This past Saturday night, Anjie and I were fortunate to see Seattle Repertory Theatre's closing night performance of John Patrick Shanley's Doubt. Doubt, which was running in New York when Daniel and I were there last year, won the 2005 Pulitzer Prize for Best Drama, and no wonder. Shanley, best known in pop culture as the writer of the film Moonstruck, wrote one of my favorite plays, a short romantic piece exploring teenage romance called The Red Coat. I knew Doubt would be good, but it's elegance and power caught me by surprise. Going to Seattle Rep usually gives me a case of the regrets because of my short stint there in 1984. My resignation from an internship in artistic direction there was a turning point in my life, and not necessarily a good one. It was the foolish act of a young man who knew little about the world of professional theatre, and even less about the difficulty of mixing faith and art. As a result, the times I've been to the Rep since have always been laced with notalgia and thoughts of what might have been. Needless to say, this is not helpful when wanting to engage a play. But Shanley's Doubt blew past all of that. When I first sat down, I read his essay-- "Embracing Doubt"--in the front of the program, a piece which apparently he wrote for the LA Times. I'd hoped to find the essay and link to it, but it doesn't appear to be online. For reasons that were clear to me, the essay spoke some healing into me even before the curtain went up. "We are living in a culture of extreme advocacy, of confrontation, of judgment, and of verdict. Discussion has given way to debate. Communication has become a contest of wills. Public talking has become obnoxious and insincere. Why? Maybe it's because deep down under the chatter we have come to a place where we know that we don't know...anything. But nobody's willing to say that." The way I've put it in conversations is that public discourse these days is all about power and not illumination. Shanley's assessment resonated immediately. The rest of the essay is making a case for the good of doubt. And he is not talking a small dose of it--Shanley's doubt is the soul-rattling kind. "It is Doubt (so often experienced initially as weakness) that changes things. When a man feels unsteady, when he falters, when hard-won knowledge evaporates before his eyes, he's on the verge of growth. The subtle or violent reconciliation of the outer person and the inner core often seems at first like a mistake, like you've gone the wrong way and you're lost. But this is just emotion longing for the familiar. Life happens when the tectonic power of your speechless soul breaks through the dead habits of the mind. Doubt is nothing less than an opportunity to reenter the Present." Then finally: "Doubt requires more courage than conviction does, and more energy; because conviction is a resting place and doubt is infinite--it is a passionate exercise. You may come out of my play uncertain. You may want to be sure. Look down on that feeling. We've got to learn to live with a full measure of uncertainty. There is no last word. That's the silence under the chatter of our time." While I can't subscribe to the "no last word" theory, Shanley's belief that doubt is a humanizing force, creating humility and the possiblity for true diverse community, is a welcome idea. I could breathe easier as I settled in for the opening of the play, knowing that perhaps these are days of growth, as hard as they are. Tomorrow, the play... 7:45:10 AM    comment []

Friday, October 6, 2006

Hell House in New York Here's a bit of irony: a secular theatre company in New York has bought the rights, or the "kit" to produce a version of "Hell House" for the New York theatre going audience. "Hell House" is the evangelical Halloween show that depicts various sins and their consequences in graphic "scare-the-devil-out-of-you" style. The NY Times article (The Road to Hell (and Maybe Heaven) Detours Through Brooklyn) outlines the obvious ironies involved in the Les Freres Corbusier's Artistic Director's desire to critique evangelicalism by sincerely producing one of that world's more popular propaganda pieces. How strange it must be to produce a play, or what might be more properly called a theatre experience, in faithful representation of the author's wishes, in order to get a result exactly opposite of what the writer intended. I love this phrase the writer uses..."a truly gymnastic display of irony." Postmodern indeed 12:49:03 PM    comment []

Thursday, March 30, 2006

Voice of the Prairie Review Looks like the Seattle Times liked the show. Read the review here. 8:58:38 AM    comment []

Wednesday, March 22, 2006

Voice of the Prairie Timothy Hornor and Marianne Savell play Davey & Frankie in The Voice of the Prairie by John Olive. Photo by Erik Stuhaug. Taproot Theatre's Voice of the Prairie has its first preview audience tonight, and from the response we got last night at the invited dress, I think the play is going to make a lot of people happy. Hat's off to my fellow actors in the play, Tim Horner and Marianne Savell, both of them funny, witty, and wonderful actors. We open Friday night (March 24) and run until April 22nd. Come catch this wise little play if you can. We all play multiple characters, which is an exercise I'm not all that used to, but watching Tim and Marianne go through their various transformations is tremendous fun. The play cuts back and forth between the years 1895 and 1923, following the exploits of a New York huckster and a midwestern storyteller as they introduce radio to the rural folks of the great plains. Should be fun... 1:39:14 PM    comment []

Friday, October 14, 2005

The Grapes of Wrath The Joads in the Intiman Theatre production of The Grapes of Wrath Photo by Laura Morton, Seattle Times John Steinbeck's story of the Joad family's journey to California at the height of the America's Great Depression continues to speak. Last night, watching the Intiman Theatre's latest production of The Grapes of Wrath, the second installment of its multi-year "American Cycle", I couldn't help but think of the millions of displaced people currently on the move across the planet. Normally such displacement happens elsewhere, and we are accustomed to seeing new reports and images detailing third world migrations. But the play at Intiman especially resonates given the recent tragedies of Katrina and Rita, which help frame our response to the earthquake in India and Pakistan. It is with some hanging of the head that I confess I've never read Steinbeck's classic, nor have I seen the classic film with Henry Fonda. So my first encounter with the Joads was in a videotaped presentation of Steppenwolf Theatre's award-winning production of this play, with Gary Sinise in the role of Tom. I was transfixed and moved, and at the end of the play, I was absolutely shattered by the final image, which, I suppose, I should not reveal, fearing to spoil the experience for others. But be warned, I have to talk about it. Women are powerful creatures, strong to the point of death, and Ma Joad (beautifully played in the Intiman production by Beth Dixon) carries the Joad family across the mountains and desert on her emotional back, withstanding blow after blow, loss after loss, vowing repeatedly to simply "go on." The men of the play may do the leading and the fighting and the heavy lifting, but it's the women who provide the ground on which these men walk, the food of their lives. Ma Joad literally sits with death, craddling Grandma in the back of the truck as they finally cross down out of the mountains to gain their first view of the great valleys of California at the end of Act One. I knew these kind of southern women, these powerful women who lived up through the depression and hung on as best they could. Ma and Pa Joad could have easily been my grandparents on my mother's side, Pawpaw and Maamaw we called them. Pawpaw was a fighter, a grizzled old soul with a heart that had a hard time making itself known, a complex sort of man who, now looking back, completely confounded me. But he was one of the ones wandering around, trying, in the 30's, to piece together a life of sharecropping and whatever hard labor he could find. And Maamaw was a quieter version of Ma Joad, not dominant in the same way, but with an undercurrent of presence that spoke of hard times lived through. Maybe I'm romanticizing, but I think not, because the truth is--and here is not the place to belabor this--our relationships, at least in my mind, were difficult. But I think this is one of the reasons I love this play so much[sigma]it reminds me of my family, and the potential, in spite of our losses, to grow on. And to the final devastating image of the play: the young Rose of Sharon, after having traveled 2000 miles to end up in a boxcar in a driving rainstorm, a nearby river threatening to overrun its banks even as she is going into labor, now abandoned by her husband, having just given birth to a stillborn child, manages to limp into a barn on higher ground (at the prompting and goading of Ma Joad), and there, having found a man on the brink of starvation, offers the milk of her own breast to keep this man from death. On the deep stage of the Intiman, with the sounds of trickling rain beating on the stage, the image of the wracked woman offering her life's milk to the weak and dying man is almost more than the heart can bear. It is an image that captures the play: the devastating results of man's inhumanity to man, as well as the core strength of a human being to dig into the unknown source of the soul (unknown in Steinbeck's world, at least) to offer its very self. Woman and Man, tied together in a primal image of God, who has poured just such hope and love into our hearts... This is life... 9:02:24 AM    comment []

© Copyright 2006 Jeff Berryman .