Inspired to paint

Every time I visit with David Robinson, I am inspired.  When I returned from Seattle, I had to paint again.  And so I did.

Old News

Ayravana Flies, or A Pretty Dish by Sheila Callaghan, directed by David A. Miller, was a winner in the Samuel French OOBR Short Play Festival 2008 and is now published in this collection.

Gutenberg! The Musical!, directed by David A. Miller for Amphibian Stage Productions, was named Best Production of 2008 by the readers of Fort Worth Weekly.

Create Your Own Caption

“You are an Artistic Director: Select a Season” (Part I)

In my Theatre Appreciation course, I assigned three projects over the course of the semester. The first was “You are a Playwright: Write a 5 to 7 page play”. The second was “You are a Reviewer: Review a professional production”. The third was “You are an Artistic Director: Select a Season”. In addition to selecting a 5 play season (which included certain parameters such as cast a “star” in one of the shows, one should be a musical, one should be a Theatre for Young Audiences play, etc), students were asked to name their theater, their season and define the demographics of their company’s audience. There were many highlights. One of the interesting play combinations was this season:

1. The Persians
2. Timon of Athens
3. Orestes
4. Agammemnon
5. Jersey Boys

George & Martha like you’ve never seen them

Thanks to Frank’s Wild Lunch for this.

River Rise & other music that I love and have attached to theatrical memories

There are a tremendous number of musicians whose work I love, truly love.  And there are a tremendous number of playwrights whose work I love, truly love. And I love when they come together in sound design for a theatrical production.

I think of this today because while listening to a “party shuffle” (though the party is me, working), “River Rise” by Mark Lanegan plays and I am transported to “The Trestle at Pope Lick Creek” by Naomi Wallace, a play that I directed while at Rutgers. After a search for authentic Depression era music I found that there was a dated sound that was not always right for the very contemporary, immediate resonances of the play in production. I rediscovered Mark Lanegan’s music, formerly of the Screaming Trees, as contemporary but so very rooted in the same music I was listening to from the 1930s (such as Ralph Stanley).

The turntable of Theatre Appreciation

It is the first day of my classes at Wagner. I am pleased to already be in conversation with my Theatre Appreciation class that will lead to the article “What Can’t Theatre Be More Like Hockey?”

We visited the stage to explore the question, “What is theatre?” and saw the stage-in-progress for Three Penny Opera. The stage is bare save for a turntable that covers 3/4 of the stage.

Every time I see a turntable, I think, “That’s going to be a problem in tech.”

All You Can Eat Sports

I am pretty fascinated with the idea of “All You Can Eat” sections at professional sporting events in the US.  I add “in the US” because it certainly seems oh-so-American to watch a game and indulge in as many nachos, dogs and popcorn as possible.  It seems to give the 7^th inning stretch a whole new resonance.   

 

In an article on the topic from one of the writers at Inside Hockey, I enjoyed learning more about another aspect of the history of all you can eat sports:

“One of the things you won’t see in any of these ‘All You Can Eat’ sections is alcohol. Not just because arenas understand that selling watered down Budweiser for seven bucks is consumer fraud at its finest, but because sports has already taken dangerous drive down the road of inebriation before.

 

The most dubious example came in 1974 when the Cleveland Indians decided to hold a ten-cent beer night, a game which ended with riot police on the field and an Indians forfeit. When the team decided to continue the idea later in the season, they put a limit on how many beers could be purchased, four per person. And when American League president Lee McPhail was asked about it, he said, “There was no question that beer played a part in the riot.””

 

Full article: Eating a Way of Luxury | INSIDE HOCKEY | Atlanta Thrashers

Wisdom from Bucky

“The greater the anger,
The greater the susceptibility
To further propaganda -
A cancerous hate growth.”

- R. Buckminster Fuller, No More Secondhand God

Party Shuffle: Sound Design style

I wonder if others have this experience as well: Because I am a theater artist who has often had the need to find sound effects for plays, sprinkled through my iTunes library are sound effects. When I select Party Shuffle many of these sound effects play, sometimes much to my surprise… The recent Party Shuffle tracks included

The The
The Smiths
Rufus Wainwright
“Audience cheering”
KT Tunstall
Brian Eno/David Byrne
and
“Dentist Water Drill”