Tag Archives: theatre

Participatory Culture, Theatre

The Inspiring (re)Works of Charles (Chuck) Mee

I was going through some past notes in my Gtasks list and came across one that simply said: Charles [sic] mee

Googling his name again, I was quickly reminded about this amazing playwright and artist.

Taken from Charles’ web site:

Please feel free to take the plays from this website and use them freely as a resource for your own work: that is to say, don’t just make some cuts or rewrite a few passages or re-arrange them or put in a few texts that you like better, but pillage the plays as I have pillaged the structures and contents of the plays of Euripides and Brecht and stuff out of Soap Opera Digest and the evening news and the internet, and build your own, entirely new, piece—and then, please, put your own name to the work that results.

Artists, especially writers, forget that they are not creating in a vacuum; creating worlds, characters, and textures from the impressions their reality has set upon them.

A curry of humanity is expressed in every work of art.  The enjoyment is in how the particular chef prepares the ingredients.

His views on casting the works are also inspiring, encouraging us to challenge our view of the world.

I am an old crippled white guy in love with a young Japanese-Canadian-American woman, and we talk about race and age and polio and disability, but race and disability do not consume our lives. Most of our lives are taken up with love and children and mortality and politics and literature—just like anyone else.

My plays don’t take race and disability as their subject matter. Other plays do, and I think that is a good and necessary thing, and I hope many plays will be written and produced that deal directly with these issues.

Charles is an accomplished individual who has given his art to the world.

Taken from Wikipedia:

Among other awards, Charles Mee is the recipient of a lifetime achievement award in drama from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, two OBIE Awards (Vienna: Lusthaus (1986) andBig Love (2002)), PEN/Laura Pels Foundation Award for Drama for a playwright in mid-career, and the Fisher Award given by the Brooklyn Academy of Music.

Thank you, Chuck.  For creating art that is accessible.  On a multitude of levels.  Cheers!

Theatre

Who are you America? – Modern Monologues

The Internet is amazing.  We all know that.  In one of my recent meanderings, I came across a series of 50 monologues commissioned by Center Stage in Baltimore, Maryland. Being a recent transplant, Kwame Kwei-Armah, along with his team, asked the question “Who are you America?”

I was happy to see that Greg Allen of the Neo-Futurists was selected as one of the 50 leading playwrights. His piece is a lovely dance through the connected, tangental consciousness of the American fabric.

I have since watched dozens of others. Some hit very well and resonate strongly, others seem to fall flat. Obviously, this project is not immune from subjectivity. Regardless, a very fascinating study in writing, directing, acting, filming, and editing.

I recommend the consumption. Here’s a link to another, titled “one evening on the #14 bus“. It was written by Christina Anderson and performed by Pascale Armand.

Who hasn’t ridden a bus and experienced a similar situation of desperation and disconnect?

Education, Resources, Theatre

Meet the New York Neo-Futurists. // Hello Neo-Futurism.

In surfing the Internet today, I came across this lovely video showcasing what is one of the more rewarding experimental theatre groups in the country, the New York chapter of the Neo-Futurists.

From time to time, TDF Stages will highlight exciting Off and Off-Off Broadway theatre companies with exclusive “getting to know you” videos. Today, we’re featuring New York Neo-Futurists, who create 30 plays a week and want you to join in the creative explosion. This video features interviews with nine (!) current Neo-Futurists.

The company’s signature show, Too Much Light Makes the Baby Go Blind: 30 Plays in 60 Minutes, runs almost every weekend of the year.

I have not seen the New York Neo-Futurists in person, but I have consumed numerous official and bootleg recordings of their shows online. I have, however, enjoyed several shows of the Neo-Futurists located in Chicago. In the continuing appeal and expansion of this theatrical vocabulary, a San Francisco chapter opened late last year. I cannot wait to start seeing some theatre from the compnay.

The theatrical aesthetic of Neo-Futurism is informed by the original Futurists, who describe their intentions in the violent language contained within the Futurists Synthetic Theatre written by f.t. marinetti, emilio settimelli, bruno corra.  The Neo-Futurists, however, abstain from fascism.

A few quotes pulled from the manifesto:

Synthetic. That is, very brief. To compress into a few minutes, into a few words and gestures, innumerable situations, sensibilities, ideas, sensations, facts, and symbols. The writers who wanted to renew the theatre (Ibsen, Maeterlinck, Andreyev, Claudel, Shaw) never thought of arriving at a true synthesis, of freeing themselves from a technique that involves prolixity, meticulous analysis, drawn-out preparation.
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1. It’s stupid to write one hundred pages where one would do, only because the audience through habit and infantile instinct wants to see character in a play result from a series of events, wants to fool itself into thinking that the character really exists in order to admire the beauties of Art, meanwhile refusing to acknowledge any art if the author limits himself to sketching out a few of the character’s traits.
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3. It’s stupid to pander to the primitivism of the crowd, which, in the last analysis, wants to see the bad guy lose and the good guy win.
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7. It’s stupid to allow one’s talent to be burdened with the weight of a technique that anyone (even imbeciles) can acquire by study, practice, and patience.

Greg Allen, who started the Chicago company in 1988, has some wonderful essays about the subject on his and the neofuturists.org web sites.

If you are in Chicago, New York, or San Francisco, take a risk of rolling the dice and see a show.  There’s always something for everyone on the menu.