Adapted & Directed by Ian W. Hill
Produced by Gemini CollisionWorks
Nominated for: Outstanding Performance Art Production
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Photo by Mark Veltman
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About the Production
A paranoid rant? A schizophrenic’s tragic delusion? An internet troll’s computer-generated word salad? An underground history of the battle between pop culture and the military-industrial complex? All of the above? Nord Hausen Fly Robot is an investigation by Gemini CollisionWorks into a 55-page anonymous online comment left on a political website that first seems nothing more than an incomprehensible tirade, but on repeated examination suggests a poetic summary of US History post-WWII from a marginalized voice.
Artistic Director Ian W. Hill talks about tackling this stream-of-consciousness offering and finding the beauty in it.
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What attracted you to this project?
Ian: I was obsessed with the original anonymous text found online, and I believed that the time and place were right for it to be shared with the world in this form.
What was your favorite part of this production?
Ian: The close collaboration with an exceptional group of actors who were willing to trust in a very singular and often inexplicable vision for the piece, and not afraid to work very hard to polish a rough stone into multifaceted, gleaming clarity.
What was the most challenging aspect of this production?
Ian: Delving into the words of a mentally-ill person, and pulling from their beauty and pain a pure theatrical experience.
What is the strangest thing that happened during this production?
Ian: There are almost too many strange things to mention -- the cast and crew still speak to each other in a shorthand of phrases from the text that will have no meaning to anyone who didn't spend months working on it. Our own in-joke patois.
What did you want the audience to walk away with after watching Nord Hausen...?
Ian: A combined sense of despair and hope at the past present and future of our country -- a sense that things have gone horribly wrong, but there is still beauty, and ideals, and people who care, even in the midst of madness.
What was it like working with this company of artists?
Ian: We made a remarkable piece of theater out of a madman's beautiful but difficult online rant, and continued our quest to make theater that is both basically indefinable/indescribable except by the production itself, and deeply satisfying to audiences of all kinds.
You can follow Gemini Collision Works on Twitter - @geminicollision
Written by Ayun Halliday
Directed by Jean-Michele Gregory
Produced by Gemini CollisionWorks
Nominated for: Outstanding Original Short Script, Ayun Halliday
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Photo by Schecter Lee
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About the Production
“An agrarian, post-digital settlement of middle-aged women and teenage boys fixate on the fruits of their garden and unexpected encounters with wildlife as catastrophes both natural and manmade lay waste to the surrounding communities. The script is entirely composed of social media posts and comments re-contextualized into a meditation on calamity and grief, as poetic as it is funny and weird.
Farming. Fawns. Food. Doom. Like. Like. Heart emoticon. Like.”
Playwright Ayun Halliday and Gemini CollisionWorks Artistic Director, Ian W. Hill talk about this intriguing work that provides a new perspective to our usage of social media.
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What attracted you this idea?
Ayun: Some friends and I - including Fawnbook cast members Nick Balaban and Marjorie Duffield - were getting together weekly to fool around with improv. One day, we agreed to bring interesting social media posts to our next rehearsal, just to see where they would lead. One guy brought in something about a woman finding a newborn fawn in her suburban backyard. The outpouring of over-the-top love and support she received in response was really quite astonishing, especially when tempered with the occasional sour comment on order of “Good work, now that you’ve touched it, the mother will reject it.” When we put it on its feet, we started gravitating to this weird, agrarian settlement in which everyone was constantly working, hoeing and washing clothes by hand in a river - a Little House on the Prairie type of situation that predated social media. I was smitten. Eventually, I gained their permission to develop it into a script, prowling around Facebook for the dialogue, and transferring the time period to a dystopian near future.
Ian: I have had a long-time admiration for Ayun Halliday and her work. I really wanted to produce -- for the first time -- something through Gemini CollisionWorks that was not actually created by the company itself. I also thought the piece would bring teenage actors and audience to The Brick.
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Photo by Schecter Lee
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What was your favorite part of working on this production?
Ayun: Hearing the platitudes and self-aggrandizement of social media spoken aloud with ritual seriousness by members of our strange little post-digital, pre-apocalyptic community. It was also very gratifying to hear the audience's horrified response to certain highly recognizable tropes... like when the community dismissed an earthquake survivor whose entire world has just been destroyed with a cheerful, "Hugs!"
Ian: Having a group of newcomers work with our company and with The Brick, especially a group including teenagers -- who brought plenty of their friends in to see the show.
What was the biggest challenge of working on this production?
Ayun: Schlepping rakes, buckets, a record player and a giant cart of shredded brown fabric dirt back and forth to our various donated and low cost rehearsal spaces...on the subway. The lion's share of our prop budget went toward the purchase of cucumbers and carrots ... which I, author, performer, publicist and prop mistress was always forgetting to replenish, though I did become quite friendly with the guy who operated the vegetable cart outside my local Trader Joe's.
Ian: Balancing it in repertory with the in-house CollisionWorks play, which was something we're not used to, as we usually take over The Brick ourselves entirely for the weeks of our season every year.
What was the oddest part of the production for you?
Ayun: There were a number of things that really made this experience unique. We hosted a Fawnbook sketch night, where audience members were invited to live-draw the performance. One of those sketches has a place of honor in my living room.
The role of the little fawngirl who appears for 45 seconds at the end of the play was shared by five young actresses - just like Matilda! (There were at least three who would've happily performed every single night, but we mixed it up to make things a little easier on their parent chaperones.
My father died right before we opened - the flurry of emotional support on my Facebook wall softened my opinion of social media condolences somewhat.
Many audience members reported that Fawnbook changed the way they communicate on social media...a couple of them went so far as to pull the plug on their Facebook accounts for good!
Ian: The huge amount of people it brought to The Brick who had never been there before, for a great deal of a near sell-out run.
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Photo by Schecter Lee
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What was it like working with this company?
Ayun: The mix of generations - three middle-aged women and three teenage boys working as equals was very inspiring. Each group inspired the other to a high degree of accountability. There was no slagging, no moping around at rehearsals.
We also had the world's most energetic and cheerful stage manager in Thomas Pflanz. He'd greet you with a hug and then dash out in the rain to pick up whatever vegetable prop we'd forgotten to replenish for that evening's performance.
What did you want the audience to come away with after watching Fawnbook?
Ian: A sense of beauty and fragility and community. With some bittersweet laughs.
What was it like working with Ayun Halliday?
Ian: Ayun Halliday is an amazing writer/performer who has been away from the stage for too long as she's focused on her zine, book, and online writing (and raising her kids). She was an outstanding and founding member of the Neo-Futurists (originally in Chicago, then NYC)
You can follow these artists on Twitter
Gemini CollisionWorks - @Geminicollision
Ayun Hallidy - @AyunHalliday
Written by Brian Parks
Directed by Ian W. Hill
Produced by Gemini CollisionWorks
Nominated for: Outstanding Original Music, Anna Stefanic; Outstanding Innovative Design, Berit Johnson; Outstanding Actor in a Lead Role, Fred Backus; Outstanding Sound Design, Ian W. Hill; Outstanding Costume Design, Kaitlyn Elizabeth Day; Outstanding Actor in a Featured Role, Timothy McCown Reynolds; and Outstanding Ensemble: Fred Backus, Broderick Ballantyne, Rebecca Gray Davis, Lex Friedman, Ian W. Hill, Bob Laine, Matthew Napoli, Timothy McCown Reynolds, Alyssa Simon, Anna Stefanic
About the Production
As their name may suggest, Gemini CollisionWorks “examines the world and the mind through collisions of unlikely ideas, media, art forms and techniques.” Such is the case with their production of The Golfer. This absurd comedy follows a golfer who is struck by lightning through the surreal world that he is thrust into as a result of the trama.
Director & designer Ian W. Hill, Costume Designer, Kaitlyn Day, and ensemble members: Anna Stefanic, Bob Laine, Fred Backus, Broderick Ballantyne, Rebecca Gray Davis, Lex Friedman and Timothy McCown Reynolds talk about working on this crazy, mad-cap, break-neck production.
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What attracted you to this production?
Anna: I was excited about this production because I've worked on a few of Ian's shows, and they're always a lot of fun, and I'd heard great things about Brian Parks from another company I'd recently worked with!
Bob: I have worked with Ian several times, and remember the author's plays from back in the Toda Con Nada days-- loved them then and loved his newest....plus working with many of my good friends who are also in the cast was a plus!
Broderick: This show was completely zany and quirky.
Fred: I've been a fan of Brian Parks since seeing his work at the old Present Company Theatorium back in the 90s, so I was thrilled to get an opportunity to finally work on one of his plays, and particularly at the Brick. The Brink was founded by so many groups that got washed up there from the Theatorium and the Lower East Side scene. In some ways Brian Parks' work feels like the artistic forerunner to the Brick Theater in terms of style. Working on his play at the Brick really felt like things were coming full circle.
Ian: The Golfer is one of the most hysterically funny scripts I'd read in a long time by one of my favorite comedic writers, and it had never been done before. Plus I saw in it some incredible possibilities for some of my favorite actors.
Kaitlyn: I was recommended by a friend who was asked but wasn't available. I read the play and was hooked.
Lex: I was excited to work on many different roles at once. Plus, my god, the cast! I mean, have you seen it?
Rebecca: The talent attached to it. I knew this cast would kill it with their character work, and they did.
Timothy: Brian Parks' wondrously funny script was a big attraction for me. I also have a long history of working with the director and many of the ensemble members.
What was your favorite part of working on this production?
Fred: I've worked with most of the cast before, and with many of them multiple times, some relationships going back ten years or more. These are some of my favorite people to work with, and to have so many of us working on the same production was a real treat. There was such an energy and yet ease working on this show - it's an amazing ensemble of actors. It was an honor to be a part of it.
Broderick: My favorite part was watching all my colleagues bring this amazing script to life. The things that came out of rehearsal would split my sides.
Anna: The cast was so much fun, and we all developed a great camaraderie.
Bob: I had a blast playing multiple characters at break neck speed. Plus the script was so funny- it was endlessly entertaining to perform!
Kaitlyn: Figuring out the best way to differentiate each character with minimal quick changes, because I like a challenge.
Lex: We really had to choreograph the labyrinthian and split-second backstage action as well as the work onstage. It could have been a whole other show, just watching what went on back there. It was a unique and necessary symbiosis in which it was lovely to participate.
Rebecca: The quirky darkness of the piece itself really took audiences for a ride, and us as well, and the jokes were so precise, one really had to surrender to the text and work to find Brian Parks' complicated rhythms.
Timothy: Performing this intricate, profound, and deeply nonsensical work with a crackerjack ensemble. Why? It is satisfying to make Art with Artists and find flow and spontaneity in performance.
Ian: Directing the incredible ensemble cast. Laughing constantly and very hard as a funny script was made even better by a terrific cast with great ideas.
What was the most challenging part of working on this production?
Ian: Taking over a part from a sick actor on opening night. Keeping all those good ideas organized and focused so that the backbone of the script wasn't lost in the insanity we were placing around it.
Broderick: Not breaking character. When another actor would do something hilarious it took strength not to bust out laughing.
Fred: Brian's work requires making big bold choices and delivering lines a breakneck pace with razor precision. And Ian's directorial concepts are big, bold, and ambitious, and require a great deal of commitment of everyone behind the scenes to make it all work. For The Golfer, when you're not onstage, your frantically changing costumes, helping someone else change theirs, paging curtains, striking and setting scenery, etc. No one was walking their way through this thing for even a moment.
Bob: The costume changes-- I exited as one character and seconds later entered as another on at least one occasion, and had several quick changes throughout.
Anna: I had to be out of the country for a chunk of the rehearsal process...I actually wrote most of the songs from an Airbnb in Amsterdam on a tiny borrowed keyboard, and sent them as voice memos to Ian. By the time I got back, Berit had notated a choral arrangement for one, and the cast had already done a great job of learning them!
Lex: Lots going on. Something like 55 scenes. Everything had to be just so or it all would come off the rails. I'm lucky to have participated in this madness with this spectacular group of people.
Timothy: Split-second shape-shifting. Why? It requires intense precision and wild abandon, both.
Rebecca: The most challenging part of this production was landing and maintaining the razor sharpness of the timing and rhythm of the piece. We were changing characters and costumes and props on a dime, and we had to be a very fast moving, and focused machine to pull it off, on and off the stage.
What was the oddest part of working on this production.
Bob: It was my first show after having lost 70 pounds, having been the 'fat' actor for the last two decades, it was a new experience, and a joy to tell the costumer my measurements....of course, one of the characters I played was Santa Clause so I had to wear a fat suit, which was a little ironic!
Kaitlyn: Attempting to search for a Santa suit to rent/ buy but then remembering that my best friend's dad dresses as him every year so I took advantage of that very quickly.
Lex: Right before our first preview, we lost an actor to an illness. (he's ok now)
Ian: An actor became sick during tech week, and wound up having to drop out of the show at the critics' preview, so I (as director/producer) had to step in for him with script in hand and minimal costumes, and still wound up with the show (and myself) getting great reviews.
Rebecca: What other playwright would put a choir of singing gonads in their show? Brian did, and people loved it.
Timothy: There were many oddities. There were many many many many laughs in the rehearsal room.
Broderick: it was so fun and funny yet the point of the story was really poignant, at least for me. Here's this guy who lives a normal life yet when lightning strikes and he goes to another world he's changed to appreciate the unexpected and challenges. When he wakes up and goes back to his normal life it's no longer enough.
Fred: In many ways it was another day at the office at the Brick - but the whole experience really encapsulated so much about what makes the Indie Theater scene so alive.
What did you want the audience to come away with after watching The Golfer?
Ian: When we do farces at GCW, as opposed to our more frequent semi-abstract work, we focus mainly on creating a "machine to make people laugh," but at their best, as in this play, there are a lot more levels to be touched and moved by among all the jokes.
What was it like working with Gemini CollisionWorks?
Kaitlyn: You can feel the passion vibrating in the room around you when you're with this group of people. Everyone is there because they love what they do, but they also know when to get silly and have a good time, after all this is theatre right?
Bob: The best part of this experience was working with extremely talented actors and crew who are also happened to be long-time friends.
Broderick: Berit and Ian are an amazing duo. They are a lovely two-headed theatrical beast.
Rebecca: Performing wildly different characters back-to-back is a difficult feat, and everyone made such specific and interesting choices for each character, I felt like I was in ten plays with them instead of one.
Fred: I think this is my fourth or fifth time working with GeminiCollisionWorks - I think it's the sheer audacity of their vision that is most impressive. Ian and Berit work on a shoestring budget not just as a matter of practicality, but as a real aesthetic, and yet their aesthetic is not barebones in any way. They do some seriously high-concept work on a level where most companies wouldn't even attempt it. As an artist and audience member, their work is often challenging, and always arresting. I've never come away from one of their shows on either side of the stage, bored.
Lex: I've worked on quite a few Gemini CollisionWorks shows in the past few years. My favorite part is always coming to the theater early before a show and spending time with Ian and Berit. They know almost everything and are always working on some little (or great) improvement. Ian likes to say that he knows "what makes actors move" and for this show in particular, we had a tiny dance party each night before places.
Timothy: What sets this company apart is the inherent trust that no matter what happens, the Work will germinate, grow, and flower as it must.
What was it like working with these nominees?
Ian: These nominees are amazing because they were all devoted to working at the top of their game. Each of them being individually awesome to start with, when they realized that was true of everyone else in the company, they all became determined to always bring their A game.
You can follow Gemini CollisionWorks on Twitter - @geminicollision
