Men of Tortuga

Written by Jason Wells
Directed by Randolyn Zinn
Produced by Living Room Theatre 

Nomination:  Outstanding Ensemble: Michael Broadhurst, Curzon Dobell, Ken Forman, Benim Foster, Allen McCullough

 

About the Company: The Living Room Theatre focuses on new and classic plays in intimate settings.

About the Production: Four powerful men plan an assignation of a rival to maintain their status. The Three Stooges meet Mamet. Reason is trumped in this very serious comedy. What are the boundaries of politics and business?


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What first attracted you to this project?

Ben: The script was fast paced and smart.

Allen: The script had a very topical theme in advance of last year’s Presidential Election.

What was your favorite part of working on this production?

Ben: My favorite part was working with my fellow actors and director.  It was a total collaborative creative experience.

Allen: A great new play; smart, funny odd, with wonderful dialogue, five distinct voices, a great director, and four other great actors. It was an ensemble piece in the truest sense.

What was the most challenging part of working on this production?

Allen: Acting and producing at the same time.

Ben: The script is like music. So many natural overlaps and cutoffs. As actors, we needed to choreograph which words needed to be in the clear and which were ok to cut off or overlap. It was a beautiful dance.

What did you want the audience to come away with after watching Men of Tortuga?

Allen: That the game of politics probably doesn't change much, over time.

What was it like working with the other artists involved with this production?

Ben: Everyone involved with Living Room Theatre is fantastic, my fellow actors, the director, EVERYONE!

Allen: I loved working with this group. The actors listened and then moved the played forward. Each performance was like a jazz jam session.

Make sure to follow The Living Room Theatre on Twitter and Instagram  @lrtvt

Theatre & Politics... Same thing

Contributed by Elizabeth Burke

I have always said that two things I love equally are basically the same thing, politics and theatre. Years ago, when I worked on local and national political campaigns, I used to stand in the back of a crowd of supporters and watch candidates give the same stump speech day after day, week after week, sometimes 2 or 3 times on the same day.  It occurred to me this is the same as doing eight shows a week, week in and week out, month after month.  How do you keep it fresh?  How do you keep saying the same words without sounding like you would much rather be at the bar with your audience having a noisy, slightly tipsy good time.  How do you convince your audience that this is the first time you are saying these words?

Like actors, politicians play to their audience, and in politics, they are usually speaking to people they already know so the audience is hard to fool. Pols need to connect somehow so they talk about local issues, whatever is important to this neighborhood so these voters will go and vote for them on Election Day.  Politicians also spend more face to face time with local political leaders, eating terrible meals at Veteran’s Halls, Booster Clubs, and (shudder) Holiday Inns.  The energy that it takes to engage with each person at these events, learning and speaking about their homegrown concerns all while acting like there is no place you would rather be could wear down the busiest Broadway actor, even the indefatigable Nathan Lane! Nathan only needs to be fully present for about 3 hours on show night, but a candidate needs to be fully engaged for about 12-18 hours in a given day for months on end. 

Actors are given a script which they memorize and from which they (almost) never deviate. The same goes for politicians. Yet, there are politicians who think that improve is the way to go!  Keeping their message fresh and new means that they will just speak “from the heart.”  This rarely goes well.  Have you ever been in improve class and you have to work with someone who loves improve, wants so badly to be funny but is not and never will be?  They try so hard, but being funny is not within their grasp because, humor is something one is born with, it’s inherent. Same with politics, some are just born with the politicking gene. It is physically painful to watch a candidate go off script, trying to be something they’re not just to forge some kind of connection with their audience. 

See, actors and politicians are both going for the same object, making the audience believe every word they say.  They both assume another identity and commit 100% so the audience can suspend their disbelief and not see them as the carefully crafted character that was created for them.  For if we believe, so will the audience.


Arthur Miller saw the same thing and made this observation of Al Gore and George W. Bush following the 2000 election. 

"Political leaders everywhere have come to understand that to govern they must learn how to act. No differently than any actor Gore went through several changes of costume before finding the right mix to express the personality he wished to project. Up to the campaign he seemed an essentially serious type with no great claim to humor, but the Presidential type character he had chosen to play was apparently happy, upbeat, with a kind of Bing Crosby mellowness. I daresay that if he seemed so awkward it was partly because the image was not really his, he had cast himself in a role that was wrong for him. As for Bush, now that he is President he seems to have learned not to sneer quite so much, and to cease furtively glancing left and right when leading up to a punch line, followed by a sharp nod to flash that he has successfully delivered it. This is bad acting because all this dire over-emphasis casts doubt on the text. Obviously, as the sparkly magic veil of actual power has descended upon him he has become more relaxed and confident, like an actor after he has read some hit reviews and knows the show is in for a run."

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Liz Burke (bio coming shortly)

Why Are We Artists?

Contributed by Brad Burgess

“They have very prominently placed cultural policy as part of the national agenda…intelligent and insightful debate around issues of culture, the cultural agenda, the possibilities of culture to determine the future of a nation…”
           ~ Professor Peter Eckersall, Graduate Center CUNY
               speaking on Singapore 10/14/2014

Political theatre starts with a fundamental question, “Why are we artists?”

In Singapore, it sounds like almost a sacred duty for this young country to utilize arts to examine, explore and ultimately improve their culture through suggestion of political, spiritual or emotional betterment…

We are artists because on some level we are reacting to reality and saying, “this is not enough.”  We are saying we need more to experience in our daily lives.  We need to create something more, explore deeper, discuss in more detail.

For me, political theatre moves forward from the recognition that this feeling of need is a political reality.

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Recently, at Prelude Festival, there was a conversation about honesty. Allison Lyman, Artistic Producer MESTC asked “How do you know when a piece is honest?” I responded something like: "I always think of Judith and what she would say as founder of The Living Theatre. For her, every play is about inspiring the audience to a beautiful, peaceful revolution that transforms our communities into better functioning communities that care for the needs of all."

That can mean a lot of things politically, not all as overt as social revolution.

In these times, the word political has been reductively devalued by a two party system, and so now much of “political” theatre has to be directed at this reduced reality, and the issues it has left us with the environment (Extreme Weather by Karen Malpede), with our health , with poverty (That Poor Dream by The Assembly), with our hardness and violent solutions that are not working (Won't Be a Ghost by Francis Weiss Rabkin).

But political theatre is also deeper than two-party issues caused by our current version of a capitalist democracy.  It is really about our political duty to our world as artists responding to the original question, “why are we artists?”

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The Assembly’s adaptation of Great Expectations in That Poor Dream, is overtly political about socio-economic class in modern day America and how it’s the same product of our financial system as Victorian England was…

At the same time, the actors break through the 4th wall and communicate stories from their real lives that are intimate, personal, and emotional.

In those moments they are recognizing a political mandate that the actors lives matter in the creation of work.  Similarly, by doing this, they are acknowledging that the individual story of each of the audience members in attendance, also matters.

The politics of this play are that we need to address class reality with each other in order to avoid the pain of the characters, and on a more Artaudian level, the pain of the actors and the the pain of the audience.

But it doesn’t have to be so heavy either.

For instance, David Neumann’s work at Prelude, I Understand Everything Better…all on death…had an inescapable delight, a playfulness and light that was its own political statement about how we can meditate together on death and its pain and react to it.    It was fun as well as meaningful.

Having fun is just as political as feeling pain in answering cultural need and development.

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For me, all that and in between is our political theatre.

Political theatre is whatever it means to you as a person that answers the cultural need for artistic creation.

Don’t get me wrong, I think more people should come right out with direct action and political critique to encourage a more politically engaged society and work with as many organizations to do so as possible.

“Art is certainly for art’s sake,” she said. “But I also fervently believe in art for life’s sake.”         
                       ~ Deborah Rutter, President, Kennedy Center (Washington Post)

War Makes a Play

Contributed by Virlana Tkacz

I first saw Izolyatsia just over a year ago. Yara Arts Group, which I direct, was invited to create a new theatre piece for the Izolyatsia Platform for Cultural Initiatives housed in an old factory complex in Donetsk, a city in eastern Ukraine. Donetsk is known as the home of miners. I had been there once before with Serhiy Zhadan, a wonderful young writer, exploring working mines and illegal digs. So I started thinking of tunnels and what people imagine while they are underground.

Luba Mykhailova, the founder of Izolyatsia, liked my proposal to build a tunnel, but asked that we think about people other than miners. We decided to interview young people in Donetsk and posted a note on a local website inviting people to come tell us about their dreams and their city. Over twenty people showed up. Most were in their early 20s and were overwhelmingly positive about Donetsk and their hopes. As we recorded them, our designer Volodymyr Klyuzko photographed them. We decided to create an installation based on these interviews. We made giant cubes with their photographs. As you approached each cube you could hear the stories people told us. We also started a workshop for young performers and worked on the dreams they would relate in the labyrinth we built out of huge slabs of Styrofoam the factory produced.

 

For our performance the audience walked on a path of yellow leaves and then entered one by one into a labyrinth of dreams. At the other end of the tunnel they came out into a large space lit up by a colorful projection. On one side were the lit up cubes with contemporary young people talking about their city. As the last of the audience entered the space we began our performance which stripped away the layers of time in the region. Donetsk was founded by John Hughes, an industrialist from Wales. Zhadan wrote a monolog for a Welsh engineer who arrived in the area in 19th century that revealed his dreams of building a new world in this area. Afterwards, there was a scene based on a story from Mediaeval chronicles about steppe nomads who lived in the region a thousand years ago. This led to fragments of poems about trees intertwined with ancient songs. Leaves fell for 150 million years in this area to create the rich veins of coal. The piece ended with a fragment of a poem by Zhadan: 

What are dreams made of?
An idea of how things should be
An aversion to how thing are
Distrust in what’s offered
And a belief in what’s hidden from us.

Then the great gate in the side of the building opened and daylight filled our dream space… Over two hundred people attended our workshop production of Underground Dreams in Donetsk  on October 10, 2013. They loved it and we were invited to return in June to create a full production.

 
All winter we were glued to our computers watching the protests in Kyiv that led to the fall of the government which had been led by a corrupt president from Donetsk. It seemed Ukraine was given a chance to truly break with its Soviet past. In May a new president was elected.  There was a lot of hope, but it was soon dispelled  by the crisis in Donetsk. Terrorists supported by Russian President Putin  were determined to separate this part of the country from the rest of Ukraine.  

I arrived in Ukraine on June 8, the day before terrorists captured the Izolyastia factory complex. The staff was allowed to leave with only some of the artwork and then the premises were mined.  Today, the war continues and hundreds of civilian hostages are being held there for ransom by one of the factions of the separatist army.

I met Luba Michailova in Kyiv and we decided to continue the Underground Dreams project in exile. Zhadan and I re-interviewed many of the same young people by Skype. Some were refugees in other Ukrainian cities, others were still in Donetsk. They told of morning commutes to work that meant enduring up to six searches at the armed posts set up by various factions. They talked of the difficulty of concentrating on work when people with guns ran past the window, the terror of walking through a totally abandoned downtown during lunch, the cold sweat induced by any loud noise once they had lived through a bombing raid. These interviews described the reality of war on very personal level.  We decided to include excerpts of these interviews in the show. 

Our piece about the dreams of young people from Donetsk became about the difficult reality of their lives. The audience listened to these tapes as they walked through the numerous corridors that led into the main space of the theatre. They had to pass through a metal detector, sit in a cramped locked room, watch a woman try to pack all her belongings in two small suitcases, read projected phone texts to realize that the “good job” promised one of the characters was to fight on the other side. 

Zhadan wrote poetry and monologs based on the stories we heard. One young man from the Carpathians told us he had built twelve large wooden buildings for a vacation complex near Donetsk. He showed us the pictures of the construction and then whispered the name of the place. We had all heard it. The place had recently been bombed and many people died. We found a video someone had posted on YouTube of the burning complex which we used in the show.  As the projected flames enveloped the wall of the theatre, the doors flung open and four young women from Donetsk who had been in our workshop, but  were now refugees in Kyiv, entered the space with suitcases. Tanya Hawrylyuk sang Zhadan’s poem.

Take only what is most important. 
Take the letters. 
Take only what you can carry. 
Take the icons and the embroidery, take the silver… 
We will never see our city again.

We kept the scenes with the reverse history of the area, but now they took on much deeper meanings. What happened to the utopian vision of the new world in this place? The nomadic tale of sense memory inspiring a return home, now reminded everyone that they too wanted to return to their homes as they were before the crisis.  We repeated excerpts of the original interviews. They were so beautiful, so naïve, and truly unattainable dreams today. 

We presented the new version of Underground Dreams at the Les Kurbas Theatre Center in July and were invited to perform in September at the GogolFest International Art Festival, held at an old factory complex in Kyiv.  The two performances were sold out. A reviewer from Donetsk wrote: Underground Dreams is such an emotional, powerful and deep piece, it is simply not possible to fill a performance with more pain... It is a good that they show the war and the situation of the refugees to people in Kyiv. People in other regions simply do not understand what it means to be a refugee – to be forced to flee from your own home.”

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Virlana Tkacz is the artistic director of Yara Arts Group, a resident company at La MaMa Experimental Theatre in New York. She has created 25 original theatre pieces with Yara which have premiered at La MaMa and performed in theatres and festivals in Ukraine, Central Asia, Siberia, Mongolia, China and Canada. Her piece Fire Water Night was nominated for two New York Innovative Theatre Awards this year.

Theatre & Politics

The midterm election is just around the corner and it got us thinking about theatre and politics and political theatre and the politics of theatre and how theatre affects politics and vice versa.

Jonathan Mandell has written a number of great pieces about theatre that effected political change. He recently asked for examples of theatre that helped change the world. He uses the New Brooklyn Theater production of Edward Albee's The Death of Bessie Smith to illustrate how theatre can lead to a tangible change. The Interfaith Medical Center was facing bankrupsy and eminent closure. However New Brooklyn's production attracted a large audience, including celebrities and politicians and helped to bring attention this the challenges the hospital was facing. While IMC still has many obstacles to overcome, it seems to be on the road to recovery. Mandell also shared the results of his informal poll and it is inspiring how many examples he came up with.

In this spirit, we asked a few folks to talk about their thoughts, experiences and insights of creating political theatre and why theatre artists should be aware and involved with politics.

Don't forget to vote on November 4th.

•  NYC Board of Elections

•  Poll Site Locator

 

Public Enemy

Contributed by Guest Blogger of the week, James Carter.

Recently Athol Fugard “berated dramatists” (will the overhyped online headlines never cease?) for failing to confront injustice. He, like those before him, scolds writers who take on more lucrative projects in film and television, and he suggests that these sister mediums are “passive experience.” There is a paragraph where Nicolas Kent, artistic director of the Tricycle Theatre, disagrees with Fugard, but there aren’t many details. Fugard does praise David Hare for his fight against injustice, and he suggests several global topics that are intriguing and valid. However, as I finished the article, I asked the question: Why doesn’t he write these plays?

To be clear – I love Athol Fugard. When I was in high school, I performed a cutting of his Master Harold…and the Boys as part of speech competition, and the first time I read that play I burst out crying. I lived and loved that play all the way to state finals. He is an activist, a director and a phenomenal dramatist. The respect I have for what he does is huge.

That’s why I’m so disappointed. Mr. Fugard obviously hasn’t been to see any theatre OOB in the past nine years. From the start of these despicable wars, I have seen more anti-war plays than anti-war films. The anti-establishment sentiments in theatre are so strong I’ve grown weary of them. Just as people have grown weary of the wars. This isn’t meant to rip apart Mr. Fugard’s opinion. His experience and reputation far outweigh my humble career. It is, however, easy to complain about the lack of political plays, overlooking a more important question:

Do political plays become irrelevant when they continually preach to the choir?

The real reason social change in the theatre is ineffective is because it often plays to an audience who agrees with the themes or messages. This also goes for film and television. Most drama confronting injustices are now passive because audiences have heard it all before. When it comes to film and television, people who want to see politically charged stories will Netflix or TiVo them (Let’s be real here – no one goes to the movies to see an anti-war film. They rent or record them).

A few years back, I went to a festival of “political theater” at the Ohio Theater, and all of the pieces I saw were slightly subversive, quickly & cheaply produced, and very, very leftist. I remember sitting there thinking, “Who is this festival for? Are any of these companies really effecting change in the community?”

Then, stuck onto the end of the evening, like drunken Uncle Harry, who happened to show up at the party and wanted to give a toast, was “The Right Wing.” Not the entire Right Wing, mind you, just a few viewpoints. A couple monologues and vignettes about abortion, the war and the economy. Mostly, social issues. All pushing back hard against an audience that didn’t agree at all.

I was one of those who didn’t agree. I laughed it off. I thought it was a piece of shit theatre (it was poorly done). But then I saw people talking, reacting, and getting riled up. It was the highlight of post show conversation. Taylor Mac had performed at the beginning of the night, and most people were asking “How did this conservative piece end up in a festival about politics?”

It was beautiful.

It was the first time I saw a New York theatre audience think about their politics. It made people discuss issues, rather than heading to the bar after the show and patting each other on the back for a “job well done” for “sticking it to the man”. I have no way to gauge the percentage of political plays produced in New York every year, but my guess is that of those political plays, over 90% of carry a leftist view. I’m not suggesting everyone go out and write plays supporting the Republicans, The Tea Party or fundamental religious groups. I’m suggesting we stop preaching to the choir. These plays are not effective in the echo chamber of liberalism. One of our foremost political playwrights doesn’t even hear the messages anymore. They are caught in the cacophony of leftist messages from people who don’t know how to propagate their message.

Granted, there are theaters across the world that are choosing seasons to placate subscribers, and Mr. Fugard’s argument that theaters are more concerned with the bottom line than facilitating change is spot on. What would happen, though, if political plays really took their message to the people?

About six years ago, The Imagination Liberation Front produced a play at Performance Space 122 titled I’m Gonna Kill the President: A Federal Offense. It was a huge success, and people loved it for the subversive and leftist outlandish antics. At the end of the play, they brought an audience member onstage and made her take out a cell phone and call the “White House.” At which point, the entire audience yelled in unison: “I’m Gonna Kill the President!” Not only was it political, it was funny and pushed peoples’ buttons on many levels. People left the show feeling a little unnerved, more supported in their beliefs that President Bush’s regime were full of assholes, and very entertained. In the end, though, I wonder if anyone was really stirred to action.

Cut to two years later: I’m Gonna Kill… goes on tour. The company packs themselves into a van and hit the heartland: Kalamazoo, Michigan. They present the play, and it all goes as planned – until the end. After the phone call to the White House, “FBI agents” (actors) storm the location and “arrest” the entire cast. The cast is handcuffed, the audience requested to exit the theater. That’s supposed to be the end of the play. Everyone goes home. But, one audience member wasn’t about to go quietly. He began to argue with the “FBI agents” and other audience members began arguing with him. Punches were thrown and a fight ensued. The producers had to talk the audience down, insisting what they’d experienced was part of the show. Finally, embarrassed and disheveled, the man backed down, and the play was truly over.

When was the last time you went to the theatre and there was a fist fight? Or, an argument? Or, even a heated discussion?

Danny Hoch’s most recent show Taking Over played The Public Theater a couple seasons back, and the play dealt with gentrification, primarily. The performance I attended was dead quiet. The lack of audience response was palpable. I enjoyed the show, but I felt a disconnect between Danny and the audience. A couple months before his engagement at The Public, Danny performed the play as part of the Hip Hop Theater Festival in The Bronx, Queens and Brooklyn. I had the opportunity to ask Danny how those shows differed from the performances he gave at The Public. The difference, he said, was huge. In the boroughs, Danny was playing to his audience, his crowd. When a character in the play, a native New Yorker, yelled at those gentrifying, Danny said the hometown crowd cheered the character on. At The Public, he was “public enemy.”

It’s important for us to be public enemy, and we won’t do that by staying in black boxes in downtown NYC where our 10 friends, 4 family members and a couple strangers cheer us on. We need to take it to the unconverted. If you have a play about the economy, figure a way to do it on the steps of The Federal Reserve or in front of the bull statue on Wall Street. A play about war? Find a way to do it next to an Army recruiting center. Have a great idea about a satire on Barak Obama being a Muslim? Do it in Alabama. Just don’t get shot.

OOB doesn’t just mean small, it doesn’t just mean scrappy, it doesn’t just mean New York City. It means doing theatre the big boys won’t touch. When New York Theatre Workshop wouldn’t put up My Name is Rachel Corrie, members of LAByrinth Theatre company met at a bar across the street from the theater and read excerpts of the play in protest. It wasn’t a production, but it took the controversy directly to the doorstep of injustice.

The only way to bring change is to raise awareness, and when we produce plays and share them for people who are already aware, it might as well be falling on deaf ears. We don’t need more plays confronting injustice. We need to take the plays fighting injustice to those causing injustice.

It's a start, a work of art
To revolutionize make a change nothin's strange
People, people we are the same
No we're not the same
Cause we don't know the game
What we need is awareness, we can't get careless
You say what is this?
My beloved lets get down to business
Mental self defensive fitness (Yo) bum rush the show
You gotta go for what you know
Make everybody see, in order to fight the powers that be
Lemme hear you say... Fight the Power

“Fight the Power” – Public Enemy, 1989