The Chairs

The Chairs
Conceived and Directed by Theodora Skipitares
Produced by La MaMa in association with Skysaver Productions


Nominations: Alice Tolan-Mee & Tim Schellenbaum are nominated for Outstanding Sound Design; Donald Eastman is nominated for Outstanding Set Design; Jane Catherine Shaw & Theodora Skipitares are nominated for Outstanding Innovative Design for Puppet Design; and The Chairs is nominated for Outstanding Performance Art Production



About this Production
Loosely inspired by Ionesco’s absurdist classic, The Chairs, Theodora Skipitares creates a post-apocalyptic world in which an old woman, portrayed by a 10-foot puppet, invites guests to hear an important message about the meaning of life. One-by-one, a collection of 25 chairs appears, each one a unique performing object with something important to say.  Judith Malina (of The Living Theatre) stars.

Artists Theodora Skipitares, Jane Catherine Shaw and Donald Eastman talk about this larger than life tale about passing on the stories and heritage of humanity.

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What attracted you to this project?

Theodora: I was interested in creating a response to Ionesco's play The Chairs, where people are invisible and where there is finally no message of any kind for human beings.

Jane Catherine: I have known and worked with Theodora Skipitares since the 1980's. Her work is always stimulating and collaborations with her are a pleasure. I know that the work being made is thoughtful, relevant and experimental, all of which make the process vibrant and rewarding.

Donald: This was my fourth collaboration with Theodora along with the opportunity to work at La MaMa and their great space and crew.

What was your favorite part of working on this production?

Jane Catherine: I worked with Theodora Skipitares on The Chairs from the initial thinking and building phases, through to performance. Each part of the process offers its own rewards, and I would be hard pressed to single out one aspect from another. In truth, this is probably what attracted me to puppetry and experimental theatre in general. There is a feeling that one should dive into the process on all fronts; be prepared to do anything, challenge one's skills, be ingenious, break boundaries....be innovative!

Donald: The inspirations for the design were both abstract and emotional informed by the reality of the Ellen Stewart Theater's impressive space. My favorite part was post load in when all the collaborators completed the space and the resolutions from moment-to-moment were all at hand. Then there was the post curtain realization between me and Theodora that, by the final tableau, we had created a gallery space that audience could walk through and become close and one with Theodora's amazing charectors and constructions.

Theodora: My favorite part was making The Chairs and bringing them to life as performing objects. Also, we were able to work with Judith Malina on this production and that was a fantastic experience.

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

Donald: Focusing the intimate moments. The solutions were at hand and I had to trust my instincts and experiences within the grand space.

Theodora: Not having enough funds.

Jane Catherine: The most challenging part of working on The Chairs  was also the most  pleasurable; how can 25 or more chairs be altered so that they can be manipulated, and each have a distinct, unique, and compelling presence that is appropriate to the speaker and the text being presented? We  must be able to envision movement possibilities that can  define character, and intention while thinking of how the chair might be altered technically.  We also need to think of each chair's design and style so that even in static repose, it can still be striking and visually resonant with the theme of the text and the speaker's character.

What was the most memorable part of this production for you?

Jane Catherine: About a year before this production of The Chairs, I had begun thinking that I wanted to work with Judith Malina on something....and then suddenly she agreed to work on this production. I was thrilled.  We gave several works in progress showings prior to the official La MaMa premiere, and Judith was at all of those rehearsals and performances.  This was a great fulfillment of a private fantasy!.

Donald: Staying honest with the rigging systems that supported the 20 plus constructions became the design and instinct to make the rigging elements a great red. Together a set design emerged. Honesty led to innovation.

Theodora: A lot of the chairs that I bought secondhand and repurposed, came from Old Iron Salvage, underneath the Smith-9th Street subway. It's a magical place, and I returned many many times to sense if there was something calling out to me. The chairs were all a bargain.......that was fun.

The God Projekt

The God Projekt
Conceived by Kevin Augustine
Written and Directed by Kevin Augustine and Edward Einhorn
Produced by La MaMa in association with Lone Wolf Tribe

Nominations: Kevin Augustine and Edward Einhorn are nominated for Outstanding Director; The God Projekt is nominated for Outstanding Performance Art Production


      Photos by Jim R. Moore

About this Production
The God Projekt is a raucous and darkly humorous minimal extravaganza on religion and secular morality that investigates the historical legacy of monotheism. God joins a cast of highly realistic, hand-carved puppets inspired by 18th century anatomical models and Old Testament animals to deliver a dynamic interpretation of a deep, contradictory, and ambiguous Almighty.

Kevin Augustine and Edward Einhorn discuss the creation of this innovative production that takes on the most epic concept of all, God.

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What attracted you to this project?

Kevin: The challenge was to tell an epic story - the secret history of God - in an intimate presentation. I based this production on my 2008 show, BRIDE- which had a 15 person cast and live band. The God Projekt, although drawing from themes and character relationships of BRIDE, became essentially a solo show.

Edward: I am drawn to large themes and ideas, and God is one of the biggest. I have a love of working with puppetry. And I was interested in working with Kevin.

What was your favorite part of working on this production?

Edward: I liked the challenge of writing towards a particular voice (Kevin's). I am nominated as co-director but honestly the writing/directing process was intertwined in that way. And finding the magic, that was a great directing challenge, and a fun one. This is the first time I have worked in partnership, and it was exciting to see what we could come up with together

Kevin: Charting the character's transformation from unaware to awake. It is good to write/direct/perform a person who goes on a journey and learns something from it in the end. I also liked this because the final point of this journey was quiet and contemplative and allowed for contact with the audience. I hoped that they would feel a bit of what the character was experiencing.

  

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

Edward: This is the first time I have worked in partnership, as I mentioned above, and I am often working with my own theater company alone. Sometimes collaborations can be challenging, though ultimately rewarding.

Kevin: Getting the myriad technical puppetry effects to work. Also- working for 2.5 hours in a heavy silicone mask. Lot's of sweat. I was concerned that working without a mic would prevent me from being heard/understood as the mask slightly distorts the projection of speech. Luckily, the voice came and elocution didn't become an issue.

What was the most memorable part of this experience for you?

Kevin: It took experimenting during every performance to finally get the effect of a bleeding video camera to fully work (on our last show). We had a true nightmare of a dress run - which lasted over 3 hours resulting in warping the floor surface of our set (deluge of water instead of blood emitting from the camera).

Edward: I've never co-written, co-directed, and even co-performed a piece, so that felt noteworthy for me. Watching Kevin transform once he was under his mask was always an awesome experience, in the original sense of the word. It really felt like he became an old man before my eyes.

Tribute to Ellen Stewart

We want to thank Ozzie Rodriguez for sitting down with us and contributing so much insightful and helpful information to our blog this last week.

Ellen Stewart receives the 2005 Stewardship Award

"Artists have ancestors. We are on the shoulders of very talented, bold, fearless and important people. They have given you the license to create and it is your responsibility to take it further. That is the heirloom that they are passing down to this generation."
                                   ~ Ozzie Rodriguez, Director of the Archive at La MaMa

Applications are currently being accepted for the 2014 Honorary Awards. Help us recognize the amazing work, artists, companies, leaders, and champions that make up Off-Off-Broadway.

Archiving Insights

An interview with the Director of the Archive at La MaMa, Ozzie Rodriguez

Ellen Stewart, Ozzie Rodriguez and Robert Patrick, in the Archive 1989

What is your favorite part of the archive?

Having a favorite item or thing in the archive is worse than having a favorite child. I arrived here as an actor, then became a director, then went on to found my own company, then went away and founded another company and then came back. My memories are entangled with so many things here. I can’t look at something without having a memory attached to it.

I put together a couple of videos of La MaMa as seen through Ellen’s eyes and I think maybe I’m the most proud of that work. I’m especially proud of them because they give you a much broader look at the organization and its evolution and how it influenced and was influenced by what was happening at the time. These clips put you there in the moment. You see Ellen in 1969 at the opening of the new La MaMa space and she jokes about the plumbing not being in yet and tells the audience that they could pay two buck and see as many shows as they wanted that week. It makes it very immediate. It captures those moments in a very real way. I know that every college in the world would like to have a copy of that video. I can’t give it to them because getting permissions from everyone involved wouldn’t be possible.

Having access to that resource however can lead you to other important movements. If, for instance, you wanted to see more about the Playhouse for the Ridiculous or Andrei Serban’s The Trilogy, you have a snippet of it in that collection that could whet your appetite for more information. You can say “Oh, I want to learn more about that.” And we have those files and you can look further into that and see how it was all put together.


What advice would you give theatre artists starting their own archive?

My advice to people who are starting archives is do the best you can, but understand you’ll have to let go of some things and you’ll be able to keep some things. Ellen was indiscriminate in preserving as much of what she thought was valuable; to her credit. However, knowing what to keep and what to get rid of is extraordinarily difficult and it becomes more and more difficult.

We don’t need fifty copies of a program. We can use five in a physical file and one digital copy on the computer that everyone has access to. However, the original artwork for that program may have been done by somebody who later on became an important artist. So that kind of thing becomes relevant. You have to be both judicious and careful.

Identification is important. For our earlier work, there are not that many people around any more who were a part of it. I can call Robert Patrick and send him a photograph and say, “Who are these people.” He was there so he knows, but I am losing those kinds of resources quickly.

Archiving for the theatre is extraordinarily difficult because you have so many tangents. You know, theatre is not one art form, it is every art form. La MaMa is all inclusive in many respects. We have dance and poetry festivals, we have celebrations of plays…. it adds up to a humongous amount of information and there is not one universal way to document all of that.

I guess my advice is, be persistent and do the best you can.


What is next for the archive?

At the end of every season there is an avalanche of material that comes down to the archive. This is an ongoing situation. It’s never going to end. We’ll never be the library for the performing arts because we don’t have that kind of an endowment. If and when that does happen, we are prepared to allocate funds to preserving the most fragile artifacts. In the meantime, we are preserving and presenting what we can.

The steps that we are taking now are that all of our records are being saved on a hard drive that can be accessed remotely by the public.

I don’t know where it ultimately is all going, but we are striving to keep it going. We feel we have something extraordinarily valuable; not only educationally valuable, but culturally valuable.

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The La MaMa Archives is a not-for-profit organization sustained by La MaMa E.T.C. The Archives are made available to the public as an educational service to the performing arts community, the press, scholars, historians, emerging artists, and students of theatre the world over. The Archives are open to the public Monday-Friday, Noon to 5PM and are located at 66 East 4th Street on the Mezzanine level.


Interview conducted by Shay Gines

The Message of The Archive

An interview with the Director of the Archive at La MaMa, Ozzie Rodriguez

What is the importance of the archive?

We have a cabaret. We have three theatres; two smaller ones and one large one. We have seven floors of rehearsal space. We also have a gallery and a reading series. We have touring companies. All of these things needed to be documented. Not only are we recording the history of the company, but we are chronicling the development of the artists and Off-Off-Broadway theatre and how all of that influences American culture and contributes to our shared history.

You know we started at a critical moment. We started at the nexus of the Vietnam War, the Civil Rights Movement, the rise of feminism, and we had the gay liberation movement all happening simultaneously. It was not accidental that Off-Off-Broadway was born from that. There was no place in commercial theatre to discuss these topics. La MaMa and Off-Off-Broadway have always been a reflection of the time.

For the first time artists were given the platform to address the ideas of the day and to experiment. Commercial theatre only presented traditional, familiar fare. The disenfranchised artists were the ones reflecting what was really happening. In the 1960’s La Mama had women directors and women playwrights, which did not exist at major commercial theatres at the time. You had playwrights suddenly deciding to incorporate sound or dance or poetry. There was nothing to lose. There were genuine experiments to find a different way to communicate with the audience.

There was a time when putting comic books on stage was a trend and that was something that started in the Caffe Cino by Robert Patrick. “What do we have this evening? We’re going to enact this comic book.” The very idea that you could do that and infuse a serious, creative, theatrical presentation with pop culture was groundbreaking. That kind of freedom gave license to things like performance art and one innovation inspired the next. Playwright Patrick went on to write Kennedy's Children.

Tom O'Horgan and Ellen Stewart circa 1968

Tom O’Horgan use to host happenings. When we arrived, we each got an instrument and we all played. Somebody rang gongs and somebody hit bells. He had tapped into the energy of the time and those gatherings informed his work and became more formalized and eventually became HAIR, which revolutionized Broadway. When it opened in 1968, HAIR violated every commercial theater taboo that existed at that time. It was agitation propaganda. It included rock-and-roll for the first time on Broadway. There were no stars. It addressed issues like unwed mothers. It talked about black girls finding “white boys so pretty.” It was psychedelic and went in every direction and no one expected it to be a success, but it struck a chord that reflected that young generation. When that wave hit, it changed not only  Broadway, but the theatrical audience, which had become a staid and older demographic. HAIR appealed to a whole new young audience and destroyed the proscenium once and for all.

Something that La MaMa did right off the bat was to completely change the relationship between the audience and the performer. By virtue of the fact that the environment was what it was, the relationship with the audience had to change. We had brick walls because we were performing in tenements or lofts - before it was fashionable. Ellen looked at these spaces and saw what she could do as far as theatre was concerned. No one was thinking we were starting a trend. This is what we had. We did not need gold flocked angels on the ceiling or anything like that.

This was a time when it wasn’t about what you CAN’T do, it was more about HOW CAN you do this? And Ellen was fearless. I mean I equate Ellen with Isadora Duncan; with Martha Graham, Madame Curie. Just think, a black lady in the 60’s in New York, doing things that were literally unheard of at the time.

All of these events were literally historic and that is why the archives are so important.

We are losing a lot of our artists. I mean in the 1980’s we had devastating losses, but we have those artists work represented here in the archive. And because so many of them were instrumental in developing something new, it is even more important to have it cataloged and available to young people. The number of artists who we present is ever growing – it is growing exponentially. The more we produce, the more we do, the more of a responsibility we have to document their contributions and the contributions of La MaMa and the Off-Off-Broadway theatre movement.

Andrei Serban, the head of the School of Arts at Columbia University was one of our artistic directors. Ellen, Elizabeth Swados and Andre created The great Jones Repertory Company of La Mama.  Wilfred Leach, another of our artistic directors,  went on to get a Tony for The Pirates of Penzance and The Mystery of Edwin Drood. Mary Alice Smith started here and received a Tony for Fences. Tom Eyen wrote Dream Girls. Harvey Fierstein wrote Torch Song Trilogy and currently has two Broadway shows running and is preparing a third. If they hadn’t had the freedom to explore and experiment and the opportunity to collaborate here, they wouldn’t have had those successes. There is a direct line and the archive demonstrates that. That inspires people and ultimately that is most precious thing the archive can do; inspire you not to give up, inspire you to follow your own dream, and inspire you to take the goddamn risk! Fall on your face. It’s okay. This is the place where you can. Fall on your face, pick yourself up and do it again and do it better this time. And really that is the message of the archive.

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The La MaMa Archives is a not-for-profit organization sustained by La MaMa E.T.C. The Archives are made available to the public as an educational service to the performing arts community, the press, scholars, historians, emerging artists, and students of theatre the world over. The Archives are open to the public Monday-Friday, Noon to 5PM and is located at 66 East 4th Street on the Mezzanine level.

Interview conducted by Shay Gines

Fully Realized History

An interview with the Director of the Archive at La MaMa, Ozzie Rodriguez

How do people use the archive?

It’s heartwarming to see the different ways that the archive is used and how the artifacts help to make the history more fully realized for people.

Every year we get scholars or people writing books about this community that can’t find the information that is essential to their endeavor.

We get students from all over the country and from other countries as well. I mean we will have a group from Montreal this week. In addition to people from Columbia, Fordham and NYU and Sarah Lawrence who visit, there are people from many cultures who are researching or seeking information. Some just want a general overview. Others are looking for something very specific. We did a thing on John Jesurun and Sam Shepard. We had two students, one from Brussels and the other from Russia. They were exploring the evolution of these two artists and their contributions to the contemporary theatre.

Ellen wanted the young people to have a hands-on grasp of how things developed. If you wanted to see Sam Shepard’s early work, you could look at his script and see his hand written notes and scribbling and everything else. She wanted that kind of availability. The more thorough and well rounded the education is for the student, the better off he is; the more choices he’ll have.

We have worked with so many international artists. There is a validation for those artists because they performed in New York and at La MaMa, which is known internationally, and it gives them a kind of credential that allows them to continue to develop their work. Being able to provide them with the documentation of their contributions is important to their artistic development.

By the same token, Ellen traveled widely and sought out a tremendous number of ancient techniques that she then introduced to American artists. We had artists from the Kabuki, from the Ramayana, from the Kathakali coming here to give workshops to the American actors. The American actor was growing in a way that was unprecedented, utilizing techniques that had here-to-fore not really been available to American artists because it was not a part of our education. There was nothing to be lost in being exposed to these influences and there was everything to be gained. We are able to show how these techniques were introduced and took root. In that way the archive demonstrates how the theatrical art form evolved.

There are also personal connections. We had a man here this morning who said, “My aunt was in a play at La MaMa in 1962. Can you tell me if there are any photographs of her?” That kind of connection is very interesting to me because, in a direct way we are responsible for the history of the artists who work with us and we contribute to their heritage and bare witness to their accomplishments. It shows that people still consider their time at La MaMa to be important and that their work here represents a milestone of sorts for them.

The greatest thing about this archive - and I am constantly rejuvenated by it and it does my heart good - is to see the same reaction from a 17 year old or a 70 year old. It is the same kind of awe. One could come from a school in New York and one could come from a country far away like Croatia. They are amazed by what they find here.

Theatre is an ongoing, living art. There is an evolution; without the work that we did, way back when, what’s happening now would not be possible. There is a lineage; a direct line. Through logistical information and the collection of artifacts, the archive demonstrates that lineage.

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The La MaMa Archives is a not-for-profit organization sustained by La MaMa E.T.C. The Archives are made available to the public as an educational service to the performing arts community, the press, scholars, historians, emerging artists, and students of theatre the world over. The Archives are open to the public Monday-Friday, Noon to 5PM and are located at 66 East 4th Street on the Mezzanine level.

Interview conducted by Shay Gines

La Mama at the Forefront

An interview with the Director of the Archive at La Mama, Ozzie Rodriguez

When did the La Mama archive first begin and what was the reason it was initiated?

La Mama is currently in its 52nd season and the archive first started in or around 1966 when Ellen started documenting everything La Mama had done. Paul Foster, one of La Mama's original playwrights, made a list of all the plays that had been presented. Files for every show were being kept in order to justify the moneies that were being spent and to report back to funders. Also everyone started to become aware of La Mama and its cultural impact. So the initial beginnings were to document the growing influence of La Mama and to keep track of all of our work.

All of these files were kept in the office upstairs along with all the contracts and all of business works and everything else. We had a cabaret in the basement of La Mama and around 1987 the Buildings Department decided that that was not a suitable space for audiences. So we could no longer use it as a cabaret. One day Ellen asked me what I thought we should use the space for. I looked around and said, “Well, why don’t you make some room in the office upstairs by sending all the past records down here and we’ll call it The Archive.” At that point we had done about 1,460 original productions so it was a lot of material. She thought it was a wonderful idea.

I went off on tour – I think it was to Japan – when I came back, she had had all of those files for those years brought down and she asked me if I would curate it. I was a resident director for La Mama – I still am – so I would be around and so I said that I would monitor it. Having initiated it, she immediately started emptying out all of her closets, and things that were under the bed, and everything that she had saved for all of those years. And this included unbelievable amounts of things from all over the world because we’d been touring internationally. I had no idea of the kinds of things that Ellen had stored or where she had stored it; the ephemera, the costumes, the bits and pieces of information, et cetera that she had gathered.

We had a rudimentary computer. I thought, at least if I enter some of this information into a computer, I can search it. I can more easily look up when a show was done, what the title was, who the playwright was, who the director was, who the composer was, who the choreographer was, do we have a poster, do we have photographs? It was a very basic spreadsheet, but it was the best way to organize the material. Because the aim was - if someone needed to know all of the plays of Sam Shepard, or all the shows that Tom O’Horgan directed, or how much of Lanford Wilson and Marshal Mason’s work we had on record, you could sort the material and at least get an idea of the amount of work and have some of the details. You could get a picture of the evolution of things. If someone wanted to know when Bette Midler first appeared here, we could look up Tom Eyen’s Miss Nefertiti Regrets in 1964. Having access to that kind of information became very very important.

We had always been at the frontier of something; legally, illegally or by accident. Ellen was always at the forefront. We weren’t supposed to have an archive. No one had an archive. Theatres, especially of our size didn’t have archives. She did it because she was a visionary and she could see the value of it.

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The La Mama Archives is a not-for-profit organization sustained by La Mama E.T.C. The Archives are made available to the public as an educational service to the performing arts community, the press, scholars, historians, emerging artists, and students of theatre the world over. The Archives are open to the public Monday-Friday, Noon to 5PM and are located at 66 East 4th Street on the Mezzanine level.

Osvaldo (Ozzie) Rodriguez is a native New Yorker. A Resident Director of Ellen Stewart’s La Mama Experimental Theater, since the early 1970’s, Ozzie has also been the Director of the La Mama Archive since 1987.  A bilingual playwright and actor, Ozzie is Founder and Artistic Director of two experimental theatre companies; Long Island’s first in 1973 and the Sol/Sun Experimental Theatre Company of San Antonio, Texas in 1981. His plays, written and adapted, include The Beauty and The Beast, The Phantom Ruin, Quincas / King of the Vagabonds, Alma /The Ghost of Spring Street, and Madre Del Sol / Mother Of The Sun, for which he received the Distinguished Contributions to Hispanic Culture Award. He has toured throughout the world as a member of the Great Jones Repertory and La Mama Umbria Company’s.


Interview conducted by Shay Gines

The Archive at La Mama

La Mama was founded in 1961 and over the last 52 years has been a founding pillar of the Off-Off-Broadway community and often at the nexus of art, culture, society, and politics. Its fundamental development happened during a time of great revolution and creativity in the United States. It is not surprising that many groundbreaking artists began at La Mama and that La Mama continues to be a significant influence to artists here in the New York City as well as around the world.

Having witnessed so much history and being a part of an historical arts movement, La Mama has a unique and fascinating tale to tell. Since 1987 Ozzie Rodriguez has been the Director of the Archive at La Mama and has been crafting that inspirational tale.

I had the pleasure of sitting down with Ozzie and discussing his work. Over the next week, I will be presenting a series of posts based on the interview. His insight is quite illuminating the archive itself is awe inspiring.

The La Mama Archives is a not-for-profit organization sustained by La Mama E.T.C. The Archives are made available to the public as an educational service to the performing arts community, the press, scholars, historians, emerging artists, and students of theatre the world over. The Archives are open to the public Monday-Friday, Noon to 5PM and are located at 66 East 4th Street on the Mezzanine level.

Osvaldo (Ozzie) Rodriguez is a native New Yorker. A Resident Director of Ellen Stewart’s La Mama Experimental Theater, since the early 1970’s, Ozzie has also been the Director of the La Mama Archive since 1987.  A bilingual playwright and actor, Ozzie is Founder and Artistic Director of two experimental theatre companies; Long Island’s first in 1973 and the Sol/Sun Experimental Theatre Company of San Antonio, Texas in 1981. His plays, written and adapted, include The Beauty and The Beast, The Phantom Ruin, Quincas / King of the Vagabonds, Alma /The Ghost of Spring Street, and Madre Del Sol / Mother Of The Sun, for which he received the Distinguished Contributions to Hispanic Culture Award. He has toured throughout the world as a member of the Great Jones Repertory and La Mama Umbria Company’s.