Guest Blogger of the Week: Jeff Lewonczyk

Thanks so much to Clay McLeod Chapman for his great posts last week.

We are so very happy that this week's guest blogger is Jeff Lewonczyk.

Jeff Lewonczyk (writer) is Co-Artistic Director of Piper McKenzie and Associate Director of The Brick. Recent creations for The Brick include The Bubble of Solace (for the Comic Book Theater Festival, which he also executive-produced); the collaborative exquisite-corpse style playwriting project Piper McKenzie’s Dainty Cadaver; the children’s holiday action comedy Bethlehem or Bust (which is published by Playscripts); Theater of the Arcade: five Classic Video Games Adapted for the Stage, a hit at both The Brick and FringeNYC 2011; and the mythic fight comedy Craven Monkey and the Mountain of Fury. A graduate of Bard College, he is married to his partner and collaborator Hope Cartelli, and is most proud of their most recent creation, Dashiell Carter Lewonczyk.

Trapped in a Closet: Living within the Fringe

Contributed by Guest Blogger of the Week, Clay McLeod Chapman

There’s a 3 ½ floor in the Clemente Soto Velez Cultural Center. It’s buried at the back of the building, large enough to hold only one room. It was a janitor’s closet back when the CSV used to be Public School 160—but during the sweltering summer of 1997, in the thick of the 1^st Annual New York International Fringe Festival, I called that crawlspace home. 

Literally.

As in—I lived in a janitor’s closet all through the Fringe. 

Most theatre artists living in New York have their own personal war story over the Fringe at this point. Whether it’s performing in a cramped black boxer or slogging through an air-conditionless afternoon as an audience member, we’ve all earned our Off-Off-Broadway red badge of courage from the Fringe. But in true you-just-had-to-be-there fashion, there really was something exceptional about that inaugural year of the fest. Pre-Urinetown, the Fringe attached as many off’s to its Broadway with reckless abandon by rooting itself within every closet, every attic, every below-the-code and foreclosed storefront in the Lower East Side. 

 

That included the Clemente. 

Built by the Board of Education of the City of New York in 1898, this neo-Gothic school building has since had its classrooms converted into four theaters, two gallery spaces and over fifty different artist studios. The Fringe took it further that first year, transforming the entire building into a bunker of batshit-independent, no-fi, devil-may-care theater. No classroom went unoccupied without some one-man show exorcising itself before the blackboard. Even the library was renovated into a fifty-seater. Some overworked techie threw up a few bed-sheets over the bookshelves and clamped down a couple clip-lights onto the sprinkler system—and voilà: 

A new venue was born, aptly christened—The Library. 

Through some fortuitous venue-programing on the Fringe’s part, this was the theater me and my friends were assigned to herald the NYC-debut of our own production—The Pumpkin Pie Show.  

I was eighteen. I was a wet-behind-the-ears freshman. On a whim, I applied to the Fringe, never believing I’d ever get in—but lord almighty, suddenly I was responsible for thirteen performances on the boards in the Big Apple. 

And I lived in Virginia.

With no money.

Total budget for metropolis-lodging for the month of August: $180.00.

Here we were—three kids, right off the bus from the Ol’ Dominion. My friends and I had taken the Greyhound, packing our props in the bus’s underbelly. Bright-eyed and bushy-tailed really doesn’t cut it. Chalk us up to dim-witted and dumb-assed, because we’d just arrived in New York without a place to stay, under the assumption that it would be a cinch to simply check in to the nearest performing arts hostel with only the change rattling about our pockets.

No such luck. Everything was booked. Everything. And the places that weren’t weren’t exactly spots we’d feel safe falling asleep in without someone standing watch.

 It’s pretty amazing how swift this city can crush a kid coming from Virginia. We hadn’t been here for more than a couple hours, hefting our set—and already, we felt like we’d lost.

And we still had a show to put on.

And fill butts in seats.

And eat.

Closing night felt a long, long ways away.

Ed Vega, head of the CSV back then, just-so-happened to be within earshot of our sob story.

You guys are really stupid, he said, shaking his head. 

Yes, we agreed.

Wanna live here?

Okay.

I got a broom closet upstairs that’s empty right now, he said. Paint the walls before you leave and it’s all yours.

A closet might’ve been a bit of an understatement, but it was ours. All ours.

There was a shower within the room, no curtain attached. We’d give each other the courtesy of turning a blind eye to whomever was bathing, for modesty’s sake.

There was a toilet in the corner with no enclosure—so whenever one of us needed to use the facilities, the rest would evacuate the premises.

There was no air-conditioning.

Hell—there was no air.

We found a cot, which the three of us would alternate sleeping on throughout the month. Sometimes, I’d sneak into the Library and sleep onstage.

We didn’t have keys. Each night, we had to make sure we were in the building by the time the venue director locked the front doors. Sure enough, there were a few nights when one particular member of our trio would inevitably stumble back from the bar a little too late for curfew, finding himself locked out—sleeping on the fire escape until the venue director returned the following morning to let him back in.

I was convinced the school was haunted with the ghosts of dead school children.

Or Lower East Side bohemians.

Or a little bit of both.

But the fact of the matter was—this sleepless, sore-muscled existence was one of the purest inductions into downtown theater that I was ever going to get. We came to NYC with nothing but our show strapped to our backs—and yet, through it all, somehow, it miraculously made its way onto the stage. Sure, only five people saw it—but that’s (almost) besides the point.

We made it.

We got here.

And we put on a show.

An awful show, of course—but trial by fire, right? We burned through thirteen performances, making fools out ourselves in front of our poor, poor paying audience. But as far as inauspicious beginnings go, ours was a glorious failure. One that’s hard to not feel a little sentimental about.

There’s a space within this city. Nothing but a room. It’s probably no longer a theater anymore, having been renovated into a yoga studio or something else by now—that will forever possess the first Pumpkin Pie Show.

I snuck back into the CSV once, a few years back—just to peak my head inside the janitor’s closet on the 3 ½ floor.

The door was locked. Whatever was in there now, the maudlin-in-me imagined three squatting teens, curled up in their sleeping bags like newborn pups in a shoebox. Sometimes the closest thing to ghosts that haunt a theater are the shows performed within them. If that’s actually the case, then the Clemente is haunted by a bunch of ripe smelling Virginians waiting for their 30-minute turnaround between shows to set up and perform. 

Horny Goat Weed

Contributed by Guest Blogger of the Week, Clay McLeod Chapman

So the horny goat weed was probably a bad idea. 

Lord only knows how many times I’d passed up the opportunity to purchase the herbal supplement from the corner deli. I’d never paid them much mind before, their tin-foil packets dangling off the rack just next to the cash register, right alongside the “rough riders” and French ticklers and other male potency placebos for sale. But for some unknown, utterly asinine reason—on this particular night, during this particular production of my own personal long-running performance piece The Pumpkin Pie Show—with hardly one hour left on the clock before show-time, this impulse-buy for “restoring a man’s inner fire” seemed like a viable option on helping me get in the mood for tonight’s show. 
 
Horny goat weed is, after all, a performance enhancer.
 
That’s exactly what it said on the front of the packet: Performance enhancer.
 
We hold these pre-show rituals to be sacred.
 
All performers do.
 
For me, the time before the curtain rises has always been holy—completely sacrosanct. My personal pre-show ritual borders on those disorders most definitely obsessive-compulsive, beginning hours before even reaching the theater:
 
The pre-show nap. The pre-show shower. The pre-show subway ride. The pre-show line-through. The pre-show coffee. The pre-show settling into the space sixty minutes before actors are actually called. The pre-show walking around the stage… 
 
Any minor divergence from my rigidly systematic warm-up risks ruining that evening’s show. Every last facet must be followed to the ‘T,’ no matter how innocuous—or else gamble the chance of wrecking an entire performance. 
 
But on this night, waiting in line at the deli, I made the cavalier call of integrating a new, last-minute component into my pre-show procedural:
 
I would pop some horny goat weed.
 
Bad call on my part.
 
For years, I had laced my extra-large cup of coffee with a packet of Emergen-C Energy Booster mix for that extra kick. Just a little more oomph for tonight’s show, I had rationalized to myself. I’d stir the powder straight in and watch it fizz up into a clumpy froth of vitamin C and half-and-half, creating some caffeinated cocktail that I speculated would rocket my energy right on into the stratosphere—thereby taking The Pumpkin Pie Show to higher, Laurence Olivier-like levels of performance.
 
It didn’t.
 
The drink was, in fact, disgusting. It tasted awful. God awful. Turns out that lemon/lime-flavored vitamin C powder and milky coffee do not mix—literally. Rather, this flotsam of citrus-foam formed along the surface of my coffee—that I would still dutifully drink, no matter how disgusting it truly was. For over five years, five years, I believed in my pre-show ritual so badly, that I was willing to wreck my liver with this battery acid brew. I only stopped after the first signs of jaundice kicked in.
 
I realize I’m talking about juicing up with over-the-counter dietary supplements here. This all must make me sound like some kind of pre-K steroid-abuser. An Off-Off-Broadway Barry Bonds. But we subject ourselves to these awful, rituals de los habituals because we believe they make our performances better.
 
By their very nature, practitioners of all-things theatrical tend to be a superstitious lot. We won’t mutter Macbeth onstage, we leave the ghost-light burning to ward off evil spirits. If you told an actor that their performance would improve ten-fold by licking the ass-crack of their stage manager ten minutes before she called "places" every night, I’m of the mind that they would seriously consider it. We performers will commit any number of delusory follies, no matter how irrational they seem to the outside eye, if we believe they perfect the performance itself. Because—what if? What if tonight you didn’t lick your stage manager’s dimpled seat cushions? Are you willing to take that risk? Once these systems have integrated themselves into our hallowed pre-show ritual, there is just no deviating from them.
 
They have become law. Holy writ.
 
Increased libido. Improved erectile function. Hours of long-lasting energy.
 
Horn-dog snake oil.
 
It was the boost to the libido that sold me. This all-natural “Phyto-Aphrodesiac” (what does that even mean?), with its recipe based around an undisclosed ancient Chinese medicinal text, was just the thing downtown theater artists have been searching high-and-low for for centuries. Its key ingredient is the leafy epimedium plant, commonly found in the mountainous Asiatic wild—not the Lower East Side. With its potent cocktail of flavonoids, polysaccharides, sterols and magnalforine alkaloids, I had visions of the coming hour-and-a-half onstage as something quasi-shamanistic. The Pumpkin Pie Show has always been a bit of a ceremonial experience in my mind, anyhow—imagine ghost stories told around the campfire by Sid Vicious. This seemed to fall right in line with our mission statement. This would be as close to a peyote ritual as I was ever going to get with an audience, guiding ticket-buyers through a metaphysical experience unlike any other evening at the theatre they—or myself—had ever encountered before. This would be the performance of a lifetime.
 
Obie-awards, here I come…
 
Not Richard Burton’s preferred pre-show warm-up, I’m sure. Nor Peter O’Toole for that matter. Or Richard Harris. But in my off-off-off-off-off-off Broadway black box world, within the realm of my thirty seat eco-system, you take what you can get.
 
And so I got some horny goat weed.
 
Down the hatch.
 
Nothing happened for the first fifteen minutes of the show. What a waste, I remember thinking. I’ve totally been shammed.
 
But then the fever kicked in. The heat seeped into my chest, flushing up my neck. I started sweating. Not simply sweating in the pits, mind you. Pores had opened that I highly doubt had ever opened before, flooding the base of my neck, my scalp, everywhere. Suddenly I looked sunburned. No amount of water could quench the brushfire that had spread out through my limbs. I couldn’t breathe.
 
I felt as if I was in the midst of my first and only hot flash.
 
I’m going to die, I thought to myself onstage. I won’t be stepping off this stage tonight…
 
I could sense the audience in the front row were no longer paying attention to my performance, no matter how enhanced—but to my pants.
 
A 30-seat black box theater has its drawbacks—one of which, I have since learned, is the unavoidable distraction of a perpetual erection onstage while performing a ten-to-fifteen minute character monologue.
 
And yet the show goes on…
 
For up to four hours.

Guest Blogger of the Week: Clay McLeod Chapman

We are excited to announce that this week's guest blogger is Clay McLeod Chapman.

Clay McLeod Chapman is the creator of the rigorous storytelling session The Pumpkin Pie Show. He is the author of Rest Area, a collection of short stories, and Miss corpus, a novel. Currently, he is writing a trilogy of children's novels titled The Tribe—book one, Homeroom Headhunters, is slated to hit the shelves in 2013. He teaches writing at The Actors Studio MFA Program at Pace University. Visit him at: www.pumpkinpieshow.com

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The Staff's Faves

Every year our staff sees lots of OOB shows. We were excited to share some of our favorites from the 2010-2011 season.

Christopher Borg:

One of my favorites shows of the year was Radio Purgatory by the TheatreTHE at Dixon Place. It is so refreshing to see an indie theatre company that is doing TRULY INNOVATIVE and experimental work. Their use of the space, lighting, sound (live and recorded) and projection was incredible. It was like you were transported to an alternate universe while you were in the theatre and taken on a bizzare musical journey.  Their skills as musicians and their mastery of physical comedy raises the bar for the whole community.  Everyone should see them and know them.

Hillary Cohen:

The Walk Across America For Mother Earth, produced by Talking Band in association with LaMaMa Experimental Theater Club, was without question one of the most exciting shows I saw this past season. It was funny, touching, slyly observant, and – perhaps most importantly: innovative. While I already knew writer and actor Taylor Mac’s is a sharp-witted solo performer, I was really blown away by the deeper story and more nuanced characters he created in this full-length narrative script. He sincerely wrote a unique coming of age story with relevant social commentary and even a couple of cute songs. Designers Machine Dazzle (costumes), Anna Kiraly (sets), and Darrell Thorne
(make up) rock! The whole look and feel of the production was downright charming in a Sad Clown way that, in my opinion, perfectly matched the Quixotic, physically and spiritually “off the beaten path” subject matter. The talented ensemble, under Paul Zimet’s experienced direction, clearly gelled as a troupe and the chemistry amongst them was electric. Damn. Good. Show.

I have a long and storied English class history with Edgar Lee Masters’ 1915 cycle of 246 free-verse epitaph poems, Spoon River Anthology. So I didn’t expect to like it when Tom Andolora brought his edited and staged version, titled The Spoon River Project, to my new hometown in Windsor Terrace, Brooklyn. What a pleasant surprise! Masters’ text is a series of challenging but worthwhile cameos about the emotionally crippling social hierarchy of small town America. This show really got it right. They gathered an eloquent cast, beautiful period costumes, and gracefully unfussy production elements in an impeccably lush patch of Green-Wood Cemetery. I was riveted all over again and would say that it was one of those theater-going experiences that will stick with me long after this season.

Diánna Martin:

One of my favorite productions I saw this year was the Belarus Free Theatre's production of Being Harold Pinter at the LaMaMa Experimental Theatre Club. I was blown away by the passion, creativity, and design of the show, which was an incredible experience that lies somewhere between political theatre and performance art. Performed in Russian with supertitles, I was amazed at the actors' ability to manifest work that moved me so much while not understanding their language at all. Half the time I didn't look at the supertitles, I was so engaged with what was going on onstage. Moments of general design on the incredible minimalist set that made this even more compelling were the use of monologues staged with the actors running towards the audience encapsulated within a clear parachute; the effect was as if they were running towards a wall, only to be thrown back into the crowd. It was eerie, compelling, and important theatre brought to us by a theatre company that has been outlawed in its own country for giving a voice to those who have none.

Lanford Wilson's Balm In Gilead, produced by the T. Schreiber Studio, took a piece that I have found usually to be very difficult to digest, and mounted it on the stage with such success that I was amazed. One thing that I enjoyed very much was the life given to each character, each actor, no matter how small their part or what was going on on stage at the time. The actors were in the moment at all times, and it was incredibly engaging. Another wonderful aspect of this production was the set design. I was delighted with the set changes, which allowed the audience three different points of view of the same set, so in essence, giving a three-quarter thrust the effect of a rotating stage. The costumes were incredible, and being at the production was like a step back to another time. Great work.

Desmond Dutcher:
One of the most exciting theatre experiences I've seen in a while is actually something that I had the pleasure of being a part of.  A burgeoning Off-Off-Broadway company called Artistic New Directions (AND) hosted a project called Without A Net which dove right to the core of pure theatre and at the same time served as an unprecedented thread sewing together many different NYC indie-theatre companies. The idea was to give the same one-act play to 5 different theatre companies and have them rehearse the play...in complete secrecy from each other!...resulting in 5 different interpretations of the same play!  None of the theatre companies knew which other companies were in the game; none of the actors/directors knew who else was participating; and the actors were not allowed to see the final set prior to performance. There were 25 performances of the play, each with an ensemble cast comprised of one actor from each of the 5 different companies. (Math was never my strong point, but trust me: it works out -- you never saw the same exact production twice!)  Each of the 25 performances was unique, made different by each new combination of collaborators.  Every performance was an opening and a closing all at once, 'cause you'd never see that exact line-up again.

To inaugurate this ingenious idea, AND commissioned playwrights Gary Garrison & Roland Tec to come up with a one-act in which none of the characters had ever met each other prior to their entrances on stage, but who have a reason to be in the same place.  Their result was the powerful piece, The Rubber Room, which deals with a collage of characters meeting each other for the first time in one of NYC's infamous voids where public school teachers await disciplinary review.  The one-act is a wonderful mix of character development with a powerful plot-driven purpose, resulting in a play that is both funny and intense but above all intriguing and exciting.

Having been one of the lucky 25 actors I can confess that it was one of the most exhilarating theatrical experiences I've ever had!!  Imagine being ushered into your dressing room at staggered call-times with the secrecy of a spy by an extremely efficient crew from AND, all the while being kept secluded from the other actors with whom you are about to share the stage in 20 minutes.  The mounting anticipation focuses you on your craft in a way I've never experienced before and when you finally walk on stage and see your scene partners for the very first time...well, lemme tell ya: there's almost no acting required.  You take them in, size them up, and suss them out in ways that are so natural and un-affected that they make the technique of your craft feel smooth and effortless.  For an actor like me who can't get enough of feeling "in the moment", I was in pure heaven!  What a joy to have that experience -- it has stayed with me and informed much of my art since.

Bravo to Artistic New Directions for taking a simple idea and turning it into stage magic!  Here's to many more trips flying "Without A Net"!

Shay Gines:

I thought Dog Act by Flux Theatre Ensemble was an amazing production; one of the best I’ve seen Off-Off-Broadway. The play is such an intriguing tale of a post-apocalyptic world where humanity has divided into tribes each with their own characteristics, moral compass and aspirations. The relationship that Lori Parquet and Chris Wight created as the wondering bard and her man/dog, was the hub of the entire production. They did such a beautiful job. Becky Byers’ performance was sublime, but really the entire cast was so fantastic and cohesive. You could tell that they all knew they were working on something special. The set…. The set was to die for; so clever and beautifully constructed. And the props where thoughtful and whimsical and added such a rich layer to the production. Kelly O’Donnell pulled it all together gorgeously.

I really enjoyed Theatre of the Arcade at the Brick. Jeff Lewonczyk took something so iconic (classic arcade video games) and twisted it, giving it an entirely new perspective. It was beautifully directed by Gyda Arber. The entire evening was so fun because not only did you enjoy watching the production, but the production was a game in and of itself. The audience was engaged in trying to figure out which arcade game and which genre each of the pieces were based on. Incredibly fun.

Locker #4173b by the New York Neo-Futurists is a production that I had heard about long before it opened. Christopher Borg and Joey Rizzolo literally spent years researching and working on this project. I was so proud of both of them that the final product was so honest and intimate and raw. It wasn’t always an easy production to sit through. It brought up a lot of uncomfortable thoughts and the audience left with a lot of new questions and an overwhelming desire to purge accumulated “stuff”.

I loved… LOVED… the Vampire Cowboys production of The Inexplicable Redemption of Agent G. After we saw the production I simply could not shut up about it. I really liked the set. It was modern and striking and elevated the production. Likewise the costumes, projections, lighting and sound were all cohesive and fully integrated. The acting was top notch across the board. But the two super stars were the play and the directing. Qui Nguyen created a piece that reveals itself as it goes along. Initially I was a little mad at Qui because I felt that he was using too many devises and it was distracting from the story. But then I realized that YES! he was using too many devises IN ORDER to distract from the story. This was a play, not about the “story,” but about Qui’s creative process of talking about something that is too big and too personal for him. In his process of trying to tell this story, he was distracting himself from focusing on the reality of the story. And in a lesser director’s hands, this complex, heart rending production could have been confusing, but Robert Ross Parker has such a strong and skilled approach that it was funny and entertaining and moving. Bravo.

Let’s talk about The Family Shakespeare, produced by MTWorks. What a beautiful production this was. This was not an easy piece; it was a period piece,  there were fantasy elements, it dealt with challenging issues including mental illness and ethical questions that can leave an audience unnerved if it’s done right. And oh boy did they do it right. David Stallings wrote an intricate piece that leads the audience subtly through the nuances. Antonio Minino masterfully guided the production through the complicated turns. The costumes were gorgeous. And Cotton Wright’s performance was hauntingly breathtaking; one of my favorite performances of the season.

Of course there were so many amazing Off-Off-Broadway and Indie Theatre productions this year. These are just a few. What were your favorites and why?