The Custom Made Theatre Co.

Interview with Director Brian Katz and Dramaturge Perry Aliado

2011-05-25T17:42:00.000-07:00

Optimism and Its Discontents:

Thoughts on Voltaire and Candide with CMTC Artistic Director Brian Katz

Recently, CMTC Resident Dramaturge Perry Aliado sat down with Artistic Director Brian Katz to talk about his upcoming production of Candide of California, or Optimism, a play adaptation of the French novella Candide, ou l’Optimisme by Voltaire. Prior forays into literary adaptation for Brian Katz include directing The Soldier of the Sorrowful Face by Nicholas Leither, an adaptation of Don Quixote by Miguel de Cervantes. Some topics in this chat included the process of adapting literary works to the stage, addressing current events in the play, and the philosophical idea of “Optimism” (and the great disillusionment it can bring about).

Perry Aliado: Why did you decide to adapt Candide back in 2008, and re-stage it again now in 2011?

Brian Katz: For some history on the project – we did Candide, but just the 1st act (up to the second departure from Cunegonde) for the San Francisco Fringe Festival in 2008. It is a “top 5” book for me, first of all, and so when looking for projects to adapt, you start looking at things you’ve already been obsessed with. And I am obsessed with Candide; I re-read it about every year because I always get something new out of it.

What we’ve done with Candide (in ’08 and ’11) is modernize it a bit by doing a hybrid. I wanted to keep most of Voltaire’s words, because they’re just that funny, but I also wanted to make sure the play was immediately relevant and recognizable to our time. We lose the French history and instead use events and places we are familiar with, wars we are familiar with, and then hopefully find funny and creative ways to adapt the mystical places in the book, like El Dorado.

PA: Were there any specific then-current events from 2008 that drew you further into wanting to adapt and stage Candide?

BK: Well it sure seems to be a funny time around here. We had Schwarzenegger, and he makes a cameo in our play. Obviously the wars in Iraq – when I was writing the play in 2007 – seemed to be never-ending. Politicians appeared to be on the news daily justifying this war, sometimes with religious overtones, even after all of our initial reasons (including the presence of Weapons of Mass Destruction) just went out the window. The religious fundamentalists in Afghanistan certainly remind me of the Inquisitors and other religious figures in the book. That said, the Church is not a big part of this adaptation. They show up once in a while in the play, but you have to remember that the Church was the State back then; they had an extreme influence on the State.

We also wanted to connect the El Dorado to the abuse of natural resources – we moved El Dorado to Antarctica, with the slowly disappearing ice shelf. We’re trying to draw parallels between what the explorers of the El Dorado did then with what we’re doing to our planet right now.

Perry: How about for 2011?

Brian: For better or worse, I think it’s really just more of the same. For this production in 2011, I wanted to second act to take more time to discuss Voltaire’s philosophy; it’s partly because of me just getting a little older, three years later, and having more of an interest in drawing out these philosophical ideas of the show. Whereas the first act is a little more vaudeville and goofy and definitely fun to do, now I have become much more interested in really breaking down the concept of “Optimism” and the different philosophies we have brought into the show to contrast against it.

Perry: Speaking of philosophies, are there any philosophies of Voltaire’s that you strongly connect with, or strongly agree or disagree with? And how do you connect these ideas with the present day?

Brian: Well, Voltaire was a Deist. Voltaire did believe in a God, but he did not believe in organized religion, which was tied to the State. Personally and politically, I absolutely respect religious figure, like Catholic Priests, Reform Rabbis on a lot of issues. They’re at the forefront of a lot of poverty work and anti-war resistance and all kinds of other great stuff. But like Voltaire, I have some distrust of the institution of religion.

The whole book is written against the idea of “optimism”, against this idea that everything that happens (good or bad) is for the best. If you believe that everything is for the best, then Voltaire says that you have to take that way thinking that to its extreme. From there, you can become passive and complacent, accepting all things as they are, or worse, you manipulate things to fit your personal wants and desires like all the evil people in the book do.

Perry: Can you talk a little bit more about your own thoughts about Voltaire’s “Optimism”?

Brian: Candide’s path to his disillusionment with Optimism is a path that everyone finds when they go from being the “optimist” or “romantic” to understanding that the real world rarely functions that way. We should feel happy that we don’t have to go through the extreme and satirical crap that Candide has to go through, but I think Candide’s journey to reaching his enlightenment is a hysterical one. He learns quickly that there may not be an all-encompassing “good karma” or religious God looking down and reassuring us that everything will be OK in the end. Then does genocide happen for the best? Or starvation? Or rape? And personally, people who try to justify these acts as being “for the best,” done through God’s good will or the nature of the Universe, drive me insane. Candide is my most favorite reaction to that way of thinking. It’s done through biting and hysterical satire, and it’s a laugh-out-loud funny book.

Perry: Could you talk a little bit about your process of adapting a literary work for the stage, because I know this isn’t the first classic work that you’ve turned into a play.

Brian: First and foremost, I’m a director and not a playwright – in spite of the fact that I write a play once in a while. I had the honor to watch the Mary Zimmerman process when she was working on Journey to the West [first produced in 1995 with Chicago’s Goodman Theatre]. I’m not brave enough to do what she did, which was bring in three pages of text a day to rehearsal based on what happened the day before. Her rehearsal process is a scary but exciting and unbelievably organic process. But I have some similarity to that process in that I didn’t want to write a ton a text that was already set before the rehearsal process began. I really wanted to see what the actors did with the text and how they adjusted to the words. It makes it very difficult on our Tech staff, as well as the actors of course, who constantly have to memorize text that could change at a moment’s notice. But it’s allowed me to see what the actors can do and see what creative choices I can make with staging.

As far as the actual writing, I just stare at the book at lot. I steal a lot from the book – we give Voltaire authorship credit, and there’s a reason for that, because the witticisms are so great in the book, you just want to keep them and say them in the play. Then I put the book down for a bit and begin to write some filler to make it into a play – some narration, some dialogue so that people are talking to each other – but throughout the process, I keep going back to the book. And when things aren’t working, the solution has almost always been in the book itself, especially when I try to get too creative and silly. Voltaire is a much better writer.

Perry: Generally speaking, what are some of your pros and cons of working on a new work versus working on an already-established play where you don’t have to tweak the text a week before Opening Night?

Brian: There’s a separate question in there, in that if I had a playwright with me and I was solely doing the directing, then that’s already an established process – the playwright is there to make all the adjustments to the script, while I only worry about directing. As both director and adapter, the challenging part is trying to figure out where the issues or problems truly lie. Perhaps it could be directorial instincts, in that maybe my staging doesn’t flow, or I need to work with the actors on interpretation. Or maybe I’ve just written some bad dialogue or I’ve been unclear in the transition from the book to the script.

When you’re doing an [Edward] Albee or [Tony] Kushner or Tennessee Williams, it’s much easier to act a great playwright, because they have an unbelievable wonderful control over how the play flows. And when the play is coming from someone like me, we all have to work a little harder to make things work. That said, I would love more opportunities to do this work; it’s a hard process, and getting better at it will be lifelong, I’m sure.

Perry: What have been some of the really great or experiences you’ve had with the cast working on this piece?

Brian: Pretty much from the first day, I told the cast that I’m not married to anything. I’m more likely to defend a line from the book than one of my own written lines. I had a discussion with some cast members the other day – they were asking about why Pangloss says that syphilis is good even though he got it. Voltaire calls it a “gift” in several different versions I’ve read – and I held fast on that one to keep Voltaire’s language and poetry intact in describing this disease. But even then, the actors have always been great. They offer suggestions – because I’m a director first – and if they have a better way of saying a line, then it goes in the play.

We’ve also been doing some improvising. There’s a bit in there where we figure out Paquette’s backstory to help explain why she hasn’t been seen or heard from on stage for the last hour-and-a-half, only to then “magically” re-appear at the end of the book. We have the actors improvise the different people Paquette has been in contact with during this time. And just like the book, it’s sad and disturbing when you see and think about her fate, but it’s absolutely funny in its presentation.

Physicality is a very important part of this showt. Some challenges included how to depict roasting Candide on a stick, or how to make an airplane. And so we had to get back to the basics. Some of this stuff we figured out at the Fringe. But I also kept going back to when I watched Mary Zimmerman’s work in Chicago, she was so open to whatever happened in the process – so we would throw out some ideas on how to depict flying on stage, try them all, and see which one sticks. And all that work is done in collaboration with the actors.

Perry: Any final things you’d like to say, especially to potential audience members who might want to come to see this show?

Brian: It’s a really funny show. And for the people who’ve never read Voltaire, or who may have read Voltaire back in high school but forgotten his writings, he’s really, really FUNNY. There are intense political and philosophical discussions in his writing. But when he does satire – and this book [Candide] is considered his masterpiece – he’s probably one of the funniest guys who’s ever lived. He’s Mark Twain funny. And in the book, it feels like every four paragraphs or so, for quite a few chapters, Candide is whisked off somewhere else. It’s almost like the original travelogue play. And that’s a lot of fun in itself, because you get all these different set pieces and it goes by super fast – it’s like a “fasten-your-seatbelt-and get-ready!” kind of ride.

I also love this kind of past-paced, high-energy theatre. It’s probably due to growing up with Chicago theatre – especially late-night Chicago theatre which was really goofy and really irreverent, pass the bottle of whiskey around the audience, and we never worried about offending anybody. And Voltaire offends everybody. On purpose. Equally. To make us question and challenge the ideas we believe.

Candide of California, or Optimism opens Tuesday, May 17^th at the Gough Street Playhouse in San Francisco, and plays until Saturday, June 4^th. Visit www.custommade.org for additional information.

The Censorship of Sister Mary Ignatius

2010-07-07T14:10:00.000-07:00

Unforseen by playwright Christopher Durang, Sister Mary Ignatius Explains It All For You turned out to be a firestorm of a play. The Catholic League for Religious and Civil Rights made it a mission to prevent productions of the play as often as possible. What Durang intend as a Catholic’s critical look at church doctrine and methods of transmission they have called “the most notoriously anti-Catholic play ever written.” In his epilogue to the script Durang describes many of the protests his play ignited. Here are some of them.

- Sister Mary opens at Playwrights Horizons in 1981. The Catholic League asks the New York State Arts Council to penalize Playwrights Horizons. When refused Catholic League appeals to the state legislature which supports Playwrights Horizons free speech.

- The Theatre Project in St. Louis announces a 1983 production in a hotel, but the Catholic League persuades the hotel to rescind their space. Two local Universities offer space for the performance. Local Senator Ewin L. Dirick tries to convince the universities or the arts council to cancel the performance. When he fails the national media picks up the story. The show sells out due to the publicity. The next year Dirick proposes a bill to cut the Arts Council budget and to refuse the Theatre Project access to the funds., it dies in committee.

- The Catholic League convinces the Mayor of Boston, Raymond L. Flynn to state the local production at Charles Playhouse is anti-Catholic. The local chapter of the Anti-Defamation League of B’nai B’rith releases a similarly condemning statement and protests are rampant during previews. Once the reviews come out saying the lay is not anti-Catholic most of the antagonism dies down.

- The Catholic League stops a production in Detriot through an organized letter-writing campaign.

- In Glen Ellyn, Illinois, a small college drama department received petitions with 2,000 signatures each to get them to cancel the show. They did not and the next Board of Directors meeting faced picketers with signs accusing them of bigotry.

- In Erie, Pennsylvania a protest group backed down when they discovered the director was a Polish emigrant who had come to America for Artistic Freedom.

- A theater in Ponca City, Oklahoma canceled its performance after an intense campaign when a local priest met with the director.

- In Coral Gables, Florida a theater company received multiple death threats after doing a production of the play. It was so bad the secretary was warned to not open any packages for the managers in case it was a bomb.

To this day the protests continue. In 2008 the Southeast Missouri State University's River Campus refunded tickets to their students' production of the show after protests.

To read more about the Southeast Missouri State University protest and refunds check out "SEMO offers to refund tickets to controversial play" in the Southeast Missourian at http://www.free-times.com/index.php?cat=1992912064198287&ShowArticle_ID=11010806100644367

Christopher Durang

2010-06-17T11:25:00.000-07:00

Custom Made ends our 2009-2010 season with Sister Mary Explains It All to You and Actor's Nightmare. These two classic one acts by Christopher Durang well hallmark one of America's most absurd, insightful and hilarious playwrights.

Christopher Durang is an actor and playwright, best known for his satire and dark comedies. His plays often exaggerate human anger, fears and daily agonies to the absurd while still maintaining resonance and recognition. His plays have explored such themes as authoritarianism, isolation, futility, diffidence, failure and loss of ideals all while keeping his audiences laughing.

Durang was born in 1949 in Montclair New Jersey. His mother, Patricia Elizabeth, was a housewife who gave birth to a stillborn child when Durang was three. Desperately wanting a second baby, but unable to have one she flew into a depression. Her husband, Francis Ferdinand Durang, Jr., was an architect with an alcohol problem which intensified with continued failed attempts at further children. Both parents cared for Durang, but the family tension was insurmountable and when Durang was 13 his parents separated.

Patricia Elizabeth was a huge theater fan and took Durang to both local and the nearby New York shows. When her son started writing plays in elementary school she supported his work,. As he grew older she arranged venues for his plays. At Harvard Durang a depression of his own, but came out of it with a new dedication to his work and he got accepted into Yale School of Drama’s exclusive playwrighting M.F.A where he studied with such luminaries as Wendy Wasserstein and Meryl Streep. At Yale Durang’s unique comedic voice was already flourishing in such plays as When Dinah Shore Ruled the Earth and The Idiots Karamazov.

In 1976 his first Off-Broadway production was his play Titanic which transferred on a double bill with Das Lusitania Songspeil, a satiric cabaret parodying Brecht and Weill co-authored and performed by Durang and fellow Yale alumnus Sigourney Weaver. The next year A History of the American Film made it to Broadway and Durang was nominated for a Tony award. Sister Mary Ignatius Explains It All For You, his next play, was presented as a limited run off-off-Broadway to raves and the first of three Obie awards for its author. A year later it was remounted at Playwright’s Horizons with an opening one act called The Actor’s Nightmare. The two quickly moved off-Broadway and played for over two and a half years.

The eighties saw Durang write four of his most enduring plays: Beyond Therapy, Baby with the Bathwater, The Marriage of Bette and Boo and Laughing Wild. Around the middle of the century Durang began to write for film. He wrote two unproduced screenplays and two produced teleplays which were performed by Jeff Daniels, Carol Burnett and Robin Williams. Durang’s acting career was similarly picking up. He was in the ensemble of his own play The Marriage of Bette and Boo and then stared in Laughing Wild. In the midst of all of this he met and started a relationship with writer John Augustine, the man he has shared his life with for the past twenty-five years. In 1989 he stared in the crackpot mock nightclub act Chris Durang and Dawne. This cabaret of lyrical rock covers and musical songs inappropriately out of context and reinterpreted became a cult hit and continued off and on into the nineties.

Durang continued as an actor and a writer on stage, in television and in film through the nineties. As an actor, his movies included The Butcher’s Wife, Life with Mikey, HouseSitter and The Cowboy Way. On television he had a recurring role on Kristin staring Kristin Chenoweth. None of his three TV pilots took off, but his plays For Whom the Southern Belle Tolls and The Marriage of Bette and Boo were both hits. In 1993 he was cast alongside Julie Andrews in Stephen Sondheim’s Putting It Together, continuing a relationship with the composer’s work that had begun when Durang was an eponymous frog in Sondheim’s infamous Yale swimming pool production. In 1994 he and Marsha Norman became co-chairs of Juliard’s Playwrighting Program. To this day they have run the program which has turned out such great contemporary playwrights as David Auburn, David Lindsay-Abaire and Adam Rapp.

Durang’s work continues to challenge and amuse audiences. His recent works include the book and lyrics for the musical Adrift in Mancao, Mrs. Bob Cratchit’s Wild Christmas Binge, Why Torture is Wrong, and the People Who Love Them and Miss Witherspoon the latter of which was a 2006 finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in Drama. Other awards Durang has received include a Geggenheim, a Rockefeller, the CBS Playwrighting Fellowship and the America Academy of Arts and Letters award in literature.

Actress Julia Belanoff Reflects on Playing Anne Frank

2010-05-05T10:20:00.000-07:00

I have cherished every moment as Anne Frank in Custom Made Theatre’s production. Well… maybe not the fighting and crying and Nazi-triumph moments. However, my experience portraying this complex and vivacious young woman has been overwhelmingly positive.

This winter, I had the opportunity to visit Prinsengracht 267 in Amsterdam and see the Secret Annex firsthand. Our guide at the museum took my family into Otto Frank’s old office on the ground floor of the building. While most of the Annex is heavily trafficked by millions of tourists each year, this room is not open to the general public. In fact, its 1943 aroma of dusty old books enveloped me when I entered. I sat at Mr. Frank’s desk, exactly where Anne once wrote in her diary so many years ago. Words cannot describe how meaningful this opportunity was for me. Unlike Anne, I felt so much history and perspective in this old office. When Anne occupied the very same seat, it was only a chair. To me, it was a relic of traumatic times. Anne knew that one day her life could be significant but she couldn’t be sure. She was just a writer with ambition, an empty page, and thoughts to be shared.
Before I perform, I always remember this unlimited potential. I try to step forward as an Anne with dignity and discover new meaning behind her words. For instance: “I still believe, in spite of everything, that people are really good at heart.” Or perhaps: “I feel the suffering of millions.” As a role, Anne Frank is immensely intimidating. She is spunky and insecure, plain and beautiful, superficial and deep; she transforms from a flirty popular girl to an introspective thoughtful young woman. Anne’s story has a tragic well-known end, but within the Annex she never loses hope. She is not a saint: she has flaws. She is a teenager! She fights with her parents and feels misunderstood. Her dreadfully perfect sister Margot irritates her at times. Of course! So much energy and life is trapped within her. Anne is human and alive! She lives on!

In the play, Otto Frank tells Anne about the value of her diary. He says, “When I see you write in [your diary], I know you’ve found your world in there. You’re lucky.” Anne found her world in her diary, but I find my world in Anne. I feel as passionately about acting as she did about writing. I am lucky to have found this world in which I feel so alive. Anne says, “Unless you write yourself, you can’t know how wonderful it is. When I write, I shake off all my cares. But I want to achieve more than that. I want be useful and bring enjoyment to all people, even those I’ve never met.” I hope I am useful too. I hope to help bring her words to people, and that together we can bring enjoyment to people every night. I am most alive when I can share this story with an audience. I lose myself in her optimism, defiance, and zest for life. I want to let Anne’s spirit flow through me and share her with strangers.

Anne says about a friend in concentration camp, “If only I could take you away and share everything I have with you.” Anne died in Bergen-Belsen. I still wish, more than 65 years later, that I could rescue Anne and share everything I have with her. I think Anne would have been as delightful and engaging as an actress as she was as a writer if she ever got the chance. I try to do what she never had a chance to do, and I share it all with her and the many other young people whose mark on the world was dimmed by the holocaust.

Obsession and Adaptation: Anne Frank on Broadway (and beyond)

2010-04-22T12:58:00.000-07:00

We asked dramaturg Paul S. Doyle to take a look at the various adaptations of Anne's diary. In the process he discovered not only how Kesselman's play builds on the work and passion of previous adapters (including Anne herself), but uncovered the fascinating story behind how the diary came to be the world-wide sensation it is today.

When I read first read The Diary of Anne Frank and subsequently read the play (the 1956 Goodrich-Hackett Broadway success, not the 1997 adaptation) and watched the film, I was in late middle school. This would have been right around the same time that Wendy Kesselman’s adaptation was on Broadway, making Ben Brantley of the New York Times swoon over the young Natalie Portman in the role of Anne. I didn’t know that the play had been rewritten at the time, although I wish I had, for the adaptation reincorporates some of Anne’s moments of darker despair and erotic reverie that resonated so strongly with me at the time, when I was nearly the same age Anne was when the Franks went into hiding.

What I did not know at the time, and what I didn’t find out until beginning to do some research for Custom Made on the history of the play and the diary, was the story of how the diary was catapulted from an obscure Holocaust narrative into the international best seller that it remains today, and the collision of avarice, obsession, and genuine desire to find the widest possible audience for Anne’s story that resulted in the original Broadway play.

The story has been explored in several academic books, most recently and most succinctly by Francine Prose, in her 2009 book Anne Frank: The Book, The Life, the Afterlife, in which Prose explores the Diary as a consciously-crafted work of literature. In a fascinating chapter, she describes how Anne, during the family’s last few months in the attic worked furiously to revise and edit her diary as a manuscript for possible future publication, fleshing out entries made years before, paring down and rewriting later entries, even coming up with the title Het Achterhuis (The House Behind). In an exhaustively researched critical edition put out by the Netherlands State Institute for War Documentation, it is possible to read, side-by-side-by-side, Anne’s original version of the diary, her edited version, and the version edited by Otto Frank from the previous two (originally published in 1947).

An American war correspondent and author named Meyer Levin was one of the first journalists to enter the concentration camps at Dachau and Bergen-Belsen (where Anne died). Amid the piles of emaciated corpses and bombed-out remnants of the crematoria, Levin vowed that “from amongst themselves, a teller must arise”—a writer whose searing prose would show the world (in particular, America) what the European Jews had suffered at the hands of the Nazis. When his wife gave him a copy of the first published edition of the Diary, Levin wrote immediately to Otto Frank offering to champion the book’s publication—and possible adaptation to stage and screen—in the United States.

Otto agreed, and in 1950, after a mention of the Diary in the New Yorker, Doubleday approached and secured from Otto for the American publishing rights. Otto stipulated that Meyer Levin remain involved as a consultant on the American edition of the Diary. When the American version came out in 1952, Levin wrote a rave review in the New York Times Review of Books—raising all sorts of conflict-of-interest questions, as Levin had been acting as the book’s unofficial agent—which instantly launched the little book to the top of the best-seller lists.

Doubleday, realizing it had a hot property on its hands, began to inquire about selling the dramatic rights to the book. Levin wrote to Otto and asserted that he would be the best choice to write the stage version, and Otto stipulated to Doubleday that any sale of the dramatic rights had to be approved by Levin, who had agreed to withdraw his name from consideration if a famous dramatist agreed to take on the work.

As the book’s popularity grew, more and more famous names began to be discussed to write the play: Carson McCullers, Elia Kazan, Maxwell Anderson. Levin wrote to Otto objecting to each of them in turn, meanwhile working furiously on his own stage adaptation of the book. Cheryl Crawford, a veteran of the Group Theater and a founder of the Actor’s Studio, was hired to produce the play.

Levin’s presence and increasingly desperate letters advancing his desire to write the play grew more and more irritating to the major parties involved. As Cheryl Crawford rejected his script, and Otto Frank’s lawyer determined that Levin had no formal rights to the play, Levin began to write letters to the New York Times, Variety, and to Otto Frank protesting that his play was being suppressed for being “too Jewish.” In 1953, made nervous by Levin’s complaints and threats, Cheryl Crawford withdrew from the project.

Kermit Bloomgarden, the show’s new Broadway producer, advised by Lillian Hellman (who had also become involved in the project), tapped the Hollywood screenwriting team of Frances Goodrich and Albert Hackett (It’s a Wonderful Life, Father of the Bride) to write the play. The two immediately began research, talking to rabbis and Jewish community members, visiting the Secret Annex and Otto Frank in Amsterdam. In the meantime, Hellman, Bloomgarden, and the production’s director Garson Kanin advised Goodrich and Hackett to emphasize the humor in the diary. They would eventually write eight drafts of the play.

Levin, meanwhile, took out a paid ad in the New York Post exhorting the public to write to Otto and Bloomgarden and demand a “test reading” of his play before it was “killed.” He wrote to Otto questioning the father’s right to speak for his daughter, claiming that while Otto knew her as a daughter, Levin knew her as a writer, and on the basis of this deeper connection, should be allowed to adapt her diary for the stage. In late 1954, Meyer Levin sued Cheryl Crawford and Otto Frank for breach of contract. When the suit was set aside on a technicality, Levin wrote Otto promising to fight the upcoming Broadway production, and comparing this struggle to the Warsaw ghetto uprising. In later letters, he compared the choice against his play to the mass murder of the Jews in Europe, and sued again in 1956, this time for plagiarism. He won a settlement of $15,000 from Otto Frank.

In 1973, Meyer Levin published a memoir of his struggle to get his dramatization of the Diary produced, called, appropriately enough, The Obsession. In it, he notes that as the fight to produce his play was going on in America, one of Stalin’s last great anti-Semitic purges was ravaging the Soviet Union. He claims that this influenced Lillian Hellman and other “Stalinists” to conspire to suppress the explicitly Jewish themes in his play, and that it was creeping anti-Semitism, not the pecuniary concerns of turning the Diary into a money-making Broadway hit (that would go on to win the Tony Award, Critics Circle Award, and Pulitzer Prize in 1956), that killed his play.

* * *

All this history was forgotten in the glow of the Diary’s international sales and readership and the critical and popular success of the play and film, until Wendy Kesselman published her adaptation of the play in 1997. The return of Anne Frank to the stage sparked two books analyzing the history of the Levin-Frank battles: The Stolen Legacy of Anne Frank by Ralph Melnick, and An Obsession with Anne Frank by Lawrence Graver, as well as an article in the New Yorker by Cynthia Ozick, entitled “Who Owns Anne Frank?” which wondered if it might have been better had the diary been lost, never to receive the adaptations, edits, and appropriations (Ozick uses the term “bowdlerizations”) that marked its rise to international prominence.

The copyright on the Goodrich-Hackett play restricted Kesselman to altering no more than 10 percent of the text, but in reading the script, one sees that some of Meyer Levin’s (and others’) objections to the original text have been addressed, particularly the criticism that in an attempt to make the story more “universal,” the specific Jewish elements were soft-pedaled, or excised entirely. Kesselman’s version does away with Goodrich and Hackett’s framing device of Otto and Miep discovering the Diary on a visit to the Secret Annex after the war. Instead, we are placed on the first day of the Franks’ going into hiding—and the most indelible image is that of the yellow Stars of David sewn prominently onto every garment they are wearing. Later, during the Hannukah scene, Kesselman replaces the Goodrich-Hackett’s jolly English party song with a traditional Hebrew hymn and prayers. At no point are we allowed to forget (as some viewers of the Broadway production reportedly did) why these people were in forced into hiding.

Unlike the 1950s writers, Kesselman had access to the 1995 Definitive Edition of the Diary, which restored five pages cut by Otto Frank for the original European and American publications, and she includes passages about Anne’s sexual awakening reading her art history textbook and experimenting with a friend. We hear the actress on stage read and embody the lines from her diary, at times speaking them directly to the audience, instead of just hearing her in voice over. In Meyer Levin’s script, a narrator keeps the audience appraised of the historical events occurring while the Franks are in hiding; Kesselman uses the more-adept device of radio broadcasts to a similar effect, including the broadcast from the exiled Dutch minister of education that encouraged Anne, during her final months in hiding, to revise and edit her diary with an eye toward future publication.

Kesselman’s most devastating alteration comes at the end of the play. Otto Frank’s new epilogue, describing in detail the fate of each occupant of the Secret Annex, fills in the grisly details for us, perhaps, at long last fulfilling Meyer Levin’s original ambition for the diary: to convey to the world what was destroyed at Auschwitz and Bergen-Belsen, so that it might never forget the horrors that Levin and Otto Frank witnessed first-hand.

But in the last half of the twentieth century, “never again” has happened countless times: in Cambodia, Africa, the former Yugoslavia, China, the Soviet Union... Anne’s last words to us aren’t the optimistic “In spite of everything, I still believe that people are really good at heart” but a darker vision, one that speaks less to the sunny optimism of the 1956 Anne Frank of Broadway, and more to the complexity, maturity, and thoughtfulness of the real writer of the Diary: “I see the world slowly being transformed into a wilderness. I hear the approaching thunder which will destroy us too. I feel the suffering of millions.”

For Further Reading:

Bloom, Harold, ed. A Scholarly Look at the Diary of Anne Frank. 1999. – Includes the New Yorker article by Cynthia Ozick, as well as other writings about the book, play, and film.

Frank, Anne. Anne Frank’s Tales from the Secret Annex. Trans. Michael Mok and Ralph Manheim. 1983. – Other short stories and fiction written by Anne Frank before and during her time in hiding.

Graver, Lawrence. An Obsession with Anne Frank. 1995.

Levin, Meyer. The Obsession. 1973.

Lindwer, Willy. The Last Seven Months of Anne Frank. Trans. Alison Meersschaert. 1988. – The stories of six women who knew Anne Frank, including Anne’s friend Hanneli (Hannah Pick-Goslar), who is one of the last people to see Anne alive at Bergen-Belsen.

Melnick, Ralph. The Stolen Legacy of Anne Frank. 1997.

Prose, Francine. Anne Frank: The Book, The Life, The Afterlife. 2009.

Photo Sources:

Page from The Diary of Anne Frank: Arjunpuri's Blog, http://arjunpuri.wordpress.com/2009/06/12/a-tribute-to-anne-frank-whose-innocence-touched-many-lives/

Meyer Levin: All About Jewish Theatre, http://www.jewish-theatre.com/visitor/article_display.aspx?articleID=3371

Frances Goodrich and Albert Hackett: Film Reference, http://www.filmreference.com/Writers-and-Production-Artists-Gi-Ha/Goodrich-Frances-and-Albert-Hackett.html

Wendy Kesselman: Truro Center for the Arts at Castle Hill, http://www.castlehill.org/workshops_writing.html

Anne Frank's Diary: AnneFrank.org, http://www.annefrank.org/content.asp?lid=2&pid=122.

New Video for "Anne Frank"!

2010-04-20T22:44:00.000-07:00

Check out our video promo for "The Diary of Anne Frank"

"Toward a living future" - Assistant Director Elizabeth Creely on "The Diary of Anne Frank"

2010-04-14T11:13:00.000-07:00

Helping a play come to life is an amazing experience; acting as the Assistant Director for Custom Made Theater’s production of the “The Diary of Anne Frank” was no exception. Playwright Wendy Kesselman’s 1991 adaptation emphasizes the claustrophobic atmosphere of the Secret Annex. The doomed inhabitants of 963 Prinsengracht Place seem to be in some sort of purgatory; not truly incarcerated, in the correct sense of the word and yet certainly not free. They occupied the annex for two and a half years before they were discovered and sent east, to the death camps.

Frances Goodrich and Albert Hackett first adapted the diary for a play in 1955. Kesselman’s version is significantly different. It challenges our perceptions of who Anne really was. Was she a sprightly young girl, wise beyond her years? Or an indulged, attention-seeking teen, who disliked her mother? Kesselman attempts to come to terms with the emotionally tumultuous young girl in part through directing our attention to Anne’s adolescence itself. Anne entered the annex just as her body entered puberty. Along with the demands of hiding, she had the additional challenge of contending with the onset of reproductive maturity and adolescent sexuality, in an atmosphere that couldn’t provide much, if any, privacy. In this atmosphere of constant intrusion and interruption, she finds solace in the pages of her diary, confessing there to a moment of same sex desire, the beginning of her menstrual cycle, and the delightfully bewildering sensuality she feels with her adolescent body and mind. “ I feel spring...spring awakening!” she says to us, her audience. “ I long for every boy!” Very different from the depictions of the sprightly, and chaste Anne many American children read about in high school classrooms.

This is a young girl who is waking up, quickly- maybe too quickly?- to the pleasures and seductions of adult sexuality. No wonder her mother worries about Anne’s frequent visits to the attic, where Peter awaits her. “It’s cold up in the attic”, Mrs. Frank says.” You’d better bundle up”. What tension her mother must have experienced, watching her daughter grow, knowing that a sweater is flimsy protection against the lure of sexuality. “ We can’t call any doctors,” says Mr. Frank in the beginning of the play.” We can’t get sick”. The management of all eight bodies- adult and child- would have been a constant source of tension and threat, especially the rapid growth of the adolescents, growing so surely to adulthood.

To the Bay Area audience, the admissions of a maturing young girl may not seem unduly shocking. Her father, Otto Frank, excised these portions from her diary in order to give her the privacy he couldn’t while they were in hiding. He may also have felt that Anne’s feelings were a distraction from what really needed to be discussed: the rigors of self-imprisonment and Hitler’s intent to eliminate European Jewish culture as systematically as possible- one Jewish family, one Jewish individual- at a time. The horrors of World War II were the reason the diary was published and the play, and film, written. Not Anne’s growing body. Future audiences needed to remember, to never forget.

Forgetting- or setting aside- exactly what happened to the Franks, Van Daans’ and Mr. Dussel was unavoidable for me, at least for the first few weeks of the rehearsal period. This is when important production priorities are met: actors get “off book” and internalize their dialogue; they synch their dialogue with the map of movement and motion the director has choreographed; the director, the actors and the crew discuss motivation and prop needs; the technical director lights the playing space; the sound technician creates a world of sound: all of this needs to be planned and negotiated, as the cast and crew commit themselves to the huge task of mastering the elements of a fully staged production.

But at some point, it became impossible for me to ignore what was being reenacted. I watched bodies get herded out of a room at gunpoint. I saw a mother and her two children watch, helpless, as their beloved husband and father is taken from them. And during Otto Frank’s closing monologue, I heard of the fates of each of the eight inhabitants of the Secret Annex. “Auschwitz. Separation.” says Mr. Frank, reciting the location and circumstance of each death. “Bergen-Belsen, Buchenwald, Theresienstadt. Date of death unknown. Mr. Dussel dies in Neuengamme.” Date of death unknown. Precise location of body? Impossible to establish. Last words, last thoughts? Unrecorded. Their bodies? Destroyed. Finally deprived of life, the children’s growth stopped forever.

Which is why the inclusion of Anne’s monologue about her sexual desire and growing awareness of her adult body matter so much. This is where the play became real to me; it is during this monologue that I felt Anne’s spirit become animate. It was also because of very skilled acting by 15-year old Julia Belanoff, who plays Anne with such insight and sensitivity. “I’m lucky. I’ve been healthy. In fact, I’ve been growing!” Anne says, exultantly, in a monologue during the second act. It’s during this monologue that the Final Solution, international in scope and impact, becomes personal: Hitler and his allies meant for Anne not to grow. Not to gain a shoe size; never to wear a bra and certainly not to get her period. Her body may have vanished, but we have her words to reassure us that she experienced growth, spiritual, sexual. Like a healthy plant compressed under a glass container, Anne’s body continued to develop, as long as it could. During that last two and a half years, it unknowingly resisted the Nazi’s plans, as fundamentally as the French resistance defied the Vichy regime or as the Dutch resisted the Nazi invasion of Holland. Anne is notable because she wrote; she is heart-wrenchingly ordinary at the same time. She was one of many adolescent Jewish girls in Europe, all dreaming of adulthood, all thinking of themselves in the future tense, and all watching, with pleasure, apprehension and anticipation, their bodies reach forward through time, toward a living future.

Before the Secret Annex

2010-04-06T09:27:00.000-07:00

Last week we opened our production of "The Diary of Anne Frank" by Wendy Kesselman. This powerful adaptation tells the story of eight Jews hiding during the Holocaust. Today assistant director Elizabeth Creeley took some time to let us know who these people were and what happened before they walked onto our stage.

The Frank family in 1941.

The story of the Secret Annex begins with Anne’s father, Otto Frank. It was he, along with his staff and rescuers—Meip Gies, Bep Voskuijl, Johannes Kleinman and Victor Gustav Kugler—who first thought of hiding from the Nazis and their Dutch allies within the city itself, at the offices and warehouse of his business, Opekta, a manufacturing firm located at 263 Prinsengracht in Amsterdam.

Otto Frank was born May 12, 1889, in Frankfurt to a prosperous Jewish family, which had been involved in banking and commerce since the mid-nineteenth century and had lived in Frankfurt for generations. Otto was brought up well, amidst turn-of-the-century German culture. He was schooled at private institutions and came of age, secure in the knowledge that his class and his culture—secular and thoroughly assimilated—were based in inheritable, stable institutions. He graduated from the Lessing-Gymnasium in Frankfurt, and enrolled in the University of Heidelberg. After cutting short his studies, he traveled in New York to work in the office of Macy’s Department Store for a time. After a broken engagement and the death of his father, he returned to Germany once in 1909 and then for good in 1911, just three years before Germany invaded Belgium and the First World War began.

He was drafted into the Kaiser’s army and rose to the rank of Lieutenant, a fact which later gave pause to the arresting officer, SS-Oberscharführer Karl Joseph Silberbauer, during the arrest of the occupants of the Secret Annex. Silberbauer later claimed to Austrian authorities that he had treated the prisoners “courteously” during the arrest, because of Otto Frank’s status as a lieutenant in the First World War.

Otto Frank met Edith Holländer when she was twenty-five and he was thirty-six. Shy and a devoutly observant Jew, Edith was born in Aachen, a German city close to the Dutch border. They married in Aachen in 1925. Nine months later, in February 1926, Edith gave birth to Margot Betti in Frankfurt am Main. Three years later, on June 12, 1926, Annaliese Marie or “Anne” was born.

After a failed banking venture, and with one eye on the rising anti-semitism in Germany, Otto Frank moved his family to Amsterdam, the Netherlands, in the summer of 1933, after staying for a short time with Edith’s mother In Aachen. Two years later, the Nuremberg Laws, which stripped German Jews of their citizenship, were introduced. Otto and his family became non-citizens, stripped of their national identity, belonging to no nation, and no state.

The Frank family thus joined an estimated 355,278 Jews who left Germany and Austria, panicked by the hatred of the Nazi government and desperate to escape the certain persecution and death that awaited them. Otto began a new life as the owner and director of Opekta, a manufacturer of pectin to be used in jam making. Once in Amsterdam, Otto met and hired three people, all destined to play a crucial role on the hiding of the Frank family: Meip Gies, an Austrian-born woman sent to live in Amsterdam at a young age due to illness and Victor Kugler (given the pseudonym “Mr. Kraler” by Anne in her diary). These two, with the active assistance of several others, including Miep’s husband Jan and Opekta staff members Bep Voskuijl and Johannes Kleiman, formed a lifeline that connected of the inhabitants of the Secret Annex to the outside world.

Otto, in an effort to diversify Opekta’s commercial base, formed a business partnership with Hermann van Pels (“Mr. van Daan”). Hermann van Pels was born in Gehrde, Germany, in 1890 to a family of butchers and sausage makers. Hermann and Auguste van Pels (“Mrs. van Daan”), née Röttgen, were married in Osnabruck and had one son, Peter, who was born in 1926. Nazi prohibitions against Jews owning businesses meant that Herman and his sister, Ida, were forced to sell the van Pels’ meat seasoning business. Shortly thereafter, the van Pels fled from the rapidly deteriorating situation in Germany, arriving in Amsterdam during June 1937. The van Pels family lived in the same neighborhood as the Franks. In 1938, Otto Frank hired Hermann van Pels as a herbal specialist and formed a new company to prepare and distribute spices, Pectacon.

The last Jewish refugee to enter the story of the Secret Annex was a man named Fritz Pfeffer (“Mr. Dussel”), a dentist. A tall, handsome, athletic man, Pfeffer was on the periphery of the Franks’ social circle, having been known by Miep Gies, whose dentist shared a surgery with Pfeffer. Fritz Pfeffer was born in Giessen, Germany, and after a first marriage ended in divorce, fled to Amsterdam, registered as a Jewish refugee, and met and fell in love with a Christian woman, Charlotte Kaletta. They tried to marry but could not, due Nazi-era “Blood Protection Laws,” segregationist laws which were a part of the Nuremberg Laws. These laws prohibited sexual relations between Jews and Christians, as well as marriage.

Otto, Edith, Margot, and Anne Frank went into hiding on July 6, 1942, and were joined on July 13 by Hermann, Auguste, and Peter van Pels. Fritz Pfeffer joined them in November, forming a group of self-incarcerated Jews, hiding in the tiny upstairs attic of the Opekta offices and warehouse. The eight lived together in the cramped annex (Achterhuis or “back house”) for two-and-a-half years, from July 1942 to August 4, 1944.

Photo Credits and Further Reading:

“The Diary of Anne Frank: The Critical Edition.” Netherlands State Institute for War Documentation. Doubleday, New York, 1989.

The Simon Wiesenthal Center, “36 Questions About the Holocaust” http://motlc.wiesenthal.com/site/pp.asp?c=gvKVLcMVIuG&b=394663.

Anne Frank.org, "Overview" www.annefrank.org.

The Anne Frank Guide, "Date" http://www.annefrankguide.net/en-GB/bronnenbank.asp?aid=10679.

Arjunpuri's Blog "A tribute to Anne Frank whose innocence touched many lives" http://arjunpuri.wordpress.com/2009/06/12/a-tribute-to-anne-frank-whose-innocence-touched-many-lives/.

USA Today "Rescuer of Anne Frank's Diary Marks 100th Birthday" http://www.usatoday.com/news/world/2009-02-12-annefrank-helper_N.htm.

Rapp on Rapp

2010-02-04T11:14:00.000-08:00

This week the San Francisco Chronicle interviewed Adam Rapp in anticipation of our Bay Area premiere of Red Light Winter. You can read it at SFGate.com. It's an interesting and honest look into Rapp's process. We were inspired and looked up other Rapp interviews. Here are some of the most elucidating quotes we found.

"I wrote it [Red Light Winter] in 2003. I was on the West Coast, auditioning people for my first film. For some reason I started about the time I spent with a best friend in Amsterdam back in 1997. My friend was very depressed and was having a hard time connecting to the world. He'd lost a girlfriend. In Amsterdam I thought it would be good for him to get back on the horse. So I went window-shopping in the red light district for a woman for him. I met a woman, we slept together, and I gave her more money so I could send my friend to her, too. She was a Greek premed student, purportedly, very beautiful and sweet. He had an amazing time and developed an irrational obsession with her. In LA, I went back to my hotel room and started writing a play about two friends who both sleep with the same prostitute. The play is very much fiction. People want to believe it's directly autobiographical, but I just borrowed the triangle."

Foster, Catherine. A 'Red Light' Rapp on love, sex, friendship. The Boston Globe.
(July 14, 2006).
http://www.boston.com/ae/theater_arts/articles/2006/07/14/a_red_light_rapp_on_love_sex_friendship/

"I've lived in this building for 17 years, on 10th between 1st and A. I lived here with my brother downstairs, and then when we had landlord problems we were squatting for a while. And I'm still here. Everything I've ever written, I've done from here. Now it's pretty nice, but I've been here with six roommates, crammed in like an artists' colony, everyone eating everybody's yogurt. I look out this tiny, barred window, and it reminds me that we're all in cages, stacked on one another. So I know those kinds of rooms. And my plays always start from the room, one window and a door."

Shaw, Helen. Adam Rapp. Time Out New York, 678. (October 1, 2008).
http://newyork.timeout.com/articles/40th-anniversary/60791/adam-rapp-interview-with-time-out-new-york

"I always imagine the room that these characters are in, there's usually a door and there's usually a window, and I like to work with weather and I like to work with why people leave. And if they leave they have to have a really good reason. So my first act might be an entire scene in this one room, and that's happened in a lot of my plays. […] When I'm writing for theater I can take my time, and you can use real time and real space and characters can breath and they can really want what's in the other character's pocket and they can really take their time getting there and you can drop story plot points in a way that's framed and takes it's time."

Leeds, Douglas B. (Host). The Playwright. American Theatre Wing: Working in the Theatre.
(December, 2006).
http://americantheatrewing.org/seminars/detail/playwrights_12_06

"[Writing] does take me to a dark place and I get mad at the characters and want them to be better people, less selfish, etc. But I also love them. I care a great deal for Horlick [a character in Ball Peen Hammer] and I resisted his fate in the story. But I feel I'm at my best when my characters are pulling me in complicated directions."

Hogan, John. Apocalypse Now. Graphic Novel Reporter.
http://www.graphicnovelreporter.com/content/apocalypse-now-interview

"I find that more and more I'm trying to entertain myself when I'm working, because I know the work's going to go to a horrible place. … I don't know where the characters are going to go or what's going to happen. I know that something inevitable will happen. I know that they want certain things and they're in a certain room and they smell like this and they look like that. More often than not, an entropy creeps in that strangles me, and then the inevitable happens. I don't know if I have the ability to write an ending like My Fair Lady's, when everyone gets what they want after a few minor conflicts. If I tried to write that it would just be false. Or I'd have someone enter with a machine gun."

"There's nothing better than when I'm in the middle of a play. I can't wait to wake up to write. I mean, sex is good and drugs are great, sometimes. But there's nothing better than that kind of ephemeral longing that you feel-that yearning right before you wake up. That I can't wait to get back in that room with those people. That's what I'm addicted to."

Norman, Marsha. Adam Rapp. BOMB, 95. (Spring 2006).
http://www.bombsite.com/issues/95/articles/2819

"Well it's been hard for me to not write, and that's the only process I can speak to I guess, it's so compulsive and I need to do it all the time that sometimes I make myself not do it so I can actually tend to my life. And my life has been in shambles, like my personal relationships, my laundry, paying bills - now I have someone who pays my bills - and it's always been a challenge because it overwhelms me. And just once I start I can go for hours and hours and hours, and sometimes I forget to eat, and the only thing I really break for is to play basketball and to walk around outside and just get some fresh air. A lot of times, days melt away; and when I'm in that zone, I love that it's like going down a rabbit hole that I enjoy. "

Gilboe, Michael. Broadway Bullet Interview: Playwright Adam Rapp. Broadway World.com.
(March 26, 2007).
http://www.broadwayworld.com/article/Broadway_Bullet_Interview_Playwright_Adam_Rapp_20070326

"When I started writing, I was a novelist. When I discovered theater - actually, more precisely - what I discovered while writing music was an immediate jolt that accompanied the process, something that takes a novel three-hundred pages to accomplish, whereas music opened up the floodgates. When theater arrived, it was a new attempt to figure out what that form truly is. You can delay an emotion in such a crystallized emotional container and also have a lyric - which tells a story or abstract a feeling. I was drawn to that and how the potential of storytelling can be living in the same organism. […] A lot of my earlier stuff had songs, and I didn't even know why. I wasn't really playing music, but I was drawn to this moment where someone needs to sing something. I always had this instinct to write songs and just didn't know how to do it. Though I am drawn to specific musical genres - indie rock and classic rock, mostly - I've been engaged by the soul-heavy troubadours, the Nick Drakes, the Bill Callahans, and usually do what novelists do, which is write as though I'm recording a song in my bedroom, you know. Tom Waits is such a great storyteller and a major influence. […] Music is the language of yearning that comes out of an animal cry into thought process. It is joy and love and animal tones; animal language."

Bartels, Brian. Shadow Sounds: Music as Character. Fiction Writers Review. (May 18, 2009).
http://fictionwritersreview.com/interviews/shadow-sounds-music-as-character-an-interview-with-adam-rapp

Adam Rapp Biography

2010-01-26T11:39:00.000-08:00

Tonight we are thrilled to open the Bay Area Premiere of Adam Rapp's Red Light Winter. Rapp has become one of the major playwrights of our time and his is one of the more interesting journeys to playwriting that we've encountered.

Adam Rapp is a critically acclaimed playwright, theater director, novelist, screenwriter, and film director. He was born to Mary Lee and Douglas Rapp in Chicago. His parents divorced when he was five and he, his sister Anne, and his brother Anthony were raised by their mother in Joilet, Illinois. His brother Anthony was a successful child actor and started making more money than his mother, a prison nurse. Thus, when Anthony got into shows outside of Illinois the entire family would have to join him. Adam Rapp found himself repeatedly uprooted from his friends and the life he wanted to have. Resentful of theater and his brother, he finally was allowed to stay in Illinois with his father and stepmother. He became delinquent and they sent him to reform school. From there he went to a military high school and finally turned himself around. He went to college on a basketball scholarship and there found himself in a poetry class. He quickly changed his major to fiction writing and, when he graduated, moved to New York City to pursue a writing career.

His first published work was Missing the Piano, a young adult novel in 1994. It was well received and won multiple awards from the American Library Association. Since then he has written six other young adult novels (The Buffalo Tree, The Copper Elephant, Little Chicago, 33 Snowfish, Under the Wolf, Under the Dog and Punkzilla). One, The Buffalo Tree, created some controversy in 2005 when a Pennsylvania school board banned it from their curriculum. Adam Rapp has also written the graphic novel Ball Peen Hammer and the adult novel The Year of Endless Sorrows.

Despite their earlier sibling animosity, Adam Rapp read his early short stories to his younger brother, Anthony, and they became close as adults, eventually sharing an apartment in New York. Despite his grudge towards theater, Rapp went to see his brother in John Guare's Six Degrees of Separation. Previously he had thought of theater as solely light musical comedies, Six Degrees of Separation was the first time he experienced theater as something that could be moving. He began reading plays voraciously and was further inspired by such playwrights as Samuel Shepard, David Mamet, Harold Pinter, Arthur Miller, Anton Chekhov, Edward Bond, Caryl Churchill, Naomi Wallace, Sarah Kane, Richard Nelson and Irene Fornes. He started to play with the form and an early play caught the eye of Marsha Norman, co-director of Juliard's playwriting program. She encouraged Adam Rapp to join them in their prestigious two year playwriting fellowship.

After the fellowship Adam Rapp wrote a number of plays that didn't get produced. He became once again disillusioned with theater and quickly ran out of money. Right before he gave up on theater, his play Nocturne got picked up at A.R.T. in Cambridge and with critical acclaim soon was produced off-Broadway. He soon had a suite residency with Mabou Mines in 2000 and won the 2001 Helen Merrill Award for Emerging Playwrights.

For the next five years he continued to find success off-Broadway and in 2005 he was nominated for the Pulitzer Prize for his play Red Light Winter. First produced at the Steppenwolf Theatre Company in Chicago, Red Light Winter was a fantastic success and was awarded the 2005 Joseph Jefferson Award for New Work. It subsequently had an Obie Award winning run with Adam Rapp directing. Rapp's other plays include Netherbones, Ghosts in the Cottonwood, Trueblinka, Blackfrost, Night of the Whitefish, Finer Noble Gasses, Faster, Dreams of the Salthorse, Animals and Plants, Stone Cold Dead Serious, Train Story, Gompers, Members Only, Essential Self Defense, American Silgo, Blackbird, Bingo with The Indians, The Metal Children, Kindness and Classic Kitchen Timer. He is currently the resident playwright for Edge Theater Company in New York.

Since Red Light Winter Adam Rapp has continued to direct many of his plays as well as some works by other authors. He directed his first feature film, Winter Passing, in 2005. He both directed and adapted his next film, Blackbird, from his earlier play of the same name. He also worked in television as a creative consultant for a season of The L Word. When not working, Rapp is an avid outdoor basketball player and musician. Once a member of the band Bottomside, he now plays guitar and sings with Less the Band, a band consisting of cast members from Rapp's play Finer Noble Gasses.

Much of Adam Rapp's work uses his own difficult life as a starting place. His plays and novels are known for their gritty and stark realism. His protagonists are generally in their twenties or thirties and he values bringing in audiences of that generation. There is a perpetual sense that his characters are waiting for inevitable tragedy, and yet he finds comedy in the harsh and painful worlds he creates. Adam Rapp is one of our great contemporary young playwrights and is well set to continue to make an impact on the theater scene for years to come.

Photo Credits and Further Reading:

Answers.com profile of Adam Rapp: http://www.answers.com/topic/adam-rapp-children-s-author

The Free Library's Profile of Adam Rapp: http://www.thefreelibrary.com/Profile: Adam Rapp.-a0126556707
Biblio.com's Biography: http://www.biblio.com/author_biographies/2045398/Adam_Rapp.html

The Vineyard Theatre's Interview Adam Rapp: Vineyard Theatre. http://www.vineyardtheatre.org/interview-metalchildren.htm

Associated Press article on the School Board banning The Buffalo Tree: http://www.firstamendmentcenter.org/news.aspx?id=15137

A New York Press Article on Less the Band: http://www.nypress.com/article-19130-the-end-of-the-world-as-we-know-it.html

Top photo from Theatremania's article on Red Light Winter: http://www.theatermania.com/new-york/news/05-2005/all-over-the-map_6030.html

Bottom photo Time Out New York's interview with Adam Rapp: http://newyork.timeout.com/articles/40th-anniversary/60791/adam-rapp-interview-with-time-out-new-york

Jesus in Musicals

2009-12-20T15:11:00.000-08:00

Cotton Patch Gospel is one of many popular musicals that uses the Gospels as source material. Each reimagines how the story could be staged and leads to a deeper understanding of "the greatest story ever told." Cotton Patch Gospel built upon this tradition and created a show that incorporated elements of each of them. Below are some facts on each of the most well known four Gospel inspired musicals. They are interesting in their own right and also give some illuminating perspective into Cotton Patch Gospel.

1961 - Black Nativity
By Langston Hughes
Music Traditional

Genesis: Langston Hughes is best known as the most famous poet of the Harlem Renaissance. However, he was also a well regarded playright having written over 20 plays primarily about the African American experience.
Productions: Black Nativity opened on Broadway on December 11, 1961. After a couple of decades of relative absence, African American Theater companies started picking it up and it is now performed all over the U.S. during the Christmas season.
Musical Style: Gospel renditions of traditional Christmas Carols
Hit Songs: "Go Tell It On the Mountain" and "Joy to the World"
Based On: The birth of Jesus as portrayed in the Gospel of Luke
Famous Actors: Marion Williams of the Ward Singers and Professor Alex Brafford who sold more than a million records with "I'm Too Close to Heaven" both were in the touring cast of Black Nativity.
Innovation: Brought the joy, enthusiasm and feel of Christmas African American church services to a mainstream audience.
Interesting Fact: Dancers Alvin Ailey and Carmen de Lavallade left the show before it opened in protest of changing the title to include the word "Black."

1971 - Jesus Christ Superstar
Music by Andrew Lloyd Webber (Evita, Phantom of the Opera, and Cats)
Lyrics by Tim Rice (Evita, Chess, and The Lion King)

Genesis: Andrew Lloyd Webber and Tim Rice had already written Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat together, but that had been for a school production and they were unknowns at the time. They first released Superstar as a concept album in 1970 and it's quick rise to #1 paved the way for two lengthy careers in musical theatre.
Productions: The original Broadway production opened on October 12, 1971 and ran for 18 months. A film version, filmed in Israel, was made in 1973. It has since been produced all over the world and seen many U.S. tours.
Musical Style: Rock Opera
Hit Songs: Murray Head released a single version of "Superstar" in 1971 which reached #14 in the U.S. The same year Helen Reddy recorded a version of "I Don't Know How to Love Him" which reached #12 in the U.S. Yvonne Elliman also had a chart reaching single with "Everything's Alright".
Based On: The Gospel of John from Jesus entering Jerusalem to his crucifixion.
Famous Actors: Yvonne Elliman, who later had a #1 hit with "If I Can't Have You" from Saturday Night Fever, had her career take off with the role of Mary Magdelene, which she played on the concept album, in the original Broadway cast and in the 1973 film. The concept album's Judas, Murray Head most famous for his recording of "One Night in Bangkok" from Chess, and the original Broadway Judas, Ben Vareen most famous for later starring in the musical Pippin and the filmAll That Jazz, also saw their careers take off after their involvement.
Innovation: Jesus Christ Superstar portrayed Judas as a main character. Rather than the villain, he was portrayed sympathetically as a tragic hero trying to prevent Jesus from inciting the Romans to destroy the Jewish people.
Interesting Fact: After the concept album was produced productions of the show began popping up without the authors' consent. They sued and the subsequent ruling is one of the foundations of theatrical copyright law.

1971 - Godspell
Music by Stephen Schwartz (Pippin, Pocahontas and Wicked)
Lyrics primarily from the Episcopal Hymnal
Book by John-Michael Tebelak

Genesis: The show was originally John-Michael Tebelak's thesis project at Carnegie Mellon University. After a two week run at La MaMa in New York Stephen Schwartz was brought in to rewrite the music.
Productions: Godspell opened Off-Broadway at the Promenade Theatre on August 10, 1971. It moved to Broadway in 1976 and spawned a film adaptation in 1973. Since then it has become a community theater mainstay, seeing wildly different interpretations of it's simply set tale.
Musical Style: An eclectic mix of musical theater styles.
Hit Songs: "Day By Day," which reached #13 in the U.S. Other popular songs include "By My Side" and "All for the Best."
Based On: The parables in the Gospel of Matthew.
Famous Actors: The film adaptation of Godspell was the film debut of Victor Garber who had been in the Original Broadway Cast of Sweeney Todd and later would be in the film Titanic. In the ensemble of both the original cast and the film was Lynne Thigpen, known to a later generation as the chief in PBS' Where in the World is Carmen Sandiego.
Innovation: Inspired by Dr. Harvey Cox's "Christ the Harlequin," Godspell focused on the festivity, playfullness and delight in the Jesus story.
Interesting Fact: Stephen Schwartz has said Godspell is realy about the building of a community. His song "Beautiful City" was written for the film and emphasizes that idea. While not in the script of the musical, the rights allow productions to insert the song into the show wherever they think it fits.

1981 - Cotton Patch Gospel
Music and Lyrics by Harry Chapin ("Taxi", "W*O*L*D", and "Cat's in the Cradle")
Book by Tom Key and Russell Treyz

Genesis: Actor Tom Key was looking to write a play transporting Jesus and his story to the present day South. Someone told him about Clarence Jordan's The Cotton Patch Versions of Matthew and John which already did just that. Inspired by Jordan's work, Tom Key and Russell Treyz created a one man show. They asked Harry Chapin to write a couple of songs to start and end the show and he was so excited by it he turned the show into a musical.
Productions: Cotton Patch Gospel opened Off-Broadway on October 21, 1981 and ran for 193 performances. It was filmed in 1988 and has since become a staple musical in the South still performed by dozens of companies each year.
Musical Style: Bluegrass
Hit Songs: "Somethin's Brewin' in Gainesville", "Jubilation", and "I Wonder What Would Happen to This World".
Based On: The Gospel of Matthew
Famous Actors: Adapter Tom Key stared in the original production and continues to perform the show to this day.
Innovation: Cotton Patch Gospel puts Jesus in our own time, effectively exploring how we'd react if he came today.
Interesting Fact: Original Matthew and author Tom Key's life was threatened by the Ku Klux Klan because in the show they are implicated in the murder of Jesus.

Further Reading:
The SF Chronicle's Review of Lorraine Hansbury Theatre's current production of Black Nativity: http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2009/12/16/DDDV1B47OG.DTL

Wikipedia's article on Jesus Christ Superstar: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jesus_Christ_Superstar

Musicalschwartz.com's Godspell page: http://www.musicalschwartz.com/godspell.htm

Loren Collins' Cotton Patch Gospel Website: http://www.lorencollins.net/cottonpatchgospel

The full text of Clarence Jordan's Cotton Patch Gospels: http://rockhay.tripod.com/cottonpatch/

*All photos from www.amazon.com except "Cotton Patch Gospel" which is from http://www.lorencollins.net/cottonpatchgospel/ and "Jesus Christ Superstar" which is from www.wikipedia.com

The Life of Cotton Patch Gospel Composer Harry Chapin

2009-12-10T16:43:00.000-08:00

Singer/songwriter Harry Chapin wrote the music to Cotton Patch Gospel right before he died in 1981. Its catchy music brings to life the funny and moving story while bringing light to the hypocrisy of human apathy. It is the culmination of a life dedicated to great music and humanitarianism.

Harry Chapin was born in New York City, the second of four children. His father left the family when he was eight and went and toured as a drummer with the big bands of the era. After high school Chapin spent three months at the Air Force Academy. He then twice flunked out of Cornell University. He went into a band, recording an album with two of his brothers, but the album was unsuccessful. To avoid being drafted his brothers had to drop the band and go to college. Harry Chapin started working in film. While writing a screenplay, he was hired to give guitar lessons to Sandy Chapman so she could play songs to her three children. In 1968 Legendary Champions, the documentary film that came from that screenplay, was nominated for an Academy Award and Chapin became father to thethree children and husband to Sandy Chapman.

Chapin found, while his passion was in storytelling, his drive was still to make music. He combined the two to start writing his now famous, story-songs. In 1971 he pulled together a band and soon caught the attention of Elektra. His debut album Heads and Tales was on the charts for over half of 1972. It’s song “Taxi” became the most requested song in America for ten weeks.

A year later Short Stories produced “W.O.L.D.” which was in the top 50 and the next year Verities and Balderdash became Chapin’s first gold album. The now classic “Cat’s in the Cradle” from that album quickly flew to number one.

Through the rest of the seventies he made seven more popular albums. His solo show, The Night That Made America Famous ran on Broadway for 75 performances and was nominated for two Tony awards.

Despite his great success as a storyteller and musician, Chapin’s greatest legacy is that of activist. Before charity concerts were vogue, Chapin did a hundred a year, raising over 5 million dollars. In 1975 he co-founded World Hunger Year (WHY), an organization dedicated to addressing the root causes of hunger and poverty. For his work to end hunger he was posthumously awarded the Congressional Gold Medal. He also served as a delegate to the Democractic National Convention and was dedicated towards bringing the arts to Long Island, serving on numerous boards there.

In 1981, at the age of 38, Chapin tragically died in a car crash while driving to a benefit performance. His final work, Cotton Patch Gospel, was posthumously produced in New York a few months later. This musical was based on a book by Dr. Clarence Jordan, the founder of Habitat for Humanity. It recontextualized the story of Jesus into the modern day and explored how contemporary Christians would respond to Jesus’ arrival. Harry Chapin’s epitath was taken from the final song from that show “I Wonder What Would Happen to this World”

Oh if a man tried
To take his time on Earth
And prove before he died
What one man’s life could be worth
I wonder what would happen
to this world

Further Reading & Photo Credits:

Harry Chapin photo from Rolling Stone's Biography: http://www.rollingstone.com/artists/harrychapin/biography

Gravestone photo from Wikipedia Article: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harry_Chapin#Legacy

Rolling Stone Obituary from the Harry Chapin Archive: http://harrychapin.com/articles/rsobit.shtml

Autobiographical Statement from The Harry Chapin Archive: http://harrychapin.com/articles/bio.shtml

"Music Rewind: The Activism & Storytelling Of Harry Chapin" by Hal Licino: http://hubpages.com/hub/Music-Rewind-The-Activism-Storytelling-Of-Harry-Chapin

Interview with "Cotton Patch Gospel" Director, Marilyn Langbehn

2009-12-02T15:26:00.000-08:00

Cotton Patch Gospel opened last week to standing ovations. During rehearsals director Marilyn Langbehn sat down with us to let us know what makes the show work.

What brought you to Cotton Patch Gospel? Why this show?

I’m not from the South, I quite honestly don’t know where my affinity for this material actually comes from, except that my grandmother was very much in the old time gospel tradition. I remember as a very little girl going to the Assemblies of God church with her, and honest to God this church was built out of logs; it looked like a log cabin. That whole revivalist feeling around religion and very simple storytelling was what she was attracted to and what she made sure I was exposed to. So, from the time I was a little girl, there was this attraction or this affinity for this style of storytelling and this style of preaching. There’s something about the simplicity of it; there’s something about the music, the bluegrass feel and the fact that Harry Chapin wrote it. He was somebody that I was very keen on when I was in college. Just basically the whole package was very exciting to me, and I’m very glad they asked me to do it.

This show is about the life of Jesus who is, of course, a major figure in Christianity. How do you feel this show speaks to Christians and how does it speak to non-Christians?

The story of Jesus, is one of the great stories that we have, regardless of where you are on the faith perspective. It’s always interesting to me to see the various ways in which it gets told. You have the big three theatrical tellings of it, from Jesus Christ Superstar to this show to Godspell. Those are all very different presentations of essentially the same story. The thing that strikes me about this particular telling is that what you’ve got is the message of Jesus distilled down to its very essence, which is essentially do unto others. At the end of the day, what they want you to do is treat everybody the way you want to be treated, and that’s what they present to you as the message.

You’ve directed Superstar, how does your approach to this show differ from how you directed that, despite both telling the story of Jesus?

Superstar has by intention a much harder edge to it. You know, the rock opera format is designed to drive things in a certain way. This is very much told in the way that we all told stories when we were kids: I be the bad guy and you be the good guy. And that’s all the instruction that you need and that’s all the context that you need in order to just branch off and spin a fantasy for yourself. The way that this is put together, Edward plays Matthew who is the narrator and one of the disciples. All he has to do is play the most basic of contexts for us and we instantly know where we are. There are no props in this show; there are no set changes. The spectacle is that of the inside of a barn and a Chautauqua meeting. It’s a fundamental storytelling style that we all grew up with and are so familiar with.

How has it been working with Edward? What’s it like to direct a one man show for much of the piece.

I worked with Edward one other time. He was wonderful, and ever since that time we’ve been in communication back and forth saying we need to find a time and a way to work together again. It all just sort of fell into place. He’s perfect for it. He understands this method of storytelling. He understands how this music works on a whole different level. He’s very generous with his emotional self in the telling of the story, generous to his fellow actors and generous with the audience. It’s been an interesting and lovely experience working with him. It’s a fascinating process to have just the two of you in a room trying to solve the problems of the text and make sure you’re telling it in as engaging and as theatrical a way as you possibly can. It’s fun.

Then there’s the trio, where did they come from and what do they give the show?

It’s really interesting, because the music is written to be sung by the band, which in the original production was four guys. That’s one of the interesting things about this piece; the authors recognized that you can take this basic structure and do a lot of different things with it. In all the notes that they send along with the piece they say “you’re probably not going to find what we created this piece with,” meaning one actor and these band members “so make it work for you.” When we had the auditions, it became clear that the three women we have were the best musicians to tell this part of the story. So instead of a four man quartet we have a three woman trio singing this. Rona Siddiqui, our music director who is also one of the singers, had to take the music and restructure the harmonies in such a way that they fell more naturally into the women’s range. She’s just done an amazing job, not only in recrafting all of that, but then creating that specific sound that the trio has. The sound that the women have is tight, rich and exactly right. It’s just thrilling. It is a whole new way of looking at the material.

You do have a bluegrass band as well, yes?

Oh my God, the band! Well if this doesn’t knock people’s socks off then I’ll throw in with you. The one thing that I knew from experience about bluegrass musicians is that they are a rare breed, a specific type of musician, and if they are any good, they are very good at what they do. One of those things you know to look for if you’ve done enough musicals is when the singers know that the band has got their backs and the band knows that the singers are worth it. It’s this incredibly magical thing that happens amongst disparate musicians when they become a unit. They become a whole sound of voices and instruments together, and I’m watching that happen in rehearsal. You can’t not dance a little in your seat when you hear this music, and you can’t help but be moved at the simplicity and genuine honesty of the lyrics.

As a director there’s always that moment when something’s working and you have some sort of infallible physical signal that happens to you. You know, when the hair stands up on the back of your neck, that kind of thing. It takes a lot for that to happen to me. The moment when Herod orders the henchmen to find baby Jesus and kill him, the massacre of the innocents for those of you that are following along in your hymnals, is heart-breaking. They end up killing all the babies under the age of two, and in this version they toss a bomb into a church nursery. Of course Jesus isn’t there, but it kills 14 babies and toddlers, which harks back to what happened in the South in the civil rights struggle. Erica Richardson, who is this glorious-voiced African American actress, is singing the role of the mother in that particular number. It doesn’t take a lot of imagination to see how far we have and haven’t come.

Anything else give you that sensation?

It happens several times, and I won’t tell you where they all are, but if I’m dancing in my seat that’s a pretty good sign. Katie Kimball, the other trio member, has the most open face. She understands the joy of the music in a way that is completely unclouded by any kind of guile or bravado or need to protect. She is just completely available to the emotional content of the piece and in the music that she is singing. When she and the rest of the trio started to sing “Going to Atlanta” last night, that group of women were so excited I thought they were going to blow the roof off. It’s thrilling. I have such fun. I do

The Art of The Heidi Chronicles

2009-10-28T03:39:00.000-07:00

It's the final week of The Heidi Chronicles. For those who have seen our production, you'll remember that after each scene a painting is taken off of the wall. We were very excited to have these paintings; they were painted by artist Nicola McCarthy specifically for the show to evoke the emotional and historical context for the scene during which they are highlighted. Each painting is also an homage to the work of a particular twentieth century female artist and Nicola took time to write a little about her inspirations for us. She also let us put photos of her paintings above each description and a photo of one of the paintings that inspired hers on the right or below.

Act One, Scene One: Painting inspired by Bridget Riley’s Drift series

Bridget Riley is one of the leading lights of the 60's Op Art movement, she inspired a wave of bold graphic design in fashion. Her paintings present a great variety of geometric forms that produce sensations of movement or colour, said to induce sensations in viewers as varied as seasickness and sky diving. If you stare at them for a minute, you will see the sense of movement – vibrating, flashing, throbbing – and perceive illusions of perspective or 3-dimensional space. The effect is mesmerizing, illuminating... but dizzying!

Act One, Scene Two: Painting inspired by Judy Chicago’s Through The Flower

Judy Chicago is a feminist artist who has been making work since the mid 1960s. Her earliest forays into art-making coincided with the rise of Minimalism, which she eventually abandoned in favor of art she believed to have greater content and relevance. Major works include The Dinner Party and The Holocaust Project. She came to be known as an essentialist as she saw something innate and essential to the female species that could be represented by round objects and openings (i.e. female sex organs).

Act One, Scene Three: Painting inspired by Lee Krasner’s Black and White and Pink Collage

Lee Krasner was an influential abstract expressionist painter in the second half of the 20th century. She married artist Jackson Pollock, who was also influential in the Abstract Expressionism movement. Comrades in art, Pollock and Krasner fought a battle for legitimacy, impulsiveness and individual expression. They opposed an old-fashioned, conformist, and repressed culture unreceptive to these values, which was put off by the intricacy of Modernism in general.

Act One, Scene Four: Painting inspired by the Guerrilla Girls’ Do women have to be naked to get into the Met Museum?

The Guerrilla Girls are a group of radical feminist artists established in New York City in 1985, known for using creative posters to promote women and people of color in the arts. Their first work was putting up posters on the streets of New York decrying the gender and racial imbalance of artists represented in galleries and museums. Over the years they expanded their activism to examine Hollywood and the film industry, popular culture, gender stereotyping and corruption in the art world. In 2001 they split into three groups, Guerrilla Girls, Inc.; GuerrillaGirlsBroadBand and Guerrilla Girls On Tour.

Act One, Scene Five: Painting inspired by Yoko Ono’s Painting to Hammer a Nail

Yoko Ono Lennon is a Japanese-American artist and musician. She is known for her marriage to John Lennon and for her work as an avant-garde artist and musician. Ono was an explorer of conceptual and performance art.

Act Two, Scene One: Painting inspired by Alice Neel’s The Pregnant Woman

Alice Neel (January 28, 1900 – October 13, 1984) was an American artist known for her oil on canvas portraits of friends, family, lovers, poets, artists and strangers. Her paintings are notable for their expressionistic use of line and color, psychological acumen, and emotional intensity.

Act Two, Scene Two: Painting inspired by Barbara Kruger’s Untitled (Your body is a battleground)

Barbara Kruger is an American conceptual artist. Much of Kruger's graphic work consists of black-and-white photographs with overlaid captions set in white-on-red Futura Bold Oblique. The juxtaposition of Kruger's imagery with text containing criticism of sexism and the circulation of power within cultures is a recurring motif in the work. The text in her work of the 1980s includes such phrases as "Your comfort is my silence" (1981), "you invest in the divinity of the masterpiece" (1982), and "I shop therefore I am" (1987). She has said that "I work with pictures and words because they have the ability to determine who we are and who we aren’t."

Act Two, Scene Four: Painting inspired by Joan Mitchell’s Sunflower Series

Joan Mitchell was a ‘Second Generation’ Abstract Expressionist painter. Along with Lee Krasner, Grace Hartigan, and Helen Frankenthaler she was one of her era's few female painters to gain critical and public acclaim. Her paintings and editioned prints can be seen in major museums and collections across America and Europe.

Act Two, Scene Five: Painting inspired by Marlene Dumas’ The Painter

Marlene Dumas was born in Cape Town, South Africa. She studied at the University of Cape Town from 1972 to 1975 and moved to the Netherlands on a scholarship when she was 23. She's been living in Amsterdam for many years. She often uses reference material of Polaroid photographs of her friends and lovers, whilst she also references magazines and pornographic material. Marlene Dumas also paints portraits of children and erotic scenes to impact the world of contemporary art.

Photo Credits:
All photos of Nicola McCarthy's paintings taken by Fred Pitts
Drift No. 2, Through the Flower, Do Women Have to be Naked to get into the Met Museum? and The Painter from Artnet (http://www.artnet.com)
Black and White and Pink Collage from The City Review (http://www.thecityreview.com/krasner.html)
Paiting to Hammer a Nail in from AskArt (http://www.askart.com/askart/o/yoko_ono/yoko_ono.aspx)
Yves by Joan Mitchell from Hauser & Wirth (http://www.hauserwirth.com/exhibitions/322/joan-mitchell-sunflowers/view/)
Pregnant Woman from ArtConcerns.com (http://www.artconcerns.net/2007MayBaroda/html/baroda_birthright.htm)
Untitled (Your body is a battleground) from Stanford BodyWorks Syllabus (http://www.stanford.edu/dept/HPST/BodyWorks/11300/04.htm)

Public Transit

2009-10-07T03:02:00.000-07:00

The Heidi Chronicles opened a week ago. We’ve had a wonderful week of performances and the audience response has been great. People love the play and seem to be almost as excited as we are about our new space. If you haven’t got your tickets already, get them now at Brown Paper Tickets. We also posted some great photos from the production on our website, be sure to check them out.

When we first started coming to the Next Stage we were surprised how easy it is to get there. On the website there’s driving directions, but here’s the easiest way to do it via public transportation.

-From BART-
Get off at Montgomery St. Station.
Walk one block northeast on Market St. to Sutter St. & Sansome St.
Catch the 2, 3 or 4 Muni outbound. Weekdays 5:00-7:30 pm one arrives every 2-6 minutes. Weekends it’s every 7-8 minutes.
Get off at Post St. & Gough St.
Walk two and a half blocks north on Gough St. to The Next Stage.

From other BART stations you can take the 49 bus (Mission 16th St. & 24th St.), the 47 bus (Civic Center) and the California Cable Car (Embarcadero). We use the Montgomery station because of the frequency of the buses there.

-Returning to BART-
The 3 is the only bus to Montgomery BART still running after our show. Walk back to Post St. & Gough St. and wait there. It runs every 20 minutes until after 1:00 am. To avoid a long wait we recommend you print out the schedule from 511.org.

-From Other San Francisco Locations-
For those already in the city, the California Cable Car, the 1, 3, 47, and 49 buses all have stops within four blocks of our theater and run til after midnight seven days a week. 511.org has schedules and maps for all the lines.

A Highly Informed Spectator

2009-09-29T13:53:00.000-07:00

Tonight is opening night of The Heidi Chronicles! We couldn't be more excited and we hope you'll join us sometime in the upcoming weeks. In preparation for the show, Dramaturg Paul Doyle gives insight into some of the references in the play we didn't all know.

Heidi’s journey as observer and outsider is steeped in the political movements, buzz words, and culture of the 60’s, 70’s, and 80’s. The names and concepts are touchstones are meant to anchor us in each scene through the years. In case you missed a few of the references, here’s a brief primer.

Weatherperson – At the party in 1968, Heidi uses this gender-neutral term to ask if Scoop is a member of the Weathermen (aka Weather Underground), a communist student movement, that became well know in the 1970s for a series of high-profile domestic bombings (described by former Weatherman Bill Ayers—remember that “scandal” during the 2008 presidential campaign?—as “symbolic acts of extreme vandalism”) in protest of the Vietnam War and meant to disrupt the government. The name comes from a lyric in Bob Dylan’s “Subterranean Homesick Blues.”

Herbert Marcuse – a German-born political philosopher whose critiques of consumerism and capitalism (best-known works include Eros and Civilization and One-Dimensional Man) strongly influenced both the student movements of the 1960 and the developing field of pop culture studies. Marcuse’s philosophy combined elements of Marxism, Freudian theory, and Hegelian dialecticism. To not be familiar with Marcuse would most definitely have raised eyebrows at a Gene McCarthy campaign party.

Consciousness-raising – Jill and Fran’s women’s rap group was part of the growing feminist movement of the late 60’s and early 1970’s. In discussing and analyzing events in their lives (“rapping”), these women-only gatherings aimed to make the participants aware of systematic oppression in their lives, and offer support in identifying it, analyzing it, and fighting back.

“Erlichperson” and “Haldeperson” – Peter is using gender-neutral terminology to refer to John Ehrlichman and Harry Haldeman, Assistant to the President for Domestic Affairs and Chief of Staff (respectively) during the Nixon administration. By this point in history, both men had resigned from their posts in the fallout from the Watergate scandal. In a year, they would both be serving federal prison sentences.

Florine Stettheimer -- A lesser-known Modernist painter (1871 – 1944), known for painting fanciful representations of Broadway, Fifth avenue, and other New York scenes. She also designed the sets and costumes for Four Saints in Three Acts, a 1934 opera by Vigil Thompson with a libretto by Gertrude Stein.

Laura Nyro – female vocalist whose work blended gospel, avant-garde jazz, and pop music forms into a series of critically-acclaimed albums in the late sixties and early seventies. Pretty good stuff.

Judy Chicago – Feminist visual artist, active since the 1960s. By 1974, Chicago had already founded feminist art programs at CSU Fresno, Cal Arts, and the Los Angeles Women’s Building. In the late seventies, Chicago would create her most famous work, The Dinner Party, consisting of a triangular table with place settings for 39 famous women of myth and history.

Felix Frankfurter – An associate justice of the Supreme Court from 1939-1962, Frankfurter’s formative years were spent on New York’s Lower East Side, saving money for Harvard Law School and attending leftist lectures at the Cooper Union. Early in his career, his progressive views brought him to the defense of leftists and radicals (he wrote a scathing critique of the case against Sacco and Vanzetti), but his strong preference for judicial restraint (upholding a piece of legislation unless it is obviously unconstitutional) placed him in the conservative wing of the Supreme Court. He taught at Harvard Law before joining the court and had an annoying habit of lecturing his colleagues at length during meetings.

“Mass weeping with Yoko in Central Park” – John Lennon was shot and killed by stalker Mark Chapman on December 8, 1980 outside his home at the Dakota building in New York City. This mention of the memorial for Lennon places us on Sunday, December 14, 1980, when an enormous crowd gathered in Central Park for a memorial service.

Reaganomics – Hot topic starting in the early eighties, during Ronald Reagan’s presidential campaign. In brief, Reagan’s policies sought to leave behind the economic malaise of the 1970s by reducing government spending, reducing taxes, and removing government regulation of industry.

“Death of the ERA” – The Equal Rights Amendment, a proposed constitutional change stating that “equality of rights under the law shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any state on account of sex.” Introduced in every session of Congress from 1923 to 1970, it was passed by Congress in 1972, but failed to be ratified by the state legislatures by the deadline of June 30, 1982. It was most recently reintroduced in the House of Representatives on July 21, 2009.

The Ethical Culture School – Scoop refers this famous New York private school at the McCarthy party where he meets Heidi, and again when he reveals that he’s late for his son’s fourth grade play (an adaptation of Gunter Grass’s violent allegory for post-World War II Germany The Wicked Cooks). The school is known for its progressive educational philosophy and emphasis on ethical instruction and community service.

Wendy Wasserstein Biography

2009-09-23T02:59:00.000-07:00

With “The Heidi Chronicles” Wendy Wasserstein cemented her place as the first great playwright of an unspoken generation. Today, The Custom Made Theatre Blog takes a look at her life and work.

Wendy Wasserstein was born on October 18, 1950 in Brooklyn, New York, the youngest of five children in a struggling Jewish family. Her father, a textile manufacturer, patented velveteen and, with new found finances, the family moved to Manhattan when she was 12. There Wasserstein attended plays and while moved and inspired, was also distressed that she was not seeing smart, strong, witty women, like herself, represented onstage.

Wasserstein attended Mount Holyoke College and graduated in 1971. She proceeded to get an MFA in creative writing at City College, where she wrote her first produced play, “Any Woman Can't.” André Bishop, the artistic director of Playwright’s Horizons, produced “Any Woman Can’t” in 1973 and went on to produce almost all of Wasserstein’s plays.

Bishop was just one of a number of lifelong friends Wasserstein soon made in the New York theater scene. Another who shared Wasserstein’s wry humor was Christopher Durang, a playwright who first approached her by saying, “You look so bored, you must be very bright.” Durang and Wasserstein met as members of the Yale University School of Drama playwrighting class of 1976. There Wasserstein found that not only were plays not being written about women like her, but no one like her was writing plays; she was the only woman in the thirteen person class. Her Yale thesis project was also her first widely successful play, “Uncommon Women,” a play about eight Mount Holyoke graduates who reunite and reminisce about their college years.

In 1988, after three more successful plays, “The Heidi Chronicles” was produced at Playwright’s Horizons. This story of one woman’s quest for fulfillment quickly moved to Broadway and became an American classic. “The Heidi Chronicles” earned many awards including the Pulitzer Prize and the Tony Award. Impressively, she was able to follow “The Heidi Chronicles” with another Broadway hit, “The Sisters Rosensweig,” a 1992 play about three sisters and their very different struggles with identity.

Wasserstein’s also wrote the plays “Tender Offer,” “Isn’t it Romantic,” “The Man in a Case,” “An American Daughter,” “Old Money,” and “Third.” Her other work included the screenplay for “The Object of My Affection,” two books of essays, and “Pamela’s First Musical,” a children’s book that she adapted into a musical. In 1998 Wasserstein started Open Doors, a program to bring intelligent underprivileged students to New York. That same year, after attempts spanning over a decade, she gave birth to a daughter and achieved her dream of motherhood as a brilliant, resilient and witty single woman. Tragically Wasserstein died in 2006 due to lymphoma complications. The lights on Broadway were dimmed the next day in her honor.

Wendy Wasserstein was the first playwright to put modern women on the stage and gave them a voice. Her work was hailed as funny and accessible as well as being an honest investigation of a struggling driven generation of women. As people balancing careers, love lives and children, Wasserstein’s characters always have doubts and insecurity, but also great strength and insight. Her characters face dissatisfaction, uncertain identities, and societal pressure, with humor. They are always ready with punch lines and quips. Her plays are reflections of a world where people are self-aware individuals who find solidarity and overcome life’s difficulties without losing their ability to smile.

Further Reading:

Wikipedia Article: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wendy_Wasserstein
Jewish Women's Archive Biography: http://jwa.org/encyclopedia/article/wasserstein-wendy
New York Times Obituary: http://www.nytimes.com/2006/01/31/theater/31wasserstein.html
Playbill.com Obituary: http://www.playbill.com/news/article/96859
Michael Feingold Remembers her in The Village Voice: http://www.villagevoice.com/2006-01-24/theater/wendy-wasserstein/

Interview - Director Brian Katz, The Heidi Chronicles

2009-09-20T12:28:00.000-07:00

Marketing Associate Alan Kline interviews director Brian Katz about “The Heidi Chronicles,” optimism, political movements, and the value of humor.

Alan: So Brian, why The Heidi Chronicles? What draws you to the play?

Brian: First of all, it’s an extremely funny play. The characters are well drawn and likable; you root for them. It has got the makings of a great play that way; it’s very universal. It actually is a unique play, I think, in that people have this sense of it as this prototypical feminist eighties play, and they’re completely wrong. While it’s a political play in its own right, it does not belong to a certain group or political movement, but is the story of those who don’t really fit in. They are intelligent, witty, and care, but they aren’t necessarily those in a certain ideology that lends itself to group movements and protests. While it’s set in a certain time period, I think what we showed last time around is that it didn’t really age if approached not as a piece of nostalgia, but as one person’s story.

Alan: You did a production of this play in 2006, why do it again?

Brian: We’re opening our new space at the Next Stage, which we are excited about. We wanted to introduce the space with an old favorite. We’ve heard from our audience that this is one of their favorite shows, so we wanted to bring it back as a treat and also to introduce our new neighborhood to us with a piece that people have really loved and gotten a lot out of. We also feel it epitomizes what we do. It’s a modern, award winning play. It is political with a small “p”, which is what we like, plays about individuals not about kings.

Alan: Are you planning to put it on as you did before? Or are you reconceptualizing it at all?

Brian: We feel we are taking the best of. It is a new space, so obviously we have to rethink a lot of things. We will be keeping elements that worked well, though slightly altering many of them. For example, this time around we’re having an artist do some framed art that will represent time and place. But they’ll still come off the wall scene by scene, like the photographs last time. We’re going further with the concept of the impressionist location, in that this will feel a little bit more like a hip museum. And of course there are new cast members who will have their own unique interpretations.

Alan: How would you characterize the play itself?

Brian: It’s a modern comedy, but it’s intellectual. We’ve always felt it’s a Woody Allen type story, that these are the people he knew too. Wasserstein writes what she knows, and she knows upper middle class women best. So it’s an intelligent upper middle-class comedy.

Alan: You mentioned that the play is often assumed to be feminist, though it isn’t. Heidi certainly encounters the feminist movement in the play, how do you feel the play addresses feminism?

Brian: It has feminism, but it’s a tricky word because it means something different to everybody. You know my background. My mother is certainly a feminist. She’s a professor. She was a professor in the 70’s where there was a ridiculous glass ceiling for her. But I was never taught that would ever drift to the side of aggression against anyone else. It’s about equality, period, with pay being the absolute number one issue. In the play, there are feminists I think Heidi is comfortable with and agrees with, and I think there are ones that she feels are on the wrong path. I think Wasserstein felt that way. I think she felt the movement abandoned women like her.

Alan: You said the play is about characters who don’t fit it. Do you see Heidi as the primary representation of this, or are all the characters in the play experiencing this?

Brian: Heidi is the character that embodies that the most, though they probably all have elements of it because we all do. But Heidi is the one who has everything going for her. She’s intelligent, she’s smart, she’s witty and yet she always seems to find herself on the outside. I’m not sure until the end of the play she’s really quite sure why that keeps happening.

Alan: In the monologues that begin the two acts, Heidi talks about women artists who are observers and outsiders …

Brian: Which is all of them, of course.

Alan: Right, and how they were forgotten. Do you see that as a model for Heidi through the play?

Brian: Oh no, I don’t think she’s forgotten at all. That’s why there’s hope in the play. I think there’s a lot of it. I think if you asked her she’d probably believe that we’re evolving in the right direction, that these are all improvements, that we are becoming more humane and more equal as time goes on.

Alan: So you see her as kind of an optimist?

Brian: Yeah, I think she is. She wouldn’t be so upset if she wasn’t, optimists are always the ones to get hurt. She has faith in people; otherwise how could her faith get wrecked at different points in the play? Otherwise she’s just a bitter angry character.

Alan: The play takes place over 24 years,. Although it is timeless, she is going through the events of her time. How do these affect the play?

Brian: Some of the scenes are set at very specific historical times, like the assassination of John Lennon. They’re used as tools to indicate where Heidi is. During the Lennon scene she is perhaps feeling some of her most aloof in the play, which may be where the country was at the time. It was a very strange transitional time moving out of the 70s into the 80s, out of the end of our idealism and into our “me, me, me” decade at its worst. And the character is always responding, because she is aware. She has strong feelings about these things. At the same time nothing changes. Those are universal themes of the play, alienation and setting out ones’ own path.

Alan: Are there any other major themes you explore when working on this play that we haven’t mentioned?

Brian: What we haven’t talked about too much is how funny the play is, how clever and witty a writer Wasserstein is. It makes the brain happy to have intelligent witty characters onstage saying intelligent witty things, and that should never go completely out of style. I don’t think everything has to be Noel Coward or Oscar Wilde, but I do think there’s a great place for a very witty intelligent play that makes you laugh at yourself. It helps us feel for these characters. I liked what you once said about Wendy as someone who hid her anger under humor. I think there’s always anger under humor. I don’t think she was an angry person, but I think she was disappointed for a while, and then maybe, like Heidi, came to terms with that to some extent. Wendy Wasserstein did find her own way to do it. We lost her tragically early. There was nobody more loved in the community. It was a major, major loss. Everyone agreed about how much she cared and how much support she gave others in theatre.