Andrew Child - Page 6

It appears the standard season-subscription model has failed across the board to provide the financial safety net individuals and institutions need to survive a global pandemic, (which is upsetting because the moderate tastes of the elite have dictated what theatres will produce for long enough that it seems we should be getting some return on that investment at this point). Theatrical staffs cannot afford to take a breath as they email ticket-holders assurances which they will later rescind and try to keep their sinking ships afloat. Aging figureheads form their mouths around new words like a?oelivestreama?? and a?oeZooma?? and pass them on to millennial assistant this-and-thats to fill in all the blanks as generation Z associate this-and-thats dig through archival images to keep social media accounts appeasing the gods of the algorithms. There is a need to be immediate. A need to be incessantly productive. A need for quantity over quality. A need to keep up. To be first. While many of us are feeling the burnout from this mad dash for constant output keenly right now, has this not been an underlying system in the theatre for a long time? 

Boston Ballet's rEVOLUTION: Dance on the Edge features three works by pivotal choreographers which stretch the label 'contemporary' to its breaking point. The three pieces, which all premiered between 1957-1987 may trace through the timeline of progress for commercial ballet in America, but I question if anything a ballet company can do could live up to the streamlined, techno aesthetic toted by their marketing team. The title, with its radical use of capitalization, cuts through the smooth blackness on the cover of the program above a photograph of two dancers in an acrobatic pose in green leotards. Inside the booklet, a geometrically conceived sketch of a dancer invites us to an event called 'Turning Pointe' where we can engage with a?oeleading innovators in the arts, sciences, and industry who are building the future in Boston.a?? Another page announces Boston Ballet's upcoming collaboration with Stephen Galloway, the creative movement director for the Rolling Stones, promising to a?oeshatter expectations of what ballet can bea??. 

For playwright Max Posner, sitting down to write The Treasurer must have been a feat of de-centering oneself. The narrative takes a dusky, balmy look back at the relationship between his father and his grandmother, a wealthy, New York socialite who lived with dementia in her old age. While the story is, in a way, indirectly autobiographical, it offers few mentions of the playwright himself, uplifting the perspective of the protagonist, his father. In shouldering the role, Ken Cheeseman seems to push Posner's language further into the periphery. His ambulatory addresses to the audience and stoic musings seem to be conceived of in real time, not memorized from a written source. However, Lyric Stage Company's production of The Treasurer is not the standard a?oeI hate my fathera?? solo performance you are likely to see at any undergraduate institution's annual student festival. In fact, though the text is dominated by Cheeseman's character, the production is upheld just as much by him as it is by Cheryl McMahon in the role of Ida, his mother.

Playwright Christina R Chan has been developing a new work, The Fortune Teller, which will have a premiere staged reading through one of TC Squared Theatre Company's Playwright Salons on March 1. This follows after her 2017 finalist entry for the Eugene O'Neill Play Conference, which also started as a reading in TC Squared's salon. I got to chat with Chan as well as TC Squared artistic director Rosalind Thomas-Clark about how The Fortune Teller has grown and developed through the Playwrights' Lab.

For a long time within their history, Company One has cornered the market in Boston for selecting those cutting-edge new works that are able to effectively spark conversations and juxtaposing them against each other in ways that are both productive and incendiary. Hats off to Director of New Work, Ilana M Brownstein, as well as National New Play Network (NNPN) Producer in Residence, Jasmine Brooks, and the entire administrative staff for selecting, through NNPN, such a well-crafted text for a rolling premiere. Jung, who may be best known in Boston for her equally nuanced play, Cardboard Piano, does not stoop to begin with a message, as seems to be in vogue for playwrights right now. She does not set out to teach us anything in a certain, straightforward lecture subdivided into all-too-interchangeable dialogue. Instead, the genesis of her play seems to center around the hypothetical. As one character explains in a moment of meta-theatricality, the evening is nothing more than a series of 'what if?'s. What if a young boy was adopted from Korea by a a?oenot-future-orienteda?? white couple who have given up on having any biological children of their own? What if, once that couple is able to conceive, the boy is again put up for adoption? What if he is adopted by a lesbian couple, and his adoptive father is not entirely thrilled with the prospect of two women raising a boy? By asking these questions and not providing answers, Jung has effectively done what so many playwrights and their commissioners claim to want. She has created a work with the potential to generate conversations that lead to growth and change. Set against the thorough dramaturgical work one can expect from Company One, the production introduces issues within the idea of transracial adoption, America's systems for adoption, and the thin line between a?oevulnerability and violencea??.

Michelle Aguillon has been working as an actor and director in Boston for over 25 years. Her work has spanned from Company One to the Nora Theatre to the Umbrella Theatre Company in Concord. How does she think the past decade treated Boston theatre? She says, a?oeI am excited to see more diversity in Boston theatre a?" not only in casting but behind the scenes as well, with writers, directors, and designers. We are going to see more stories about 'the other' a?" those who have endured being mostly shut out or ignored, stories rarely told from their point of view.a??

It is interesting to look at the history of art and entertainment by analyzing the innovations which have been deemed exclusively novelties and written off as fleeting trends by their contemporaries. For film, color and sound were both considered by many to be cheap gimmicks that would quickly fade out of style, within a medium that itself was sure to merely exist for a brief moment in time. Yet, in the 21st century, we still praise the brilliant color work in movies by Wes Anderson and exalt the sounds in the works of Paul Thomas Anderson. When we look, however, at 3-D technologies ranging from the two-tone glasses technology from vintage cinemas, to warped screens which became popular with the release of Oklahoma! (explaining some of the bizarre cinematic sequences in that movie), to those distorted selfies your friend just figured out how to post on Facebook, none seem to have found a lasting hold beyond trendiness or novelty entertainment. Slightly different, though sharing some characteristics, virtual reality technology is gradually developing into a tool which may be the next lasting innovation in entertainment. While the development of the technology has mostly been pounced upon by the video game industry, the theatre and film worlds have found ways to benefit from and expand the possibilities of what audiences can engage with inside a pair of high-tech glasses. Notably, Robert LePage's company, Ex Machina, created an interactive, virtual experience called The Library at Night which let audiences roam through real and imagined libraries, including one underwater conundrum and the Library at Alexandria as it burned.

Picture it: You've registered as a criminal justice major at UMass Boston, but there's this really cute girl in your theatre history class. Theatre appeals to you, especially because it gives you a chance to tell stories and to play. You start talking to that cute girl and she watches from the wings as you take on the (almost) titular role in The Importance of Being Earnest in the theatre department's production. You love the chance to be physically funny as the iconic character. You make her laugh. Flash forward: You and she are both theatre majors and finally calling each other boyfriend and girlfriend. Upon graduating, you land a spot in the acting MFA program at the University of Florida. Things are going pretty well. To top it all off, you get cast in your dream role, Seaweed Stubbs in Hairspray, at Priscilla Beach Theatre. You'll be spending the summer dancing and making people laugh in a charming little barn by the beach in Plymouth. And the best part? Your girlfriend will also be in the cast, playing Lorraine.

In David Mamet's book On Directing Film, he breaks down the way a linear narrative can be conveyed by placing images in direct contrast to each other. a?oeThe dream and the film are the juxtaposition of images in order to answer a question.a?? Certainly, with a majority of the action taking place upstage of a scrim and the fusion of filmed and live material, ArtsEmerson's Detroit Red, an original play by Will Power about Malcolm X's early adult life in Roxbury, leaves one feeling more as though one has watched a movie or woken from a dream than sat through a performance. Recently, I also saw Gloria: A Life, which is playing at the American Repertory Theatre. While I admittedly found the show to be trite and pandering, it obtusely fused projection effects with live performance in a way that felt cheap, gimmicky, and more like a new SnapChat filter than anything else. Contrast that with Ari Herzig's film work for Detroit Red, which snaps the audience effectively between viewpoints in black and white and splays broad images across the haziness of Adam Rigg's nondescript set. The success of the production lies in the success of the filmed elements, which establish a framing device, pinpointing the action to an exact moment in time. Additionally, the projections act as effective abstractions, allowing the actors to waver between realism and poetry as photos of their faces appear as oversized watermarks in space. Lighting designer Alan Edwards equally contributes to the cinematic feel of the piece. Sharp shafts of light slice through open space and act, ingeniously, as the camera lens might in film, focusing our attention on specifics and the relevant details. Aside from a few extraneous hat changes for the three actors who take on all the roles in the piece, between the work of Herzig, Rigg, and Edwards, the performance seems to be a study in the logistics of jump-cuts or cross-fades in real time. Adding to the film-instead-of-theatre feeling in the space, the performance actively roused and engaged the audience, which had a huge swathe of Boston school groups present. The crowd felt comfortable verbalizing responses, in part, because of our physical separation from the action presented to us, and to be able to laugh, cheer, gasp, and grimace in solidarity with those around you is a rare treat.

Sutton Foster, since her Tony Award-winning break through as the title role in Thoroughly Modern Millie, has been one of the select leading ladies who have held a decades-spanning monopoly on Broadway's biggest musicals. Foster holds the distinction of being one of the gawkiest, most palatably quirky actors working in the commercial theatre today. Unlike other recurring ingenues, Sierra Boggess, Laura Benanti, or Laura Osnes, Foster is just off-kilter enough to headline productions of Shrek the Musical as the ogre/ princess Fiona or revivals of Anything Goes as Reno Sweeney. Meanwhile, she is still conventionally attractive enough to be a safe, viable option to helm profitable productions of Sweet Charity, Violet, or the upcoming Broadway revival of The Music Man. The Celebrity Series of Boston hosted Foster along with a three-piece jazz combo (Michael Rafter, Leo Huppert, Matt Hinkley) and her Little Women co-star Megan McGinnis in a concert of musical theatre selections and jazz standards at the Sanders Theatre in Cambridge.

'I think there's a lot of cowardice in Boston theatre,' Explains M Sloth Levine, a playwright and director who recently left Boston to make their art in New York City. 'I would like people to take ownership of their creative power and stop looking to other cities and other awards ceremonies for permission to produce certain plays.' Levine is far from the only artist who feels ready to challenge standards of theatre in ways that Boston just can't seem to get hip with. Their play The Interrobangers has already had a reading done by The Art Garage since their relocation, but when asked if they could see the piece garnering any attention in Boston, they reasoned, 'I don't think anyone would have put up the money that it needs to be produced.' The reason? In addition to the puppetry and special effects called for in the script, Levine feels that the queer perspectives in the work would not appeal to Boston's powers-that-be.

Why isn't this show an impersonation of cool even if it falls into some trappings of the dreaded 'regional theatre' scene? I think it's because Praxis Stage is, at its heart, genuinely concerned with the prospects of theatre that every other theatre in this city needs to purport to care about in order to get covered by the Boston Globe and nominated for Elliott Norton Awards. Every facet of the performance seems to be manufactured with an average audience member in mind, and the results are refreshingly un-pretentious. Just as with Coriolanus, I advise any theatre artist who works at one of Boston's theatres with cloudy-dishwater mission statements and haphazardly 'diverse' offerings to engage with Praxis Stage. Even when renting the BCA, their ticket prices are less than $20. For a show of this caliber, thought through down to the details, that's cool enough for me.

What do young artists (many with intersecting, marginalized identities) think about where Boston theatre will go in the 2020s? a?oeNo one's gonna want to work with me after reading this,a?? Geena Forristall laughed when asked. Although a light-hearted comment, it is backed up with an all too unfortunate truth. As a non-binary theatre artist who uses they/ them pronouns, Forristall admits to being limited in where they can work in Boston. a?oeMaybe it's just me being picky, but I just won't work for theatres whose leadership refuses to respect my identity.a??

Queer couples in the greater Boston area: if you are looking for a mushy, warm, romantic gay love story with a backbone and plenty of heartbreak that will make you want to cuddle up with your partner between now and Valentine's Day weekend, you couldn't do much better than Actors' Shakespeare Project's Bright Half Life, playing at the Plaza Theatre at the Boston Center for the Arts. (If you don't already have plans for the 14th, I recommend purchasing tickets to the 8 o'clock performance that evening, which should leave you enough time to get dinner at Buttermilk & Bourbon beforehand. The 65 minute run time leaves ample time for an ice cream at Picco afterward, while still allowing time to catch the T before it shuts down for the night.) When I saw the show, I did not have a significant other with whom I could cuddle (so if the aforementioned evening sounds like your idea of a good time, I'd be delighted to splurge and Dutch treat), but the audience was filled with visibly queer, femme-presenting couples holding each others' hands, snapping their fingers in agreement, and letting out an occasional 'awww' in moments of tenderness.

Peter Sinn Nachtrieb's boom was the most produced American play of 2010. 10 years later, Wellesley Repertory Theatre has brought it back, directed by artistic director, Marta Rainer, armed with the proverbial program note toting its enduring relevance. In a way, it seems to wittily comment on the 'New Play' format that still plagues us. It gives us the Annie Baker-esque satisfaction of seeing things really happen on stage. Right at top of show, one character bangs on a timpani. We see the drum reverberate and hear the sound ringing off of the walls. Another character immediately tells her scene partner to take his shirt off. We watch him do so, and then we see him fumble to awkwardly remove his jeans, turning them inside-out in the process. Is that a real fire extinguisher? Is that a real first-aid kit? Cool.

One of the inescapable pillars of the human condition is the universal narcissism with which we consume media. Entirely incapable of existing within a vacuum with the narratives presented to us, we search films, theatre, books, songs, and television for those personal implications we are certain the authors have buried for us in their work. The mention of the word 'father', for instance, can send every individual's mind spiraling through memories and individual associations. Same with 'home', 'memory', 'childhood', and 'love'. This narcissism reveals itself in unfortunately dangerous ways when we look at how our culture, race, economic status, sexuality, and gender intercede in our consumptions of media. White people (of which I am one, I choose to address the crowd rather than say 'we' because I know I do not write for an exclusively white audience) can bring whiteness into a space, both physically and metaphysically, in ways that it is not asked for. Too often, I interact with white people telling me how much I can learn from reading such and such a book or seeing such and such a play. This is all well and gooda?"- we all need to expand our horizons beyond the perspectives of those exactly like usa?"- until we start to unpack the fact that not all art made by non-white people is made to be educational for white audiences. Reducing Black art, or any art by non-white artists, to be judged through a measure of how well it educates white people is ignorant. White people need to start to be okay with Black theatre that does not seek to educate us or, for that matter, cater to us or even represent us in any way.

As we embark on our voyage through the 2020s, it will be exciting to see if Lopez's lofty ambitions become a reality. After all, Boston theatre has just come through a huge decade of change in which our city's pertinence to the theatre world has grown. Let's look at how our relevance as a city has changed in regards to theatre as an art form in the past decade: 

You know those cartoons where the little fish is eaten by a bigger fish and then, just when you think everything is going to be fine, that fish is eaten by an even bigger fish? That kind of sums up how Molly Smith Metzler's 2017 play, Cry It Out unfolds in its new production by Apollinaire Theatre Company. The piece begins like a playwright's exercise, juxtaposing two young mothers  from a New York suburb with little in common within the mutual confines of where their baby monitors can still receive signals from their respective nurseries. Through almost-realistic exchanges, we meet Lina, a rowdy, working class woman who has just had a baby boy named Max and Jessie, an upper-middle class corporate lawyer who has just given birth to a baby girl named Allison.

Arguably, for a certain age group, there are no greater cultural influences than Harry Potter and Spongebob Squarepants. (Cue laments from the homeschooled crowd that they were never permitted to engage with such low-brow, mind-numbing media. Those of us with less protective mothers are doing just fine, thank you very much!) In a turn of events that would not have been possible even just a decade ago, both franchises have grown and become largely iconic through means which are impossible to capitalize upon. While corporations have tried to sell merchandise based on popular Spongebob memes, by the time the figures or t-shirts are manufactured, the internet has already collectively moved on to the next Spongebob mania, be it a picture of the titular character in drag holding a purse or a moment of rage from Mr. Krabs. While the Harry Potter franchise is still turning out blockbusters, updating its theme park, and packing in crowds for its two-part Broadway sequel, there is an equally sprawling network of fans who engage exclusively with its less-than-mainstream spawns.

In a recent review for Actors' Shakespeare Project's King Lear, I tried to boil down what an audience can expect from any piece the group presents. (Thanks to their conveniently affordable student tickets, they are a theatre from whom I have perhaps seen more productions than any other company.) I previously wrote that three of their dominant tenets seem to be; a?oedeeply human connections on stage, a clear commitment to narrative, and a genuine sense of gratitude for coming to be present as their tale unfolds.a?? Upon seeing The Complete Works of William Shakespeare (Abridged), all three statements remain consistently applicable. However, I unfortunately felt the pang of a fourth major tenet that routinely plagues ASP's work, namely, an outdated understanding of gender performance. Using the word a?oeoutdateda?? to refer to anything done by a theatre that regularly presents plays written nearly 500 years ago may seem imprudent, but I feel the word exactly addresses the issue.