Axis Adapts HIGH NOON for the Stage

Axis Company presents High Noon, an adaptation of the screenplay for the 1952 Western film, devised by an ensemble led by Artistic Director Randy Sharp. In Axis' High Noon, the Wild West is not the place of heroes and rollicking adventure, but a landscape of overbearing nothingness where humans, and their troubled moral compasses, are cast in glaring light. As a town awaits the alleged return, and potential revenge streak, of a released murderer on an incoming train, their just-married, retiring marshal decides to try to rally a crowd to fight him. Time cruelly continues to pass, and to presumably carry the dangerous figure along his collision course with the town and its former marshal, who considers, and over-considers, his very uncertain fate.

Sharp references the inherent theatricality of the story and structure of High Noon, itself loosely based on the John M. Cunningham short story The Tin Star. "If you take it without any shot-lists, you're left with maybe one third of the script," she says. "And when you delete all of that, it reads like a Beckett play. It's extremely spare. We're translating that into live theater. How do you show people-who've seen hundreds of movies about the Wild West, and seen hundreds of photographs-how the nothingness of it can be dangerous? Those are exciting challenges ahead of us." Using the stylistic choices for which Axis has become known-avoidance of the artifice of staging traditions like costume changes, blackouts, and actors leaving the stage-High Noon provides uninterrupted immersion into the tense world its narrative depicts in near-real-time.

High Noon was a rare Western film that became controversial among genre-enthusiasts for its lack of an undaunted male hero. Centered on a protagonist far less swaggeringly assured than the John Wayne archetype, this was not the tale of a hero saving a town in a series of edge-of-your-seat shoot-'em-ups. (The character's very existence in fact incensed John Wayne himself.) Rather, the film and this theatrical interpretation follow someone deliberating saving a town, and, with increasing desperation, soliciting the help of people who mostly want to pretend there's nothing wrong-particularly if it means saving themselves. Tension in the play is not derived from guns, but from conflicting moralities and motives. Is the marshal attempting to commit a heroic act, or simply self-aggrandizing at the expense of everyone around him? Are the townspeople callously refusing his pleas, or calling out self-interest masquerading as bravery?

Much like the Gary Cooper's protagonist character in the original High Noon, on its release in 1952, it became open to all forms of political and social projection. Though its writer Carl Foreman meant it as an allegory about the Hollywood blacklist and McCarthyism (and though John Wayne declined to play the lead role largely because he was pro-Blacklist, calling the film "the most un-American thing [he'd] seen in his whole life"), it was also coded enough to also be a favorite of people like Ronald Reagan. While some may see a complex composite of bravery and fear, collective and self-interest in the protagonist, others may see story of a lone figure determined to do the right thing, despite being surrounded by detractors-someone with whom a screenwriter criticizing the mob mentality of the Red Scare, or, conversely, an ultra-capitalist President, might identify.

Sharp, however, wonders of the central figure, "Is he really a hero? If you've ever done something heroic, you don't think about your personal danger. It's not heroic because you thought it through and still did it. Heroism is kind of blind; you don't make a moral decision, you go in automatically. Everybody puts their personality into this character, and he's kind of a cipher. The actor playing the part [in our play] has an interesting journey ahead!"

High Noon's cast includes Spencer Aste, Brian Barnhart, Andrew Dawson, George Demas, Britt Genelin, Phil Gillen, Jon McCormick, Nicholas McGovern, Brian Parks, and Katie Rose Summerfield. The creative team includes Randy Sharp (Director), Erik Savage (Production Stage Manager) Laurie Kilmartin (Asst. Stage Manager), David Zeffren (Lighting Designer), Amy Harper (Asst. Lighting Designer), Chad Yarborough (Set Designer), Karl Ruckdeschel (Costume Designer), Jess Gersz (Asst. Costume Designer) Lynn Mancinelli (Prop Designer), and Paul Carbonara (Composer/Sound Designer).

Performance Dates and Ticketing Info

High Noon begins performancesThurs., February 15 and runs through Sat., March 24. Performances run Thursday-Saturday and begin at 8pm. Tickets for each are $30 for adults, $20 for seniors/students, and $10 for artists and people under 30. The performances are FREE for veterans and active U.S. service members and their families. Tickets can be purchased online at www.axiscompany.org or by calling TheaterMania at 212.352.3101.

About Randy Sharp (Director)

Randy Sharpis Axis Theatre Company's founder and Artistic Director. Her plays include the Drama Desk Award-nominated Last Man Club (published by DPS), Nothing on Earth, Down There, Seven in One Blow (published by DPS and performed every December in NYC and around the country) and the long-running serial Hospital. Sharp wrote and directed The Vast Machine (2015), and co-wrote (with former Blondie member Paul Carbonara) and directed Evening - 1910, which premiered at acclaim at Axis in 2016.Sharp's directing credits also include Last Man Club, Nothing on Earth, Down There, Seven in One Blow, Hospital, Edgar Oliver's East 10th Street: Self Portrait with Empty House (Fringe First Award, Edinburgh Fringe; Spoleto Festival USA 2011) and In the Park, A Glance at New York (Edinburgh Fringe & NYC), Julius Caesar and the U.S premiere of Sarah Kane's Crave, starring Deborah Harry.

About Axis Theatre Company

Randy Sharp founded Axis Company in 1996. The company acquired a permanent home in 1998 at 1 Sheridan Square in New York City's West Village. Built in 1834 by Samuel Whitmore, the building once housed Café Society, the historic site of performances by Billie Holiday, Lena Horne, Sarah Vaughn, Art Tatum, Big Joe Turner and other jazz greats; and later was the home of Charles Ludlam's Ridiculous Theatrical Company. Axis transformed interior performance space into one where audiences are totally immersed, surrounded by the experience of a theatrical production the moment they enter. Distractions from the material are minimal.

Among the wide variety of works Axis has produced in the theater are Beckett's Play; Benjamin Baker's 1848 vaudeville A Glance at New York (also at the Edinburgh Festival); the U.S. premiere of Sarah Kane's Crave, starring Deborah Harry; the premieres of Edgar Oliver's East 10th Street (New York Times Critic Pick; Fringe First Award at Edinburgh Fringe Festival; Spoleto Festival, USA) and In the Park; David Crabb's Bad Kid (New York Times Critic Pick, now an acclaimed book published by HarperCollins Perennial); Marc Palmieri's The Groundling; and Sharp's The Vast Machine, Last Man Club (Drama Desk-nomination), Solitary Light, Nothing on Earth, Down There, Seven in One Blow and Hospital.

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