October | 2012 | Intimate Excellent
Our Los Angeles Premiere of Tarell Alvin McCraney’s In the Red and Brown Water officially opened Saturday, October 20th. A full house, a dazzling performance, followed by a catered reception upstairs in the cafe. The cast, company and audience members enjoyed the wine and delicious food served at the post-show party, including (because of the Louisiana setting of the play) a huge tray of homemade creole jambalaya.
Enjoy the photos!
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Posted in actors, Arts, Fountain Theatre, new plays, performing arts, plays, playwright, Theater, theatre
Tagged African American, Brenda Lee Eager, Diarra Kilpatrick, Dorian Baucum, Erinn Anova, Fountain Theatre, Gilbert Glenn Brown, In The Red and Brown Water, Iona Morris, Justin Chu Cary, Los Angeles, Los Angeles Premiere, Maya Lynne Robinson, new plays, opening night, Peggy Blow, plays, Shirley Jo Finney, Simone Missick, Stephen Marshall, Stephen Sachs, Tarell Alvin McCraney, theater, Theodore Perkins
Michael Elyanow
by Michael Elyanow
We hear it a lot about playwriting—that there’s no money in it. Whether or not that’s actually true, I had the opportunity to talk about this issue recently when I met with a young playwright, a senior at Northwestern University’s Creative Writing for the Media Program, who wanted to pick my brain about how I’ve managed to make it as a career playwright.
But first: let’s try and define make it. I, like a lot of playwrights, struggle. I struggle to write, and to write well. I struggle to get productions, workshops, grants, commissions, and more. Like hundreds of other playwrights, I spend days putting together applications to get into conferences, festivals, and residencies. And, like hundreds of other playwrights, I receive many more rejection letters than congratulatory calls.
Second: let’s define career. If you mean a reliable paycheck—nope (see above). If you mean health benefits or financial security—not a chance. If you mean a profession that steadily moves forward, increasing in stature and scope and visibility… possibly… depends… could happen one day. As writers, so much is out of our control.
In 2010, New York magazine ran a brief piece on Bruce Norris (and his then-new play Clybourne Park) that’s always haunted me. To this day, I remember it vividly thanks to the number $19,000. This was how much Mr. Norris said he earned the year before. Earned. All year. This, from an acclaimed and brilliant writer, who’s had plays produced across the world. To me, this announcement was not only a brave thing to declare publicly, it was a revelation. After Todd London and Ben Pesner’s incredibly insightful Outrageous Fortune, David Dower’s years of field study… there it was again, in bold print. In New York magazine. A monetary truth exposed.
It is indeed the rare playwright who gets to announce playwriting as a job, a real-life, full-time gig.
And I know this, I do. I knew it going into this field. And still, when this Northwestern student sincerely asked me “Is it worth it?” I found myself nostalgic for the days when I used to immediately answer that question with an unqualified, urgent, booming Yes. But these days, with a kid and a husband and responsibilities and more, my answer has grown in complexity. And, especially with young playwrights, I want to share open and honestly about where I am today with this notion of worth—of value.
Half of the time, and especially in a country where The Arts (and arts programs) are in a constant struggle for survival, my belief that the value of art trumps the value of cash remains unshaken. But then, the other half of the time, when the mail comes in and my school loans are due or my son needs a filling that isn’t covered by insurance…well, that’s where things get complicated. At what cost are we choosing to live the lives of playwrights? Or artists?
“Is playwriting worth it?” My answer to this student was: financially? For where I am today, right now? No. But… in almost every other aspect: yes. Playwriting is worth it. But why? With the amount of energy I spend on writing, the time away from my family, the funds I shell out to attend readings and workshops in other states with no guarantee of production, no guarantee that if I do get a production another one’s coming along, what is the value of playwriting? Or better yet, what can’t I put a price on?
“The Children” (2012, Theatre@Boston Court)
For me, it turns out the answer is collaboration. Or more specifically: a collaboration that works. The experience that I had working with director Jessica Kubzansky and dramaturg Emilie Beck on The Children couldn’t be measured in dollar signs. I was fortunate enough to work with two artists who attacked the play with great care and sensitivity, who asked incisive questions, who challenged my every line but never lost sight of the origins of the play’s beating heart. When collaboration works, you leap together. You dig together. You forgive together. When collaboration works, you learn to become a better artist, communicator, listener, leader, and follower.
How many other professions make this kind of deeply personal exchange possible? Where the work includes sharing who you are and why you are? And how do you place a value on that? Can you put a price on that conversation? That dialogue? That sharing of your core identity in pursuit of a common purpose and goal?
Collaborators build something together. We hear the phrase “the theater community” used often. And that’s what this collaboration built for me. A community. A home—for myself, for my play, for ideas and emotions and a mission. These are all things I greatly value—it’s what I hold dear.
Here’s what I want to say about the money part: wherever we go, we pay for the privilege of community. Governments have taxes. Clubs have fees. Religious organizations have tithes. It’s not exactly analogous, but maybe playwriting is like Social Security. It’s something you will always pay into because it provides you a social safety net. You contribute—with money and time and sacrifice—to a community of artists who shore you up, challenge your evolution, and provide you a place in the world. In this instance, the word value can literally mean a bargain.
Michael Elyanow is a playwright. The Children was produced in 2012 at The Theatre @ Boston Court. A Lasting Mark, commissioned by Hartford Stage, was part of Manhattan Theatre Club’s 2011 7@7 Reading Series. The Idiot Box, published by Samuel French, was produced at Open Fist and Naked Eye theatres. Ten-minute plays Banging Ann Coulter and Game/Over were Humana Festival finalists. Michael is currently writing a play commission for the Carleton College Department of Theatre & Dance.
This essay first appeared on HowlRound.
Posted in actors, Arts, Fountain Theatre, new plays, performing arts, plays, playwright, Theater, theatre
Tagged Bruce Norris, Clybourne Park, collaboration, dramaturg, Emilie Beck, Fountain Theatre, Jessica Kubzansky, Los Angeles, Michael Elyanow, new play, Outrageous Fortune, performing arts, plays, playwriting, starving artist, The Children, theater, Theatre@Boston Court, Todd London, value
Previews began last week for our LA Premiere of Tarell Alvin McCraney’s In the Red and Brown Water. The production officially opens this Saturday, October 20th.
Enjoy a few snapshots from our first preview last Saturday, Oct 13th:
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Posted in actors, Arts, director, Drama, new plays, performing arts, plays, playwright, Theater, theatre
Tagged Adolphus Ward, Deborah Lawlor, First Preview, Fountain Theatre, Gilbert Glenn Brown, In The Red and Brown Water, Los Angeles, Los Angeles Premiere, Maya Lynne Robinson, new plays, plays, Shirley Jo Finney, Stephen Marshall, Tarrell Alvin McCraney, theater
Diarra Kilpatrick
I was born and raised in Detroit, MI. My mom was always really dedicated to nurturing the artist in me as I was growing up. She put me in every arts or literature program she could find and I thrived in them, so there was no way I was gonna grow up and become an accountant. And thank God for that. And my dad has the best sense of humor of anyone in the whole world. So if my mom gave me the gift of art, my dad gave me the gift of laughter.
How would you describe Oya, the character you play in In the Red and Brown Water?
“The Interlopers” at Bootleg Theater.
At this point in the process its a little hard to delineate where she ends and I begin honestly. She’s a track star, so she’s alot faster than I am, that’s for sure. My track and cross country coach from high school would probably chuckle if she saw this play because aside from the horizontally challenged members of the team, I was the worst one. And I had the longest legs. But I went to this painfully conservative college prep school and the rule was everyone had to play a sport. And if you were on scholarship you had to play TWO sports. I thought that was completely racist because nearly all the scholarship kids were black. So I think the angry little militant in me didn’t want to excel in sports cause as a black girl on scholarship was expected to. I was like whatever, somebody point me towards the stage please. But I regret it now. I’ve grown up and found that I actually do like to run. I probably could have been better if I had applied myself. So I’m getting a chance to feel what that might have been like through Oya.
What themes in the play resonate for you?
The play for me is about Oya’s growth. She has a hell of a time getting over the hump, from one version of herself to the next. She’s special and she knows she’s special so there’s quite a bit of frustration that comes in when she has such a difficult time asserting herself in the world.
The language of the play
Yes the language of the piece is poetic. Black folks speak in poems to me anyway. McCraney definitely highlights the lyricism in the black vernacular. It informs me as an actress. I know exactly who these people are by the way they speak. There’s no vagueness in there. I know who they are.
How does mythology weave its way through the story?
My favorite thing about the piece is the presence of the mythology throughout. These characters are black and poor and living in the projects. Seems like the makings of a sad sack 90s movie that we’ve all seen before. But by reminding us that at the very center, at the core of these characters, is the spirit of a god or goddess, it somehow more fully reveals their humanity. The playwright is showing these characters so much respect in that way. It somehow manages to both elevate the piece and pull us closer to it.
Diarra Kilpatrick (Oya) and Gilbert Glenn Brown (Shango) from ‘In the Red and Brown Water’.
This is your first project at the Fountain. Are you having a good time?
I’m really enjoying working with Shirley Jo and the whole cast. There’s a closeness that happened pretty organically. I’m excited to get to rehearsal everyday. This is the only ensemble I’ve been in where people balk about taking a day off. Everyone is very excited by the work. And everyone is bringing so much of themselves to their performances.
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Posted in actors, Arts, Drama, Fountain Theatre, new plays, performing arts, plays, playwright, Theater, theatre
Tagged actor, actress, African American, Detroit, Gilbert Glenn Brown, In The Red and Brown Water, mythology, Oya, poetic language, Shirley Jo Finney, Tarell Alvin McCraney
by Charlzetta Driver
Theater should remind us of our own lives. Remember the story that we see is how we can transform, change, and evolve. ~Shirley Jo Finney
Shirley Jo Finney
Promoting In the Red and Brown Water at the Fountain Theatre, the riveting play written by award-winning African American playwright, Tarell Alvin Mc Craney would be simple enough. Well known for his acclaimed trilogy The Brother/Sister Plays, the first play of this set In the Red and Brown Water has already been well received in each of it’s venues since the first premiere. Further, Tarell’s talents are highly sought as he is considered by many theatrical leaders as the best young writer around.
However, once combining the desired works of this proven playwright with the style and perspective of director, the eloquent, Shirley Jo Finney, anticipation and excitement of experiencing this enticing play reaches boiling point!
Less than two weeks before the Los Angeles premiere of In the Red and Brown Water at the Fountain Theatre, in an exclusive interview I had the unique opportunity to experience first hand the reasons Shirley Jo is an award winning actress and director. Within less than an hour, I was virtually moved through the history of theater, Africans in America, church, and the modern day classroom. Her passion and expertise is palpable in conversation as she effortlessly creates visions of slaves on the plantation, Sunday afternoons singing and dancing for their masters. As the folk watched from their porches, thoroughly absorbed and entertained, they were often oblivious to the sarcasm that shadowed the mimicry of their chattel’s exceptional performances.
Fast forwarding some years, I virtually viewed the descendants of the old masters in black face erroneously mimicking Black people. I traveled under her spell to the Black community of theater where portrayals in the history of African American churches were common. Shirley Jo instantly broke into character invoking the “Call and Response” style of the good reverend after which she explained:
That’s the call and response. It’s what I like to call “edu-ma-tainment,” creating ritual, engaging in the stories of, like the bible. Living, laughing, and dying – as a ritual.
Tarell McCraney
I asked Shirley Jo some specific questions about Tarell’s style of writing, here are some of those questions and answers:
Me: Is Tarell’s style like Tyler Perry’s?
Shirley Jo: No. Two different styles. If you want to co-explore, go see the works of August Wilson and Suzy-Lori Parks that show African Americans incarcerated by the institution of slavery. He (Tarell) incorporates those elements which makes the difference.
Me: Okay. Spike Lee said some negative things to say about Tyler Perry’s portrayal of African Americans. What is your opinion on this subject?
Shirley Jo: The beauty is the diversity! Everybody has a market and a point of view. Tyler makes what’s called “cottage films.” No judgement. I love that about where we are. We are no longer stuck in Blaxploitation, allow everyone their voice regardless if you like that person or not, we have a choice.
Me: Shirley Jo, what do you believe the theater’s job is?
Shirley Jo: Theater should remind us of our own lives. Remember the story that we see is how we can transform, change, and evolve.
Tarell Alvin McCraney does just that in In the Red and Brown Water. The main character Oya, struggles to maintain her dreams. She runs track and sees it as her way of breaking free from the impoverished community she grew up in. After losing her mother she encounters a number of obstacles and sacrifices her dream. Oya means goddess of wind. Red represents our life blood, life force or passion. Brown represents the environment as the plays setting is in Louisiana. Water represents cleansing or new beginnings.
Entering adulthood just after the Civil Rights Movement shifted in to high gear, Shirley Jo had already experienced a lifetime of firsts. First integrated neighborhood, first Black student in the school, and she was the first African American student in the MFA program for Theater at UCLA. Shirley Jo was in the midst of an amazing acting career when she first delved into the role of director. Best known for her portrayal of Wilma in “Wilma” the true story of one of America’s greatest Olympic athletes; her resume includes many well known works including several episodes of “Moesha” and “Remember Me?”
Just prior to preparation for In the Red and Brown Water, Shirley Jo returned from Africa where she’d just completed “Winne The Opera,” the operatic story of Winnie Mandela.
Video: Winnie – The Opera
In The Red and Brown Water Oct 20 – Dec 16 (323) 663-1525 More
Charlzetta Driver is a freelance writer for Examiner.com
Posted in actors, Arts, director, Drama, Fountain Theatre, new plays, performing arts, playwright, theatre
Tagged African American, August Wilson, call and response, director, Fountain Theatre, In The Red and Brown Water, Los Angeles, Los Angeles Premiere, Moesha, new plays, plays, playwriting, Remember Me?, ritual, Shirley Jo Finney, Spike Lee, Suzan Lori Parks, Tarell Alvin McCraney, The Brother/Sister Plays, theater, Tyler Perry, Wilma Rudolph, Winnie Mandela, Winnie:The Opera
Victoria and I have been residents of Los Feliz for more than 25 years. We love theatre and we fell in love with The Fountain Theatre the first time we saw a play there about ten years ago. We immediately became subscribers even though we subscribe to other theatres in the greater Los Angeles area. We are continually impressed by the originality and quality of the plays at the Fountain, as well as the intimate environment. As such, The Fountain is a great place to see the plays of great writers like August Wilson and Athol Fugard; and we have seen them all, – Gem of the Ocean, The Train Driver, Coming Home, Exits and Entrances, and the most recent classic, The Blue Iris. We will be remiss if we do not mention the professionalism and friendliness of The Fountain staff. They have always been gracious in accommodating us since our business requires frequent travel out of town.
– Dr. and Mrs. Ejike Mdefo
Posted in actors, Arts, Drama, Fountain Theatre, performing arts, plays, playwright, Theater, theatre
Tagged Athol Fugard, August Wilson, Coming Home, Ejike Mdefo, Exits and Entrances, Fountain Family, Fountain Theatre, Gem of the Ocean, Los Angeles, Los Feliz, memmer, new plays, plays, subscribe, subscriber, The Blue Iris, The Train Driver, theater, Victoria Mdefo
Athol Fugard at the Fountain Theatre, Sept 2012
by Chris Thurman
The last time I met Athol Fugard, he was following a technical rehearsal of The Bird Watchers – his thirty-fourth play. Sitting in the auditorium of the Cape Town theatre that carries his name, Fugard leaned over and told me in an almost-conspiratorial whisper: “I’m working on something new.” The playwright’s eyes sparkled as he showed me a typescript of The Blue Iris. That script is now a performed reality (the US Premiere just concluded its run at the Fountain Theatre on September 16th).
Athol Fugard, who is based in San Diego, has returned to South Africa to take up a three-month residency in Stellenbosch and – you guessed it – he’s working on something new.
This time, we’re talking on the phone, but that same excitement is discernible in Fugard’s voice as he describes his “first attempt at Afrikaans theatre”. This may be surprising to many; after all, the work of this self-designated “half-English, half-Afrikaans bastard” (he grew up in a bilingual household) is peppered with Afrikaans phrases, characters and settings. His play texts have also been translated into Afrikaans, most recently The Captain’s Tiger/Die Kaptein se Tier by Antjie Krog. But Fugard himself has never penned an exclusively Afrikaans play, and he’s clearly eager to take up the challenge.
What is it, I wonder, that drives this restless creativity? What is the imperative that keeps an 80-year-old writing “compulsively”? In the past, Fugard has emphasised the feeling of both obligation and delight that accompanies his discovery or invention of characters and their stories: “Everything I have written is an attempt to share their secrets.” But watching The Blue Iris, I thought I discerned a darker (perhaps even desperate) impulse behind the author’s prolificacy.
Fugard outside the Fountain Theatre, Sept 2012.
The play is a different kind of “first”. Fugard’s work bears evidence of a range of influences, from Beckett to Camus – but, he tells me, “Before Blue Iris I had never written a play directly in response to a particular piece of writing.” The writer in question is Thomas Hardy, who is best known as a novelist but who turned away from fiction towards the end of his career and produced a series of poems that Fugard considers “among the finest in the English language”. Hardy wrote them after the death of his wife, Emma, from whom he had become estranged (he subsequently married his secretary): they express grief, regret and longing for an irrecoverable past, ultimately paying tribute to the relationship.
The Blue Iris is, in turn, a tribute to Hardy’s poems – an encomium in which that curious love triangle takes on a South African incarnation, in the Karoo landscape so closely associated with Fugard. We find Robert Hannay and his sometime housekeeper, Rieta Plaasman, camping outside the ruins of a farmhouse that Robert had built for his young English bride, Sally. It stood for decades until, one night, it was consumed by fire after a lightning strike. Sally died shortly afterwards, but her spirit haunts the place; Rieta has stayed with Robert during his unsuccessful attempt to recover items lost in the fire, hoping to exorcise Sally’s ghost.
Morlan Higgins and Julanne Chidi Hill in “The Blue Iris” (Fountain, 2012)
In the opening dialogue, Robert admits to Rieta that his recuperative efforts remind him of an old story about “some arme ou skepsel who, as punishment for something bad, is made to push a big rock all the way up to the top of a koppie. But just when he gets there, he slips, the rock rolls back down the hill, and he has to start all over again. And so it goes, on and on…” This is, of course, the tale of Sisyphus, who was condemned by the gods to an eternity of futile labor – a likely comparison, particularly given the prevalence of ancient Greek myth in Fugard’s oeuvre.
Jacqueline Schultz and Julanne Chidi Hill in “The Blue Iris” (Fountain Theatre, 2012)
Yet the allusion is given a different resonance as, during the course of the play, we learn that Sally was a talented artist. She spent years painting the flowers of the Karoo, partly out of a wish to locate herself within a landscape to which she felt foreign and partly to reconcile with Robert, from whom she had grown distant as the strain of farming under conditions of drought took its toll. The blue iris – the ‘bloutulp’, Moraea polystachya – was her first subject: a beautiful but poisonous plant, surviving the harshest conditions but deadly to animals. The painting was the centrepiece of her collection, but we hear Sally’s ghost shriek, at the climax of the action, “I didn’t get it right!”
I put it to Fugard: does this aspect of The Blue Iris reflect his own frustration as an artist? Is the relentless desire to create new plays, to write new stories, a Sisyphean curse? “That’s a fair interpretation,” he replies. “When I look back on my earlier stuff, there is always a sense of ‘If only I’d known then what I know now…’ And yes, I think I am more critical of my own work than anyone else.”
He notes that, along with The Captain’s Tiger (1997) and The Bird Watchers (2011), Master Harold … and the Boys (1982) makes up a trio of “portraits of the writer – from arrogant little schoolboy to adolescent ambition and finally a playwright wrestling with the material of his own life. They all have the same concern: what does it mean to be a writer?”
Fugard at the Fountain Theatre
I ask Fugard what he makes of the other ways in which his plays have been grouped together. Some critics have noted, for instance, that The Blue Iris continues a pattern established in Valley Song (1996), Sorrows and Rejoicings (2001) and Victory (2007), in which much of the dramatic tension stems from the age and race of the main protagonists: an older white man and a younger coloured woman.
“Any writer,” Fugard concurs, “has only a handful of themes. You don’t invent a theme every time you write a play.” We talk about the conscious echoes in Blue Iris of earlier plays, such as Boesman and Lena (1969) – the trope of homelessness is underscored when Rieta complains, “We are living out here like people in one of those plakker kampe outside PE” – and A Lesson From Aloes (1978), in which a character affirms that studying Karoo flora “makes me feel that little bit more at home in my world”.
Indeed, Fugard takes the idea of “categorising” his plays even further. “Look at Blood Knot (1961), Boesman and Lena and Hello and Goodbye (1965), which together examine the primary relationships in a family: between siblings, between spouses, between children and parents. I didn’t set out consciously to do that, but it happened.” And, of course, there is Fugard’s “sustained romance with the opposite sex – in my work, I mean. Blood Knot is the only one of my plays in which the dominant, most powerful presence is not a central female character.”
This is certainly true of Boesman and Lena, which has been ‘updated’ by director James Ngcobo for a current staging at the Baxter Theatre. Fugard says he’d like to go and watch the show “with a disguise on”, just to see how it has been revised. “My plays are like my children – they must make their own way in the world.”
Chris Thurman is Associate Professor in the Department of English Literature at Witwatersrand University in Johannesburg (South Africa); a freelance arts journalist, academic and editor.
Posted in actors, Arts, director, Drama, Fountain Theatre, new plays, performing arts, plays, playwright, poem, poetry, Theater, theatre
Tagged A Lesson from Aloes, Afrikaans, Athol Fugard, Baxter Theatre, Beckett, Blood Knot, Boesman and Lena, Camus, Cape Town, Chris Thurman, Emma, Fountain Theatre, Greek myth, Hello and Goodbye, Jacqueline Schultz, James Ngcobo, Julanne Chidi Hill, Karoo, Los Angeles, Master Harold and the Boys, Morlan Higgins, new plays, plays, playwriting, San Diego, Sisyphus, Sorrows and Rejoicings, South Africa, Stellenbosch, The Bird Watchers, The Blue Iris, The Captain’s Tiger, theater, Thomas Hardy, United States Premiere, Valley Song, Victory, Witwatersrand University