Everyman Theatre "Noises Off" Play Guide by Everyman Theatre

PLAY GUIDE

EVERYMAN THEATRE GR E AT STOR I ES, W E L L TO L D.

A NOTE FROM THE ARTISTIC DIRECTOR By Vincent M. Lancisi, Artistic Director

he Resident Company is back in full force and it has been so much fun to have our family of actors together again tackling one of the great farces of our time. Rehearsals for Noises Off proved to be a rollicking reunion of relationships both onstage and off, immensely enriching our production. You see, our company of actors gets to play another company of actors, doing a farce within a farce—where everything that “can” go wrong does! This is a recipe for hilarity and hijinks both in the rehearsal hall and in the theatre. We laughed heartily and worked up a sweat on a daily basis, filling the stage with sight gags, pratfalls and physical comedy that required an almost athletic commitment to the craft of comedy—and left us at once exhausted and fulfilled at the end of each day. It has been a pleasure and a privilege working on this amazing comedy with this fine company of actors. I hope you will join the Resident Company for more adventures during our exciting 2017/18 Season. We have a dynamic roster of six wonderful plays lined up that explore global issues of East meets West, spies, heroic women, intimate secrets, The French Revolution, food’s nurturing role, fathers and sons, families and legacies, skeletons in closets, and a story very close to home right here in Baltimore. Come see Bruce Nelson as French Diplomat Rene Gallimard in David Henry Hwang’s M. Butterfly. Witness Dawn Ursula become

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a turn-of-the-century seamstress who fashions delicate undergarments for rich white customers and prostitutes alike in Intimate Apparel, written by Lynn Nottage (the only female playwright to win two Pulitzer Prizes). Imagine Deborah Hazlett—who will be celebrating her 20th season at Everyman—tackling one of the great roles in modern theatre, as Mary Tyrone in Long Day’s Journey Into Night. And the list goes on... Subscribers will see six plays that visit the cultures of Peking, Korea, France, New England, Warsaw, Harlem and Baltimore. Four of the six plays are written by women. Five of the six plays take place in time periods from the French Reign of Terror to Connecticut in 1912, and one occurs today. We will look back to explore different cultures and eras through a lens that allows us to see ourselves and consider how our world—and ourselves—has (or has not) changed. Our 27th season is curated as a global journey that ultimately ties us all together through our shared experience of absorbing these breathtaking plays. Theatre, at its best, entertains and enlightens. Great theatre can engage us in ways no other medium can achieve. Sure, we have television, movies and live streaming at any time of the day or night to watch on demand in our living rooms, but nothing is more riveting and moving than being entranced and transported by a live company of actors to another place and time alongside a community of fellow theatre-goers. As one, the actors and audience hold the mirror up to nature and see ourselves and others in a new light. We come to be moved, transformed and united by the great stories of our time. Join our community of theatre lovers. Come play at Everyman.

EVERYMAN THEATRE presents

Vincent M. Lancisi, Founding Artistic Director Jonathan K. Waller, Managing Director

NOISES OFF

Playwright MICHAEL FRAYN | Director VINCENT M. LANCISI Dotty Otley...................................................................... DEBORAH HAZLETT* Lloyd Dallas............................................................................... CARL SCHURR* Garry Lejeune.................................................................... DANNY GAVIGAN* Brooke Ashton........................................................................... EMILY KESTER Poppy Norton-Taylor.................................................... MEGAN ANDERSON* Frederick Fellowes..........................................BRUCE RANDOLPH NELSON* Belinda Blair.............................................................................BETH HYLTON* Tim Allgood.......................................................................... ERIC BERRYMAN* Selsdon Mowbray............................................................................ WIL LOVE* Set Design DANIEL ETTINGER

Lighting Design JAY A. HERZOG

Costume Design ERIC ABELE

Sound Design PHILLIP OWEN

Fight Choreography LEWIS SHAW

Dialects GARY LOGAN

Props Master JILLIAN MATHEWS

Dramaturgy JOHANNA GRUENHUT

Stage Manager CAT WALLIS*

Time: 1970s; Place: The living room of the Brents' Country home. This production will be performed in three acts with two intermissions.

PLEASE TURN OFF ALL CELL PHONES. NO TEXTING. NO EATING IN THE THEATRE. Noises Off is presented by special arrangement with Samuel French, Inc. The videotaping or making of electronic or other audio and/or visual recordings of this production or distributing recordings on any medium, including the internet, is strictly prohibited, a violation of the author’s rights and actionable under United States copyright law. For more information, please visit: www. samuelfrench.com/whitepaper *Member of Actors’ Equity Association, the Union of Professional Actors and Stage Managers in the United States PRODUCTION SPONSOR

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THE PLAY This piece charts the journey of a touring production of the play Nothing On throughout the United Kingdom. We begin in the Grand Theatre of Weston-super-Mare, and move to other fictional theatres in Ashton-under-Lyne and Stockton-on-Tees.

SETTING

The cast and crew of the touring production, Nothing On, endure “showmances,” injuries, rogue props, and forgotten lines over the course of ten weeks. From their final dress rehearsal to their closing show, the ensemble faces absurd and unlikely challenges, each risking the integrity of the performance.

THE CONFLICT

THE PLAY WITHIN THE PLAY Each of the three acts of Noises Off contains a performance of the first act of a play within a play, a sex farce called Nothing On. The three acts of Noises Off are each named “Act One” on the contents page of the script, though they are labeled normally in the body of the script; and the program for Noises Off will include (as intended by the author) a comprehensive program for the Weston-super-Mare run of Nothing On, including spoof advertisements and acknowledgements to the providers of mysterious props that do not actually appear (like the stethoscope, hospital trolley and straitjacket). Nothing is seen of the rest of Nothing On. Left: Illustration for Nothing On program by Noises Off set designer Daniel Ettinger.

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THE CHARACTERS

Most actors in this farce have dual roles as this is a “play within a play” premise.

ACTORS PLAYING DUAL ROLES... Everyman Actor: Danny Gavigan

Everyman Actor: Deborah Hazlett

In Noises Off: Garry Lejeune Romantically engaged with Dotty

In Noises Off: Dotty Otley Romantically engaged with Garry

In Nothing On: Roger Agent with Squire, Squire, Hackham and Dudley

In Nothing On: Mrs. Clackett The Housekeeper

DEBORAH HAZLETT

DANNY GAVIGAN

Everyman Actor: Bruce Randolph Nelson

Everyman Actor: Emily Kester

In Noises Off: Frederick Fellowes Prone to bouts of over-thinking and nose bleeds

In Noises Off: Brooke Ashton Romantically engaged with Lloyd In Nothing On: Vicki Romantically engaged with Roger, works for Inland Revenue

EMILY KESTER

BRUCE RANDOLPH NELSON

Everyman Actor: Wil Love

Everyman Actor: Beth Hylton

In Noises Off: Selsdon Mowbray Veteran actor with a penchant for the bottle

In Noises Off: Belinda Blair Consummate optimist attempting to put out fires left and right In Nothing On: Flavia Philip’s wife

BETH HYLTON

In Nothing On: Philip Wealthy business owner wanted for tax evasion by Inland Revenue

WIL LOVE

In Nothing On: Burglar Robber who breaks into Philip’s Estate and discloses a secret

ACTORS PLAYING SINGULAR ROLES...

CARL SCHURR

Lloyd Dallas (played by Carl Schurr) is the director of Nothing On. He is engaged in romantic relationships with multiple women in the company.

MEGAN ANDERSON

Poppy NortonTaylor (played by Megan Anderson) is the stage manager of Nothing On. She is desperately trying to keep the show (and her personal life) afloat.

ERIC BERRYMAN

Tim Allgood (played by Eric Berryman) is the assistant stage manager of Nothing On. He is overworked and no doubt underpaid. He is the solution to all of the problems that occur.

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TIMELINE EARLY

1500s

1752

THE HISTORY OF FARCE AND RESIDENT COMPANIES THROUGH THE AGES

Commedia dell’arte was created in Italy, and is regarded in history as the first professional theatre. The style features stock characters, and fuses rehearsed theatre with improvisation. Many troupes, of the same actors working together, were formed as the style spread throughout Europe and beyond.

Peeter van Bredael, Commedia dell’arte Scene in an Italian Landscape, 17th/18th century

Hallam Company was organized by William Hallam of London. Led by his brother, Lewis Hallam, the company was comprised of twelve adults and three children, and was the first fully professional theatre company to perform in North America. Touring the Eastern Seaboard until 1754, the troupe merged with a company under the leadership of David Douglass in 1755. The Southwark Theatre in Philadelphia opened in 1766, featuring the ensemble under the new name of The Old American Company. The troupe—comprised of British, American and Island actors— performed in New York, Baltimore, Washington and Philadelphia through the end of the 18th century.

Illustration of The Bowery Theatre, a playhouse on the Bowery in the Lower East Side of Manhattan, New York City, 1845

18151850

Theatres expanded along the East Coast, many adopting the models of the resident company and traveling theatre troupes. By 1850, the United States boasted thirty-five resident companies.

1875

Shakespeare Memorial Theatre Ltd. Incorporated was created, and opened to audiences in Stratford-uponAvon in 1879. In 1913, the ensemble performed its first American Tour. The theatre was decimated by fire in 1926, but rebuilt in 1932. Through several iterations of artistic direction and building reconstructions, the theatre is now known as the Royal Shakespeare Company. A company of many actors, directors, musicians, and writers performs in repertory internationally, while Shakespearean, classical and new plays are produced on the stages of the Royal Shakespeare Theatre, the Swan Theatre and The Studio Theatre at The Other Place.

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1949

The National Players was founded at Catholic University by Fr. Gilbert Hartke. Now permanently homed at Olney Theatre, this traveling ensemble is the longest running touring company in America featuring a company of actors who perform plays in repertory. The Olney Theatre Center building in Olney, Marylandâ&#x20AC;&#x201D;located North of Washington, DC.

1964

The Everyman Theatre (Liverpool) was established by Martin Jenkins, Pete James, and Terry Hands at the former Hope Hall Cinema. As the cinema was closing in 1963, a group of artists known as the Liverpool Scene elected to reinvent the space as a theatre. When Everyman closed in 1975 for reconstruction, the ensemble toured its productions until the building reopened in 1977. Since 2004, the institution has collaborated with the nearby Liverpool Playhouse, and was again rebuilt in 2014. Notorious for producing new and groundbreaking work, the theatre houses a unique company of actors every season; 14 artists will call Everyman their artistic home in 2017.

1974

Steppenwolf Theatre Company co-founders Gary Sinise, Rick Argosh, Leslie Wilson, and Jeff Perry produced their first season at a Unitarian Church in Illinois. In 1975, Steppenwolf officially incorporated as a non-profit, and established an ensemble in 1976. Now a company of forty-four, the ensemble in residence is comprised of playwrights, actors, directors, and adapters.

1990

Co-founder Gary Sinise poses with a sign at then-new Steppenwolf Theatre Company in Highland Park in 1975.

Everyman Theatre was founded by Vincent M. Lancisi in Baltimore, Maryland, with the mission to provide affordable, high caliber theatre to everyone in the community. With a resident company of local artists at the forefront, Everyman began at St. Johnâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s church, then established a theatre space on North Charles Street. In 2013, the theatre opened its doors to our current building on Fayette Street. Today, Everyman houses a resident company of twelve actors and seven designers, several of whom have been with the theatre since its inception.

Repertory Theatre: A resident company presents works from a specified repertoire, usually in alternation or rotation. In the British system, however, it used to be that even quite small towns would support a rep and the resident company would present a different play every week.

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AN ANATOMY OF FARCE: THE RICHES OF EMBARRASSMENT

By Michael Arditti, The Times (September 9, 1992)

Broadway production of Noises Off, featuring Patti Lupone (second from left).

n 1870, Nietzche wrote “In our day, only the farce and the ballet may be said to thrive.” If you substitute musical for ballet, much the same may be said of the West End today. Don’t Dress For Dinner by Marc Camoletti, author of Boeing Boeing, continues in its second year at the Apollo, while veteran British farceur Ray Cooney’s new play It Runs In The Family follows the record-breaking Run For Your Wife. Of all theatrical terms, farce is the one used most loosely— and cynically. Andy de la Tour, the author of three political farces and the most recent translator of playwright Dario Fo, notes how Fo’s plays are always billed as farces even though, with the exception of Can’t Pay, Won’t Pay, the description is false. They may have a madcap quality but not the genuine farcical motor and momentum. “The term is used to reassure people: it may be about a political subject, but don’t worry, it’s funny.” To many audiences, laughter is the litmus test of farce. Ray Cooney declares: “Someone once said the sole purpose of farce is to get laughs.” That is a perfectly respectable ambition. People need to laugh, even in adversity, hence the traditional Jewish joke. Meanwhile, the first casualty of mental illness is a sense of humour. Playwright and novelist, John Mortimer, goes further, seeing farce as the quintessential

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dramatic genre: “Most of life is farce. Whoever said history repeats itself first as tragedy, then as farce was right.” The word itself derives from the French for “stuffing” and refers to the medieval custom of either “stuffing” a programme with several short pieces or the liturgy with comic scenes. Traditional French farce has its roots in Molière and commedia dell‘arte; but the first generally accepted English version is little more than a hundred years old: The Private Secretary, adapted from a German original, by Charles Hawtrey in the 1880s and starring Herbert Beerbohm Tree. This was followed by the farces of Arthur Wing Pinero, the most celebrated of which is called The Magistrate. It has an archetypal farcical plot, in which the hero—a pillar of Victorian society—escapes in compromising circumstances from the police and appears in court with a filthy collar and black eye. As British actor Brian Rix, long a byword for the genre, puts it, “All farces have the same thread running through them, though they may be presented differently: people with reputations to lose caught in situations where they can lose them.” Farce is the most conservative dramatic form. Ray Cooney admits, “I’m writing the same thing that I was writing thirty years ago. The trimmings are more sophisticated, but the heart is still as naive.” Andy De la Tour agrees that, “Farce has more set rules than anything else; it’s like a piece of music or a sonnet.” And yet it need not serve a conservative purpose. De la Tour adds, “You can make it about anything you want. Whatever the cover-up, whether it’s a mistress in a cupboard or corruption in high places, it’s still a farce.”

The action of a farce is propelled by panic, with characters lying to save face, which compounds their troubles since they now have to deal not only with the original problem but also the lie and hence they behave even more bizarrely. The art of a master farceur is supreme, as French playwright and screenwriter Marcel Achard said of french playwright Georges Feydeau: “It is not simple to combine the skill of a clockmaker, an inventor, a chess-player, a mathematician and a comic writer.”

They are, however, French and, by definition, immoral. We may have appropriated French maids and French windows as farcical devices, but we have never embraced the French attitude to sex. In English farce adultery is unacceptable; in French it’s simply expensive. There may be more beds in Alan Ayckbourn’s Bedroom Farce than in any Feydeau and yet they are put to quite innocent use.

Despite the common ground of laughter, the world of farce is very different to that of comedy. In English author Sir John Clifford Mortimer’s view, “Comedy is to do with people saying funny lines. In farce, after the first ten minutes there’s no time to make jokes because they’re so busy running around; the laughs come from character and situation. The biggest laughs in farce are on lines like ‘what?’” In fact, farce is more akin to tragedy. As English stage director Ned Sherrin says, “It’s the same complications: people put in impossible situations, but with different results.” The discovery of two simple items of clothing—braces and a handkerchief—can produce the very different dramas of A Flea In Her Ear and Othello. Jumping into a grave is tragic in Hamlet, whereas tampering with a coffin is farcical in Loot. As Mortimer neatly defines it, “Farce is tragedy played at a thousand revolutions a minute.” This emphasis on speed is also of the essence, both in the writing and playing of farce. Feydeau declared, “When in one of my pieces, two characters must not meet, I bring them together as soon as I can.” Which is why so many writers, whether Ben Travers at the Aldwych, Brian Rix at the Whitehall, or even Peter Rogers and Gerald Thomas in the Carry On films, have relied on a stock troupe of actors. Instant identification saves time. Cooney maintains that farce needs the most generous actors: “There’s no time to stand centre-stage making flowery speeches or intellectualizing problems.” Subtlety hampers speed. The result is to bypass normal audience identification. As Mortimer says, “The audience’s response has nothing to do with fellow feeling, because the actors themselves have no feelings.” It is rather recognition that we might be in the situation ourselves coupled with relief that we are not. Orton may have inverted it and Fo subverted it, but traditional farce still aims for the happy ending and endorses the status quo. Changes in social convention have been reflected in the humour—as Cooney remarks, “When I first played with Brian Rix, we were allowed only one ‘bloody’ in an evening”—but the conventional virtues of hearth and home continue to be extolled. Thus, although the central couple in Don’t Dress for Dinner are rampant adulterers and a worse advertisement for marriage could not be found, come the final curtain, they trot merrily up to bed.

Commedia dell‘arte stock characters Pantalone (left) and Harlequino.

Despite such innocent pleasure, farce is frequently derided. In the seventeenth century English poet, literary critic, translator, and playwright John Dryden declared, “The persons and actions of a farce are all unnatural and their manners false” and his view would find many adherents today. Michael Frayn, author of the most virtuosic modern farce, Noises Off, regards such criticism as self-protection: “In laughing at it you have lost your moral dignity, and don’t like to admit it afterwards— you don’t like to concede the power of the people who have reduced you to such behaviour.” Farce remains a uniquely theatrical genre. To sit racked with laughter in an audience six or seven hundred strong is very different from tittering to the canned laughter of a sitcom on TV. The obituarists periodically file their notices and even Brian Rix admits that bedroom farce is dead: “The public no longer wants to see middle-aged ladies in slips and middle-aged gents with large tummies running around the stage thinking that their sexual prowess is undimmed.” But, in other guises, it radiates good health. So long as the lies are big enough, the plot convoluted enough and the person important enough, there will always be farce.

Reflection: What are the tenets of farce and how do we see those dramatized in Everyman Theatre’s production of Noises Off? What moments in your life have turned into a farce?

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Sir Tyrone Guthrie’s 1963 production of Three Sisters by Anton Chekhov at the Guthrie Theater, designed by Tanya Moiseiwtisch.

GOING NATIONAL:

HOW AMERICA’S REGIONAL THEATRE MOVEMENT CHANGED THE GAME By Jim O’Quinn, American Theatre Magazine (June 16, 2015) (This essay first appeared in The Art of Governance (TCG Books), a 2005 collection edited by Nancy Roche and Jaan Whitehead.)

hen the American regional theatre movement took off in earnest in the early 1960s, it was traveling alongside some heady companion movements: Civil Rights, feminism, environmentalism, sexual liberation. The upstart effort to foster resident professional theatre companies in cities, towns, and communities across the nation hardly rates, on the Richter scale of social and political consequence, with those broader categories of revolutionary impulse. But a revolution it was—one more finite and focused than those larger societal movements, and with consequences that can be documented and quantified as well as debated for their impact on the art form itself. Numbers tell part of the story. In December 1961, when the Ford Foundation approved an initial grant of $9 million to begin “strengthening the position of resident theatre in the United States,” the term itself was newfangled and obscure; foundation staff helpfully referred in early grant documents to “what Europe knows as ‘repertory theatres.’” While an array of educational and amateur theatres kept stage activity alive outside New York City, the professional theatre landscape at the time was limited (with rare exceptions) to the Broadway commercial theatre, New York–based touring companies, and a smattering of summer stock companies. As Zelda Fichandler capsulized it: “There was Broadway and the Road.”

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Fichandler was only slightly exaggerating. A few significant theatre companies with professional aspirations had put down roots in the early part of the century—the venerable Cleveland Play House opened in 1915, and Chicago’s Goodman Theatre was founded as a school in 1925—and others predated the Ford initiative by little more than a decade: most notably, Nina Vance’s Alley Theatre in Houston, founded in 1947; Margo Jones’s Theatre 47 in Dallas, launched in the same year; and Fichandler’s own Arena Stage in Washington, D.C., initially organized in 1950 as a commercial venture. A number of festival theatres (usually meaning summer seasons only) devoted to Shakespeare were also in operation, including the Oregon Shakespeare Festival in Ashland (founded in 1935), Joseph Papp’s New York Shakespeare Festival (founded in 1954) and the Old Globe in San Diego (founded in 1957). These and a handful of other professionally oriented companies were poised—alongside those hundreds of others about to be kindled into existence— to benefit from what turned out to be Ford’s visionary largesse. The growth came fast and furious, in a kind of perfect storm—a convergence of money and legitimacy with passionate interest on the part of young theatre artists (fueled in no small part by daredevil work being done Off Broadway and the anti-establishment tenor of the times) in alternatives to the economics and aesthetics of the commercial theatre, and in new repertoires the commercial sector had ignored (the classics, cutting-edge new work, forgotten masterpieces). The money and legitimacy were to come from Ford’s philanthropy to theatre companies, which would eventually total an astonishing $287 million. Then, to seal the case

for an unprecedented national expansion of theatre art, came the establishment of a national membership support organization, Theatre Communications Group, and the founding in 1965 of the National Endowment for the Arts, the first program of designated federal subsidy for arts institutions in U.S. history. Why was this expansion of theatre in the U.S. so essential to the viability of the art form in American cultural life? The question has any number of answers, depending on your perspective. “The idea that artists could create a life in the theatre in Providence or Louisville was inconceivable in 1961,” pointed out Peter Zeisler, a cofounder of the movement’s exemplary institution, the landmark Guthrie Theater of Minneapolis, speaking, as he often did, as an advocate for individual artists and their creative independence. Building a theatre career before the ’60s was indeed synonymous with living in New York City; and, to the detriment of artists and audiences alike, Broadway had devolved after World War II into an upscale retailer of popular musicals and boulevard comedies, virtually devoid of the classics and equally shy of risky new plays (the occasional Miller or Williams or O’Neill excepted). From the perspective of the larger American public, theatre was geographically and economically inaccessible—and essentially off the radar. All that was to change significantly in the first five years after Ford’s initiative was announced, as some 26 major new theatre companies (not counting burgeoning Off-OffBroadway groups) were established in far-flung U.S. cities, large and small. Suddenly, for millions who thought of theatre as a distant and esoteric experience, live performance was becoming a local affair, an alternative to movies or television, even a bonding community experience (when theatres played their cards right). Within the same period, more Equity actors began working in not-for-profit companies than on Broadway and the road combined. In 2005, 44 years later, the numbers are off the charts: More than 1,200 U.S. not-for-profit theatres are currently alive and more-or-less well (the number is based on TCG’s annual fiscal research, though neither TCG nor the Endowment ventures an exact count), mounting some 13,000 productions a year and having an estimated economic impact on the U.S. economy of more than $1.4 billion. Such tallies show the enormous scale of the regional theatre movement, but its impetus can only be understood in terms of the outsized personalities who led the charge. Along with Guthrie pioneer Zeisler, who continued to spur the movement on from his post as executive director of TCG from 1972 to 1995, and the trio of visionary women whose names are attached above to theatres they inaugurated (of the Alley, the indomitable Nina Vance was fond of saying, “I clawed this theatre out of the ground”), those personalities include the man who conceived the Ford Foundation initiative that started the ball rolling: W. McNeil Lowry.

Lowry was only three-and-a-half years into what would become a distinguished 23-year career at the foundation when a new, national-scale philanthropic program in support of the arts was placed under his direction in 1957. Ford’s aim in nurturing the theatre was, in Lowry’s own words, “to offer American artists a clean slate, to encourage them to build companies devoted to process; in other words, to foster the coming together of American directors, actors, designers, playwrights and others beyond a single production and beyond commercial sanction.” Lowry—soon to be known as “Mac” to the theatre people he advised—launched a series of field studies; staged a planning session in Cleveland in 1958 attended by such key movement personalities as stage director Alan Schneider, impresario Joseph Papp and producer Roger L. Stevens (who was destined to become the first chairman of the NEA); followed up with a landmark 1959 conference in New York, where, Lowry said, “the first planks in the resident theatre movement were laid down”; and, a year later, drafted a grant for a fouryear program to establish TCG. This essential groundwork, and the continuing flow of foundation support to theatres through the ’60s and ’70s, carefully overseen by Lowry— including backing for the seminal experimental work of such groups as Joseph Chaikin’s Open Theatre and Ellen Stewart’s struggling La MaMa E.T.C., and the controversial underwriting of the creation of the Negro Ensemble Company (which led to charges from Civil Rights leaders that Ford had retreated from its integrationist policies)—gave the movement its backbone. That backbone undergirded the network of professional resident theatres that came into being or solidified their identities during this era of proliferation—basically, the array of companies that today belong to, or aspire to the standards of, the League of Resident Theatres (LORT), the national association representing the interests of largerbudget organizations. The imprimatur of the newly formed arts endowment—and the important legislative provision that 20 percent of the NEA’s total budget was to “pass through” directly to the states, resulting in the establishment of state arts councils as well—put theatres, along with museums, symphonies and other arts organizations, on a new and more public footing. The single event that became the most potent symbol of this simultaneous burgeoning and decentralization of the American theatre, and that defined both the movement’s dearest goals and some of its shortcomings, was the establishment of the Guthrie in Minneapolis. While most regional theatres originated locally, carefully molded and tended by their organizers, the Guthrie (first known as the Minnesota Theater Company) sprang fullgrown from its creators’ heads in 1963. Zeisler, who had been working as a Broadway stage manager, and his fellow New Yorker Oliver Rea, a scenic designer, wanted to find a hospitable American city in which to begin a regional CONTINUED ON PAGE 12...

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repertory theatre devoted to the classics. They enlisted the aid of the eminent British director Tyrone Guthrie, who joined as a partner in the enterprise, and after four-and-a-half years of fundraising, planning, and meetings in seven U.S. cities, the triumvirate settled in the Twin Cities to bring forth what Guthrie called “an institution, something more permanent and more serious in aim than a commercial theatre can ever be.”

the newly formed LORT, stimulated popular support for both existing institutions and for the start-up of new ones. The Guthrie was an enduring success (as this book is being written, an expansive new $125-million complex to house the much celebrated company is under construction), but its operations over the years serve as a textbook case for the regional theatre’s thwarted ambitions as well as its accomplishments. Size matters, and the Guthrie’s vast, 1,437-seat auditorium was often hard to fill. The ideal of a permanent acting company playing in rotating repertory (one of director Guthrie’s key principles) got a great run in the company’s early years, but was unable to take permanent hold there—or, indeed, anywhere in the American theatre system, despite the best efforts of such determined repcompany advocates as William Ball, at San Francisco’s American Conservatory Theater; Robert Brustein, at Yale Repertory Theatre in New Haven, Conn., and later at American Repertory Theatre in Cambridge, Mass.; and Ellis Rabb, at his short-lived APA Phoenix in New York. Similarly, the frequently articulated aim of developing an original, genuinely American classical acting style, free of the stiffness and histrionics of English traditions (at one extreme) and the mumbly hyper-naturalism attributed to the Method (on the other), got lost in the shuffle of artistic leadership after Tyrone Guthrie’s departure, and was pursued elsewhere only in fits and starts. On the plus side, as Zeisler has written, “Once the Guthrie and a few other theatres started to examine the classic repertoire, actor training changed radically in this country. Suddenly, enormous physical demands were being made on actors. It became necessary to have voice work and movement work in the training programs that there’d never been before.”

Tyrone Guthrie, 1962, at the site of the soonto-be-opened theatre in Minneapolis.

The Guthrie’s dazzling first season, with George Grizzard, Hume Cronyn, and Jessica Tandy as part of a 47-member company playing in rotating rep on designer Tanya Moiseiwitsch’s distinctive thrust stage, was greeted with national fanfare. Life magazine called it “the miracle in Minneapolis.” “Planting the Guthrie full-blown in a Midwest landscape, for many corporate and lay patrons, gave credibility to new efforts in other communities,” wrote Lowry, whose foundation provided funds to insure the theatre against loss in its first three years. Lowry was right: The advent of the nation’s most fully realized not-for-profit professional company, complete with its own brand of Equity acting contract negotiated by

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Many other changes were afoot, including a concurrent and equally vital wave of theatre activity only tangentially affected by the economics and mechanics of Ford and TCG. This initiative came from artist-activists, a rich array of politicos, experimentalists, collectives, and rebels of various stripes who were less interested in theatre per se than in the proud traditions of social organizing, labor issues, and identity movements. They seized the historical moment—its freewheeling ethos, its radical sense of possibility—to put theatre to work in passionate service to their causes: racial or ethnic equality, the antiwar and antipoverty movements, gay liberation. On this front, the San Francisco Mime Troupe redefined American street theatre with its sharp satires opposing the war in Vietnam; Luis Valdez, with the support of protest leader Cesar Chavez, founded El Teatro Campesino as a company dedicated to the heritage and lives of Hispanic farm workers; Bread and Puppet Theater’s peace pageants, with their craggy, monumental puppets, inspired thousands; budding experimentalists like Sam Shepard and Lanford Wilson plied their trade at Off-Off-Broadway’s Caffe Cino; John O’Neal’s

Free Southern Theatre championed civil rights in the Deep South; acclaim for the Negro Ensemble Company enlivened the Black Arts movement and fostered the New Lafayette and New Federal theatres in New York City; some years later, Roadside Theater sprang up in Appalachia; and East West Players took up the cause of Asian American artists in Los Angeles. The list is as long as it is inspiring. This mushrooming theatrical activity, grassroots and otherwise, was part of the larger arts renaissance of the era, and it fed variously upon the new energies being unleashed in the worlds of dance, literature, and the visual arts (via “happenings,” for example, and, more generally, the minimalist impulse that gave rise to what we know today as performance or performance art). Another important outgrowth of this general artistic ferment was the formation of collective theatres, alternative troupes, or, in National Endowment for the Arts parlance, circa 1984, “ongoing ensembles,” dozens of which burst onto the scene in the ’60s and ’70s, and many of which continue to endure today despite the odds against them. Such artistically original groups as New York City’s Wooster Group and Mabou Mines, northern California’s Dell’Arte International, Milwaukee’s Theatre X and the traveling Cornerstone Theater Company based their work on longstanding partnerships, democratic decision-making, and collective creation by communities of artists whose bonds were deepened by time. The NEA’s eventual addition of its IntraArts and Expansion Arts programs bolstered those who did not recognize themselves in the more traditional trappings of the theatre establishment. The decentralization and diversification of the American theatre did change university and conservatory training for designers and directors as well as actors, much as it reconfigured the economics and the locus of the theatre business in America. The stage became tempting again to writers, as playwriting shed its esoteric status and gained prestige as a literary form; new plays, freed of the hit-or-miss constraints of the commercial system, were touted by many theatres as leading attractions. Audiences, it goes without saying, changed and grew, as well (today’s arts advocates are fond of citing the statistic that more people now attend live performances than sporting events in the U.S.). Zeisler again: “Perhaps the most stunning thing of all—and one of which we need to constantly remind ourselves—is that the not-for-profit professional theatre was created with no precedents, no role models. It was learning to fly by the seats of many pairs of pants; textbooks didn’t exist. Has there ever been such a radical change in the form and structure of the theatre in so short a period of time?” That rhetorical question’s answer—undoubtedly not—may be taken as both admonition and affirmation. The speed with which changes in the system occurred meant that expectations and reality were sometimes out of sync. The aforementioned ideal of permanent acting companies, for

example, was abandoned for a host of reasons, artistic and economic. Such an arrangement put limitations on casting; actors were not willing to commit themselves long-term, especially in geographically isolated areas of the country; and the maintenance of full companies proved prohibitively costly. Still, other manifestations of the company model emerged in cities like Chicago, Philadelphia, and Washington, D.C., where clusters of not-for-profit theatres offered regular employment to a local talent pool, and it became possible for designers and directors to engineer satisfactory, regionally based careers as well. In the same spirit, a great success of the movement has been the affirmation and nurturing of the American playwright, not only in terms of production but of writer development. Recent decades have seen playwriting in this country advance from the status of an adjunct literary genre to that of a viable career. Theatres in the regions have become the showcase of America’s best theatrical writing—of the past 34 winners of the Pulitzer Prize for Drama, 32 have premiered at not-forprofit companies. As the years passed and founders of theatres inevitably turned leadership over to a new generation, the character of the work on some regional stages underwent changes. In the less charitable view, many once-vital wellsprings of theatre art grew into management-heavy institutions, supporting a vast array of artists but missing the spark of visionary intensity that was the movement’s animating impulse. While such criticism may have been valid in some places and at some times, the fact remains that the movement’s larger goal of making it possible for theatre professionals to make a living in communities throughout the nation has been by and large achieved; the regional theatre movement has provided America’s theatre workers with an “artistic home.” Once upon a time, professional theatre in America operated centrifugally: From the creative crucible of New York City, theatre spun out, via the touring circuit or the scattered outposts of resident stages, to the nation at large. Today that dynamic is precisely reversed. Theatre in America is centripetal: Its creative fires burn in hundreds of cities and communities, and that energy flows from the regions to New York City, where the commercial sector has grown dependent upon its sprawling not-for-profit counterpart for virtually every aspect of its well-being. Broadway is still the place where talents are validated and economic prospects escalated, but it is no longer the singular, or even the primary, font of the nation’s theatrical creativity. That distinction belongs to the array of not-for-profit professional theatres that has blossomed into being over the past 45 years in every nook and cranny of this country: the diverse, still-evolving network that must be acknowledged for what it is—America’s national theatre.

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Carl Schurr (center) and cast in The Dresser at Everyman Theatre during the 2013/14 Season. Photo by ClintonBPhotography.

THEATRE, PERFORMANCE AND SOCIETY By Vikas Shah, Thought Economics (May 8, 2016)

he performance is key to human experience. There is not one of us on this planet who hasn’t captivated an audience as a baby with our gurgles, squeaks and steps; nor is there one of us who will fail to move an audience when our shell plays the central role at the spectacle of our own funerals. The intervening period—regardless of its length—is a series of scenes where the protagonist (as self) plays the lead in a tale of joy, tragedy, comedy, farce and errors. The beautiful paradox however, is that in life we are simultaneously the central-actor of our own narrative alongside being the support for hundreds of other stories, and the spectator of millions—perhaps billions more. This view of life in context of creative culture is shared across the arts. Speaking on literature, Maya Angelou said, “We write for the same reason that we walk, talk, climb mountains or swim the oceansbecause we can… We have some impulse within us that makes us want to explain ourselves to other human beings… That’s why we paint, that’s why we dare to love someone—because we have the impulse to explain who we are. Not just how tall we are, or thin… but who we are internally… perhaps even spiritually. There’s something, which impels us to show our inner-souls. The more courageous we are, the more we succeed in explaining what we know.” (Thought Economics, October 2012). Speaking on music, Hans Zimmer said, “…If

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you go to any rave, or any football event, you will find people chanting in a rhythm—human beings do that. We have this sense to participate and organise—Music lets you rediscover your humanity, and your connection to humanity. When you listen to Mozart with other people, you feel that somehow—we’re all in this together…” (Thought Economics, March 2013). Theatre and performing arts are also hugely important to economies and communities. The US Bureau of Economic Analysis showed that 3.2 percent of US GDP (around US $504 billion) is attributable to arts and culture (compared with the entire US travel and tourism industry, which accounts for 2.8 percent of GDP). Alongside this, Americans for the Arts also showed that the arts and cultural industries support over 5.4 million jobs in the US alone. This picture of economic impact and significance is the same in country after country, around the world- and doesn’t even begin to include the intangible- the social capital brought to communities as a result of the existence of arts. So what is the true relationship of theatre and performance to human society? In this exclusive series of interviews, we speak to six world experts on theatre and performance. Sir Howard Panter (Founder of the Ambassador Theatre Group Ltd, Chairman of Rambert Dance Company), Gilles Ste-Croix (co-founder of Cirque du Soleil), Joanna Read (Principal of the London Academy of Music and Dramatic Art – LAMDA), James Houghton (Director of the Drama Division of The Juilliard School, and Director of New York’s Signature Theatre Company), Tamara Rojo (English National Ballet Artistic Director and Lead Principal Dancer) and Darcey Bussell (President of the Royal Academy of Dance). We discuss the role of theatre and performance in culture, look at the secrets of the performing arts and discuss the future of theatre in the modern world.

Q: What is theatre? Gilles Ste-Croix: Since human beings started to gather in groups and communities, they sensed the necessity to transmit their experiences and knowledge—fundamentally—through storytelling. It is both the wish and necessity of human beings to tell stories. Joanna Read: Theatre is an art form that brings people together to celebrate, challenge and provoke through the telling of stories. Theatre is unique—you see transformation right in front of you, created in the moment. In a book, you pick it up, put it down and it remains—similarly with film. But with theatre, what you witness in any given moment is unique and only you and the audience will ever experience that. James Houghton: Theatre is a moment of intersection between people where events collide or reveal conflict through storytelling. It is an art-form that always has, and always will be, important and relevant. I think we have an insatiable appetite to understand our relevance; in context of our human relationships and our existence. Theatre is a moment where we stop our lives long enough to reflect off each other. Ultimately that leads to context which, in turn, gives perspective on life and circumstances.

written by a composer, a lyricist or an author. He is the humanconduit to convey the story to the audience. His or her choices are therefore crucial in making that story as vivid as it can be. Read: Actors are communicators, storytellers, inventors and commentators. They have many roles in their art, depending on the story they are telling and the genre of the play. Actors are there to entertain, but also to deliver the story as the writer (or they, themselves) would want. Greatness comes from the quality of the transformation, experience and how they can access and communicate emotion to effect a change in the audience. Houghton: Theatre is an art-form that is meant to be heard. It is a collection of words and moments that are defined by the writer, but ultimately given voice by the actor. For me while it’s always story first; the actor is the instrument for those stories coming to life. We each have our own notion of truth, but the great actors are the ones who make truth the through-line of their work. They are the ones who make the boundary between actor and character invisible- immersing themselves in the story. They are the ones who allow the audience to do the same. The actor must be generous, and give with abandon. Without the actor, there is no theatre. Q: What is the role of the audience?

Darcey Bussell: Theatre is a sense of escape, it transforms you into a new space. Theatre can be a source of intellectual learning, inspiration, and can even reflect your life. Theatre is live, and that’s important. So much of our art is consumed through live-streams, through computers and so on, and this misses that extraordinary atmosphere, and sense of grounding and presence that theatre gives.

Ste-Croix: People decide to buy a ticket, and come to be surprised, moved, entertained, inspired or informed. It is the decision of a consumer to make these steps—they could easily have stayed at home to watch TV. Live performance with a live audience creates a bond which has existed for thousands of years where a human being meets another, and tells a story.

Q: Why has theatre become such an important art-form? Sir Howard Panter: In my imagination this goes back to the time when we lived in caves. I’m pretty convinced that two people, three people or one person sat on one side of a fire, providing the lighting, while a lot of other people sat on the other side of the cave or dwelling… and from time immemorial stories were told by one or several people, to a larger group of people. These stories may have been history, myths or legend… they may even have been about religion or about grappling with the seasons. Stories have always been told by live human beings to other live human beings, that’s what makes it such an important and enduring form of art in my view. Q: What is the role of spectacle in performing arts? Ste-Croix: Spectacle is largely a question of means, but it also brings an accent to a presentation or to the way of doing a show. At the beginning of Cirque, we were just a group of street-performers—not great acrobats—so the spectacle was little! As we went along, we were able to add artificial spectacle which was connected to the performance and enhanced with better acrobats, improving the whole experience. Now it would be very hard to go back to 1984 where we were just street-acrobats, people expect and accept spectacle from our performances now. Q: What is the role of the actor in theatre? Panter: The actor is the person who tells someone else’s story, he is the messenger of the story; regardless of whether that story was

Read: The audience are an active participant, theatre is a relationship between the production and the audience—audiences are not just consuming… A piece of theatre is not complete until the audience is in the room. The work is changed by the presence of an audience. Whether the audience know it or not, they are active in the process. They clarify things, deny things, join with ideas and more. Houghton: The audience are not passive consumers of theatre, it is a circular relationship. It is extremely important that an audience and a story become one. You often hear people describe the experience of ‘losing themselves‘ in the story; I, personally, would call it “finding yourself.” We are at a place where an entire generation has been introduced to the arts through digital context and theatre is becoming new again. The notion of going into a theatre… a quiet small space with a bunch of real human beings… sitting in a three dimensional experience requiring attention? It’s so old, it’s new again! Q: What makes a theatre production great? Panter: There is no one single formula to theatre success, needless to say, otherwise we’d all be doing it! Theatre is a collaborative artform with writers, producers, directors, lighting designers, costume makers and so on. When all those pieces coincide, and when the performances are great, the lighting is great, the music is great, the design is great… when all those different creative activities fuse into one emotional and intellectual delivery, that’s when great theatre

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occurs. I use West Side Story as an example. Bernstein arguably never wrote any music as great as he did for West Side Story, and similarly Sondheim arguably never wrote any greater lyrics. Many say Jerome Robbins also never choreographed anything as great as he did for West Side Story either. At a fundamental level, one could also argue Arthur Laurents never wrote another book as great as West Side Story, a book he based on the work of another genius, Shakespeare, and his play Romeo and Juliet. In this case you have five geniuses at the top of their game, and when they came together, they created the masterpiece of West Side Story, which will endure for time immemorial. Great theatre happens when original creative people come together at the height of their powers in a miraculous concoction. Ste-Croix: Even though we have been in the business for 30 years, the truth is that the concept of what makes a show great is still very fragile. We must also remember that often we are dealing with theatre which is based on literature and can be the interpretation of a story. Very often I am deceived! If I have read a book, I will create a visual in my mind of that story and often the interpretation I am presented with does not match that. We are going to launch a show in Montreal, called KURIOS – Cabinet of Curiosities in the Big Top. We have been working on the show for over three years but it all comes down to the moment we put the show in front of a live audience to see their reactions to we have perceived in our minds and as members of the production. We need to see how the audience bond with a production, how they breathe with it. That’s what creates the rhythm and determines whether something will become a timeless piece. We have created some productions that have become timeless and some that have not made it that far… But in my mind I can think of so many works that have existed for millennia. The works of Shakespeare, Molière, Wagner and so on… they touch and invoke things within us that are universal in their existence. They create images in me that I can recognise myself, something that makes me sit back and say, “ah!” A baby in China, Europe or Canada recognises his mother and calls her “Mummy!” this is something that’s within us, it’s a collective memory. We have to see a show as evoking these basic facets of humanity—both good and bad. Read: A great piece of theatre has relevance… whether that is to the now and the immediate concerns of an audience… or whether it’s a greater universal truth such as love or death or war… This relevance is then brought alive by the quality of the art… how good the acting is… and more. Houghton: Theatre that becomes timeless digs into the human condition in a way that goes beyond the given circumstances of that piece. Whether you see West Side Story or Shakespeare examining the story of star-crossed lovers, you will see an authentic and genuine human condition—the search for love. When a story is told with authenticity and honestly, digging into the time and place and human nature, you will create a piece of theatre that becomes timeless. That’s true in work which is current, or in work that is set around a particular circumstance or period. Q: What is the role of education in theatre? Read: At LAMDA, we’re training our students to be artists. Art is essential to how we live our lives, it can change us, inform us, and position our lives relative to others. We hold the business of theatre-making and the actors role in that very seriously. There is an

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obligation and social responsibility to be an actor. We are training artists not entertainers. Houghton: My greatest hope for the students graduating from the Juilliard graduate division is that we provide them the opportunity to be expressive and more of themselves, and that we give them the tools to express through their work in a manner that is generous, responsible, and authentic. We want our graduates to enter the workplace not just prepared for the task at hand, but equipped to produce work that ultimately stems from their core selves… who they are, and their own voice. Our students want to be great global citizens, they want to respect the form of theatre, they are inspired by the unending possibilities the medium allows. Every year we audition 1,500 for just 18 positions, and I see the heat and passion of theatre being as relevant today as it ever was—and I predict it will be for hundreds of years to come. Q: What is theatre’s economic role? Panter: Every single independent tourist review that is written about reasons why people should come to the UK and London starts with heritage/royalty and then immediately moves on to theatre. Specifically theatre. Not the arts, not entertainment, not shopping, not restaurants—the theatre. Alongside the fact that theatre employs many people in many diverse and different jobs, it’s also a great regenerator of town-centres. If you speak to any government or local-government official that is trying to regenerate cities and towns further, theatres are at the centre. From time to time I get interviewed by an unnamed newspaper about the death of the West End. I always offer to take the journalist around London in a taxi where I can show them boarded up shops, boarded up offices, boarded up factories and boarded up pubs. Funnily enough, I can’t find any boarded up theatres! Theatre is growing globally, and people want it globally. How the work of theatre develop will be a fascinating blend of cultures, it’s an incredible opportunity. We currently have three proposals from Shanghai asking us to build, operate and convert theatres as a central core-magnet to retail, residential and other developments. This is alongside conversations we are having in Korea, Hong Kong and more. Around the world, more theatres are being built now than at any other time in history. Theatre will lose the London and New York concentration. Hamburg, Vienna, Melbourne and Sydney are already great theatre cities. Hong Kong is growing into a great theatre destination too. There is also a huge opportunity across Canada and other territories. I see theatre essentially following an upward trajectory in terms of number of cities and venues. People worldwide now acknowledge theatre is good for society economically and socially. Q: What does the next 25 years hold for theatre? Panter: I think the essential core of theatre… the unique selling proposition of being there to see it, having to perform in a space… will remain the same… However what that core is saying and doing will depend on the message and story of the artists of the future. The activity of theatre has lasted for many thousands of years. As long as human beings have the need to hear stories, and to tell stories, it will remain. Read: We’re in very difficult times at the moment in terms of funding. This does however mean that we tend to get better at what we do. The work gets tougher, leaner and better. I would hope however that

regional-theatre funding improves in the future, and we’re left with a secure theatre network. Houghton: Theatre is ultimately about conflict between people and circumstances… you can wrap it in a different package and bow, but these principles have remained the same for hundreds of years. In the off-Broadway scene of the 1960s, you saw a trend of selfgenerating theatre in storefronts and unusual venues. They were still going after the essence of theatre, but taking it everywhere. If you look today at the influence of technology in theatre, we are now able to do some of the things we used to do by hand- but more easily… for example, throwing a light cue by computer rather than moving dimmers by hand. Technology gives us more tools to get to the core event, but ultimately the fierce passion the artist has to reveal the story is what powers the theatre.

by which you grab those emotions makes theatre exciting. Houghton: You must be fearless and brave. You must be willing to express what you feel, and to do that with thought. Rojo: You have to be curious and learn as much as you can from as many people as you can. You can even learn from people who don’t know what they’re doing—at least you will then know how not to do something. You have to be kind to yourself. You do not have to suffer or punish yourself to be a great artist. The sooner you can accept yourself, the sooner you can progress and discover what you’re capable of.

Q: How do artists cope with the mental pressures of perfection? Tamara Rojo: I would contest that we all have one or two “issues” with our mental health, perhaps that is just the normal being of being a human. The discipline of ballet gives you the ability to manage your emotions, and an outlet for them. Ballet is a way to go through your emotions with the permission to exploit your frustrations, investigating them, using them and exposing them. Society faces dangers when people have doubts and questions, and cannot investigate them. When people hold-on to their emotions, and don’t become malleable to them… they become fragile, and can break, like glass. Q: How has art changed your worldview? Rojo: Art has changed my world-view completely. I have travelled the world, not for tourism but to work. I have worked with so many different people, from so many different cultures and backgrounds and I have had my mind opened about humanity. I don’t feel that I am a particular person from a particular part of the world. I was born somewhere, grew-up somewhere else, and lived in a few more places. I am a person of the world. Art has allowed me to live with myself, and to make sense of the fragility of humanity’s desires and traits. I’m just a human being, and art has given me the space to be OK with that.

Clinton Brandhagen (left) and Danny Gavigan in The Understudy at Everyman Theatre during the 2014/15 Season. Photo by Stan Barouh.

Bussell: People have a lot of inhibitions, and are hugely preoccupied with what other people are thinking. Dance gives you a space to forget that, and enjoy being you. I always think you should dance with others, but it’s amazing how happy you can be dancing on your own. For me however, the entertainment and enjoyment is dancing with friends or even strangers. Dancing breaks down so many barriers, and makes you more comfortable with people around you. People let their guard-down when they dance, and it opens a lot of doors for communications.

Q: What would be your message to the next generation? Panter: You really have to devote your life to theatre. It doesn’t mean you can’t have a family and so forth… but it isn’t like some activities in life where you can get a healthy work-life balance, as much as we would like to encourage it. Theatre is your life as well as your work, and if that doesn’t fit with you, then theatre isn’t right for you. Ste-Croix: Whatever your talent… music, movement, whatever… if you have the drive to continue and develop and become a great performer then you should. It’s a lot of work. My father used to tell me that in life you need a little bit of talent, but lots of hard work. If you have a little talent, prepare yourself for hard work to develop it, and you may attain greatness; but don’t forget that the road to greatness is long. Read: You should make the work that tells the stories you feel are important to you and your generation. The role of a theatre maker is to tell the stories of our lives. You should try and grab the whole of the gamut of emotions, it’s not just to entertain. The mix and bravery

Art is the medium by which we, as human beings, are able to relate to each other. Art allows us to understand things that are more than ourselves, and imagine life through the agency of others. Theatre, as perhaps the most human of all the arts, has the profound ability to engage us immediately in the experience of someone else’s agency- at any point in time, at any place. It breaks down the loneliness of being a self, and allows one to realise that not only are there others- but that the self can be them too. “I regard the theatre as the greatest of all art forms…” wrote Oscar Wilde, “the most immediate way in which a human being can share with another the sense of what it is to be a human being.”

Reflection: Join in the discussion! How would you respond to these prompts and which artist’s thoughts resonate with you?

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Danny Gavigan (left) and Bruce Randolph Nelson in The Beauxâ&#x20AC;&#x2122; Stratagem at Everyman Theatre during the 2012/13 Season, featuring fight choreography by resident fight choreographer Lewis Shaw. Photo by Stan Borouh.

CURTAINS UP ON CAREERS: FIGHT CHOREOGRAPHER

Interview with Noises Off Fight Choreographer Lewis Shaw

Where are you from originally and when did you first develop an interest in theatre? Originally I'm from central Pennsylvania. I first got interested in the theatre during middle school. Like so many theatre people, it seemed like a refuge for the strange. When and why did you decide to pursue theatre professionally? How has your background shaped your career path? I pursued theatre as an actor and technician through high school and then majored in Acting and Comparative Religion at the University of Maryland College Park. I acted in as much Shakespeare as I could and it was inevitable that I started doing fight scenes. That's when I decided to pursue acting and fights. Define the Fight Choreographer's responsibilities or the scope of their work in relation to bringing a story to life onstage. My responsibilities are to interpret the characters violent intentions within the given circumstances of the script and develop a style in conjunction

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with the director. I then have to bring that to life safely with the actors in a way that is understandable and viscerally interesting to the audience in a repeatable way. How do you find work as a Fight Choreographer? What other types of work outside of theatre do you do? I don't travel much, so I generally rely on word of mouth for work as a Fight Director. In addition, I am a certified teacher with The Society of American Fight Directors (SAFD.org) and teach regular classes in stage combat. I also make swords and special effect props for theatre, opera, TV and film. You could see these on such shows as Daredevil and Iron Fist on Netflix. I am the Resident Fight Choreographer at Everyman Theatre, so, if they need assistance in the fight department, Iâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;m their man! What skills are necessary to being a stage combat expert? Dance, fencing, dramaturgy, martial arts, history, acting theory and directing, to name a few.

How do you connect to Noises Off? How does movement and combat influence this piece in particular? Oddly enough, I was a Noises Off virgin before this production. I find the fast pace and precision of action to be particularly appealing. At least a third of Noises Off revolves around slapstick and lazzi so we constantly refer to the classic styles of physical comedy. We are lucky to have a gifted company of actors who will try anything. What is the Fight Choreographer's relationship to the Director? What other relationships are critical to your work?

Lewis Shaw at the first rehearsal of Noises Off at Everyman Theatre.

I always have to work closely with any director, but in this case I've been in every rehearsal to work on the physical storytelling techniques. I always enjoy any production I do with Vinny, but this one has been a particularly challenging delight. The entire design staff has to work in close collaboration to get a show like this on stage. What piece of work are you most proud of? What is a play you would love to fight choreograph for? You might as well ask which of my children are my favorite. Love them all for different reasons! The play I want to do most is always the next play I'm going to do.

Danny Gavigan (left) and Bruce Randolph Nelson in Deathtrap at Everyman Theatre during the 2014/15 Season, featuring fight choreography and weapons by Lewis Shaw. Photo by ClintonBPhotography.

What advice might you give someone interested in pursuing the professional of fight director career path? Get a well-rounded education.

Slapstick: Comedy based on deliberately clumsy actions and humorously embarrassing events. Named for a device consisting of two flexible pieces of wood joined together at one end, used by clowns and in pantomime to produce a loud slapping noise.

Bruce Randolph Nelson (left) and Megan Anderson in Wait Until Dark at Everyman Theatre during the 2016/17 Season, featuring fight choreography and weapons by Lewis Shaw. Photo by ClintonBPhotography.

Lazzi: From the Italian â&#x20AC;&#x153;lazzo;â&#x20AC;? a joke or witticism. Stock comedic routines that are traditionally associated with Commedia dell'arte. NOISES OFF PLAY GUIDE | 19

GLOSSARY Ballcock: A mechanism for filling water tanks, much like those found in the tank of household toilets.

Row: In this context, to “have a row” with someone indicates a fight between two persons.

Bust-up: A quarrel, often between lovers.

Surgical corset: Intended to train a woman’s shape, these garments were often reinforced with surgical steel and/or buckles, instead of the laces typically seen in traditional corsets.

Duke of Clarence: A name traditionally given to junior members of the British Royal Family. Front of House: The part of a theatre that is open to the public, i.e. the lobby or foyer. Inland Revenue: Until 2005, the tax collecting branch of the British Government. Inland Revenue has since merged with HM Customs and Excise, to create HM Revenue and Customs. Myra Hess: A British pianist who grew to international fame in the 1920s, and remained an American favorite throughout World War II. Her expansive repertoire and advocacy for the arts during wartime made her popular during her time, and legendary in history. Over the course of her career, she performed 1,968 concerts around the world. Potentates: A monarch or ruler. Richard III: A historical Shakespearean play, based upon the life of the King sharing its namesake, and his short-lived reign of the throne.

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Taps: The two separate faucets commonly found in British sinks. In contrast to many western societies containing one faucet, most sinks found in the UK contain two faucets: one hot and one cold. Technical: Shorthand for “Technical Rehearsal” in professional theatre. It is the phase of the rehearsal process during which refining technical elements (e.g. lighting, sound cues, etc.) is the central focus. Turbot: A fish native to marine or brackish waters of the North Atlantic, and the Baltic and Mediterranean Seas. V.A.T.: Stands for Value-Added Tax in the United Kingdom. A tax on the amount by which the value of an article has been increased at each stage of its production or distribution. WC Suite: A set of coordinating fittings for a bathroom (or “water closet”), typically containing a toilet, sink, and shower.

THE NOTHING ON TOUR Follow the Nothing On tour around England... Act One begins in the Grand Theatre of Weston-super-Mare.

Map of the United Kingdom

Peebles

Act Two takes place one month later at the Theatre Royal in Ashton-under-Lyne. In Act Three, we see a performance near the end of the ten-week run of Nothing On, at the Municipal Theatre in Stockton-on-Tees.

Stockton-on-Tees

Ashton-under-Lyne

Other locations mentioned include Basingstoke, Yeovil, and Peebles.

Weston-super-Mare

Basingstoke

Yeovil

KEY Nothing On tour locations Other locations mentioned

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THEATRE ETIQUETTE The beauty of live theater is that the audience is just as much a part of the action as the performers. When you come and see a play, remember... Respectfully enjoy the show. While we encourage you to laugh when something is funny, gasp if something shocks you, and listen intently to the action occurring, please remember to be respectful of the performers and fellow audience members. Please turn off or silence all electronic devices before the performance begins. There is no texting or checking your cell phone during the show. The glow of a cell phone can and will be seen from stage. Photography inside the theatre is strictly prohibited. Food and drinks are not allowed in the theatre. Food and drinks should be consumed in the Everyman lobby before or after the show, or during intermission. Be Present. Talking, moving around, checking your phone, or engaging in other activities is distracting to everyone and greatly disrupts the performanceâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s energy. Stay Safe. Please remain seated and quiet during the performance. Should you need to leave for any reason, re-entrance to the theatre is at the discretion of the house manager. In case of an emergency, please follow the instructions shared by Everyman staff members. Continue the conversation. After your performance, we encourage our audiences to engage with Everyman via social media. Use #EmanNoises on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram to tell us what you thought!

DEEPER DIVE

Take a closer examination of the world of Noises Off by visiting these helpful and fun resources...

The Role of Farce Today theguardian.com/stage/2012/jun/10/farce-is-everywhere-why

Live Theatre in a Technological Society harvardmagazine.com/2012/01/the-future-of-theater

Ray Cooneyâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s Six Rules of Farce telegraph.co.uk/culture/theatre/10688416/Ray-Cooneys-six-rulesof-farce.html

Everyman Theatre Resident Company Member Shenanigans everymantheatre.org/chaos-wings

SOURCES Page 4 en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Noises_Off Page 6-7 backstage.com/news/12-touring-theater-companies-make-difference steppenwolf.org/ensemble/history nationalplayers.org everymanplayhouse.com johndurang.yorkhistorycenter.org/the-old-american-company-oac geneseo.edu/~blood/Thea203USA.html rsc.org.uk/about-us

EVERYMAN THEATRE | 22

Page 8-9 michaelarditti.com/non-fiction/an-anatomy-of-farce Page 10-13 americantheatre.org/2015/06/16/going-national-how-americasregional-theatre-movement-changed-the-game Page 14-17 thoughteconomics.com/theatre-performance-and-society

POST-SHOW DISCUSSION How did setting this play in the 1970s impact your experience watching it? Humor is ever-present in this play. What types of comedy did you see onstage? Chart your reactions. What made you laugh? What surprised you? What amazed you? What unique skills did this company of actors exercise onstage? What makes a farce different than other plays you have seen? Can you identify the elements of farce having witnessed Noises Off? How did they do the second act? What does that look like on the page?