Art makes the world slow down

 I’m paraphrasing Diane Paulus, artistic director of the ART, in her opening plenary address to the annual Americans for the Arts Conference, today in Boston. Art is antidote to information overwhelm. It causes us to pause, and in the best of circumstances to be present—and to go deeper than the surface of an idea, a feeling, or an event. If the theme of this OHA season has to do with how we deal with a world spinning too quickly, Paulus has one answer.

Echoing in many ways Orlando director Natalya Baldyga’s beautiful and passionate post three days ago, Paulus begins by telling us that the speech she had been planning radically changed last Sunday in the wake of the shootings in Orlando. “I make theater,” she says, “because it is a forum to ask questions. To live inside questions. To push boundaries with questions. To provoke with questions. “ She tells young directors, “If the theater you create is banal, it is most likely because you have not asked a big enough question.”

Paulus’ tenure at the ART, like Rob Orchard, Polly Carl, and David Dower’s at ArtsEmerson, like Melanie Joseph’s at Foundry Theater, and on and on, has been signally engaged with how to get the big questions in the water, to get them to live in the staff and artistic teams, in the audiences, and those who don’t usually come to theater, those who we in theater are often talking about. Those of you who know the Opera House know that that was the OHA founders’ goal as well, in the post-show conversations, invited rehearsals, and Shakespeare-in-Stonington reads, and in general the commitment to listening to our community, making work that responds to this community. I am moved and heartened by the new additions and directions in which Meg Taintor, the new Producing Artistic Director at the Opera House, is taking these efforts.

Here are a few of them: Preparation for the summer season begins with sit-down read-throughs of the season’s plays. You are invited. Next, Page One conversations are held with each director, to apprehend their vision, their big questions, to—get everybody on staff on the same page before the rehearsal process begins, to understand how to market the shows, to understand to whom to reach out, to whom to ask questions. The whole staff attends, and community is invited. YOU are invited. To read, to listen, to ask your big questions.

This week there was a sneak-peek at an Orlando rehearsal. YOU were invited, and will be again. Come! And if there is any question about how theater slows time down, observing just this one thing: how in rehearsal a gesture is taken apart, again and again and again, to make it visible in terms of sight lines—can everybody see this!?—and visible in terms of what it communicates, to the other actors, to the audience, about the character—will answer that question. Liz Rimar is sublime in giving us a turn of the wrist that is at one moment male and in the next female, whatever that means. Feel how that sets loose something in your gut.

Paulus, in her also Harvard role these days, actually begins the remark about time slowing down by talking about how college offers this to young people. Scholarship, at many levels, offers it to us all. Pausing . . . to think things through, to find out what we mean.

Shout out to Linda Nelson who at this very moment is at the Americans for the Arts conference and texted me to say: Watch this now! You can watch Paulus’ speech on Youtube (Diane Paulus, Opening Plenary: Arts and Engaged Citizenship—but you’ll need to skip to hour two, precisely, past the welcomes and awards), and I cannot recommend it enough.

On directing a play called ORLANDO

A note from director Natalya Baldyga

When I accepted the invitation to direct Orlando, Sarah Ruhl’s charming and poignant play, the title had two associations for me. The first was Virginia Woolf’s novel, from which the play is adapted, and the second was a city that I knew fairly well from my time as a professor in Florida. Although Ruhl’s play features a protagonist who changes mysteriously from a man to a woman, and who experiences desire for both men and women, I was more focused, as we entered rehearsals, on how the play explored the multiple identities we embrace as we move from young adulthood to mature middle age. I did not see myself, or the production, making a bold statement about same-sex attraction or relationships. “Let biologists and psychologists determine,” says the play, quoting Woolf directly – that is, let others attempt to analyze why these things exist – it is enough for us to accept that they do.

All this changed on Sunday, June 12, 2016, when I woke to the hideous news of the mass murder at the Pulse nightclub in Orlando. Like so many, I sent a message to a loved one, “Please check in.” Thankfully, that former student, now a professor at the University of Central Florida, was safe. Social media informed me that those I know who live and work in the city – other former students – all vibrant, young, and dear to me – were safe.

So many others were not.

I can no longer hear the name of the play that I am directing without new and painful associations. It bears the weight of the innocent dead. Of the fear and hatred that could lead a person to coldly murder so many of his fellow human beings, most of them young people with their futures ahead of them. All because of a fact that he could not – would not – choose to accept: that men have loved men, and women have loved women since time immemorial. That gender and sexuality have always resisted, and will always continue to resist, simple binary definitions. That love will continue to defy hatred, misunderstanding, and even atrocity.   

Virginia Woolf wrote Orlando as a love letter to another woman, Vita Sackville-West, who was herself a prominent writer. Sarah Ruhl’s adaptation retains the novel’s passion, its longing, and the intense beauty of its language, all of which were inspired by the romantic feelings shared by Woolf and Sackville-West. It is no longer enough for me that we merely accept this great love as a fact. Our production, Orlando, must embrace that love. Our production, Orlando, must celebrate that love. Our production, Orlando, must proclaim that love.

Whether theatre can change the world, I do not know. Whether it can change minds, I do not know – although my most fervent hope is that it can. What I do know is that art – at least the art that I love – demands that we pay attention, that we ask questions, that we challenge as much as we inspire and delight, and that, above all, we never take the act of living for granted.

Natalya Baldyga

Stonington, Maine

June 14, 2016

A Species of Storytellers

by Kelly Johnson

We’re all storytellers. There’s no real way around it. From telling someone about your day to performing on stage and everything in between, every human being is telling stories constantly. We can’t help it. We’re compelled to do so.   

Perhaps what I’m most excited about this summer at the Opera House is the conversation that all our mainstage shows have about this very compulsion.

The story that we all start with is our own – and it’s constantly changing, which is so beautifully illustrated in Orlando. How do we age? And does that process alter us? How do we choose to present ourselves to other and what part of ourselves do we try to ignore?

Time can be viewed as a fairly consistent construct. 60 minutes to an hour. 24 hours to a day. But I’d be hard pressed to say that the flow of time always feels the same to me. Looking back on moments of great joy or great trauma, it can sometimes feel simultaneously like they happened to someone else lifetimes ago and that they’re still happening to me right this second. All of these things impact who we are, but when we choose what to share with others, we craft our own stories. We do what we can to influence how we’ll be remembered. But we’re not the only ones who have sway over that memory.

In An Iliad, the Poet tells the story of the Trojan War and many of those who were involved. And while she undoubtedly feels deeply for those she’s discussing, she also undoubtedly tells the stories of these individuals differently than they would tell their own. Which is the more truthful retelling? Or can they be both equally truthful and significantly different?

And why do we tell other people’s stories at all? Do we do it for them or for ourselves? Is it possible to tell someone else’s tale simply for the sake of telling it, without any of yourself coloring it? Or by telling the story of someone else’s life in our own voice, does that person’s life become part of our own? The Poet certainly has purpose. She states it early on, "Every time I sing this song, I hope it's the last time." She wants to effect change, and that desire and the manner in which she tells this story, makes the retelling as much about her as about anyone else she mentions.

We go through life challenging ourselves to reconcile the linear chronology of our lives with the chaotic spontaneity of the moments within them. We’re born, we live, we die. Therefore we expect a beginning, a middle, and an end to our stories and the stories of those around us. The danger in this is when we begin to guess at what the middle and end will be for others. This can be done as innocently as a parent’s wishful planning for their child or as complicated as the Senate’s fear of the threat Caesar could possibly pose in a hypothetical worst-case scenario. Without question our guesses as to how someone else’s story will progress says more about our own that it does about theirs.

In Caesar, Brutus states:

And since the quarrel
Will bear no color for the thing he is,
Fashion it thus: that what he is, augmented,
Would run to these and these extremities;
And therefore think him as a serpent's egg,
Which, hatch'd, would as his kind grow mischievous,
And kill him in the shell

Sure, Caesar hasn’t done anything wrong yet, but the possibility exists that he could. Better nip that in the bud.

How many times do we do this? Look at someone else’s actions (or inactions) and project our own fears on to them until the person in question becomes the villain of our story? While true villains can and do exist, do we just as frequently create our own antagonists out of those who had no intention of doing us harm? How do we use storytelling as a weapon to prevent other people from reaching their goals? A tool to get what we want?

In Mr. Burns, the human compulsion to tell stories is both center stage and shown as a vital tool of survival. After a cataclysmic event, those who remain use storytelling – in this case, retelling episodes of The Simpsons – first to survive, then to rebuild. Can we tell stories for the sole purpose of escaping reality or do all stories serve a greater purpose? Must that purpose be deemed by the storyteller, or can different purposes be given by each listener? At what points in your life have you used stories as a coping mechanism? How effective was it? What story did you choose – your own or someone else’s?

It is this steep waterfall of questions that has me so fascinated with and so excited about this summer’s season. Nothing impacts our daily lives, and the relationships in them, like the manner in which we tell stories and the stories we choose to tell. I hope you’ll join me in enjoying this summer’s shows, and in thinking about what stories each of us feels compelled to tell and why.   

“Sometimes it’s the smallest things that are the hardest to do.” Natalya Baldyga

by Judith Jerome

Day four of rehearsals. Danny McCusker, the choreographer for the piece has arrived, and the ensemble has begun to develop a movement vocabulary; the chorus parts have been set; and blocking in the space has begun.

I walk into a run-through of the rapid-fire opening scene, which is full of movement around the still-only-imagined central set piece. It’s gorgeous and funny. So much gets said—in far more than language—established, in these opening moments. The cast takes a break and then they are on to the second scene, a relatively still moment up on the small stage of the Burnt Cove Church. Natalya sets some opening blocking, they try it, adjust, try it again, adjust, again, adjust. They are trying to figure out how to get the queen off the dias. Try it again, adjust. Ok, let’s leave it until we know a little more.

“Sometimes,” Natalya says, “it’s the smallest things that are the hardest to do.”

And the first of OHA's summer interns has arrived: Gwen Higgins, Directing Intern 2016! watching rehearsal. Gwen is from Stockton Springs and is in school at the University of New Hampshire

Day 1: Rehearsing Orlando and the pleasures of gender

by Judith Jerome

Tiresias, the Greek seer who, among other things, foretold Oedipus’ troubles, gained hard-won wisdom from the gods in several ways: he was blinded, and thus became a seer; his ears were reamed out in compensation, such that he understood the song language of the birds; and his sex was changed from man to woman and back again—giving him particular understanding of the pleasures of gender. Surely Virginia Woolf had the story tucked somewhere in her mind when she wrote Orlando: A Biography.

What an extravagant love song it was! And Sarah Ruhl’s stage adaptation condenses, distills the song, retaining Woolf’s language, but creating another kind of melody, quick and funny and something else I haven’t got words for yet. In the first read-through the actors read round-robin, each taking only a single line. Director Natalya Baldyga quipped that it would keep them on their toes—it also created a kind of ensemble, group reality to the story that seemed fitting to me. It is us. In the happy gender elastic world we live in it is us, and in the pleasure of that round-robin moment I wanted the play to always be done like that.

Woolf’s love song was written to her lover and friend Vita Sackville-West, and it is sexy! Certainly in the mouths of this fine group of actors, and through Ruhl’s distillation. I adore Woolf but tend to think of her as a sort of gorgeous heady, asexual creature, at least in part because she was a troubled “person to whom things happen,” as she wrote (and Parul Seghal recently reminded us in the NYT Magazine http://www.nytimes.com/2016/05/08/magazine/the-forced-heroism-of-the-survivor.html?_r=0). Be not prepared for headiness here, my friends! 

Director Natalya Baldyga liking what she hears. And Per Janson, back again!

Back, too, Jason Martin (The Last Ferryman), plus stage manager, Lindy Lofton, Natalya, and the backs and sides of other actors you will meet, Barry, Liz, and Jade.

   

Behind the Scenes at the Opera House: Michael Gorman

Hello all! We are very excited to close out our week with a visit from playwright Michael Gorman to our blog. You may remember Michael's work from the production of Biffing Mussels in 2009. We're thrilled to be showcasing another one of his plays, UltraLight, as the final Community Staged Reading of the spring season. Dates for the show are below, but first, spend a little time getting to know Mike!

1) Where did you grow up?

I grew up in a small rural central Massachsetts town called Warren located in southwestern Worcester county. My mother came from a farm family that grew up in Warren. My father came from Boston to take a job teaching history in the local high school. There were six of us kids, born within eight years -- Irish Catholic! Our greatest joys were  playing and working in the woods and fields, athletics (my dad was also a coach), and reading. (Only 3 television channels) Hard work and education were always at the center of our lives.

2). How would your elementary school classmates remember you?

My elementary school classmates would probably remember me as quiet but smart. The quiet part probably playing into the appearance of being smart! I was always writing as well as reading, taking my notebook down into the woods or to bed with me at night, determined to express something profound or poetic about the world. Nature was my obsession. They probably also remember me as being kind, I believe. Being an artist, I have always been sensitive to the situations of others. And being a middle child, I have always tried to include others. As an adult, I have embraced the fact that I am an "extroverted introvert"-- a reality that has probably naturally inclined me toward both the writing and performance of plays.

3) Name four fictional characters with whom you'd be okay being stuck in an elevator. Why them?

Muley Graves from The Grapes of Wrath because he would just crouch in the corner and wouldn't say anything.

Bartleby the Scrivener from Herman Melville's story because he would be as silent as old Muley unless you asked him to do something, and then he would just say "I'd prefer not".

Carolyn Chute, the great Maine novelist, because I could just talk with her and her husband Michael for days about everything.

Michael Chute, Carolyn's husband, because we have our own silent non-literary communication and both like to smoke the occasional cheap cigar.

Whoops! Carolyn and Michael aren't fictional, but they are kind of mythical. Does that count? :)

4) If you were a cartoon character, which character would you be?

I don't know who I'd be. I did play a cynical and somewhat cavalier rabbit once in a play my brother and I wrote for a Halloween event, so maybe I could be Bugs Bunny in an episode that the Coen Bros. wrote.

5) When did you fall in love with theatre?

I fell in love with theatre through my studies in Landscape Architecture before I finished my degree in literature and through reading plays. I was always trying to put people into my landscape designs, rural or urban, and raise their interaction to the level of some kind of poetic performance. When I transferred to Clark University to pursue my degree in Literature, I took a class in theatre and started reading plays and said WOW, I can do this. Writing plays allowed me to find my natural voice which was as much that of a visual artist as that of a writer. In theatre, you can make a lot of things happen at once. I liked that. The plays that interested me most, other than the absurdists, (Beckett, Pinter, Ionesco) were the plays coming out of the downtown theater scene in NYC. One theatre, in particular, kept coming up--La MaMa e.t.c.--and I knew one day soon I would have to knock on that door.

Don't miss Gorman's stunning UltraLight on Wednesday, May 18 at 7pm and Saturday, May 21 at 2pm at the Stonington Opera House! Directed by Dave Bennett. Suggested donation: $10.