Day 1 Antony and Cleopatra rehearsals

by Judith Jerome

This cast is researched and ready! As we are doing on the Island, many of the actors have read Stacey Schiff’s biography of Cleopatra. Two questions stay with me from our day of tablework: Melody Bates (Cleopatra) asks—what about this great love between Antony and Cleopatra? What part politics, what part passion? Why does she, twice, turn her ships from the battle, for example? Director Craig Baldwin suggests that we are in this production enacting a kind of ritual, and Stephanie Weeks (Charmian) asks what that ritual wants to accomplish? These are juicy questions we will be answering in the next weeks . . .

Aryeh Lappin's Day 1 photo of the rehearsal room. 

Titanic: 100 Years Ago, or Yesterday?

by Emily Cormier

Last month the Opera House had a free showing of Titanic by James Cameron as part of their Centennial Celebration Film Series. 100 years ago this April, the brand new luxury liner Titanic sank in the Atlantic Ocean on its maiden voyage to New York City, so the movie was an appropriate choice for the start of the free series--since the Opera House also turns 100 this year.

I had never seen the film, and I dragged my friend Ann along with me to watch what would be an agonizing three hours of drowning: the passengers in the Atlantic, me in my own tears.

I had not expected such an assault on my emotional faculties, and my reaction represents the effectiveness of the film to provoke a specific response. Films are means of communication: all screenwriters and directors have something they want to tell the world. A good film makes the viewer think, forcing them to see the world from a certain perspective for as long as the movie lasts. The hope is that this perspective will last after you leave the theater and remain with you in your daily life. Titanic accomplished this in full.

The class struggle in the film is especially poignant because the sinking of the ship pits the rich against the poor in a life-threatening situation. Those in the lower holds of the ship are separated from the upper class for the entire journey, unseen and unconsidered by their rich counterparts. The wealthy families believe they are entitled to the best treatment, and that their lives are more valuable than those below them.

As the ship begins to sink, the lower class are locked in steerage until all of the wealthy men and women are comfortably ushered on to the life boats. The depth of the class system stretches into the very roots of the human heart, and we are reminded that those class boundaries still exist in our own hearts; we all think of ourselves as better than someone, give our own lives more value than someone else's. But if it came down to it, would you take another's life in order to save your own? Or does that make you just like the first class passengers on the Titanic?

This movie brought me to the edge of my existence, so that I could look at the world as a whole: how thin the line between sophistication and savagery are. When our survival instincts kick in, the money, the manners, no surface civility matters, the only thing we have left is our integrity and true intentions.

What separates us from animals is our ability to choose whether to resist our animal instincts, or to embrace them depending on the situation. We have consciences, and feel the weight of what we do. Though we are animals, survival is not our primary concern. For humans, existence is worth nothing without a reason behind it, and in the case of the move Titanic this reason is love. The central female protagonist, Rose, is willing to give up her privileged spot on the lifeboat to stay with Jack because she has had enough of surviving- she's been doing it all her life. Jack was the one who showed her how to live.

As a whole, this movie was so powerful to me because it represents what I love and hate the most about humanity: the profound mercy and self sacrifice of the people who decided to stay behind and drown rather than take up space on the life boats, and the utter savagery and emptiness of the men who panicked and killed each other to save their own lives.

Emily Cormier is a senior at Deer Isle-Stonington High School. She will be attending Bowdoin College in the fall for English.

Students Speak!

What a whirlwind of a week!

What happens when you bring an expert in classroom management and team building into the classroom? A LOT!

I watched a group of students, known as the “tough group” come together and work as a team, solve problems and show their teacher they had learned the material! What a proud moment for a teacher.

It was really exciting to have Sean Layne, a visiting artist from the Kennedy Center, back with us, leading a workshop for teachers and practicing demonstration teaching in the classrooms. I really loved to hear the student reflections when Sean asked, "Why am I doing this? Your teacher must think I'm wasting time".

What did the students say?

“ It was challenging and I like challenges”. -6th grade

“It helps us learn vocabulary better because it helps us learn synonyms of the words”. -6th grade

“We worked together and cooperated as a team”. -7th grade

“We get to get up and move”. -3rd grade

“It helps us focus”. -3rd grade

“We worked on the length of our sentences”. -6th grade

“It lets us know if we are in symphony with the rest of the group”. -6th grade

What more can we ask for? A group of students engaged, working as a community, being recognized, listening and being listened to and learning more effectively.

The Agony & the Ecstasy of Mike Daisey and the Theater

I wrote most of this update last week, just after seeing Mike Daisey's "The Agony & Ecstasy of Steve Jobs" at the Public Theater in New York.

Wish I'd posted it then. Because for some reason I couldn't put my finger on at the time, I just didn't like the show. I went in thinking I'd be wild about it: I'm a bit of a techno-geek, Apple fan, theater producer and political activist all rolled into one. I went to see it thinking I might direct it as part of OHA's "Our Own Community Playreading Series."

I still might. But the unfolding events around Daisey and this monologue during the past few days have helped me to place what I didn't quite like about the work to begin with.

We OHAGs were in town for our first-ever series of NYC board meetings. Judith and I had researched downtown shows to take our board members to, wanting to expose them to something Off Broadway. We'd considered Daisey's show because he is a native Mainer and a solo performer--both of which make him a potential Opera House performer. And more importantly, his theatrical monologue was making a real difference in the world: people were taking action to protest worker conditions in Apple's China supply chain. Ultimately it seemed the show would be closed by the time we arrived, and instead we (very happily) ended up attending "An Iliad" at New York Theater Workshop (see earlier post, below).

From theater to direct action to make the world a better place: this is a kind of mainlining Opera House Arts' mission. As Scott Rosenberg, former theater critic and co-founder of Salon.com, has written, "Theater can do journalism; it can do activism; it can do anything." Right on.

Rosenberg goes on to say, "What it must do first to do any of these effectively is to establish some kind of trust." Exactly.

Except it turns out Daisey has lied to his audiences--both in the theater and on the radio, for "This American Life." He undertook a grand charade, masquerading his very strong but fictionalized piece on his trip to China as documentary journalism--and even vouching for it as such with "This American Life"'s fact checkers.

He didn't need to do this for the piece to have such power. Daisey could have said, "I went to China, I did some research, and here is how I am going to present this to you, as a fictionalized collection of real facts." He could have kept it away from fact checkers and the news reporters of "This American Life." But I suspect he was having too much fun mocking journalists--which he does in the piece itself, and is probably one of the reasons I didn't like it--and being too carried away with the power his own words were having to set in motion action--to put the brakes on it. And all of this is what I didn't like about the performance itself: it had just enough edge of self-righteousness, of "nobody else would do this except for me"-ism about it, to give it the pure power Daisey hoped for and for which I was looking (and which many others apparently found in it). It felt, in fact, a bit like a movie--and it turns out it is exactly like a movie, in which the director works to heighten the drama and put the screws to your emotions in order to achieve the external result s/he desires.

Oh, right: this is called propaganda.

In many ways, all of this makes the piece even more fascinating to do. Daisey made the script available free for download and performance after the "This American Life" episode, one of the most listened to in the show's history. And in considering casting what is written as a monologue among a group of community members, we'd automatically take the "personal memoir" element out of the production.

So let's discuss: theater is supposed to move us, and has the capacity to move us to action. Knowing in retrospect that what Daisey performs as his experience is in many ways a fiction--but that the underlying facts of the oppression of Apple's China workforce are true--should we view it differently? How will this experience affect our ability to be moved by future theater performances? Will we simply return to blind consumption of our beloved, sleek, beautiful Apple goods?

Is "The Agony & the Ecstasy of Steve Jobs" good theater? Bad journalism? A lie? Propaganda? Good propaganda or bad propaganda? Want to grapple with all of these issues as part of a community-based production at the Opera House? Let us hear from you!

Read more about it all here:
"This American Life" retraction
Mike Daisey's Blog response to "This American Life"'s retraction
the facts in Apple's Chinese factories: "The I-Economy" by the NYTimes
"With 'Agony' Fabrications Exposed, Theater Artists React," Wall Street Journal March 19
Mr. Daisey and the Fact Factory, by Scott Rosenberg
etc. etc. etc.

Teaching Cooperation DOES Change Our Lives

It's a concept that almost feels too obvious: we need to teach our children how to cooperate and collaborate.

Yet if you go into many public schools today, what is most obvious is that these skills so critical to our ability to learn are NOT being taught.

This past week, Opera House Arts and the Deer Isle-Stonington Schools, as part of our Kennedy Center Partners in Education program, brought Washington, D.C.-based actor and teaching artist Sean Layne into residence to work with our teacher and students on effective ways to use arts integrated learning techniques in their every day classrooms. Sean conducted a one hour professional development seminar for all teachers grades K-8 on the power of arts integrated learning and why it is where education is headed to advance the 21st century learning skills our students need to succeed.

Sean then lead self-selected teachers in an additional two hours of professional development on "Putting Drama to the Test: Increasing Test Taking Abilities Through Drama." Sounds like an odd marriage, yes, but the truth is that even if we can correct the imbalances created by No Child Left Behind, test taking will likely be a skill ALL of us need to succeed in life and work. Additionally, Sean worked for four days in classrooms, demonstrating techniques for building effective learning communities among students and teachers. The visible results of his techniques were amazing. With the repetition of a few simple terms and exercises each day, standardizing vocabulary and developing a practice in the students for concentration, cooperation, and collaboration, the climate of the classrooms greatly improved and we could all feel true "learning communities" in formation.

In fact, arts-integrated learning is not only being seen as a leading edge to improve and advance education nationally, but locally we are extremely well suited to it for a variety of reasons. The arts are a community strength on Deer Isle, which is home to four strong community and professional arts organizations as well as numerous individual artists. And our fisheries-based community is comprised primarily of kinesthetic learners, for whom the industrial model of classroom learning has never been a successful fit. As part of his workshop with the full staff, Sean presented a wonderful, short (6 min) video history of education as it has lead us to this moment, when arts-integrated learning is poised to take the lead.

Future posts will go into more detail on Sean's techniques: his Actor's Toolbox (and how we are using that monthly in our MAD (Music/Art/Drama) Morning Meetings, Concentration Circle, Cooperation Challenge, and One-Minute Tableau Challenges.

Could Paul Goodman Change Our Lives, Again?

Ever hear of Paul Goodman?

If you're under 60, probably not.

But look him up. Filmmaker Jonathan Lee and his new documentary film, "Paul Goodman Changed My Life," are trying to put Goodman back into the conversation. And with good reason.

Why invite a writer best remembered for the book he published in 1960, Growing Up Absurd, back into our public conversation?

Because Goodman is iconoclastic in some of the same ways Opera House Arts is. We showed the film this week, and were very lucky to have filmmaker Lee with us for a Talk Back and supper.

Goodman called himself a humanist and defined this widely to encompass a variety of disciplines and genres so that he never settled into one field or type of creation: fiction, poetry, and criticism; psychology, urban planning, community development. Goodman was passionate about life and appears to have wanted to "have it all:" he was an out bisexual as early as the 1940s, with a wife, three children, and numerous male lovers/affairs.

Despite being completely male-centric, Goodman's gorgeous writing and robust, iconoclastic ideas reached many, many people--including feminist heroes such as Adrienne Rich, Grace Paley, Susan Sontag, and Deborah Meier--who Lee interviewed for the film.

Goodman was hungry. He believed ideas matter, he believed that we could create the change our country desperately needed in the 1960s--and now. He believed in "the Grand Community." At the same time, he saw himself as an outsider--someone whose ideas would never really be accepted in the mold of Hannah Arendt's concept of "the pariah"--and became a contrarian when Growing Up Absurd and his politics and beliefs made him a darling of the growing anti-war movement, and thus a best-seller.

Yet in the end, dead in 1972 at too early an age from a series of heart attacks, his books quickly went out of print, and Goodman and his ideas went out of our public conversations. We haven't really seen a thinker or writer like him again--and we'd all be richer if we had.

Thanks at least in part to Lee's film, Goodman's work is beginning to make a reappearance. The New York Review of Books is offering Growing Up Absurd as an e-book now, and making it available again in a print edition in June. And Oakland's PM Press now has three collections of Goodman's writing back in print, including The Paul Goodman Reader.

Perhaps "the philosopher of the New Left" who set the agenda for the youth movement of the 1960s can generate a little hunger for life back into our own turbulent times.

In the meantime, to test and stretch the boundaries of your own humanism, keep coming to the wide variety of events like this one as Opera House Arts moves into its year of celebrating the 100th anniversary of its home, the Stonington Opera House.

Telling the Story of the Ages

Opera House Arts' board members enjoyed a group outing to New York Theater Workshop this past weekend. We were off our island and in town for our midwinter board meeting, including a meeting of our new Artistic Advisory Board.

We attended NYTW's new production, "An Iliad,' co-written by director Lisa Peterson and actor Denis O'Hare and, the night we saw it, featuring a virtuosic performance by Tony Award-winning actor Stephen Spinella. Artistic Director Judith Jerome and I wanted our board members to experience one of the many ways a well-known story can be movingly retold on stage.

Greek poet Homer's epic narrative is not only one of the oldest works in Western literature: it was also one of the most memorable books I read growing up. Raptly listening to Spinella appeal to his muses and "sing" his tale, I wondered: why? Why be so enamored of a 15,000 line epic poem on the Wrath of Achilles?

Was the main reason that Achilles loved Patroclus and Patroclus, Achilles?

Was it the "Trojan women," so remarkably memorialized by Euripedes, Katharine Hepburn, Vanessa Redgrave, and finally Christa Wolf in her 1988 novel and essays, Cassandra.

No. I think, looking backward and forward, the reason to be enamored with "The Iliad" and all of its heirs, including "An Iliad" at New York Theater Workshop, is Homer's portrayal of the terrible destruction the rage roaring inside each of us wreaks. The cities sacked, the battles fought. The endless, endless, cycle of pointless rage ("because you took my girlfriend," etc.) that has become our story for all ages.

Our human need to be confronted over and over again with the realities of our rages is why the poets write, the troubadours travel and sing and teach, and the rest of us go to theater. With luck, we each gain insight into our own rage and destructiveness as we fall under the spell of this classic tale. With luck, we don't find ourselves storming the battlements for 10 years.

"An Iliad" is there to remind us: it doesn't take much.