Furious Theatre Company returns to the stage with their most ambitious production to date… the world premiere of NOgoodDEED will be presented as part of the award-winning play series at [Inside] the Ford, in partnership with the L.A. County Arts Commission.

NOgoodDEED

By Matt Pelfrey, Directed by Dámaso Rodriguez

January 21 – February 26, 2012

No Spandex. EVER. No Capes. EVER. A gritty and savagely humorous action adventure that is part play/part graphic novel.

When I was a lowly intern working my way through the new play development ranks, I remember hearing the name “Jessica Kubzansky” and “trailblazer” in the same sentence. From my desk, amidst a mountain of scripts, I heard stories of how Jessica was the fearless Indiana Jones of West Coast new play development. And, six years later, when I sat down to ask her about Boston Court’s 2012 season, I found out… I was right.

Ayla Harrison: You’ve done a season of World Premieres once before, in 2010. What have you learned from that?

Jessica Kubzansky: Over the years, Boston Court has developed an audience that will take the ride with us. And while doing a whole season of unknown plays is big, one thing 2010 taught us was that our audience, as it has grown with us, has come to not need to know the play. In the beginning, we found that attendance was title-recognition dependent, and when we did plays no one had heard of, we had lighter attendance. But we continued to do new and riskier plays, and slowly built an audience who was ready to really take the leap with us. So in 2010 we discovered that our audience was willing to take the leap on an entire season of unknown titles. It also should be stated that, both in 2010, and now, for 2012, we programmed the plays we believed in most passionately as the best fit for our season, and they happened to all be world premieres.

AH: In terms of choosing your season, is it a year-round event?

JK: It is indeed. Since we do so many new plays, we put plays in our PLAY/ground Reading Series that we are very interested in potentially programming on our mainstage. And in terms of season planning, there’s always a deadline. I’m not the only one who will tell you making a season is incredibly challenging. All theatres would concur that making the jigsaw fit is such a complexity; both in terms of giving balance and conceptual content, and in terms of affordability of production, numbers of actors, etc. But we work very hard to make sure that if you come see all four shows in our season you’ll see something really rich and balanced.

AH: Are there any plays in your 2012 season that were featured in your reading series last year?

JK: In fact, Kathryn Walat’s play Creation was in our PLAY/ground Reading Series last year. So it’s very exciting that it ended up on the mainstage. We have quite a tradition, actually, of taking plays from our reading series and putting them on the mainstage.

AH: What was your impetus to say, “Let’s do a season of all world premieres”…

JK: As I mentioned, we actually did not set out to do a season of world premieres. We set out to do a season of interesting plays. I don’t think we’d like a year to go by without doing at least one world premiere. But, as it happened, these are the plays we all happened to love that seemed to make for a rich and electric season, and they just happened to be world premieres. And, just to be precise, we are doing three world premieres and one world premiere adaptation of an existing piece.

AH: I think you have a lot of unique work happening in the 2012 season. You have a piece that’s based heavily in dance and movement with Theatre Movement Bazaar—what made you want to work with them?

JK: Both Michael (Michetti, my Co-Artistic Director) and I think theatre is a very complete kind of storytelling and it involves the use of all elements. Movement and dance are an incredibly profound and evocative element that drive a very kinetic kind of theatre. It’s the kind of theatre we have done at Boston Court, but not as much as we have wanted to. It’s a very interesting style, because it is about creating several kinds of language, not just text-based, and but also a physical language that communicates distinctly. For Theatre Movement Bazaar, both Michael and I have always been really fascinated and blown away by their movement style and the things that they do with incredibly physical story-telling and the gifts that are mined from that. Theatre Movement Bazaar is highly stylized movement, it’s repetitive action, it’s dance. Often, actors play many different characters. They did a take on Jekyll & Hyde called Model Behavior and they enacted that whole world with a small ensemble. Their work is so exciting that we really wanted to collaborate with them here on the making of a new piece.

AH: I’ve seen their pieces online. I’d say they live in this space where there’s a marriage of words and movement, even to the basest action…it is completely harmonious. A simple action, like reading a letter, becomes a comedic ballet with that company. I’ve never seen anything like it.

JK: Well said! I’m in love with physical theatre. Both Michael and I are.

AH: I know you’ve worked with Furious Theatre Co before (The Pain and the Itch by Bruce Norris)—what prompted you to jump into another collab with the talented company on The Government Inspector?

JK: When we do a co-production we’re really blending two sensibilities, which can be challenging, but working with Furious was harmonious and easy in our first collaboration, so we were delighted to try it again, with a very different kind of piece. The director, Stefan Novinski, who directed Medea for us in our second season, has wanted to do The Government Inspector for quite some time, and Furious was interested in investigating a play in this style. We loved the play, and got even more excited when L.A. playwright Oded Gross, who has recently co-written adaptations of An Imaginary Invalid and A Servant to Two Masters for Oregon Shakespeare Festival, came on board to do a world premiere adaptation. Another plus, Furious has a company of talented actors and the play has a rather large cast. So Stefan was especially pleased to be able to use the talents of an acting company that already has a great deal of experience working together in addition to actors simply cast for the production.

AH: You’re directing a piece in BC’s upcoming season called The Children—can you divulge your choice to take on this piece?

JK: This is a play that was introduced to me by our wonderful literary managers. We all found the play very intriguing and moving, but like many plays we love at Boston Court, the complexity of the piece on the page raised some questions. Michael Elyanow, the playwright, happened to be in town from Minneapolis, so we did an in-house reading just to hear the play aloud. And at the reading, we all found we were haunted by the play, even as we still had questions. We talked to the writer about them, and the questions started opening doors both for us and for the playwright. And that whole investigation was so exciting. It’s a piece that plays with language, genre, blending of an ancient story and a modern story…and it requires puppetry (which is one of the other things I love about theatre—the use of all theatrical elements to elevate reality). And, most importantly, I don’t want to give too much here, but I will just say that I was incredibly moved by what I think the play asks us to walk away with at the end. It was very powerful and compelling.

AH: I’m excited about Creation too.

JK: Me too! The questions that Kate is asking about where creativity comes from and the divine spark that inspires people and about events that change lives and how relationships are changed as a result of them…those are all really profound investigations. And I love that a play asks us to explore them by giving us such a visceral experience.

AH: Does doing this new season scare you or rattle your insides…ya know, in a good way?

JK: Yes. I don’t know if this is the answer you want, though, because the answer is that it’s genuinely a thrill. I think it’s right for artists to be a little frightened of all plays they’re about to dive into; if we can look at them complacently, we’re probably not making great art. And, I suppose it’s scary in that all new plays have a higher percentage rate of failure only because nobody has been out there with a stamp of approval, some words in the world that let people know, “This is a great play!” So it actually means that an audience has to make up their own minds—as opposed to being told what to think. But that’s not scary to me. That’s exciting.

***

For me, Boston Court’s gift as a company is that they don’t take anything for granted with the audience. They set the bar, and the audience doesn’t demand something from them—they demand something from the audience. And the audience becomes better for it, I think. Jessica Kubzansky and Michael Michetti are trailblazers in the sense that they aren’t just introducing the theatre world to unknown titles. They’re showing other theatres that a season of world premieres is possible and provocative. And maybe those theatres will take heed and sprinkle a few more world premieres into their season too one day.

Four world premieres may seem as daunting as racing a giant boulder, but trust that Jessica (and Indie) will tell you: It’s a damn good time.

They refer to themselves as True Stories Told Live. Here is a more specific description I copied from their website:

The Moth is an acclaimed not-for-profit organization dedicated to the art and craft of storytelling. It is a celebration of both the raconteur, who breathes fire into true tales of ordinary life, and the storytelling novice, who has lived through something extraordinary and yearns to share it. At the center of each performance is, of course, the story – and The Moth’s directors work with each storyteller to find, shape and present it.

They have a radio program broadcast on many NPR stations around the country and they host a live show in NYC (as well as in other cities such as LA from time to time.)

During one particular episode from last December, Peter Sagal, who hosts his own popular weekly radio show on NPR titled Wait, Wait, Don’t Tell Me, shared a story about an important person in the world of theatre: 

Peter Sagal:
… I just want to share one story with you in addition to trying to come up with stories to tell myself, and listening to them, like these 10 great stories you’ve heard tonight, I also collect ones.  And this is perhaps my favorite and it also explains a little bit why I love The Moth and I love a lot of other things that I love like the theatre in particular.  And it’s a story that happened to a friend of mine named, Morgan Jenness.  When she told me this story she was a dramaturg, that’s somebody, if you don’t know, who works, that is sort of like an editor of plays, somebody who works with playwrights.  Now she’s a literary agent in New York City.  And the story was that when Morgan was a young woman and living in New York City, she had trouble – she came from a difficult background and had trouble finding herself; and was very uncertain of herself.  And for whatever reason she had become obsessed with Mother Theresa.  For some reason, in her young mind at the time, this was around 1980, 81, Mother Theresa was the epitome of human beings.  The best kind of human there was.  And Morgan so much wanted to be like or with Mother Theresa.  And one day she found out  (she read in the paper) that Mother Theresa was coming to New York City to visit the UN or testify about something or other.  And Morgan was such a Mother Theresa fan that she found out what hotel Mother Theresa was staying at.  And stalked Mother Theresa.  So she’s there, at the curb, outside her hotel.  And a car pulls up.  And Mother Theresa gets out.  (I remember one detail of the story that Morgan told me was that first all these little nuns got out – this little row of penguin like nuns getting out- and then finally here comes Mother Theresa).  And Morgan runs up to Mother Theresa who was an old woman even at that time and says “Oh Mother Theresa, I’m so glad to meet you.  Mother Theresa, oh the work you do is so wonderful”.  And Mother Theresa was very nice and took her hand and listened to her.  And Morgan said “the work you do is so important and its so wonderful and I so much..I just want to come to Calcutta and do that work with you…because I just think it’s so wonderful”.  And Mother Theresa kind of shook her head and said “no no, you don’t do this work because you think it’s good – you do this work because you so love the people – the poor people of Calcutta with whom I work that you can’t be away from them.  THAT’S when you come – and you do this work”.  And Morgan kind of realized she had been busted a little bit – in a nice way.  And kind of nodded and understood.  And Mother Theresa said “Well, what do you do?”  And Morgan said ” Well, what I do isn’t important.  What I do is I work in a theatre.  And I just help put on plays.  I mean, what use is that?”.  And Mother Theresa said, to Morgan, who then told me the same story about 10 years later, Mother Theresa said “There are so many different kinds of famine in this world.  In my country there is a famine of the body.  In this country, there is a famine of the spirit.  Stay here and feed your people”.

I posed a holiday question to Boston Court’s Co-Artistic Director Michael Michetti recently, “What’s your favorite holiday classic?” The man behind such Boston Court favorites as 2011’s The Dinosaur Within had a lot to say about a dear friend I grew up with: George Bailey.

“Year after year It’s A Wonderful Life makes me cry.   I love its message because it says something very profound about the power of the mind to change our experience of our lives.  When George arrives home at the end of the film, his circumstances haven’t really changed.  But through a shift in his way of thinking he has gone from suicidal despair to a place of tremendous gratitude.  And then that shift becomes manifested as his friends and family give back to him both in love and material wealth, reflecting back to George his transformed experience of his wonderful life.”

This notion about Christmas classics got me thinking about other holiday favorites. I’d seen much of Michetti’s fantastic work this season, and I pondered how he’d handle iconic holiday character: Ebenezer Scrooge from A Christmas Carol. So I asked him about his experience with the well-known piece.

“Dickens’ A Christmas Carol has resonated deeply with me for many years. I’ve never directed a production, but it’s haunted me since I was a teenager and began dreaming of how I might stage it as a play.”

I wondered what a man with such a theatrically diverse resume, with such a fantastic directorial range might say about this curmudgeonly old man. And the answer he gave me was so simple I felt like George Bailey holding a Christmas bell—just absolutely warm all over.

“Because A Christmas Carol is so frequently produced, it is almost de rigueur to reset it in some clever setting.  Certainly one could winkingly make Scrooge a banking mogul who has lost sight of how his greed and stinginess have affected those around him, and you’d get some good chuckles.  But I’m afraid that kind of approach actually undermines what I find so powerful in the story.

Like It’s a Wonderful Life, A Christmas Carol is a story of personal redemption, of a protagonist who has lost his way and who, through a series of supernatural visions has his entire outlook transformed.  I’m afraid by making Scrooge a banker or some other symbol of greed, we present him as the “other.”  We distance ourselves from him because we have already judged his sins, and they’re not our sins.

I cry at the end of A Christmas Carol because I am Ebenezer Scrooge.  I’m not angry at him, and I don’t pity him.  I empathize with him. We’ve all had the experience of having our hearts shut down. We have all tried to justify our anger rather than release it.  We have all been stingy because we fear scarcity.

Dickens has done a pretty miraculous trick.  He has created an intensely dislikable, seemingly unredeemable character whose armor is slowly chipped away, who slowly reveals the source of his wounds and the child-like vulnerability beneath his hardened shell.  And by the end of the story, he is transformed – simply through a shift in his mind – to a lovable, empathetic figure.  And he gives hope to us all – if Ebenezer Scrooge can change so profoundly, maybe I can as well.

These stories endure because they’re little Christmas miracles.  They teach us something about ourselves, and remind us of truths we often forget as we get caught up in the daily grind.  They’re perennials because we need to be reminded.  And I’m thankful for these annual reminders.”

***

And as we wrap gifts and rush to festive gatherings with family and friends this holiday season, as we ready ourselves for another year, as technology quickens and smartphones get even smarter…it’s nice to know that some things were meant to remain untouched.  And sometimes you need a little Tiny Tim to remind you that slowing down isn’t quite so bad.  

We asked each of our PLAY/ground playwrights to answer one question pertaining to their play. Here’s what they had to say…

Martin Zimmerman author of Seven Spots on the Sun:

Q. Was there a particular incident that provided inspiration for “Seven Spots on The Sun”?  If so, how did your relationship to the situation(s) evolve and change throughout the writing process?

A. Seven Spots on the Sun was actually inspired by a number of real life situations. A lot of the ideas the play wrestles with came out of a research trip I made to Argentina in 2007, during which I interviewed family members of people who were disappeared by the military dictatorship that ruled Argentina from 1976-1983. I went to Argentina to investigate the relationship between justice, redemption, revenge, and forgiveness, but when I returned to the U.S., I struggled with how to interrogate these ideas dramatically and theatrically. It was during this struggle that I heard the most chilling story about perpetrators of the Rwandan genocide dying only months later during cholera outbreaks in their refugee camps. As soon as I heard the story, I knew I had a central story structure for my play. Of course, from there, the work on the play was far from over. I worked on the play for the next several years trying to render a world that is vivid and visceral while also epic and larger than life. I have continued drawing on real life situations to lend specificity to the world of the play, but the goal was never to accurately represent the factual reality of these historical situations, but rather to investigate how people mourn and manage in the face of such immense violence and loss.

PLAY/ground is free and open to the public.  Click here for more information.

We asked each of our PLAY/ground playwrights to answer one question pertaining to their play. Here’s what they had to say…

Roland Schimmelpfennig author of The Golden Dragon:

Q. How did the ideas for the play come into being?

A. There were two moments which together formed the beginnings the play. The first was a visit from a dramaturg from Sweden. He asked me to write a play, one far away from naturalism. It was to be playful, anti-naturalism. The second was a conversation with a lawyer, who approached me during a time when he was covering illegal immigrants in Germany. He said to me, ‘Why not write a play about it?’. But it is difficult to write about immigration because of the necessity to write in two different languages. I thought, how can ‘we’ i.e. WHITE WESTERNERS impersonate Asian illegal immigrants. We cannot pretend to be Chinese, and there are no or very few Chinese actors in Germany. Therefore you need the actors just to SAY who they are. ‘I am Chinese’. This method then becomes linked to all types of otherness: age and sex become twisted.  There are fifteen characters in this play, performed by five actors. And Forty-eight scenes.  They are short.  Episodic.

PLAY/ground is free and open to the public.  Click here for more information.

We asked each of our PLAY/ground playwrights to answer one question pertaining to their play. Here’s what they had to say…

James Christy, Jr. author of Egyptian Song:

Q. “Egyptian Song” encompasses a tightly constructed story about relationships within a much larger suggestion of cultural pressures. Which came first, and how did that lead to the other?

A. Interesting question. I’m not sure I have a satisfying answer. You like to think that characters grow sort of organically rather than coming out of a cultural issue you’re trying to address. But there’s no question the cultural landscape informed who they are and how the story took shape.

Before I started writing I tried to soak in as much knowledge and understanding as I could. I know enough to know that I don’t know that much about the various cultural influences and pressures in rural Egypt in the early 20^th century. It is a time and place filled with contradictions. There were strong matriarchs yet girls and unmarried women had little autonomy. In particular, the singer Umm Kulthum was one of the most respected artists throughout the entire Middle East (Cairo essentially shut down during her monthly radio shows). Her life, especially her upbringing in rural Egypt, provided a helpful guidepost to me. In the end while the understanding and appreciation of the culture was critical to the piece, my goal as I wrote was to stay true to the characters and let them have their own voices.

PLAY/ground is free and open to the public.  Click here for more information.

We asked each of our PLAY/ground playwrights to answer one question pertaining to their play. Here’s what they had to say…

Sheila Callaghan author of Everything You Touch

Q. This work deals significantly with perspectives on body image and beauty. What was your particular access point for these topics?

A. Fashion has been of particular interest for me since giving birth to my son.  Suddenly I found myself struggling with this entire new idea of self that had little to do with my previous identity, and so the desire to find a new way of describing myself physically that encompassed this role became a preoccupation for me. Also, the immediate change in my body after giving birth put several categories of clothing completely off-limits, which made me obsess over them even more.  Consequently, I became consumed with the manner in which women attempt to define themselves by what they wear, how they eat, and what they choose to project of themselves into the world.

PLAY/ground is free and open to the public.  Click here for more information.

We asked each of our PLAY/ground playwrights to answer one question pertaining to their play. Here’s what they had to say…

David Wiener author of Cassiopeia:

Q. Cassiopeia is a stylistic departure from your other plays. How did you come to this more poetic approach, and has it informed your work overall?

A: In 2002, when I was just out of graduate school, I received a strange and wonderful phone call.  On the other end of the line was the halting musical voice of Joseph Chaikin. Joe had suffered a stroke several years earlier, which had left him partially aphasic — aphasia is a condition which diminishes a person’s ability to access the language centers of the brain.  It’s important to note that aphasia affects a person’s ability to retrieve language and not the language itself.  As was the case with Joe, the words are all there, but often remain just out of reach. At the time, I remember thinking that it was no small task for Joe to call on a telephone.  In any case, the gist of our conversation was that Joe had read one of my plays called For The Dead (which I think was my second full length play). He liked it and wanted to know if I would consider writing something for him to perform.  I had no idea what that commitment might mean, but I did know that I was speaking with one of the most significant theatrical artists of all time. So, I said, yes.

The great director (and Joe’s long-time “right hand”) Anders Cato, acted as a kind of facilitator for our meetings in Joe’s loft on the Hudson, but even with Anders’ equanimity and patience I found collaborating with Joe to be difficult.  Not only was conversation challenging because of Joe’s aphasia, but our ability to settle on a theme or idea that was mutually interesting seemed elusive.  I should also mention that Joe’s interest in my writing led to a commission from a prominent theater, so that pressure came to bear on the process as well.  I began to suspect that I was out of my depth and lost in the process.  And then one day…

Joe began to speak about his stroke.  He spoke of waking up, alone, in a dark hospital room, knowing only the word, “no.”. He spoke of laying on his side, staring out the window.  And this man– an essential member of the Living Theater, the creator of The Open Theater, the man who played both Lear and Hamlet at the Public Theater in the same season, the progenitor of many groups including The Wooster Group and Mabou Mines, the only person whom Samuel Beckett authorized to direct his plays after his death, found himself without the one tool which had made him all of this.  Joe Chaikin knew he had lost his words.  And in that moment, he wanted to die, he said.  Joe stopped his story there.  His brow furrowed in the way that it did when he was searching for the right sound… “But… not… die.  But…  Surprising… but…”  The words hiding from him again, Joe stood.  He took my hand and led me to the one room I’d never seen in his apartment.  He opened the door. There, above Joe Chaikin’s bed was a spinning mobile of the heavens.  He pointed:

Joe: Stars.

(Pause.)

Me: They kept you alive.

Joe:  Yes.

I went home that night, turned on some music, poured a drink and wrote the majority of Cassiopeia in a single sitting.  I knew that what I put on the page would be about change, about memory, about music, and most of all, about stars.  I tried very hard not to “compose” a play.  Instead, I focused on two distinct voices. I relaxed as much as I could and allowed the music to establish a rhythm.  Then I “transcribed” what the voices said.  Somehow, all of our talk over the preceding months filtered through these two characters and became the intertwined narrative that comprises the bulk of this piece.

That these voices spoke in a non-naturalistic manner is as much a product of Joe’s theatrical tradition as my process in writing it.  Over the course of our collaboration, I’d listened to recordings of Joe’s work with writers like Sam Shepard and Jean Claude van Itallie.  To me, these pieces seemed less concerned with the explication of plot and psychology and instead, focused on the exploration of a state of being.  That view of theater resonated with me.  I don’t like plot in plays.  Even in my more conventional work, I can’t begin there. That’s not to say that I’m repelled by story.  Quite the contrary, I believe a playwright’s first duty is to tell a story well.  But the kind of storytelling that interests me most (and which I saw exemplified in Joe’s work) is that in which the dramatic action proceeds, not from characters reacting to a series of events, but rather, from emotional causality.  It is a kind of theater that places a great deal of trust in its audience.  It’s a theater that’s not primarily concerned with drawing connections and making sense intellectually or even logically.  Instead, non-naturalistic theater wants to transport us in the way that music can transport us– emotionally.  And that’s where I think poetry enters the equation.  ”Normal” or “conventional” dialog tends to engage our brains– it lives in the literal world of cause and effect.  Poetry however, engages us through our bodies and metaphysical organs — poetry lives in the metaphorical realm between music and conventional speech– where the concrete rules of language give way to the evocative primordial forces of rhythm and melody.  That poetic language can exist in the theater is, I think, evidence that theater is a dynamic and exciting medium.

PLAY/ground is free and open to the public.  Click here for more information.