Theatre Is Dead and So Are You

Seems sour and awfully bitter, doesn't it? That's not me talking -- that's the title of the newest piece from one of my favorite groups -- the Stolen Chair Theatre Company.

(Jon Stancato, the artistic director, is almost certain to email me now and say "one of your favorite groups?" but I really can't play too much in the way of favorites because I don't trust any of those theatre sons-of-bitches in a dark alley, nuh-uh, especially those Off-Off-Broadway give-us-money-or-we'll kill-you types. Why else was one of my favorite Stolen Chair productions called Kill Me Like You Mean It?)

Anyway, here below for your delectation and kind consideration is the press release. And GO! Go NOW!

And by the way, you can get $12 tickets if you use the code FIRST2 and mention this blog.

So what good is sitting alone in your room, playing with yourself?

Theatre Is Dead and So Are You people. Now, GO!:

Stolen Chair launches its 7th season with the premiere of its 12th original work, a vaudevillian take on mortality that stares death in the face and laughs.



Theatre Is Dead and So Are You

The Stolen Chair Theatre Company wakes the dead in Kiran Rikhye’s latest "unholy hybrid," Theatre Is Dead and So Are You. Directed by Jon Stancato, previews begin January 9 at the Connelly Theatre. Opening night set for January 15.

Theatre is Dead and So Are You is an irreverent funeral for the stage. A ragtag bunch of variety hacks are laying their sometimes beloved MC to rest, performing his funeral live, travelling from city to city, until such time as his body is too decomposed to make the proceedings pleasant. Their "eulogies" are performed à la classic variety, with slapstick, melodrama, song & dance, and feats of illusion and mentalism, each taking its own deadly turn as they celebrate the life and death of their dearly departed dead dead dead friend. Even in their joyous performance, a spectre looms as each knows they've all been exposed to the fatal disease that killed their MC: Life. Watch these seasoned has-beens kill theatre, live before your very eyes.

The production stars returning Stolen Chair veterans David Bengali, David Berent, Rainbow Dickerson, Tommy Dickie, Liza Wade Green, Noah Schultz, David Skeist and Alexia Vernon, with sets and lighting by David Bengali and costumes by Julie Schworm, and live music by Raphael Biran and Emily Otto. The production was made possible, in part, by public funds from the New York State Council on the Arts.

Chosen as "Best of Manhattan 2007" by New York Press, The Stolen Chair Theatre Company is a critically-acclaimed award-winning collaborative theatre laboratory dedicated to the theft, recycling and re-examination of historical performance styles, and to the creation of visually stunning and uniquely contemporary work where the earnest and ironic happily co-exist. Since its inception in 2002, Stolen Chair has created 12 critically-acclaimed original works including the absurdist noir Kill Me Like You Mean It and the Weimar child’s-play cabaret Kinderspiel, both published by United Stages. Their 2005 silent film for the stage, The Man Who Laughs,was published in the anthology Playing With Canons: Explosive New Works from Great Literature by America's Indie Playwrights.

Theatre Is Dead and So Are You runs Jan 9 - Jan 31, Thursday - Saturday at 8pm. The Connelly Theater is located at 220 East 4th Street, accessible from the F at 2nd Ave-Houston St or the 6 at Bleeker. Free wine at all performances.

Tickets are $18, available at 212-868-4444 or http://www.theatreisdead.com/.

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Remember the Move Toward Finding New Models? Jon Stancato is Doing Just That

For those of you unfamiliar with what ERPA is, read this.

Meantime, here is a press release I received from my buddy Jon Stancato, artistic director of the Stolen Chair Theatre Company, which I proudly support financially and otherwise. Jon's idea is just superb. Congratulations to all the grantees.

Dear Friends & Colleagues,

In 2008 more than 350 community stakeholders joined us for Invention Session across New York City. Now, with seed money from the Rockefeller Foundation, The Field invests in seven artists who brought forth innovative ideas to generate new revenue streams from their art for their art...

Congratulations to Kahlil Almustafa, Nick Brooke, Rachel Chavkin, Connie Hall, JoAnna Mendl Shaw, Jon Stancato, and Caroline Woolard.

These seven artists will be paid $5,000 to research and develop their projects under the auspices of the ERPA entrepreneurial lab. In the fall of 2009 their ideas-in-progress will be presented and publicly adjudicated to receive up to $25,000 in additional project implementation funds.

More than 100 ERPA applications were received and adjudicated by a panel of veteran arts and business leaders, including: June Choi, Shawn Cowls, Corey Dargel, Trajel Harrel, Jaki Levy, Kristin Marting, and Heather Rees. ERPA projects were selected based on their potential vision, impact, relevance, and viability.

Kahlil Almustafa: will bring performance poetry to his hometown of Jamaica, Queens. Through poetry workshops at high schools, performances at theaters, and Living Room Readings, Almustafa will promote poetry as a tool for community engagement.

Nick Brooke: composes collages of pop song fragments and sound effects, and then trains live performers to sound like these recordings, while creating intricate theatrical tableaus. Though he cannot release any of his music on CD due to copyright, he wants to use ERPA to create a 'micro-commissioning' program, in which small fragments, songs, or vignettes of a larger work are supported by smaller commissions.

Rachel Chavkin: The T.E.A.M. proposes re-envisioning the model for corporate sponsorship in the arts with the goal of solving one of the leading problems facing small companies and individual artists: the inability to afford health insurance. Through a partnership program, business and corporations will adopt theater companies and artists to form a mutually beneficial bond between the business and arts community.

Connie Hall: Conni's Avant Garde Restaurant not only generates an abundance of comic material and great food, but also offers an alternative producing model for artist-driven theater. Through the ERPA program, the actor-run theater company will develop a sustainable business model using income generated by the sale of food and beverages to support its artistic work.

JoAnna Mendl Shaw: The Equus Projects will develop their Regional Touring Program to include on-site coordinators in seven regional hubs throughout the country, enabling each to advocate on the company's behalf and cultivate performance and workshop participation. This program will build upon The Equus Projects' strong national support base, cultivating effective leadership with a handful of key supporters.

Jon Stancato: In conjunction with his company, Stolen Chair, Jon Stancato proposes a way to adapt the business plan followed by most Community Supported Agricultures (CSA). Like the CSA model, Stolen Chair hopes to build a membership community which would provide 'seed' money for the company's development process and then reap a year's worth of theatrical harvests.

Caroline Woolard: proposes an online peer-to-peer network where creative people can trade objects, services, and space with each other. Check out the prototype at www.OurGoods.org. There you will find a work dress designed by Caroline waiting to be traded for your skills or artwork!

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Stolen Chair Steals the Show

Finally got to see the Stolen Chair Theatre Company's new piece, Commedia dell'Artemisia, on Friday night, as part of The Undergroundzero Festival at Collective: Unconscious. There's a lot to be said about it, especially given the fact that the piece is all of 40 minutes long.



Before I go on, I should do some full disclosure. I wrote about Stolen Chair in the pages of Back Stage about a year ago (for my Now Playing weekly column), and in addition to the fact that Jon Stancato has become a very good friend and the additional fact that I recently made a modest donation to Stolen Chair's coffers, I happen to be, on an aesthetic and critical level, an unabashed fan of the company and its unique mission.



Recently, someone asked me to describe what Stolen Chair does, and while I could naturally refer the person to the company's mission ("dedicated to the collective creation of imaginative new work and original adaptation of classical texts...[F]using high theatricality and playful dramaturgy with traditional storytelling..."), that's really just grant-getting gibberish (sorry!) when you're sitting in a social setting and people just want to get to the point relatively quickly. I, therefore, tend to describe Stolen Chair's work as the result of putting genres into an aesthetic supercollider and pressing the trigger. Just as contemporary subatomic physics is all about what happens when you smash protons, neutrons, neutrinos and all kinds of indescribably small objects in order to simply find out what makes them tick, Stolen Chair will take genres you don't necessarily think of as inextricably wedded -- in Commedia dell'Artemisia's case, Moliere, commedia and the rape trial of Renaissance painter Artemesia Gentileschi -- and link them up, smashing them together to see what, if anything, happens, and what we can learn about what makes each of those genres/styles/elements/aesthetics tick.



I think Kiran Rikhye's script, in addition to being supple, smart, and with regard to this play, almost always well rhymed (I'd have to scour the script to see if there are any Spring Awakening-style imperfect rhymes), is also pretty daring in the sense of taking a celebrated rape trial and satirizing it. (A play I reviewed in 2002, Lapis Blue Blood Red, dealt with the subject far more seriously, and was quite memorable.)

One of the difficult things, too, about what Stolen Chair does is Stancato gently insists upon a sense of uniform style even as the play necessitates the taking of different genres and styles and smashing them together. In other words, if you're doing Moliere, you're doing Moliere; if you're going for classic commedia, you're going for classic commedia; we know what is expected of the actors performing in such works. By contrast, once you smash together the two, you're unsure of how much commedia to infuse into the rhyming Alexandrine couplets -- so the actors are effectively left to perform without a net.

In the last piece I saw, Kill Me Like You Mean It, "an absurdist film noir for the stage" mixed with a dose of Genet, the actors were similarly forced to decide in performance (and I thought mid-performance) what mixing noir and Genet really means.

Last point: I don't think Jon Stancato has a bottom line for why the company prefers to mix and match genres and styles and aesthetics. I think he does it because he believes that, as with subatomic physics, there are important things to be learned by engaging in said smashing.



As you can tell from the press photos, the production also involved some gorgeous mask work. My own mask is off to the cast, including David Bengali, Cameron J. Oro, Layna Fisher, and Liza Wade White.

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Browsing

So I've been working on how to come up with little categories for the things I do with this site. Lacking focus groups and the ability to test-market, I won't be able to research whether visitors to The Clyde Fitch Report identify and engage more positively with a category labelled "Rant" or "Arrrggggggggggggghhhhh" -- or whether "Arrrggggggggggggghhhhh" would be somewhat more pleasing to experience if it had one fewer g.

But, for example, I get emails for benefits all the time and unless I'm asked to go or there's some compelling reason for me to pay and go, I tend to skip them. I mean, they're benefits: giving me a ticket means, in theory, that it's one ticket they're not selling. I think people asking for comps when they're not reporting are mooching. So I really want to be able to do something with these press releases, so I post "Benefit Watch" or "Benefit Alert" as the name of the post. Seems easy and it's free advertising, I guess, and doing a good deed. In case you're wondering, I have not decided on "Benefit Watch" or "Benefit Alert" yet. Lacking focus groups and the ability to test-market...

Anyway, I'm creating one called Browsing." Little things I find amusing or want to respond to.

To wit:

1) An unexpected and warm tribute to me, of all people, at the distinguished Rat Sass. I had lunch with Nick almost two weeks ago and I've been very remiss about reporting about it. I'm weird, when I meet someone new that I particularly like, as I liked Nick, it's more fun to sort of not blog about it. But let's just say that he's very smart, very opinionated, has led what I'd call a very cool bohemian life (and who uses that phrase nowadays?) and I'd definitely hang with him again.

Oh, one thing Nick: It's Jacobs, not Jacob. Although supposedly the original name in Dutch, in Amsterdam some 200 years ago, was de Groot.

2) Theatreforte has an excellent bit about that awful David Mamet acting book. I reviewed it 10 years ago and hated it then and hate it now.

3) My friend Jon Stancato (of the much-touted Stolen Chair Theatre Company) is so f***in funny.

4) And now I want to meet Tom Garvey: his comment about the photo of the new a.d. of North Shore Music Theatre was very funny. I mean, nothing personal, it was just funny.

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Ratings for Theater: Horrid Idea

Just took a peek at the new post on the nytheatre i and I am SO dismayed that anyone would even suggest ratings for theater. And to think my good buddy Jon Stancato, the man with whom I have consumed so much peaty scotch, even suggested this as a topic of discussion! (Jon, Jon, debate me, debate me, let me show you the error of your ways! Here...drink! DRINK!)

In all seriousness, critics have all the reasons in the world to totally reject the idea. Just because everyone else is jumping off the roof of the Empire State Building doesn't mean the street below is begging for your dead body. Er, let me think about constructing a different metaphor.

(Jon, are you drinking? DRINK! I'm sure I misunderstood...)

Anyway, it's impossible for me to see why it would be to the good to give ratings to a painting, for example, so why should we devise ratings for theater -- either as an industry-wide practice or on a single website or publication? Just to ease the financial transaction for the ticket buyer? True, popular music is the obvious counterexample to all this, and I'll let Tipper Gore, for better or worse, address that one. What I find most regrettable in our society is this impulse toward reductionism -- and it's regrettable that coming out against theater ratings is something that must be defended, as if it isn't already common sense. Thumbs up, down... what is the American consumer, a hopeless lemming? Um, maybe we shouldn't answer that. Let's try this instead: Critics must lead, not follow.

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Props to Stolen Chair

You know what you guys should check out? I mean, it's on my list of Fitch pitches (look to the left!), but the Stolen Chair Theatre Company's blog is always interesting, and very often insightful and curious, even. Go there.

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Denis O'Hare...Watch Out!

I just finished a cover story on one of my favorite actors, Denis O'Hare. In fact, I told him that the first time I saw him on stage was in Lonely Planet, the Steven Deitz play of about 4 million years ago. He was great -- his reaction was "Wow!" And now the Gerontological Society of America is investigating.

Anyway, I'm off to see Blackbird at MTC tonight, on the heels of seeing Men of Steel, the Vampire Cowboys show, last night with my friend Jon Stancato.

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