Best mission statement?

I just found this:

"We are committed to creating new work for theatre that imaginatively engages our audience and makes them laugh. It is these two things, imagination and laughter, that drives us."

No catch phrases, no pretentious high-mindedness, a mission statement that may really drive the activities of the company.

Who is it? Some young folks from across the pond, with a pretty interactive website.

...and a related blog, too. Plus they twitter, of course.

Navigating the theatre blogland

Late to the party?

I am.

But I am finding, bit by bit, the varied and increasingly connected world of theatre
sites and blogs on the Internet.

I've been a fan of the Guardian Theatre Blog for a while: a rare example of a mainstream newspaper concerned with more than just pithy reviews.

My new jumping-off point is Alison Croggin's Theatre Notes, an Australian blog with an extensive, international list of other sites. I've included a rotating feed from some of these sites -- and others -- on my sidebar. It's always updating itself, so check back often and expose yourself to theatre from all 'round... Another inspiring blogroll can be found in the sidebar of hip British director Chris Goode's blog. His list includes not only theatre sites, but some cool "picture blogs", too.

Finally, a particular find comes from Canada's Praxis Theatre blog: namely, Augusto Boal's message on World Theatre Day. I found Boal's view that everyday life is a theatrical spectacle worth reading, not only because of what it may say about everyday life, but how it makes me think of my theatrical endeavors in more immediate, effective terms.

Churchill's A Number -- Off to a good start

On the page, the play seems spare: the speeches are mostly short, within narrow margins, and the there is a noticeable shortage of punctuation and capitalization. On further inspection, most utterances seem grammatically fractured. So one's first impression of the play is that of a mystery waiting to be solved, daunting and detailed.

Spoken aloud, the text of Caryl Churchill's 2002 play A Number, sounds like "real" speech: that is, it seems completely to put the artifice of its writing into the background, while putting the characters and the action up front. Rarely have I felt a play so effectively create the impression of its characters speaking with one another. What this means of course, is that the writing creates the illusion of its sub-conscious sources, and gives the actors real lives in which to live. For the actors, this means not only applying their considerable technique, but the kind of emotional courage one needs when the only way forward is dead ahead. Skydiving requires jumping. So it is the most deliberate kind of writing imaginable; only a playwright of Churchill's gifts and long experience could have made a play so rooted in its own core. Churchill celebrated her 70th birthday last September: you can read more about her here.

There are just two actors called for by the play, and the staging is likely to be relatively simple, and so -- despite the usual time limitations -- I've opted for us to spend as much rehearsal time "at the table" as we feel we might need. We've been at it for a week, and found that every comma, every full stop (or lack thereof) tells us something about the situation, the action, the relationships, the mindset and being of the characters. A Number is a play built on the singular necessity of its operative words. Nothing is for show, and our growing intimacy with the text is engendering a shared commitment to creating a production that is lives up to its essential textual basis.

NC Stage has recently begun its own blog. A Number will be the company's first show accompanied by blog posts about the creative process: impressions provided by our student guest blogger, Elizabeth Dacy, whose current and future posts can be accessed all together here.

Exits and Presence

I had the perverse pleasure -- in more ways than one -- of seeing Geoffrey Rush and Susan Sarandon act side-by-side in the unlikely Broadway production of Eugene Ionesco's vaudevillian meditation of narcissism and non-existence, Exit The King.

The contrast between the two performers presented a familiar lesson about the difference between stage and screen acting: breathing, presence, quicksilver emotional flexibility, the ability to speak to evoke, to command a room with one's body, and endless stamina are the craft of one, but not-so-much of the other. Sadly, the same distinctions are referenced in a brief piece in the NYTimes about the death of Natasha Richardson.

Leaving aside the morbid fascination with blood clots and liability, Isherwood writes about the Redgrave family legacy and implies that the values of stage technique are the values of theatre-as-art: perseverance in the face of life's realities. In other words, the theatre is inherently more real; a stage actor needs to be more real, too, not merely realistic.


I especially like these two passages:

"...in England acting is still considered above all a discipline requiring hard study and careful apprenticeship — as well as a healthy taste for challenge — not merely a convenient expressway to riches and fame..."

"Although Vanessa, Lynn and Ms. Richardson all had significant movie careers, the fertility of the family talent surely is linked to their dedication to the stage, which demands a special discipline, a raft of technical skills that cannot be mediated by the ministrations of directors and cinematographers. The dailiness of stage acting, I imagine, may have helped keep the family from disintegrating under the onslaught of media attention that has dogged many of them since birth. The rigorous discipline of stage work — you’re punching a clock, after a fashion, only it’s set at curtain time — mirrors the grind of more mundane lives, the trudging pace that may deaden the spirit at times but also helps us fight through the sudden batterings of misfortune that every life has."

The whole thing:
Critic’s Notebook - Natasha Richardson and the Redgrave Dynasty - NYTimes.com

Finally, here he is (perhaps)...