Oh, the days are just flying by …

A Song for Coretta has less than three weeks left, Six Degrees of Separation opens in less than two, and Plaza Suite is at Theatre on the Lake the week after that. And if that’s not enough, we’ve got a big announcement coming up very soon about our 2010 season featured playwright. I’ll do my best to keep up with the blogging.

This is a new photo - from Six Degrees of Separation, which opens July 26th. Ouisa (Karen Yates), Flan (Eric Leonard) and Paul (Michael Pogue) pose for a family portrait. Much thanks to our fantastic photographer Scott Cooper for capturing this loving and creepy family.

From Total Eclipse 2009 (our annual benefit), this is a reading from Jeffrey Sweet’s play The Action Against Sol Schumann, presented as part of the 2010 featured playwright selection process and featuring ensemble members Steven Fedoruk, CeCe Klinger, Nora Fiffer and myself.

The process is almost complete – we’ll have some exciting news to announce by mid-July …

In preparation for our forthcoming show SIX DEGREES OF SEPARATION, now in rehearsals, I had gone through many reviews of the John Guare play; and many had referenced THE BONFIRE OF THE VANITIES by Tom Wolfe.  “Transcendent…magical…a masterwork that captures New York as Tom Wolfe did …” as Frank Rich wrote in his review of the play. So, I set forth to my local bookstore and picked up a copy of the Wolfe satire.  There is maybe a difference of a few years between when both plot lines take place, but the main themes and ideas are shared. The issue of class, race, status, identity, sexuality, and connection are all burned in the pages. The other thing they share is the New York pace, the quickness, the whirlwind, the speed, the thrill.

In early discussions of how we wanted to put our mark on this  play, the theme of isolation and disconnection kept coming up.  There is an excerpt from BONFIRE, they captures an element these themes:

“Insulation! That was the ticket. If you want to live in New York, you’ve got to insulate yourself from these people. The cynicism and the smugness of the tide struck as very au courant. If you could go breezing down the FDR in a taxi, then why file into the trenches of the urban wars?”

Steve  had said that in many ways SIX DEGREES and BLUE SURGE share an equal fate: BLUE SURGE is about the insulation and isolation of the poor and their inability to break out of that world, and SIX DEGREES is about the same thing, only with the upper class, the rich.

A major difference I find in Tom Wolfe’s book and John Guare’s play is that Wolfe has no mercy, sympathy, admiration, doesn’t find or give many redeeming qualities in the menagerie of characters he has created. Guare, on the other hand, has tremendous love for his characters.  It is very important, as Steve said at our reading of the play, with the full glorious cast assembled, that we  like these characters. And there is the trick of the play, I think. If we as the audience, the cast, the crew, the reader, genuinely like all of these characters despite their flaws and status and attitudes, then we have succeeded in delivering the power of this piece; a very timely  piece when it first premiered as it is now.

Perhaps that is why the famous actors of the movie THE BONFIRE OF THE VANITIES, speak ill of the film. Wolfe passed judgement on them through his story telling, instead of leaving it to the reader to cast the stone.

Stagechannel.com has two video clips of scenes from A Song for Coretta – click the images below to watch.

In the first scene, Zora (Niccole Thurman) interviews Helen (TayLar) about her memory of Mrs. King:

click image to watch video

In scene two, Helen (TayLar) and Keisha (Kristy Johnson) have a hard time seeing eye to eye across the generation gap:

click image to watch video

From the currently-running, Jeff-Recommended A Song for Coretta by Pearl Cleage – I promise the whole show isn’t this sad, but this moment between Keisha (Kristy Johnson, left) and Mona Lisa (Kelly Owens) is beautiful:

I received an email yesterday morning from the Joseph Jefferson Awards Committee – a week after winning two awards at the 2009 ceremony, we’re already in the running for next year.

Congratulations to everyone involved!

Eclipse ensemble member TayLar plays Helen, giving an interview to Zora (Niccole Thurman) about her memories of Coretta Scott King, in Pearl Cleage's A Song for Coretta

The last few nights of previews for Pearl Cleage’s A Song for Coretta have been great – so great, in fact, that I haven’t been able to get a seat since Thursday. So I’ve been listening from the lobby and talking to audiences after the show as the cast and crew make the final push before the big show tonight.

It’s been a fun week – we’ve had fun and responsive audiences who have really loved the show, and we’ve had our share of weirdness and then some. In the last few days, we’ve seen a doll get accidentally beheaded on stage, an actor lose her footing in the rain, and a trolley of drunk partiers that parked just on the other side of the thin theater wall for half a show. And then there was the naked bike ride, which rolled by the front doors a few minutes after the show ended last night. I think we’ve gotten all the weirdness out of the way, though – and the show is strong and beautiful and ready to rise above whatever else pops up during the run.

I’ve never been all that good at tooting my own horn, and maybe that’s why I’ve been so slow to blog about the fantastic night we – and I – had on Monday. The 2009 Non-Equity Jeff Awards were held at the Park West, and two of the night’s awards went to myself (Actor in a Supporting Role) and Laura Coover (Actress in a Principal Role) from Blue Surge. The full list of nominees and winners is at www.jeffawards.org.

Jeff Award Winners Laura Coover and Nathaniel Swift in Blue Surge

I think the acceptance speeches will be posted soon at www.stagechannel.com – I’m excited to see them, since I have no idea what I actually said. I’ll tell that story when I link to the video, though.

Congratulations and thanks to all involved!

Eccentricities of a Nightingale, from the 1999 Tennessee Williams season.

I forgot to post a photo yesterday, but here’s an action shot from today – from about twenty minutes ago in our tech rehearsal for A Song for Coretta, here’s Sound Designer Adam Smith working on a sound cue: