Marilyn Monroe and Arthur Miller: part one

This rare documentary looks at the relationship between Marilyn Monroe and Arthur Miller, and contains interviews with Miller himself. It’s in two parts – here’s part one:

I’ll post part two, along with some thoughts on what this means in terms of After the Fall, later this week.

Prop Lobsters (with video)

The script of Resurrection Blues calls for lobsters in scene five, to be eaten by Felix and Emily as the scene opens on them finishing their elegant meal. For a small-budget Non-Equity theatre company, this is a challenge to solve, and our props designer Kim Lyle not only solved it beautifully (with the essential help of my fantastic sister in Maine who donated and shipped four live Maine lobsters!), but also documented her adventure in the brilliant video below:

Watch a scene from Democracy

From our current production of Democracy, which opened last night, Baron Jacobi (Larry Baldacci) has an old-fashioned plan to stop Madeleine Lee (Rebecca Prescott) from marrying the ambitious Senator Silas Raitcliffe in the scene below from The Stage Channel:

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Video: backstage during Six Degrees tech rehearsals

On the first day of tech rehearsals for our current production of Six Degrees of Separation, I handed my digital camera to Eclipse ensemble member Stephen Dale, who plays Ben in the show. Take it backstage, I told him – have some fun, shoot anything you want back there, and maybe we’ll be able to create a quick montage of what it’s like to be backstage during tech.

With a cast of sixteen, there was a lot of down time for actors as we went through tech rehearsals – as we spent time planning and practicing the timings of light and sound cues, the actors were backstage spending their time … well, I’ll let Stephen show you:

Another video interview with actors from Six Degrees

Continuing Stephen Dale’s ongoing series of interviews with the cast & crew of Six Degrees of Separation, here’s a part of his conversation with Eric Leonard (Flan) and Karen Yates (Ouisa), talking about their characters and their approach to this complex script.

There’s more on the way, including some fantastic backstage footage from tech rehearsals – if you haven’t subscribed to our YouTube channel yet, now’s a pretty good time…

6 Degrees of Separation Interview – Theme

The second part of our interview with Michael Pogue; he discusses the themes within 6 Degrees… that resonated with him the most.

Watch videos from Six Degrees of Separation

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Playing Paul in Six Degrees of Separation

Ensemble member Stephen Dale sat down recently with Michael Pogue, who plays Paul in our upcoming production of Six Degrees of Separation. It will be a two or three part interview – here’s part one, where Michael talks about playing a character he’s had his eye on for a long time:

Interview with the Jeff Nominees

Laura Coover and Nat Swift, Jeff-nominated actors in Blue Surge, sat down with ensemble member Steve Dale before the final performance to talk about their characters, their process, and the nudity:

Watch scenes from Blue Surge

Two short clips from Rebecca Gilman’s Blue Surge are now up on The Stage Channel, and you can watch them both right here on the blog:

In the first clip, Curt and Sandy (Kevin Scott and Laura Coover) discuss the down side of community college:

Click on the image to watch video

In the second, Curt describes the undercover operation at the “massage parlor” to his girlfriend, Beth (Kerry Richlan):

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An interview with Sasha Gioppo

Stephen Dale, one of our fantastic new ensemble members, has been sitting down with the cast and crew of Blue Surge to talk about the show, the rehearsal process, and whatever else happens to come up when you put creative people in front of a digital video camera. We’ll be posting more interviews with actors and designers as the show rolls along – the first is Sasha Gioppo, who plays Heather in Blue Surge – watch the video below:

Watch a scene from Blue Surge rehearsals

We’re just over a week into rehearsals for Blue Surge, and last night we ran through all of act one twice. We’re all still carrying scripts and exploring choices at this point in the process, and there’s still a long way to go before we open, but things are starting to take shape.

In the clip below, Kevin Scott (Curt) and I (Doug) are discussing our relationships with the prostitutes we failed to arrest:

This is a great part of the rehearsal process – we’re starting to get comfortable with the characters, we’re starting to remember our lines and our blocking, and there’s a lot of time to play.

Watch scenes from The Autumn Garden

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The sleek, newly redesigned STAGE Channel has two video clips of scenes from The Autumn Garden – click on the image above to watch Ned Crossman and General Griggs examine their lives, or the image below to watch Nick Denery try to convince Constance Tuckerman to pose for a new portrait.

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Deliciously pleasing by any standard

One of the true gems of dramaturgical research – Sarah found this video to give us some background on Sam’s troubles in Plaza Suite:

SAM: I can’t even think straight. I’ve had five meetings this morning, four teeth capped, and I haven’t even had my Metrecal.

Fight Call

I filmed this video a few weeks ago, but I didn’t want to post it then and spoil the surprise for anyone who hadn’t seen the show yet. With only one weekend of performances left, I think it’s safe now to share this look at the actors practicing the choreography of the big fight scene, where Star and Red are attacked by a gang of strikebreakers:

This is part of the preparations the cast goes through before each performance, making sure that the fight will look realistic – and be safe – when it happens in the show.

Ross Travis, who you can see getting in some gratuitous shots at Red at the end of the clip, choreographed the stage combat for Candles to the Sun.

The Cathouse Rags

About an hour before each performance of Candles to the Sun, the cast runs through the musical pieces in the show, with some help from cast members Stephen Dale (fiddle), Sorin Brouwers (guitar) and Ross Travis (harmonica), who play their instruments throughout the show on stage and off.

In this video, the three actors/musicians, who have taken on the name “The Cathouse Rags” (inspired by a line in the script), spend a few minutes jamming and talking about the band:

Singer of Darkness

Even lighter blogging than expected (partly because I got more sick than I expected), but I promise we’ll be back in full force soon. I did manage to put together a quick video of the prelude to Candles to the Sun: the sonnet “Singer of Darkness,” which Williams wrote just before Candles, and which our sound designer Toy DeIorio set to music.

This is from yesterday’s technical rehearsal (if you listen closely you can hear stage manager Kat Saari calling light and sound cues):

Interview with the Artistic Director

As we were closing out last year’s Pearl Cleage season, and as I was getting ready to step into the role of Eclipse’s new Artistic Director, I sat down for a long interview with ensemble member Cecil Averett. Here’s a short clip from that conversation – Cecil had asked me to talk about our mission statement and how it informs our approach to the work we do:

I’ll be posting more clips from this video, and more interviews with more artists, soon. Keep up with the growing collection at YouTube.

An early look at the set

Kevin Hagan, set designer for Candles to the Sun, created a model of the set to show the actors and designers at rehearsals. It’s a simple and slightly abstract set (designed to create the sense of being inside a mine shaft), and serves as both Bram’s cabin and Star’s cabin at different points in the play.

In this video, Managing Director Kevin Scott demonstrates the set change:

Tablework

For the first few rehearsals of Candles to the Sun, the cast worked around a table (“tablework” is the fancy name we give it), discussing the script and their characters with director Steven Fedoruk and dramaturg Sarah Moeller, digging into the text before getting up on their feet.

Here’s a quick video from those rehearsals, with Steven talking about the use of metaphors in the script, and Sarah giving us all some background on Pellagra, a disease that affects many in the mining community where Candles is set:

The first read through

Sixteen actors trudged through the snow and the creepy fog last night to gather for a first read through of Candles to the Sun – with members of the design team and a few friends there to listen, the cast got their first opportunity to play together with Williams’ language and the rest of us got the opportunity to hear these words out loud for the first time.

And you get an opportunity to take an early look into the process – this is a scene from the beginning of the play, where Bram and Hester confront their sixteen year old daughter Star after she’s spent the night out with a young man and returned home with a new silk kimono:

In case you missed it …

You can watch a clip from last Saturday’s Playwright Scholar Series event, From the Page to the Stage:

This is Steven Fedoruk reading part of “Monogamy Blues,” from The Brass Bed and Other Stories.

Ensemble members read excerpts from What Looks Like Crazy on an Ordinary Day, Deals With the Devil and Other Reasons to Riot, and The Brass Bed and Other Stories in a great afternoon enjoying the side of Pearl Cleage’s writing that we can’t present on stage.

A conversation with the sound designer

Bourbon at the Border‘s sound designer, Cecil Averett, sat down with me last week to talk about the collaborative process, the emotional connections a melody can evoke, and some damn good music. Watch the video:

A video interview with the dramaturg

Our dramaturg for Bourbon at the Border, Sarah Moeller, sat down with me yesterday to talk about the process and the research she put together for the cast and crew:

Watch a scene from Bourbon at the Border

Act 1, scene 5, to be exact – I filmed this during a tech rehearsal a few days before the show opened. Watch for Kat Saari, our fantastic stage manager, calling sound cues in the foreground.

You can watch this same scene at Stagechannel.com, filmed a few days later with a much better camera.

Watch a video of Bourbon at the Border rehearsals

We have our final dress rehearsal tonight, first preview tomorrow, and opening night on Sunday. As we’ve gone through the last few days of long technical rehearsals, I thought it’d be fun to share a behind-the-scenes look at the process: