We were doing some (late) spring cleaning the other day and we ran across this video of the fight call for 1001.

Bonnie Brady (PSM) runs a fight call where Matt Rauch gets “brained” by Drew Cortese who in turn gets his arm chopped off by Roxanna Hope.  You can hear Jonathan Hova and the lovely Mia Barron commenting in the background.

1001 Fight Call from Asher Richelli on Vimeo.

Last night was the last meeting of 2007-08 Interstate 73.  We missed Ken (we drew a little portrait of him on the piece of paper that Krista is holding).  From left to right: Kara Corthron, Kristen Palmer, Krista Knight (Ken Lin - in absentia and held by Krista and J), J. Holtham, Andy Bragen. 

We’ll miss these guys.  (And thanks, Krista, for this brilliant brainchild.)

The League of American Theatre Women is awarding us the Lortel Award for showing “great creative promise”.  There’s a luncheon today at Sardi’s honoring us, which is quite exciting.  To find out more about it, check this out. 

We had a cold reading of Tommy’s Beautiful Night - which is about Leon (we referred to him as “Lev” - ooh) Theremin and his wife Lavinia Williams.  The reading featured Bruce, Alex, Tommy’s friend Nena Mediah (who is a Bat).   And it was pretty great to hear it.

Then, we all went out for our last night in New Haven to good ol’ Sullivan, which during our halcyon times at Yale, used to be called “Cavaugh’s”.  The group split up (shockingly!) into smokers and non-smokers.  Do people actually still smoke?  Apparently, they do.  Seriously.  Lots of smokers at Yale - every other person walking through cross-campus seems to smoke.

Tomorrow is our last day.  We’re also going to have presentations of Brett’s The Revival and Molly’s Firehouse 17. 

At dinner, Kara (Manning) talked about the difficulties of juggling her freelance gigs as a music journalist and her career as a playwright.  She talked about that rare thing: The ability for an emerging playwright (any writer, really) to focus entirely on her writing without the distractions of deadlines from a paying gig.  It’s tricky.   She kept saying that her time at Yale was a real luxury.  She then expressed concern that no one else would understand what she was talking about — she was worried that she sounded like she was talking “Icelandic”.  Not really.  Her story is all too familiar.  It reminds why this type of residency (any residency really) is so important for writers.  It also reminds us how badly we wish we could fully fund our playwrights and provide them with enough resources - anything! - so that they can just sit down and write, research, do whatever they need to do to move on to the next play, rewrite any play, or just think about a play — to do it all without having to run to that temp job to make ends meet.  Basically, we want to turn our playwrights into trust fund babies. 

We’re organizing the first read-through of Tommy’s newest play (Beautiful Day) tomorrow.  It’s in the evening.  The play looks at the relationship between Leon Theremin and prima ballerina Lavinia Williams, who was a member of the American Negro Ballet.  

And now a word about our fall production…

At an impromptu gathering in Kara-Lynn and Molly’s apartment, we got the run down on everyone’s day.  Kara Manning wrote in her apartment the whole day; she only left for a couple of minutes to buy a salad.  That’s dedication.  We are a bit worried about Brett, though, whom we haven’t seen in over 24 hours.  When we asked him to join the festivities last night, he replied that he couldn’t tear himself away from his computer and was in the middle of a writing spell - he then added that the invitation allayed any neurosis about being left out from residency festivities.

We were going to join the after-gathering at a nearby watering hole called Sullivan’s but general fatigue and age sent us back to our apartments for an early-ish night (10:30 PM - that’s actually late, no?  We thought so.).

We woke up to rain, which turned out to be a good thing.  Everyone got a lot of work done.   Twenty pages from Molly, apparently - and, according to Brett,  a productive day in the rehearsal room with Jack and the actors.  The actors in The Revival are actually getting a full day off tomorrow so that Brett can focus on rewrites.  In the meantime, Molly, Kara-Lynn, Terri, John, Teresa and Marguerite are going to explore the very new pages of Firehouse 17.

Kara and Tommy arrived this afternoon.  Tommy’s a bit jet-lagged; he just flew in after two and a half weeks in Prague.  We tried to indoctrinate Tommy (and everyone else) into the mysterious ways of Mory’s, but alas T– was too jet-lagged to join us.  Brett also was unable to join us since he’s hard at work on The Revival.  Kara sipped a glass of white wine while we passed around a cup filled with the suspicious libation of assorted colors - she left us before we closed out Mory’s so that she could go write.  And Molly only joined us for the tail-end.  In the meantime, Jack, Caitlin, Alex, Kara-Lynn, Terri, Marguerite, John and Rachel braved the ritual, cups and merriment that accompanies an hour (or two) at Mory’s. 

We tried to twitter our arrival to New Haven.  We wanted to give a minute-by-minute account of our day.  A laundry-list of activities prevented us from writing more than two twitter entries. (”Two twitter…” We don’t like the sound of that.)

We’re back in New Haven for our summer residency.  Most people arrived today. We’re waiting for two playwrights (Kara Manning and Tommy Smith will arrive tomorrow).  In addition to working with Kara and Tommy, we’ve been joined by Molly Rice and Samuel Brett Williams.  This year, we’re also up here with 7 actors (Teresa Lim, Marguerite Stimpson, John Giampetro, Bruce Altman, Caitlin Clouthier, Alex Knox and Carter Gill), 2 directors (Jack Cummings III and Kara-Lynn Vaeni), 1 stage manager (Terri Kohler), 1 dramaturg (Rachel Rusch), and a partridge and a pear tree.  ‘Kidding.  (We’ve been up since 5:00 am, so you’ll excuse the bad pun.)

Brett, Jack, Bruce, Caitlin, Alex and Carter are going to be working on The Revival, a new play that focuses on the growing popularity of an Evangelical minister not unlike Ted Haggard.

Molly, Kara-Lynn, Teresa, Marguerite, John and Rachel are working on Firehouse 17, a new play inspired by the myth of Persephone that looks at loneliness, love and black coffee.  Terri’s doing double-duty as stage manager for The Revival and Firehouse 17.

 In the meantime, Kara and Tommy are using this purely as a writer’s retreat.  Kara’s focusing on rewrites for her dark dark comedy (when does a dark dark comedy become, uhm, a drama?) Killing Swans and Tommy’s going to be writing his new play Beautiful Day about the life of scientist and electronic music inventor Leon Theremin.  

Busy.  We’re hoping that everyone finds this week helpful.  It’s wonderful to be so close to the start of new projects — The Revival, Firehouse 17 and Beautiful Day are pretty much brand new.  It’s thrilling that these writers have agreed to come up to New Haven to get started (in one way or another) on these new plays.  We’re just here to give them some time and space.  And, hopefully, they’ll have some fun, too.

We know the article is a couple of days old.  (We also know that we haven’t blogged in a while.  We’re erratic bloggers.)  But we do want to respond to Charles Isherwood’s article from this past Sunday’s “Arts & Leisure” section in The New York Times.  Isherwood finally says something nice about Off-Off-Broadway (and it’s not even in the context of Chicago theater) and writes about the cross-pollination that may or may not be occurring between Off-Off-Broadway non-profits and Off-Broadway non-profits.  (He calls Jenny Schwartz’s God’s Ear “adventurous”.  That’s a compliment, no?  He says that voices like Jenny Schwartz’s need to be heard more often.  Again, a compliment, we think.)

He does raise some interesting points in his piece.  From our perspective (the perspective of one of the many Off-Off-Broadway non-profits), the biggest issue is this: How do the Off-Off-Broadway non-profits retain their identities in light of their collaborations with the larger Off-Broadway non-profits?  Isherwood briefly mentions this when he quotes Dan Sullivan, who, regarding MTC’s collaboration with Ars Nova  on From Up Here, says that “[t]here could be some trepidation on the part of smaller organizations in sharing with the larger ones, the fear that the big dog eats the little dog…” Apparently, though, the concerns that Ars Nova may have had were addressed since Ars Nova was with MTC “for artistic decisions of all kind”.  That’s only half-the-story, though, in the big dog/little dog scenario.  How can/does an Off-Off-Broadway non-profit truly capitalize on this situation?  How does an Ars Nova, a Page 73 retain its brand in these situations?  And are these true collaborations?  Does each company have equal say in the marketing strategy of the play?  What about the artistic decisions?  What if Ars Nova and MTC disagreed about the casting of a particular actor?  Who has the last say? (In the From Up Here scenario probably MTC, given that Ars Nova is getting “in association with” billing.)  And do most MTC audiences even know that From Up Here is a collaboration with Ars Nova, given that Ars Nova’s billing is in such small font (a function of the financial contribution of each company, most likely)?   We just wonder how these arrangements are set up.  From the Off-Off-Broadway non-profit perspective, these collaborations are great because they help sell tickets; the larger Off-Broadway non-profits usually (always…) have a subscriber base, which Off-Off-Broadway sorely lack.  But after the show has closed - then what?  Do the smaller shops retain the mailing list?  Can they approach the subscribers of the larger non-profits?  And will the subscribers remember the small non-profits?  And how do you quantify the success of these collaborations?  Certainly, through the satisfaction felt by the artists - the co-mingling of the companies’ resources should increase the tools available to the artists and hopefully heighten the artistic quality (from a physical production perspective, at least) of the play that is co-produced.  But what about the smaller non-profit?  How does it protect itself?  Hire a good lawyer, I guess.

Lincoln Center Theater has jumped on the bandwagon and recently announced its newest initiative, LCT3 - a space for productions of works by emerging playwrights.  There’s an interesting post on the McCarter’s blog about the recent trend at larger non-profit institutions of setting up a separate stage for productions of plays by untried new playwrights.  It’s all well and good - and I actually think it’s a great thing.  I hope we soon see works by Jason Grote, Krista Knight and Quiara Hudes at LCT3. (Too many organizations with the number 3 in their title - 13P, P73, etc.  What’s that about?)   I guess, this begs the question: Why not produce these new plays at the Harold and Miriam Steinberg Center  (w/re: to the Roundabout) or at the Newhouse?  Knee-jerk response (I’m guessing): The economics don’t make much sense - it’s harder to get audiences to see a new play by an unknown (when do the economics in non-profit theater make sense, though?) - and critics (primarily Charles Isherwood and Ben Brantley) are less likely to villify a new work by an emerging playwright when that writer’s play is not produced at a theater like, say, the Newhouse or the Steinberg Center.  (I’ve heard this latter argument before.)  Is that really it, though?  Are citics really less likely to trash a show when it’s being produced by a small non-profit in a basement in a downtown walk-up.  (Not really… I’ve read some pretty nasty reviews of shows produced on a shoe-string budget.)  And then I see how, in the same season that Isherwood gave that horribly dismissive (and unduly harsh) review of Mr. Marmaladeat the Steinberg Center, he gave a similarly dismissive (and again unduly harsh) review of Bach at Leipzig at New York Theatre Workshop - in a less established, more downtown (much more downtown) venue.  So what gives?  Is it really about real estate?  If a show is produced in a 60-seat basement theater, is it less likely to get crucified by the Times?  Would the Roundabout’s Speech & Debatehave received reviews that were as good if it had been produced at the Steinberg Center?

Regardless, I think this is a great trend.  The bottom line is that, because of these new initiatives, there will be additional theater spaces that are specifically dedicated to productions of new plays by emerging playwrights (I know.  People dislike that term - “emerging” - immensely and I apologize for using it.  Here at Page 73, we’ve replaced it with “early-career”.  Whatever that means.).   A stage for productions of work by new playwrights?  Honestly, I can’t think of anything better.