Welcome to My Blog!

Hello!

As per several requests, I have decided to start a blog to keep you all updated on life in the Big Apple.  So far, I've been in graduate school at the New School for Drama for about a month and a half, in their playwriting MFA program.  It's already proven to be a very challenging and unique experience.  I'm taking two contrasting playwriting classes with two award-winning playwrights, Chris Shinn and Laura Maria Censabella.  I'm also taking play analysis, acting for playwrights and directors, and theater history.

Laura's playwriting class is by far the most challenging.  The focus of the class so far has been mining our personal experiences for intense emotional feelings from which to write.  Basically, it is about getting ourselves back in the mindsets we had when extremely good or extremely bad things happened to us in the past, so that we can write powerful plays.  I am learning that these are the moments in life that it is valuable to make theater about, that's what audiences want to see.  As tough as it is remembering difficult times in the past all day long, if I look at the great plays of our cannon it is true.  Arthur Miller wrote Death of a Salesman based on his troubled relationship with his father. The Crucible he wrote about being accused of communism by McCarthy.  Tennessee Williams wrote many, many, plays about his family, especially his sister.  It's a weird profession this one, for sure.  Sanford Meisener said "Acting is living truthfully under imaginary circumstances." The same is true for playwriting: You take real experiences and then fantasize on top of them.

A nice perk of being at theater school is I am required to see lots of shows, on and off and off-off Broadway.  Here are a couple of the most interesting shows I've seen so far, and my personal reviews.

Through the Yellow Hour, by Adam Rapp at the Rattlestick Theater.  Adam Rapp is an incredibly successful, pulitzer nominee playwright.  I know he's written excellent plays, but this wasn't one of them.  It was a sort of futuristic 1984 style plot.  Some combination of al-quida in conjunction with "corporate entities"  has taken over the world.  One women tries to survive through the chaos.  Lets put it this way: I don't mind violence or nudity onstage, but it has to be justified.  This play was over-the-top and sort of like Rapp just wrote an outrageous play because hes famous and he knows it will be put on. To paraphrase the New York Times review, at the end of the play, when the lead actress asked, "should I take me clothes off?" the audience almost wants to respond, "Well... duh!"  That being said, I loved the set-up walking in to the theater where they all treated the audience like captives and made us stamp our necks, ect.  Also, the acting was excellent, in my opinion, under the circumstances.  I really believed the desperation of the character's situations, and their emotional states.  This play is not for the faint of heart.

Luz by Catherine Filloux at La Mama Experimental Theater.  This play way more my style, being a journalistic piece.  It focused on a lawyer who worked on amnesty cases for women who had suffered sexual violence at the hands of various governments.  I liked that the journalistic elements were merged with fantastical effects, such as the use of a giant vulture puppet.  I also liked how some scenes were done entirely in Spanish, with subtitles actually projected across the back of the stage.  This allowed scenes to be done in the actual language of the speakers.  The biggest downfall of this show, unfortunately, was the lead actress.  She could have been the lead in a high school play...I could tell she was acting the entire time.  I didn't relate to her as a real person at all.

Grace, by Craig Wright, on Broadway.  This is by far the best play I've seen so far in NYC.  It is a dark tragi-comedy about an evangelical couple that is trying to open a chain of gospel-themed hotels in Florida, but their European sponsor backs out, and they are left in a financial, and spiritual lurch.  It is both sharply funny and deeply disturbing.  The play deals with how people change when their expectations of what should happen are dashed, especially if they base this expectations on religious ideas.  "God sent me a sign and it didn't come true... now what?" is a way of phrasing the question.  Another thing I loved: The set.  The entire set was on a turntable that imperceptibly moved throughout the entire show.  So you couldn't see it moving, but you'd notice after a few minutes that the table wasn't where it was before... very disorienting.  Also I love the playwright Craig Wright.  (You might know him for the TV show Dirty, Sexy Money.) 

This Friday I am going to see Sleep No More, which I'm really excited about.  Apparently its a re-imagined, totally interactive version of Hamlet.  I've been reading about it in theater classes since junior year, and now I finally get to check out what it's like myself.  So I'll be sure to let you all know what its like!

Until Next Time!