Featured Discussions - TheatreFace

Jazz Hands!

2010-06-30T06:00:38.128Z

So I'm in Montreal for a couple of days to do a story on the Montreal Jazz Fest, and of course, like any good theatre geek, that got me thinking about jazz-y musicals. So -- here's your assignment. Who can name the most "jazz-y" musicals? And I don't mean just in period or tenor -- I mean, the music is jazz. So go to it! (Bonus points for links to YouTube clips!)

Embodying a Play -- One Man Shows.

2010-04-02T17:48:34.306Z

One person shows often get a bad reputation in the public eye. They are often made fun of on television. The one that always pops into my mind is from Will and Grace with the character Jack's show "Just Jack." I can think of dozens of times where artists are made fun of for having a one person show and the shows always end up being narcissistic and self serving.
It seems that one person shows are simultaneously viewed as the highest form of art you can achieve on a stage (AKA, the hardest to accomplish) and the lowest form (AKA a narcissistic self serving piece put on because someone has aspirations of being an actor and isn't quite making it).

As with anything that can be put on a stage, I believe one person shows can be beautiful. There are many stories that can be told using only one person. It becomes the journey of an actor through a situation by embodying all of the characters. Indeed, there are many stories that should be told that only involve a single person. Emotional or internal journeys for example.

I think Cheryl King has a unique view on things since she did standup (a different challenge on its own) for several years.

Let me know what you think!

Blog Pasted from Backstage for your Convenience
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All Alone
Actor-writer-director-producer Cheryl King discusses the acting challenges of one-person shows.
By Cheryl King

April 2, 2010

After 13 years on the road doing standup comedy to drunken audiences, I decided to move to New York to create my own solo show. A good idea, except I had yet to learn an essential fact: Solo theater is not standup comedy. Solo theater is acting. You take the emotional journey—as every character in the play. If your play is autobiographical (and first solo shows often are), then one of the characters is you.

I thought this was no big deal. I knew how to bring myself (via my persona) to the stage. I knew how to use my charisma to communicate with my audience. I just hadn't yet learned how to act. Many actors face the opposite problem. They have craft, but they don't yet know how to bring their authentic selves to the stage.

The first challenge in solo theater is learning how to be yourself on stage. The second is bringing ensemble acting skills to solo performance.

When You're Also the Writer

A major difference between a solo show and a play for multiple actors is in the writing, which must be tooled differently. Doing dialogue by yourself requires either longer speeches, shorter scenes, or both. You must build your physical reaction to what Character A said into the beginning of Character B's response. This can't all be accomplished at the keyboard.

Actor-writers who are developing a solo show learn to rewrite in rehearsal, and it is one of the most satisfying parts of the process. After all, the writer and the actor in you share a common love of language, a passionate desire to communicate, a wish to be appreciated. You have to write dialogue that supports the way you have to act it. You want to switch characters, bodies, intentions with a minimum of fuss and bother. As you practice doing dialogue alone, it becomes clear what will work and what won't.

There are areas in which the writer and the actor part company. The writer refines the words, the shape, and the rhythm. The actor is seeking to embody the text. My acting teacher Carol Fox Prescott often said to me, as I worked my solo show in her class, "The writer needs to let the actor have the show now."

She was right, of course. She often was—but not always. One day she side-coached me with one approach after another, and I struggled and resisted, until she finally shouted, "Are you willing for me to be wrong?" That novel question stopped me cold. Was I willing for her to be wrong? No, I wasn't. I had made her my authority figure. I counted on her to tell me if I was right or wrong. As I contemplated her question, I realized I had to take the authority. I had to own my own technique, my own ideas. I had to drive the car.

This is where solo performers live. You're not totally alone, of course. You need the same support system as any actor: director, designers, choreographers, musicians, not to mention producers and investors. But in the self-written solo theater piece, the principal drive and authority must come from you.

Who Am I Now?

So let's assume you've finished the rewriting. Now it's time to move fully into rehearsal. You take the stage. It's time to create a world by yourself. How do you do it?

Let's consider dialogue. Novice solo performers sometimes doubt the audience's ability to imagine the scene. They bounce about on stage, assuming first one character's position and then another's. This is unnecessary and distracting. If the character is well defined—by body language, tone of voice, rhythm, and style of movement—the audience will know exactly who is talking. Change of speaker can be indicated with the slightest of head inclinations, or sometimes none at all.

Most solo shows involve playing multiple characters. Each one has intention and desire, and those desires are often in conflict. (Wow, just like classic theater.) How do you become each character in rapid succession? It requires a powerful focus, an ability to run both characters' sides of the scene at the same time in your head. You may find yourself siding first with one character and then another. You'll make discoveries: Maybe your mother was right to give you a whack. Could be you deserved it.

Or you have despicable Character A, who takes advantage of Character B. The challenge is to love Character A, to identify with his very real human desires, no matter how extreme they may be. The joy lies in that challenge. There's pleasure to be found in being both the perpetrator and the victim, and there's satisfaction when the audience says afterward, "Wow, he was so awful." It's fun to remind them, "That was me, you know," and to hear them respond, "But he didn't look like you." That's because they saw a scene between two people.

Many solo shows make use of narration. Some use it to move from scene to scene or to establish settings. In some, the narrative element is the dominant one. In either case, you're addressing someone. Who is it? Sometimes you are literally talking to the audience. Sometimes the audience stands in for other characters. You also have to know why you're talking to them. It's the Passover question: Why is tonight different from any other night? Am I confiding in the audience? Am I talking to myself? Has the audience magically joined me inside my head? All of these are possible.

Taking the Ride

You have to have a sense of joy and playfulness to work alone. It's where you get your energy. And it's where you get variety in your performance. With no one on the stage to provide an unexpected response, you have to find in yourself that sense of adventure and discovery. But it's a good thing. It's your chance to be a kid again, playing make-believe by yourself in the basement or the yard.

And, just like a child, you have to have stamina. Whether you're playing one character or many, yourself or other people, you'll have emotional ups and downs. You gather momentum as you move along, the emotional residue builds, and your energy waxes and wanes. Like a marathon runner, you have to practice regularly, learn where your energy fades, and develop staying power. You've chosen to work solo, and there's no going backstage until the show is over. It's you, baby, on your own.

Then there's the wild card—the audience. Many solo artists work in small theaters, where you can see the faces in the crowd. This can lead to fear of judgment and rejection. But as my good friend Rob Bartlett counseled me in my standup years, "You have the audience from the beginning. The trick is not to lose them."

He was right. The audience members spent time and money to be with you. They hope it was a good idea. That's the key to solo theater: Keep them with you. The audience is your travel companion. Give up the fourth-wall ideas that would keep you isolated. This is a group experience—a mosh pit of the mind. Throw yourself into it.

Cheryl King is the creator and producing director of Stage Left Studio in New York City, was resident acting coach at "All My Children" from 2007 to 2010, and is a playwright, director, and actor. Her solo show "not a nice girl" enjoyed extended runs in New York City and Los Angeles. She most recently directed two solo shows: Frank Blocker's Drama Desk–nominated "Southern Gothic Novel" and Taren Sterry's "180 Days" (www.cherylkingproductions.com, www.stageleftstudio.net).

The Internet, Friend or Foe?

2010-04-01T17:38:02.888Z

The Guardian always has the most interesting blogs about theatre. They rather catch me off guard.

I rather find the internet useful. Not just for communication but for promotion. You can sell tickets online, promote show dates, have discussion boards. For a small theatre, the internet is your friend. You can get a lot of advertising (and other things) done just by having a Web site.

Twitter and other social media server as icing on an every growing cake.

We have talked about things such as web casting your production in Stage Directions. If anything the internet serves to explore and expand art better, faster and more conveniently.

Does this diminish the theatre? Does reaching a larger audience diminish the art? Is that what people are really afraid of? Or is it something else?

Blog copied from the Guardian for your Convenience:

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Is the internet good or bad for the theatre? Does it provide exciting opportunities for
interactivity that should be exploited? Or, as in the case of Twitter, does it
only serve to further reduce our attention spans and our ability to connect
with anything that needs to be said in more that 140 characters? These are the
questions bloggers are exploring this week. For Lyn Gardner, the web certainly
holds enormous promise and potential for theatre-makers. In a recent post on this blog, she argued that "the growth
of pervasive media and digital technologies is offering theatre-makers and
audiences unprecedented new challenges and opportunities".

Yet not everyone is so convinced. George Hunka recently came across this article in the New York Times by Michiko Kakutani about the effect of the web on our ability to appreciate art. Kakutani suggests that the rise of the net has helped create a culture with attention-deficit disorder
in which people will "tweet and text one another during plays and movies,
forming judgments before seeing the arc of the entire work". And where the
constant feedback demanded by interactive technology can, in effect, become
like a "giant focus group" that challenges "the autonomy of the
artist".

Hunka shares this cautious scepticism towards cyber-interactivity. "Internet users," he says, "seem to be a jumpy lot, demanding the instant gratification that is denied by more complex art of any kind. It is
a call for an increased shallowness in some ways, and these digital and virtual
connections, it must be remembered, are digital and virtual, not particularly
human."

Yet perhaps the real issue the internet poses for artists is that, as 99 Seats suggests, it forces them to work harder. "Audiences," he argues, "are smart ... They see plot twists coming a mile off. They know
tropes and devices the instant they appear and are rarely fooled … Too often,
in theatre, they're getting the same old slop; even when it's postmodern slop,
[they] see where it's going and would rather engage in something that engages
them back. If someone is texting or Twittering during your show, maybe – just
maybe – it's not them. It's you."

Of course, interactive art is not just confined to the virtual reality of the
web; it can also flourish in the concrete reality of the city. At its best, it
can traverse the two. Theatre-maker Tassos Stevens was recently in Tokyo for the British Council's
Connected festival, where he took part in a panel discussion about how we
make art in the city. He posts his notes from that discussion on his blog, and they provide
an excellent insight into how the real and virtual worlds can be combined.

Stevens's company, Coney, creates events that are "about the audience. We often talk to them using digital technology to bring them into the story wherever they are. Digital
infrastructure means that we can bring people to work that is happening in any
place." And once they have gathered people in this way they can then work
to transform their audiences' view of their surroundings. To illustrate this,
he describes one project that took participants on an adventure through and
around the National Theatre: "By having an adventure in the building about
the building, we could transform the way people felt inside that place and the
way they perceived the building."

Andy Field, who also took part in this discussion, gives another example of how the virtual world can be used to transform our view of the real world. He cites the work of the company Blast Theory
that "often examines our relationship to new digital technologies in the
city. GPS tracking devices, mobile phones, the internet. Their art asks its audience
to reconsider their relationship to these everyday technologies. In Rider
Spoke, the matrix of isolated Wi-Fi networks arrayed across the city are
repurposed as a way of building up a map of memories and experiences."

Arguably, in both of these examples, the audience is being asked to work much harder, and concentrate much more than they would in more traditional pieces of theatre. So perhaps, ultimately, we should avoid looking at the net
as either intrinsically good or bad. Rather, we should see it as a tool, and
like all tools, it is only as good as the person or people using it.

Stage: Theatre blog | guardian.co.uk by Chris Wilkinson