“Sandboxes of Sexual Consequence” Must Close This Saturday. Don’t Miss It!

You have three more chances to see the Spring 2010 series of Workshops, Sandboxes of Sexual Consequence!

Tonight at 8pm, and tomorrow at 2pm and 8pm.  Tickets are only $6!

Photos Courtesy of Sam Bowman.

“Troilus & Cressida” Publicity Photos

“The Flu Season” Publicity Photos

200 word project: Schwab (Pritzker School of Medicine)

I have found that I must be creative in my work as a pediatrician because although there are many similar questions and problems, the people I am working with may require a “different” answer and approach to a similar situation.
Although the answer may not change, the manner it is presented to the patient may require some creativity to account for the vast differences in the patients we work with.  This is based on their cultural background, educational level, socio-economic level, and what is going on in their lives at the present time.  At times I have to re-invent methods to communicate effectively with patients and their families.

—Dr Joel Schwab, Associate Professor and Co-Director Pediatric Clerkship, Advanced Pediatric, Faculty Director, Health Professions Advising in the College Pritzker School of Medicine

200 word project: Danzig (TAPS)

How do you experience creativity in your work?

I’m rereading Anna Karenina.  That minor text, a few pages long, by a guy named Tolstoy.  I read it years ago, remembered liking it (vague understatement) and have found myself through deliberate accident (whaaa?) a co-creator/co-director of a new dance-theater adaptation of Anna Karenina with Julia Rhoads and her excellent Chicago dance-theater company Lucky Plush.  How am I experiencing creativity? Karenin is walking thru rooms in his house thinking his way out of his incongruous agony.  Another chapter – Levin thinks his way out of a depressed static hopelessness into an exuberant optimism cradled by an infinite universe – pages and pages of his slow crawl into joy and then within seconds – a few words, shattered by an unexpected glimpse of Kitty, who he loves.  Reading the book with this project underway, I read it with adrenalin, my mind and heart rushing into the space of how does this novel work, what is it I am so compelled by that I want desperately to capture it in a different medium, to surprise with a translation between forms.  And then late night sprawling phone calls with Julia, my collaborator, as we navigate more colliding languages – dance and theater.  I’m elated and smart and reflective and active and moved seemingly all in the same moment.

And now for a tone shift — If I were to answer this question in a deliberate and prepared way (by cutting and pasting from something else I’ve written) –
Artistic practice, scholarship, and teaching share an important kind of discovery: the happy accident.  As a director, I have found that the gold lies in the accidental occurrence – when everyone in the room is passionately committed to an objective and then, just to the side, something happens, unseen by most.  My job is to see it and, in that moment of perception, to have the flexibility and wisdom to know whether to follow the (unknown and unplanned) detour proposed by that accident.  This moment of decision happens in the rehearsal studio, classroom, theater, and library. And it is the muscle I most like to work, because it relies on impulse, feeling, intelligence, and spontaneity.  It also celebrates the risk of not knowing, which lies at the foundation of how and why I work in the theater.

—Leslie Danzig

Director Susan Augenbraun discusses “We Had A Very Good Time”

Sandboxes of Sexual Consquence begins tomorrow at 8pm in the Third Floor Theatre!

This is UT’s quarterly night of workshops, short, sweet, fun plays by up-and-coming student directors!   These shows have been rehearsing for only four weeks, an insanely short period of time.

Susan Augenbraun, the director of We Had AVery Good Time, discusses.

“My favorite type of play to direct is one with a small cast and minimal tech elements. Especially when putting a show   together in such a short period of time, I love being able to focus on just a few actors and characters, creating and fully realizing a world onstage through the exploration of the personalities, memories, actions, and interactions of just a few people. My fifth-week workshop, We Had A Very Good Time, is a great example of this intimate type of play. At the same time, it’s also very different from plays that I have worked on before in one respect: each of the play’s two actors plays two different characters.

In the play, an American husband and wife on vacation in a foreign country decide to split up for their last day abroad. While they are separated, they each have an encounter a native of the city they’re in. It’s been an interesting and unique challenge to work with my actors on creating and embodying two very different people in very different circumstances, as well as exploring why each of these two people was meant to be played by the same actor. How do the two speak, act, and carry themselves differently? How are they similar, and why? What drew them to the other characters that they interact with? How do they understand the world and the situations that they find themselves in? These are some of the questions that the actors and I have been trying to answer in our rehearsal process, and I’ve been both surprised and really impressed by the results.

After two weeks of working on the play, and with just under two weeks until the show, the actors are coming to know both of their characters very well. It’s been so fun and so fascinating to be a part of the process as each of them has developed not one, but two different people, with different physicalities, motivations, even accents! They’ve really been able to make the story of four people in this tiny, unnamed country come alive.”

200 word project: Garrett (student)

I once found myself in a basement theater within a major performing arts complex.  I decided to be adventurous and see a small piece of theater called Henry V on Live. It was a retelling of Henry the 5th as a homeless man’s one-man show in an alleyway outside a major Broadway theater.  Coincidentally enough, the touring production of Mamma Mia! was going on at the exact same time in the theater above us.  I remember being so captivated and altered by this one man’s show that, even with the oppressive sounds of dancing chorus member beating down on the ceiling above us, I couldn’t move afterward.  My dad and I were both stopped.  After the show, we walked up the stairs and saw the dancing, excited members of the other piece.  Although both were valid shows, the intensity of feeling I had after Henry V on Live was so much more enjoyable than the light-heartedness of Mamma Mia which I saw a week later.  It was through this experience that I solidified the idea that I’d rather strive to be the best artist in the world
rather than the most successful.

—Evan Garrett

200 word project: Teeter (The Oriental Institute)

The artifacts that I deal with were made thousand of years ago. They can take on a certain abstractness due to their chronological separation from today. But sometimes, there is an immediacy that compresses the millennia and brings the past vividly alive. The coffin and mummy of a woman named Meresamun are such objects. We know her name, the name of her father, where she worked and what she did. She was a real living breathing person, with many of the same cares as today. The coffin reinforces this immediacy. There are drips of blue paint where the artist was careless. The differences between the decoration of the left and right sides of the coffin indicate that at least two different artists painted it. Signs were repositioned to suit the eye of the master artisan. The workman who applied the top coat of the (then clear) varnish did not have eternity in mind. He slopped it beyond the colored decoration, where over the years it has turned yellow, exposing his indifference to his task. It is these sorts of encounters with the past that move me, that make me reflect on the shared humanity of people through the millenniums.

—Emily Teeter, The Oriental Institute

The Workshops Run This Week!

Join UT this weekend for our lineup of workshops!
This time round we have four exciting one acts, by four exciting playwrights, directed by four exciting directors!
We Had a Very Good Time, by David Auburn, directed by Susan Augenbraun

Lunch, by Steven Berkoff, directed by Jesse Roth

Controlling Interest, by Wayne S. Rawley, directed by North de Pencier

Crimson Hotel, by Michael Frayn, directed by Sarah Pickering

You get to see all of these shows for just six dollars! That’s right! Just $1.50 a show!
Join us at 8pm on Friday, or 2pm or 8pm on Saturday.
Or, catch the free preview on Thursday!

Check out more info on Facebook or buy tickets now by clicking HERE.

200 word project: Kotis (alum)

The first improv set I remember seeing performed by the Cardiff Giant Theater Company at Jimmy’s Woodlawn Tap involved John Hildreth cast as a cruel and furious queen bee, spitting commands at her hapless workers, demanding increased honey production, and executing drones at random both for her own amusement and to make the doomed insects examples to the rest.  To create the queen, John placed two chairs side by side, facing stage left, so the chairs were aligned perpendicular to the lip of the stage.  John then lay on the chairs, belly down, arms at his side, so his own head faced the audience.  This was the queen bee:  John, immobile from the neck down (except for some wriggling), her head snapping back and forth in supreme frustration while screeching impossible instructions to her incompetent minions.  At one point, pushed beyond endurance, John commanded workers to carry her to a clerk of some kind who had fled to a corner of the stage, now a jiggling mass of terror, so she could carry out his execution herself.  The expert, and completely improvised sequence of physical comedy that followed remains one of the most startling things I’ve witnessed on a stage.

—Greg Kotis