TELL
A NEW WORK written by Subjective Theatre Company‘s Colab

(Andy Waldschmidt, Heidi Jackson, Matt McIver, Stephanie Vella, Audrey Neddermann)

and Resident Playwright Julia Holleman

Directed by Jeffrey Whitted

With Original Music Composed by Lucas Cantor

Funding for the COLAB project has been made possible by The Puffin Foundation.

 From the interrogation rooms of Iraq to the talk show sets of California, from the boardroom to the bedroom, TELL explores the drives and desires that inspire us to confess.  The interwoven stories create a contemporary tapestry that is sometimes hilariously funny, sometimes disturbing, sometimes heartbreaking and occasionally redemptive.

Collective Unconscious
279 Church Street NYC, NY 10013 
(between White and Franklin just South of Canal)

Fri, May 16 – 7:30pm
Sat, May 17 – 7:30pm
Sun, May 18 – 3:00pm
Thurs, May 22 – 7:30pm
Fri, May 23 – 7:30pm
Sat, May 24 – 7:30pm
Sun, May 25 – 3:00pm
Thurs, May 29 – 7:30pm
Fri, May 30 – 7:30pm
Sat, May 31 – 7:30pm
Sun, June 1 – 3:00pm

RSVP: 212-631-3516
Admission: $0.00

CAST:
Dyalekt, Valerie Feingold, Nathan Francis, Zach Griffiths, Heidi Jackson, Angela Lombardo , Elena McGhee, Matthew McIver, Timothy Meadows, Lucy Owen, Stephanie Vella, Joanna Walchuk, Andy Waldschmidt

Assistant Director and Stage Manager Audrey Neddermann

Costume Designer Mary McKenzie

Lighting Designer Charlie Forster

Asst. Lighting Designer Tom Lay

Fight Choreographer Lisa Kopitsky

Prop Master Megan Benjamin

Sound and Video Designer Lucas Cantor

Associate Video Producer Monica Hinden

Director of Photography, Video Editor Mike Castaldo

Production Assistant Andrew Upchurch 
Sax, Keys, Drums, Percussion Jeff Pettit
Bass Ari Folman-Cohen

Engineer Emil Karol
Guitar, Whistling Lucas Cantor

Words are never spoken with one voice in a Mee play. Feelings, sentences, actions, and poetics are all pieced together out of the cultural items made available to his characters. There is the thing on its surface, the meaning it has inherited from the history of the fragments that construct it, and the multiple readings made available to those interacting with it.

In “Paradise Park” fragmentary characters wander around in a carnival wasteland of American amusement in search of the ultimate escapist vacation: love. These are not genuine people and this is not a genuine world. This is entertainment. These characters have been voluntarily lost for days, weeks, years and play silly little games that occasionally are mistaken for genuine interaction.

All of the devices you would expect to be in place in a production of a play that utilizes this dialogic style were: video projections, microphones, voice overs, breaks in the time/space frame. Although these devices are used generically to fairly pointless effect in half the shows in New York at this point, this production used them in justifiable ways for occasionally stunning effect.

Nonetheless, as a whole the production ended up feeling sort of flat and simplified. None of the choices seemed incorrect, but they had a formulaic, “decided in advance” quality to them that read, frankly, as shallow. Maybe the standard Off-Broadway production/rehearsal schedule isn’t particularly conducive to creating poly-vocal work.

To conclude, please consider Dollywood’s take on the intersection of entertainment and meaning:

Mission & Core Values

We Create Memories Worth Repeating^TM

• We Greatly Exceed Customer Expectations
  With distinctive, themed, entertaining experiences for every member of the family.
  With genuinely friendly, caring people who take pride in what they do.
• We Serve Others
  By working as a team and empowering each other.
  By being patient, kind, humble, respectful, selfless, forgiving, honest and committed.
• We Create Emotional Connections
  By treating guests like members of our family.
  By providing shared experiences that bring families closer together.
• We Constantly Improve
  By adapting to our guests’ changing expectation.
  By managing safety, security, risk and resources.
  By investing in people and products to produce growth and provide a reasonable return on our investment.
• All in a Manner Consistent with Christian Values and Ethics

Note: All tickets to Signature shows are $20. That’s a bargain in this town.

http://www.signaturetheatre.org

http://www.charlesmee.org/

Although, theatre historians will insist on the democratic nature of Shakespeare’s performances in Elizabethan England, he has been passed down to us as a cultural artifact because some rich and powerful people decided that his texts were important. Hence the high-class reek that seems to follow Shakespearean drama like a dead father’s ghost despite many noble efforts to the contrary. So many mid to late 20th century encounters with Shakespeare are prefaced by a denial of this elitist pedigree, an effort that often reinforces the notion even more deeply.

The 1964 Richard Burton Hamlet is an attempt at this re-discovery of the democratic origins of Shakespeare by taking the exclusive and privileged theatrical event, filming it and putting it out in movie theatres. The production itself is stripped down, in casual clothing, spoken out of the rhythm of the verse in a conversational way. It is a play for the common man, or rather, the uncommon man’s idea of him. This Hamlet is an honest attempt at recreating this perceived accessibility without the slightest hint of cynicism.

The Hamlet that we have inherited in the 21st Century has been filmed, set in other times and places, translated into American slang, deconstructed (and reconstructed), and interpreted in the service of various political and aesthetic motivations. To pretend that Shakespeare and Hamlet exist outside of their strange history (and the stranger history of the 20th century) is not only naive, but profoundly elitist. Bowing at the holy alter of timelessness divorces the text from any relevance it might have.

Theatre is a social art form that utilizes a shared a cultural language to create a community event. To negate the shared collective understanding a community brings to a memorialized text like Hamlet would only serve to alienate the audience.

However, despite the Wooster Group’s rejection of such traditional devices, this production was profoundly alienating as an audience member. By engaging with the media-saturated false freedoms of contemporary western culture so pointedly, the Wooster Group suspends the audience in a heightened awareness of their own ability to act in our society.

Whether or not it is possible to act honorably under deeply alienating circumstances is what Hamlet is ultimately about, even by the most traditional standards. For how unapologetically inter-textual this production strikes you at first glance, it has a strangely classical quality in the end.

http://publictheater.org/

http://www.thewoostergroup.org/

If meaning is dead, hope is obsolete, and the capacity for human cruelty seems to expand daily, why bother making art? Why bother constructing or deconstructing anything? Except if you take a perverse pleasure in the useless. Which is precisely what, at least according to the questionably accurate back story presented by our narrator Heinrich, the Kinderspielers are doing.

Child’s play has no point. Louisa the whore, whose body has never been anything other than a means to someone else’s end, revels in performing a purely selfish action with no use value. Max the rich bitch, likewise, revels in the opportunity to perform an action outside of market exchange. Or maybe this is just Heinrich’ s fantasy born out of reading, believing, and then not being able to live up to his little pocket copy of Marx and Engels. Because despite his communist zeal, he reveals that he is selling the Kinderspielers. As it turns out, people with nothing to live for will pay good money for the opportunity to waste there time on meaningless frivolities. It also turns out that a thorough grasp of dialectical materialism can be more useful to the seller than the sold.

Then the dutiful worker arrives on the scene, is dutifully appalled by the hollow entertainment, then dutifully enthralled, then dutifully tries to “clean it up” by participating in it. Inevitably, later on she will be dutifully fervent in her support for the Third Reich. Her sense of duty is pathetic, revolting, and entirely believable. It’s easy to feel sympathy for her until you realize that all of her good intentions will soon turn into justification for genocide.

The intellectual, Sonja, tries to explain away all the pathetic uselessness. She transforms shoddy pointless amusement into high art with all sorts of radical negotiated meanings. The intellectual attempts to justify the stupidity that the public so eagerly consumes by imagining it as a revolutionary critique.

Towards the beginning of the play Heinrich says that it is where you heart is that matters, not how you earn your money. There is something poignant about an off off company producing a play about the bored and the burnouts entertaining the masses by pretending to be sniveling children at play. Perhaps even more poignant is that these lost souls, who never were able to take heart in anything, lose interest in their child’s play not when it begins to generate a profit, but rather at the moment that it becomes contextualized into an act of art.

Brave and beautiful downtown theatre artists, please take heart. But don’t be foolish enough to hope.

Discount tickets for this show ($12) are available through this link.

http://kinderspiel.stolenchair.org/

This is a play about displacement. And how the outcast, the deformed, the freak is never in the here and now. For the outcast, here and now is always other. Your own body, the thing that links you to other people, also becomes other. The outcast is dead but not dead.

Philoktetes, the leper without a colony, turns his back to the audience and his face appears massive and grotesque above him on the screen. He disassociates from his body. Curiously, this image is later replaced by the image of Neoptolemus, the too young and too passionate boy who wants to find out “if there is anything about love.” Odysseus’ and Philoktetes’ cruel and cerebral sparring shoves any emotional eruptions out of the picture. They create the new outsider, the one who won’t play the nasty games of men with elephant-sized egos. Maybe this is why Neoptolemus and Philoktetes fall in love towards the end of the play.

The language in this play forces you outside of time and place. It turns you into the outcast trapped on the outskirts of some crumbling city constantly tumbling towards the brink of anarchy. The world of the play is always in motion, morphing like Philoktetes strange festering bacteria so as to encompass dissonant things like the Trojan War, Moo Shu Pork and talking suicidal birds.

Odysseus insists, with a fervency only to be found in an historical figure of antiquity, that there must have been some mis-step that brought about Philoktetes’ injury. He must have brought it upon himself by offending or neglecting some god or some custom. However, this world is strange, cruel and always doubling, then triangulating itself. This play doesn’t mold itself to the conventions of Odysseus classically Aristotelian sense of tragic fate. No. This play happens in the land of the outcast with no history, no present, and no desire except for death.

Please note: Soho Rep offers 99 cent tickets to all of its Sunday performances. More theatres should do this! http://sohorep.org/