Tag Archive for: EELWAX JESUS

REHEARSAL JOURNAL #3

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Week three at the Festival…we are in the thick of the creative process. Scenery, costumes and props are being constructed. The Frank Stage has bits and parts of scenery from five different shows scattered across the stage. Sculptures for INANA are being fabricated and carved in the sculpture studio. The costume shop is busy with actor fittings, shopping and construction. Our Props dept is raiding the local flea markets, shopping for props and creating props. The electrics crew is hanging three rep lighting plots.The admin staff is preparing for our opening weekend. And the actors are digging into the third week of rehearsal. Needless to say…there is a tsunami of activity throughout the Festival. I can honestly tell you that I am having a BLAST. The work is hard and exhilarating. The work is intense and collaborative. The work is endless and yet full of joy.

I am pleased with the publicity that we are receiving. Elizabeth Blair from National Public Radio visited rehearsals and conducted interviews with Max Baker and Lee Sellars. She is doing a feature story on our 20th Anniversary Season which will air on NRP soon. West Virginia Public Radio did a story on the Festival which aired this week. Wednesday’s Washington Post had an interview with Michele Lowe and Frances Ya-Chu Cowhig. WYPR Public Radio in Baltimore is doing a story on INANA next week. So the word is getting out…we are creating BUZZ.

So…can I count on you to help me “spread-the-word?”  

Ed Herendeen

REHEARSAL JOURNAL #2

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We are into our second week of rehearsal. The work is intense and the company is responding to this ambitious season. We are confronting the many unanswerable questions that these five plays raise. I agree with David Mamet when he says that the playwright’s highest calling is to wrestle the unanswerable. Help us see it, give us an opportunity to sit in a room together and bear it. Craft something beautiful out of our human mess. The 2010 Repertory meets these challenges…fearlessly. I am proud of the work that we are doing. Our playwrights, directors, designers and actors are not turning away from the world that we live in. These plays burn with intensity and truth. This work reminds us that theater has the power to change us.

Storytelling is thriving at the Contemporary American Theater Festival. We live in a turbulent and dangerous world. We face an uncertain future…yet the theater offers us a public space to come together in a community to ask difficult questions by engaging us and entertaining us with new stories. The CATF rehearsal spaces are buzzing with creative energy. I can hear the EELWAX JESUS Band belting out the music below my office. The shops are working late into the evening preparing the costumes, props and scenery. And there is a constant hum of human emotion and activity coming from the artists residences. The Festival is in high gear. The work has begun.

MAX BAKER IN SHEPHERDSTOWN

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Max Baker Playwright /Director THE EELWAX JESUS 3-D POP MUSIC SHOW

Playwright and Director Max Baker was in Shepherdstown over the weekend. He was meeting with the CATF Design team for our up-coming World Premiere of THE EELWAX JESUS 3-D POP MUSIC SHOW. Max wrote the book and lyrics and is directing the premiere at the 2010 Contemporary American Theater Festival July 7th-August 1st.

     “So great to come down and meet Bob Klingelhoefer (set designer) and to nail down the set-design (which we did). Bob is a great guy and I am really impressed with his designs. I am happy with the final EELWAX design and can’t wait to see it operational…it was immensely useful for me to see the theater in its’ raw state…”  Max Baker

     “The concept for the show is…that it comes OUT OF THE TV! The band and Ignatz and Mr. Shine appear 3-Dimensionally in the Day Room…the focus should be on the band and Mr. Shine. They become the TV… My hope is to blow the walls off the theater and really feed the audience with EXCITEMENT and BUZZ!”  Max Baker

THE EELWAX JESUS 3-D POP MUSIC SHOW is a performance art/theater piece set in the eclectically-furnished, highly sanitized Group Home Day Room. The Residents (each with their own set of anxieties, compulsions, hunger and clothes to iron) are fed a daily dose of Corporate-controlled entertainment in the form of a 3-Dimensional Music Show hosted by the charismatic, character-shifting Mr. Shine who literally pops out of the TV. The outside world is plagued by Swine Flu, there are cameras in the sky, and the intrusion of a seemingly scruffy old man who lives down the hall is greeted by the Residents with fear and animosity.

     “My overall thoughts at the moment are that the theater audience members are an extension of the Resident’s. After all, we are all Residents…”  Max Baker

We had a very productive weekend of design meetings. I am impressed with Max’s creative energy and imagination. THE EELWAX JESUS 3-D POP MUSIC SHOW is a collaboration between Max Baker who wrote the book and lyrics and CATF actor, Lee Sellars who composed the music. You can hear some of their music and songs at www.eelwaxjesus.com. So go to their web site and listen…send me a comment. I am interested in hearing from you. Please forward this posting to your friends and invite them to join you at this ALTERNATIVE THEATRICAL EVENT! This show will help you bend your mind…think… “the bastard love-child” of  Bowie…think… The Breeders…think… William S. Burroughs…thinktheater. This summer get saved by EELWAX JESUS!

Ed Herendeen

WORKING WITH PLAYWRIGHTS

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One of the things that I love about my job is the opportunity to collaborate with the living playwright. My passion for directing new plays began in Graduate School. Directing a new play is risky because new plays are produced without a safety net of tradition…there is no production history to fall back on. Everything involved in doing a new play is done from scratch. The success of a new play is invariably founded on the successful collaboration of the artists involved. This is what we do at the Contemporary American Theater Festival…we develop and produce new work with the playwright. And this experience really turns me on.

Last week I had the opportunity to meet with Michele Lowe (INANA) and Max Baker(EELWAX JESUS) while I was in New York. We looked at preliminary set designs and discussed production concepts etc. Hearing their ideas and feedback was incredibly important. It is exciting to collaborate with these writers during this important pre-production period.

I have been in constant communication with J.T.Rogers RE: WHITE PEOPLE and Frances Ya-Chu Cowhig (LIDLESS) and I have been trading emails RE: my directors concept for her play. Frances is in China doing research and J.T. is in Afghanistan working on his latest play BLOOD AND GIFTS. Our conversations have been stimulating and productive.

All five of our 2010 playwrights will be in residence in Shepherdstown at various time throughout the rehearsal and performance process. They are an important  part of the creative process. They play a vital role in developing their plays at our Theater Festival. We are a playwright inspired theater and we listen to our playwrights. We encourage and welcome their ideas and suggestions. We involve them in every step of the creative process. For example: Yesterday… Frances Ya-Chu Cowhig and I were  discussing the Sound Design for LIDLESS. I emailed her my idea to create a percussion soundscape of “cell doors/cage doors/locking doors opening and closing.” I also suggested using “birds” in the soundscape. Here is her response:

“I really love this bird idea, and it makes me think about nature soundscapes as a whole–and using sound as an element that provides different information from what you see visually. For example, since the grays, the chain-link fence, is already suggesting the entrapment, the getting stuck/being in a cage is already expressed visually, I wonder if the soundscape would be effective focused around things like birds, ocean, wind, static, etc. It is interesting to me that the ocean is something that can always be heard at Gitmo, and that white noise is used to disorient, and that white noise often sounds very much like the ocean, played at a different pace…And then of course Bashir talks about how he always found ways to change terrible things(i.e. moans and screams) into wind whistling through trees, etc…So that could suggest something too that any noise that sounds ominous has a transition point to a nature sound, etc…So maybe since visually we are getting the chain link fences, the harshness, the metal, that an organic soundscape could open things.”

I asked Frances if she heard any specific music in her play. She offered this intuitive suggestion for me to consider in the Sound Design:

“If there is any kind of music/tonality, I imagine that perhaps it is used during Bashir’s hallucinations, and when he talks to his daughter…perhaps the acapella voice of a woman singing a Pakistani ballad/lullaby. Without instrumental accompaniment. We never feel the presence of Bashir’s ethnic heritage in language, etc…so maybe there is a subtle way to integrate it into the soundscape. This could also be used to add a haunting element, as Bashir is haunted by the past he left and  that is gone forever to him…(his dead wife, his young daughter.)”

As you can imagine…this is terrific feedback from the writer. Her intuitive ideas are something that I can really run with. I can integrate her suggestions into my concept for the production. It gives me a starting point as I begin my collaboration with the Sound Designer.

This is one example of the kinds of conversations that I have with our writers. I am interested in hearing your reaction to this playwright/director conversation. Please share your comments on this blog.

Ed Herendeen