The Seafarer Set Built—In Time Lapse!

Ednotes - The Seafarer

From Drew, Arts Administration Intern

In a seedy backlot in Baldoyle, Ireland, Ed Boyd pitches Conor McPherson's The Seafarer, now playing in The Rep's Bagley Wright Theater through March 28.

Ednotes - Betrayal

From Drew Dahl, Arts Management Intern

Ed Boyd, Lead Telemarketer for the Seattle Rep pitches Betrayal, the new show on our Leo K. stage . . . backwards.

In the trenches

From Joanna, Communications Manager

A few notes from the trenches:

Betrayal opening night is tonight. The play spans 9 years in 75 minutes. Our costume crews are busy, busy backstage with all the fabulous 1960s and 70s costume quick changes.

The Seafarer starts in previews tomorrow. There are a lot of bad Irish accents happening (in the marketing department, that is...the ones on stage are impeccable and you can read an interview with dialect coach Deb Hecht here). The other day we were trying to remember how those old Irish Spring soap commercials went. If only I had had a video camera on our Assistant IT Director Heather while she was whistling.

The two-story Seafarer set is amazing. We're in the process of recording a time lapse video of the building of it...on the way soon.

Interning...on Betrayal

From Becca, Literary Intern

It’s opening night for Betrayal, the third and final show that I get to work on this season. Here are some highlights from my experience on the show:

-One of the scenes takes place in a restaurant. During down time, the actors practiced their napkin-folding skills and created the always entertaining “napkin chicken.” It’s really amazing the kinds of things actors know how to do to keep things interesting.

-There are projections in the show of one of the actors playfully lifting a little girl in the air. The day we filmed, our young star (I think she was 3) got camera shy. It took about an hour of coaxing and the promise of hot chocolate to get the footage we needed. It of course looks wonderful on stage.

-The amount of liquid that the actors have to consume on stage is astonishing. I think one of them has to drink 2 beers, 4 scotches, and about a bottle of wine during the show. Of course it is all just really colored water (except for the beer which is O’Doul’s) but it’s amazing how much they have to drink. At least they are more hydrated than they have ever been in their lives.

The Emerging Critics Get Real

From Kiki, Audience Development Intern

Emerging Critics is an innovative education program that allows high school students to connect with theatre through critical writing. And eat a lot of Pagliacci Pizza. The program features a writing workshop staring local critic celebrities and then the students attend a matinee performance of one of our Bagley shows. Here are what the students had to say about The Road to Mecca:

"The glittering sets, subtle lighting shifts and audience-beguiling acting blended in harmony to the final standing ovation. Anyone who cares about the pursuit of creativity and the well-being of both old and young will enjoy this outstanding play." -Riley Peter-Contesse

"When you hear of the pain and suffering [Miss Helen] has endured, you begin to empathize. Moreover, when she is describing her lovely Mecca, you get a nice warm feeling. Sort of like going to your happy place." -ReeceAnn Buendia

"To appreciate the history and eloquence of The Road to Mecca entails an acquired taste belonging to those who value the performance of intimate conflict." -Amir Shabaneh

"I found the acting performance by Dee Maaske as Miss Helen very good. She impressivley kept character throughtout the performance...and I found [her] to be the highlight of the show." -Austin Hebert

"The message of elderly Helen [comes through] strongly with an excellent performance by Maaske, as the walls around her glitter and shine as bright as the outcast widow does." -Joe Johnson

The Night Watcher heads to New York

From Joanna, Communications Manager

We just got word that Charlayne Woodard's one-woman show The Night Watcher, which played at Seattle Rep to sold-out crowds in September and October, has been picked up for a run at Primary Stages in New York. Congrats to Charlayne!

Read the full scoop at Broadwayworld.com.

Photo: Charlayne Woodard, by Chris Bennion.

Playwriting Boot Camp

From Joanna, Communications Manager

Tonight is our Woodinville High School Playwriting Project. If you're looking for creative inspiration and faith that the youth in our country are imaginative and talented, you should check out tonight's free performance. Riffing off a given theme, eight playwrights from two high schools went through the Rep's "Playwriting Boot Camp." You can see the results—performed by students and directed by Seattle Rep teaching artists—tonight in our Leo K. Theatre!

This year's theme is "spilt milk." To the high school playwrights, this translates into plays involving a co-ed bathroom, a night of speed dating, a bank heist with lingerie, and a wacky psychiatrist.

Roosevelt High School performed Jan. 16, and tonight Woodinville High School performs right here at the Rep on our Leo K. Stage. The show starts at 7:30 pm. It is free (although donations will be accepted at the door!), but reservations are required. Just call 206-443-2222 to reserve your seats.

Celebrating color, life and artistic freedom

From Leigh Silverman, director of The Road to Mecca

When thinking about how to bring The Road to Mecca to the stage the first thing to consider was the set. The set is like another character. I wanted to honor the real Owl House (which you can see on the internet) and at the same time translate it to the stage in an exciting way. Our set – the main rooms of Helen’s house - is a literal and metaphorical representation of her soul – the soul of a radical, brave, inspired totally wild artist – willing to live on the outskirts of societal norms and sacrifice everything for her vision.

An example of her unconventional ways: Helen would grind glass in a coffee grinder (by hand!) and then put it on her walls. She was all about color, enormous mosaics and a compulsive use of color, light and candles. The first time Rachel, the set designer, showed me a sample of the glitter walls that we were going to use I was delighted, and I am so happy to work on a play that celebrates creativity, color, life and artistic freedom.

Mecca Opening Night=Cocktails

From Joanna, Communications Manager

Happy opening! You know it's an opening night around here because our IT Director comes to work in a suit. You know you work at a non-profit theatre when someone showing up in a suit signals a special day. And today is special because I hear we're having tea cocktails and little cakes for the opening night party tonight. Yes that's girly, and I am a girl and I love it.

The Road to Mecca is gorgeous, so beautiful and personal. I saw it last night by myself, and I'm glad I went alone so I could just have room to take it all in. It's a quiet play in that even though there are some intense emotions on stage, it has a sense of being really gentle. Is this making any sense? I guess I'm still soaking it in.

I can say that I am so jealous of our Associate Artistic Director Braden who just got back from a trip to South Africa. After doing research for The Road to Mecca (which takes place in a tiny town in the South African desert called The Great Karoo), I am so fascinated by the country. If Braden took pictures, I'll try to get some to post here (although I don't think he made it to The Owl House, the house that the play takes place in).

I have a blog from The Road to Mecca director, Leigh Silverman that I'm going to post in a second. We also got some photos of Leigh hanging out with set designer Rachel Hauck in our green room (photo by Miryam Gordon). Check it out:

Marya Sea Kaminski on the World of Mecca

From Marya Sea Kaminski, actress in The Road to Mecca

I spent some time in the blue room yesterday - the little alcove upstage that serves as Elsa's bedroom when she makes her visits to Miss Helen. We were teching (perfecting) the lights for one of the many big speeches in the play, and the actors were holding onstage. I happened to be in the blue room at that moment and sat down on the chenille comforter over the bed and had a small breath of a chance to take a good look around.

Candles with glaciers of wax drippings at their bases. A collection of thorny seashells across the upstage window, under the beaded mosaics of noonday suns. Figurines, mermaids, beads, glitter. So many tiny pieces placed so carefully by hand. "Elsa loves sleeping in this room," I thought, "I bet she dreams of the ocean and small treasures washed up on the shore when she falls asleep in this room."

Sometimes, when a show goes into technical rehearsals, I stop being able to actually see things for awhile. All of my focus is set on a rotating collection of balls to juggle - intention (why does she open her mouth in this moment?), listening (like I haven't already heard these words dozens of times), stage business (maybe if I loosen the buckle on my shoe by one knotch I'll be able to get it off faster during that first beat of dialogue).

Now that we've got a few previews under our belts, I can actually breathe on stage a little. And take a good look around. It's been a long time since I played on a set as inhabited as our world for The Road to Mecca. There are sweeping, gorgeous, glittering aspects to the set, which will be obvious (and maybe thrilling) at first glance, but the real life of this set is in the details. It feels like someplace I have lived in my life - with dishes in the sink and dust in the corners and small treasures stashed on shelves and pinned up on the walls. It is so complete.

It is so complete that it makes our jobs easier, as actors. This play is so much about relationships, and listening, and being present; living in such a meticulously detailed world allows that fiction to work on us, to envelope us even. Yes, there is a whole houseful of audience outside that fourth wall, but in here it is just us, and the tiny dusty details of our lives, and the crisis of this moment.

—Marya

Building Walls

From Dana Perreault, Technical Director

Note: Dana agreed to blog about a specific part of building The Road to Mecca set. The following is his insight on creating walls that literally shine.

Our work to obtain a wall application that would sparkle under candle light yet would be sedate under the regular stage light was tricky. We started by looking into what Miss Helen actually used for material and how she applied this material to her walls.

The thought of actual glass ground up and glued on the wall was vetoed for two reasons.
One was that we didn’t want the glass to flake off the walls and end up on the floor because there was a large possibility of actors having bare feet during the show. Second was the fact that it didn’t sparkle as well as desired when lit with the theatrical lighting.

Our paint shop experimented making samples using glitter, Mylar and lighting gels that would be painted silver on one side. These items proved to shine as bright as we needed, as well as provide the designer with the desired wall color. Now we needed to figure out how dense and in what order these items would be applied.

After figuring this part out, the lighting designer suggested that we should look into building fiber-optics into the wall, in order to “help” it shine.

When finished there was 20,000 feet of fiber-optic strand run through the walls which were then connected to three fiber-optic illuminators.

Once all of the walls were assembled, the paint department could come in and start adding toning glazes to help unify the parts.

Photo by Cindy Farruggia. Ten pounds of glitter in various color tones and sizes was used on the walls.

Mecca Set Building

From Joanna, Communications Manager

The Road to Mecca director Leigh Silverman calls the Mecca set a "fourth character in the play." Here's a picture of set designer Rachel Hauck's set model. The finished product took 400 lbs of cork (to look like sand) and 20,000 feet of fiber optic cable for some very magical lighting effect. Click here for a full slide show of photos of the set building in our scene shop.

Photo by Cindy Farruggia.

Re-Introducing Athol Fugard to Seattle

From Jerry Manning, Producing Artistic Director

In early September—two days after I was appointed Producing Artistic Director— it became clear that a planned production of Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot was not going happen. Skittish outside producers and wavering directors derailed the play. What were we going to produce in its stead?

The Road to Mecca immediately sprang to mind.

In the late 1980s into the early 1990s it seemed that South African writer Athol Fugard had a new play every season. My Children! My Africa! and Valley Song were mounted by companies around the country. Fugard’s work always carried strong political content—most specifically about the oppression of apartheid and the effects that the South African social system exacted on both white and black people. His plays told simple, personal stories of people struggling with racial segregation.

The Road to Mecca is set in South Africa during the time of apartheid, but in this play Fugard deals with a myriad of themes, with race only a tangential focus. How does one define independence? What constitutes art and who determines such? What role does religion play in our lives, and at what point does religion undermine our self-expressiveness? What moral obligations exist between young and old folks?

The generational themes struck me particularly as I re-read The Road to Mecca. Every year the Rep takes on as many as a dozen interns, recent graduates from some of the country’s best schools. I asked one of the new interns to pull some information on Athol Fugard and apartheid—I was met with blank stares. People now in their early 20s have no recollection of it. No recollection of Robbins Island and the Krugerrand. No real knowledge of Athol Fugard’s work. We thought it time to change that.

I am pleased to welcome back to Seattle Rep Leigh Silverman who staged Blue Door here two seasons ago. I am also delighted to welcome back to this theatre Marya Sea Kaminski (last seen here as Rachel Corrie), Terry Moore, and Dee Maaske who last appeared at the Rep in The Caucasian Chalk Circle. And I am pleased to re-introduce Athol Fugard to this community.

The Road to Mecca is currently in rehearsals and opens Jan. 15.

Harold Pinter dies

From Joanna, Communications Manager

If you haven't heard, playwright Harold Pinter passed away on Christmas Eve at the age of 78 after a long battle with cancer. He might be one of the only playwrights in history to have spawned his own adjective—"Pinter-esque". He's best known for delving into complicated interpersonal relationships with unflinchingly sparse and meticulous language (and sometimes the absence of language, i.e. "The Pinter Pause.")

From an Associated Press article, which ran in the Seattle Times:

"Pinter restored theater to its basic elements: an enclosed space and unpredictable dialogue, where people are at the mercy of each other and pretense crumbles," the Nobel Academy said. "With a minimum of plot, drama emerges from the power struggle and hide-and-seek of interlocution."

His characters' internal fears and longings, their guilt and difficult sexual drives were set against the neat lives they constructed in order to try to survive. Usually enclosed in one room, the acts usually illustrated the characters' lives as a sort of grim game with actions that often contradicted words. Gradually, the layers were peeled back.

We'll be staging his Betrayal here in February.

Life at the Sycamores: Xylophone, Ballet Dancing and more

From Rebecca, Artistic/Literary Intern

Pat your head and rub your belly. Now dance on your toes and deliver a monologue. Play the xylophone, wrestle…and could you sing, too?

The members of You Can't Take It With You's Sycamore family have wacky hobbies, and the actors playing these eccentric characters spent long hours becoming proficient in a crazy array of skills. Director Warner Shook would often pat his head and rub his belly during rehearsals saying, "I know it's hard. But you gotta do it."

Xylophone 101
Brad Farwell plays Ed Carmichael, an aspiring xylophone player and amateur printer. Before rehearsals began, Brad had no experience playing the xylophone (even though he has had to learn guitar, piano, harmonica and tambourine for other shows). To prepare Brad for the role, the Rep hired a percussion consultant to teach him "Xylophone 101."

Brad learned the songs that he needed to know for the show and repeatedly played scales to get accustomed to the instrument. To get more practice time in, the Rep arranged for Brad take a glockenspiel (an instrument similar to a xylophone) home with him to practice. Even during breaks in rehearsal, the cast could hear Brad practicing the xylophone in a dressing room down the hall. When asked if he would keep up with his new talent after the show, Brad responded, "Probably not. My dog hates it. She runs under the bed and howls."

Ballet Dancing
Unlike her character Essie Carmichael, who has been practicing ballet for eight years, Annette Toutonghi has never been a ballerina. Even though Essie is a terrible dancer, Annette needed to be familiar with ballet movements. In order to get the vocabulary of a dancer and some basic skills, she started taking lessons months before rehearsals even began. Working in classes and private lessons, Annette’s teacher eventually told her that she could wear toe shoes, a must for Essie's character. She even took twice a week during the rehearsal process. Despite all the practice, Annette says she's far from losing the spirit of her skill-challenged character, "I'm in no danger of being too good," she says.

And More
Wrestling, ballroom dancing, and singing are also on the long list of activities that the cast of You Can't Take It With You has had to tackle. On the surface the Sycamores might seem simply weird and, from an actor's perspective, a huge pain. But as Brad points out, they are just "enjoying life."

Pictured: Brad Farwell and Annette Toutonghi, photo by Chris Bennion.

"Baseball Been Bery, Bery Good To Me"

From Kiki, Audience Development Intern

Lately I've been moonlighting as a Seattle Rep Lobby Manager to help supplement my rather stark financial situation. I didn't mean to buy so much at H&M, it just kind of happened. Layering is my weakness.

If you've been to see a show at the Rep recently, you've most likely seen me working. I'm the one in clogs and arm warmers. Most of the time I'm interacting directly with our patrons giving them directions, answering questions or bring sexy back to the Concierge Desk. But every now and then I also get to interact with the actors in our shows. For example I always made a point to watch the Musketeers exit the theatre after their dashing, dangle-from-a-rope-OH!-don't-land-on-a-patron entrance at the top of the show. Who didn't love that part?

For You Can't Take it With You there are always actors milling about backstage, waiting for their appearance in Act II or their staggered entrances here and there. There are 18 of them after all. Well one Sunday I was in the green room heating up my microwavable Zesty Chicken dinner inbetween our matinee and evening performance. A lot of the actors had also gathered to eat a bite of dinner and chat. One of the actors, I won't say who for fear I'll be hit with a law suit, was excited to tell everyone that they bought "Bull Durham, only the greatest baseball movie ever." I know, I was shocked too. It was all I could do to smile and nod my head as I proceeded out of the green room with my scaulding hot black tray full of soupy chicken and imitation-carrots.

Hear me out, I like the movie Bull Durham as much as the next baseball enthusiast. But as a permanent benchwarmer myself, I've seen my fair share of baseball movies, especially starring Kevin Costner, and I just don't think that Bull Durham is the grand slam. (You're not even ready for all of the baseball puns that I'll be using.) At least he picked one that is probably in the top 10. The actor could have sighted Hardball starring Keanu Reeves or Mr. Baseball with Tom Selleck and then I would have had to control my gag reflex. Just because you're a Matrix boy or because you have a gigantic mustache does not mean that you should be making bad baseball flicks. Angels in the Outfield and Sandlot are pretty standard childhood fare and will probably be around "Foooooooorrrrrrrrreeeeeeevvvvvveeeeeerrrr" but they don't really capture America's favorite pasttime. And I don't even want to talk about monkeys playing baseball. Ed is just bad.

Let's get down to the real scoreboard. What about A League of Their Own? If you honestly can tell me that you don't know what I'm talking about if I say, "There's no crying in baseball" then it's time to retire your glove. That movie is classic. Or perhaps you think baseball movies should be more schtick and less heart. Then look at Major League. Ridiculous and nominated for Best Foreign Film by the Japanese Acadamy. Now that's a double play. But overall, in my heart of hearts, I think that the actual best baseball movie ever is Field of Dreams. I know, I know but she's from Iowa, of course she'd say that. Well, get over it. This movie quintessentially depicts what baseball is: playing it for the love of the game, in a cornfield, with Mufasa. Done and done.

I suppose I could have told the actor all of my opinions on baseball movies, but those programs aren't going to restock themselves. So let's just keep this between us.

Ednotes - You Can't Take It With You

From Drew Dahl, Arts Administration Intern

Enjoy Ed Boyd, Lead Telemarketer for the Rep, as he makes his 1936 pitch for You Can't Take It With You. Then stop in to see our production of the American classic in the Bagley Wright Theatre.

Audience Responses - boom

From Drew Dahl, Arts Management Intern

What did you think of boom? Below are some clips of what audience members had to say about the show in the Rep's brand new Talk-it-out Booth (previously the Rep Confessional).

Geek of the Week

From Joanna, Communications Manager


Seattle Rep's Assistant IT Director and resident tech goddess Heather (left) is Seattle P-I's Geek of the Week! I knew she liked Buffy, but this Q&A reveals the depths of her delightful geekiness: Star Trek, muppets, something called a 'Prelate Wizard," and years of making her own Ren faire costumes.

Read her full Q&A here: http://seattlepi.nwsource.com/tech/geekoftheweek/?geekID=10