Review of Week Three – New Ideas Festival 2013

Last night I caught the second performances of this year’s Week Three lineup.   The evening kicked off with the funny and touching Dead French Philosophers and What We Mean When We Talk About Love by James Papoutsis, directed by Yevgeniya Falkovich.  The audience became students being addressed by professor David Black (Derek Perks), who continually diverges from his lectures on French philosopher Roland Barthes to tell the class about his own problems with love, which began when his wife left him.  “Love is a linguistic impossibility”, Black tells the class, and “You’re much better being ignorant about the true nature of love, because it’s depressing.”  Wow – bitter much, Professor Black?  David’s romantic troubles are played out by his doppelganger (Phil Rickaby) and unrequited love interest (Nicole Wilson) – a woman who is absolutely perfect for him, except she’s married to someone else.  But he’s sure she will fall in love with him, if only he can find the right words…  Great work from the cast, and the playing-with-alternative-scenarios was a very cool conceit.  Loved the glowering  eye-roll from “He” when the restaurant Muzak played “The Look of Love” and “Un-break My Heart”!

The head-scratching continued with the My Friend’s Best Friend’s Boyfriend by Wesley J. Colford, directed by Joanne Williams. What starts as a guys’-night-in with popcorn and a DVD of Spiderman 2 for Ben (James Aaron) and his friend Alex (Kwaku Adu-Poku) turns into a strange conversation when Ben fields a call from another friend that he doesn’t want to discuss.  Alex finally overcomes Ben’s reluctance, but Ben doesn’t want to name names, hence the convoluted relationship conveyed in the play’s title!  As Ben tells Alex the story, it’s played out by a couple on the other side of the stage, Jared Bishop as The Boyfriend, and Christina Manco as The Girlfriend.  I won’t spoil the ending, but let’s just say it gave the audience a lot to talk about during the intermission.

When the audience re-enters the Studio after intermission for Eglinton directed by David Suszek, we see Mary (Anne-Marie Krytiuk) and Charlie (Nicholas Porteous) sitting in chairs on either side of the stage, spattered with blood.  What the heck??!  The story of a date gone very wrong gradually unfolds, told in separate-yet-connected monologues, beautifully played by the actors.  The style is reminiscent of Irish playwright Conor McPherson’s This Lime Tree Bower – I saw its Toronto premiere back in December, in which Eglinton writer Anthony MacMahon was one of the performers.

 The delightful solo show My Red Feather Boa by Flora Stohr-Danziger closes out the evening.  The only play in this week’s lineup which is *not* a world premiere, it was previously a favourite in the 2004 New Ideas Festival, and is re-mounted this year in celebration of the Festival’s 25^th anniversary.  Original director Nancy Bradshaw and original actor Whitney Ross-Barris bring life again to the story of Celine, a teenage girl from Chicoutimi who follows her naïve movie-star dreams to the big city of Toronto, armed only with good friends and a red feather boa.  Navigating mishaps as a cocktail waitress and an exotic dancer, the irrepressible Celine (she nicknames dour employment office workers Mr. Hardass and Ms. Stone-head) shakes off loss and tragedy, eventually finding her voice and “lust, love and kindness all rolled into one.”  Ross-Barris’ Québecois accent was convincing, and her totally committed performance brought tears from many in the audience – I heard the sniffs!  Nice use of Aimee Mann’s song “Wise Up” (which you may recognize from organ donor TV commercials).

 My guess for the theme this week is violence in relationships.  Or could it be storytelling?

You still have 4 more chances to catch these plays – tonight (Friday) and tomorrow at 8pm, and Saturday and Sunday at 2:30.  Tickets are $15 for the whole lineup. http://www.alumnaetheatre.com/tickets.html   If you choose the Saturday matinee, why not come for noon, and see the one-time staged reading of Adrianna Prosser’s Everything But The Cat…, a “not-so-one-woman-show” with projections!  Tickets for the reading are PWYC, available in person only, cash payments.  Both the reading and the matinee lineup will be followed by Talkback sessions with writers and directors.

Final week of New Ideas Festival is underway…

Week Three – the final week – of the 25^th anniversary New Ideas Festival opened last night to a sold-out house in the 3^rd floor Studio.   I could not see the show because I was in rehearsal downstairs for Alumnae Theatre’s next production, James Reaney’s The Killdeer, which runs April 12 – 27.

But I’ve reserved my New Ideas ticket for tonight, so will be reporting on the plays (Dead French Philosophers and What We Mean When We Talk About Love by James Papoutsis;  My Friend’s Best Friend’s Boyfriend by Wesley J. Colford; Eglinton by Anthony MacMahon; and My Red Feather Boa by Flora Stohr-Danziger) tomorrow.

Performances of the Week Three  lineup continue at 8pm until Saturday March 23, and there are also 2:30 pm matinees on Saturday March 23 and Sunday March 24.  Additionally, there’s a one-time staged reading of what stage manager Stevie Baker describes as “a badass one-woman show” (!), Everything But The Cat… by Adrianna Prosser.  Catch it at noon on Saturday, and read Stevie’s blog about the show at http://jurassictheatrics.com/

Everything But The Cat…

 

Tickets for the 4-play weekly lineup (yes, you’ll see ALL 4 short plays for one price) are $15 – go to http://www.alumnaetheatre.com/tickets.html to purchase.  If you prefer not to purchase online, please reserve by phone at 416-364-4170 box 1, and bring cash to the Box Office to pay on arrival.  Tickets for the Saturday reading are only available for in-person cash purchase on the day of the reading.  Box Office opens one hour before performance times.

Falling rehearsals - we got rhythm

Reblogged from life with more cowbell:

We got rhythm.

Saturday’s rehearsal – in the studio again – was about rhythm and nuance. Mostly, it was about rhythm.

Director Ed Rosing, who was reading for Cora (who got stuck having to do a training session at her new job that day), was also an orchestra conductor of sorts – suggesting a quickening of the pace during certain sections, then returning us to more thoughtful, even languid, rhythms elsewhere.

Read more… 486 more words

Falling is the staged reading in Week One of New Ideas Festival. Don't miss it: Saturday March 9 at noon sharp.

Falling - first rehearsals

Reblogged from life with more cowbell:

As some of you know, I auditioned for Alumnae Theatre Company’s New Ideas Festival 2013 and, after being called back to read for two plays, was cast in the Week One reading of Jamie Johnson’s play Falling, directed by Ed Rosing.

I don’t want to give too much away – since I dislike spoilers and want you to come see for yourselves – but I can tell you that Falling is a mother/daughter drama, beautifully written, and presented through personal storytelling and fairy tale.

Read more… 536 more words

Alumnae Theatre's former bloggergal's intriguing notes on her rehearsals for Jamie Johnson's play Falling (a staged reading on March 9 in Alumnae's New Ideas Festival)

New Ideas Festival 2013 casting timeline

Thanks to all the actors who attended the general auditions for New Ideas, and congratulations to those who were called back last week for individual plays.  Sorry, actors:  yet another week of anxiously waiting to hear stretches in front of you!

Each play’s director is now required to submit a list of their top 3 casting choices to the Artistic Directors of New Ideas by Jan 16.  Conflicts (the same actor requested as #1 choice for two plays scheduled in the same week of the Festival, for example) will be sorted out at a production meeting on January 20.

We cannot offer roles to any actors until after that meeting.  Hang on!

 

MESSAGE FROM THE ARTISTIC DIRECTORS OF New Ideas Festival 2013 :

Unfortunately we are unable to post the NIF sides on the website at this time as our webmistress is quite ill. The sides are now posted in a folder attached to a new gmail account.

Actors who have a scheduled audition are being emailed with the log-in information and password.

–
Pat McCarthy, Carolyn Zapf
Co-Artistic Directors, New Ideas Festival 2013

New Ideas Festival 2013: third night of cold reads (+ listing of 4th night)

Third night (of four) of the cold reads of New Ideas scripts.  The evening began with Still Waters by Suzanne Gauthier, to be directed in Week One by Stacy Halloran.  The playwright could not attend, but she had already seen a reading of this piece (although with different actors and director) at the Write Now event on October 21.  Charles, a 60-something retiree who’s a compulsive Canadian Tire shopper, thinks he has the solution to his wife Monica’s “sleeping problem”.  I thought this 10-minute comedy was so charming when I first heard it at Write Now (see post at http://alumnaetheatre.wordpress.com/2012/10/24/write-now-2012-running-water/),  and it’s still adorable.

Next up was Say The Words by me (Tina McCulloch), to be directed in Week One by Kim Radmacher.  I confess to sitting in the audience of other writers and directors,  shaking with nerves a little, in anticipation of hearing it read aloud for the first time.  And wondering how it would be received!  It’s an 8-minute monologue – a form I’ve never written in before – about love and loss.  The audience was very attentive [phew!], and quite complimentary.

Then we heard The Deepest Trench by Chloë Whitehorn, to be directed in Week Two by Justen Bennett. Described by the playwright as “an almost love story”, this flashback and flash-forward piece shows the relationships between Kate, her friend & roomie Emma, and Kate’s brother Ryan, who develops feelings for Emma.  Contains a great geek reference to Zander’s invisibility in episode 4.4 of Buffy The Vampire Slayer; Emma’s malapropism “pair of ducks” (was it deliberate?  She means “paradox”) that culminates in an adorable gift; and the Best Quote Ever, from Kate:  “Could we please not talk about my brother’s genitalia?”.

Wrapping up the evening was the Week Three reading, Falling by Jamie Johnson, dramaturged by Diane Forrest, to be directed by Ed Rosing. This is a play that the writer confessed had been stashed in a drawer for 18 years when he pulled it out to submit to New Ideas.  Currently the format is a series of monologues interrupted by brief interactions with other characters – but that could change!  Constance, mocked in her small town as the “crazy widow” (she’s survived two husbands and miscarried a baby), defends her choices and tries to explain her life to the daughter she imagines she might have had.  Lovely, semi-mystical stories about the moon and its power punctuate the text.  Johnson noted that the reading helped to highlight some clarity issues which he will work on, along with exploration of theatrical possibilities.

Readers for night #3 were: Carol Baker, Charles Hayter, Neale Kimmel, Tina McCulloch, Lynne Patterson, Derek Perks, Laura Vincent, Mike Vitorovich, Maria Wodzinkska.

Unfortunately I won’t be able to make tonight (Thursday) – the final cold read night.  The plays tonight are:

-          Dead French Philosophers and What We Mean When We Talk About Love by James Papoustsis,  to be directed in Week Three by Yevgeniya Falkovich.  The readers (as scheduled, although there have been last-minute substitutions on all the previous nights!) are Derek Perks, David Christo, Elisabeth Feltaous and Carys Lewis. 

-          My Friend’s Best Friend’s Boyfriend by Wesley J. Colford, to be directed in Week Three by Joanne Williams.  Readers:  Carys Lewis, Alex Dault, David Christo, Jake Michaels, Elisabeth Feltaous, and Derek Perks.

-          Over the Edge by Catherine Frid, to be directed in Week Two by Pomme Corvellec.  Readers: Elisabeth Feltaous, Alex Dault.

-          Everything but the Cat by Adrianna Prosser is the Saturday reading in Week One, to be directed by Steph Ouaknine.  Readers:  Carys Lewis and Elisabeth Feltaous.

And that’s it for the cold reads – all the scripts that will appear in the Festival have been read!  Next for New Ideas:  the auditions in early January. 

 By the way, yesterday’s post about the second night of cold reads has been updated to add the names of the readers.

New Ideas Festival 2013: second night of cold reads

Second night (Tue Dec 4) of cold reads for New Ideas Festival 2013.  The lineup started with Eglinton by Anthony MacMahon, to be directed by David Suszek in Week Three.  Mary calls her friend Charlie for help when a date with a Bay Street type (this is very definitely a Toronto setting!) goes horribly wrong.  Meanwhile Charlie has an unfortunate dating experience of his own.  The playwright specifies that both characters are onstage the entire time, even through each other’s monologues – they don’t always speak to each other.  Nice contrast of the characters: Mary’s speeches are descriptive and lyrical; Charlie’s bitter-verging-on-nasty, but funny.  Carolyn Zapf, one of the New Ideas Artistic Directors, was curious about where Charlie and Mary were when they had monologues.  MacMahon responded that the style was modeled after Irish theatre; no frame or place.

Next up was Flora Stohr-Danzinger’s My Red Feather Boa, which originally appeared in the 2004 New Ideas.  To celebrate the Festival’s 25^th anniversary, it was selected as an audience favourite, and will be directed by the original director, Nancy Bradshaw as the Festival  closer.  It’s a monologue told by Celine, a small-town girl from Chicoutimi. Quebec, who came to Toronto with dreams of stardom.  She tells the story of her adventures – both tragic and funny – in a group therapy session , interacting with other [unseen] patients and the doctor.

R.J. Downes, a playwright formerly based in Toronto but now living in Kingston, Ont. , has penned the comedy Two Actresses, to be directed by Pam Redfern in Week Two of the Festival.  Assistant Director/Stage Manager will be Sean Speake.  Margo and Susan are best friends (they say!) who are also bitter rivals in their community theatre group.  The play takes place in a hospital emergency room, where they’ve wound up – in full Victorian costume – after Susan “accidentally” pushed Margo off the stage during a dress rehearsal.  The reading was recorded for the playwright, and there were lots of guffaws and snickers at all the theatre jokes and zingers.  Director Pam Redfern noted that the first draft of the script was “very AbFab” [British sitcom Absolutely Fabulous, sweetie darling.  What – you haven’t seen it?].   She thinks it still needs “a bigger ‘a-ha’ moment” – something to explain why these two are still friends, and what does Susan, who’s stuck with all the “dignified supporting roles” while Margo snatches the leads, get out of the friendship.

Last on tonight’s schedule was Rain Chan’s Lullaby for the Abandoned, which will be the Saturday reading in Week Three, dramaturged by Shaista Latif and directed by Brenda Darling.  It was inspired by an article that Chan read only in August, and she whipped off a 12-page script and submitted it to New Ideas.  It was accepted, she kept writing, and the piece is now at least 60 minutes long.  The story centres around a family in China, and ranges from the present, with 88-year old matriarch Liu Ying in a hospital suffering from kidney disease, all the way back to her young adulthood, when she began collecting abandoned babies to raise them.  China instituted its one-child policy in 1979 [for some reason I thought it was much earlier…], and girl children were frequently abandoned.  Liu Ying, a fictional character based on the real woman profiled in the article, is a poor cleaner who cannot resist taking in these girls, to the despair of her concerned husband – “We have too many babies!” he protests, more than once.  Also in the present, Liu Ying’s now-adult daughters (one biological and two adopted) try to comfort their sick mother with the help of a sympathetic hospital nurse, and reassure her that the youngest adoptee, a 7-year old boy, will be cared for and educated.   Director Brenda Darling intends to have several workshops of the play as the script develops, and asked for actors interested in improv and script development to contact her.

Tonight’s readers were:  Zahir Gilani,  Barbara Haber, Susan Kerr,  Anthony MacMahon, Lara Mrkoci, Kay Randewich, Kristen Scott, Maria Wodzinkska, Sangeeta Wylie.

Two more nights of cold reads to come!

New Ideas 2013 audition notice

Here’s the audition notice for New Ideas Festival 2013.  Please read CAREFULLY and follow directions.

NEW IDEAS FESTIVAL 2013

— March 6–24, 2013—

 Actors of all ages (18+) and ethnicities are needed for
New Ideas Festival 2013, a three-week juried festival of 15 new works.
A program of 4 different plays will be presented each week, running from Wednesday to Sunday, with a staged reading at noon on each Saturday.

General Auditions will be held:

January 3 & 4 evenings

January 5 & 6 daytime

Call-backs the second week of January

 Actors must be available for rehearsals beginning February 1.

Auditions will be booked according to age and gender, so actors should keep all the audition dates free until they receive an audition time.

 Actors will perform a two-minute monologue of their choice and
a side from one of the plays. (Alumnae members have the choice of reading two sides rather than presenting a prepared monologue.) Sides will be available on the Alumnae website (http://www.alumnaetheatre.com/ideas.html) after
December 20. Please print an appropriate side and bring it to the audition
along with your résumé and headshot.

 Note that all directors and many playwrights attend the general auditions, so be prepared for a full house.

 To book an audition email nifauditions@gmail.com

Give your name, gender, acting age range, email address, phone number,
and say whether you are a member of Alumnae Theatre Company.

No emails between December 21 and 26 please.

 Actors must not be a member of CAEA or ACTRA, as Alumnae Theatre is a not-for-profit, non-professional company.

Auditions will be held in the Studio (3^rd floor) at Alumnae Theatre – 70 Berkeley Street, Toronto.

New Ideas Festival 2013: first night of cold reads

This is the 3^rd year that playwrights and directors have been given the opportunity to hear the plays read aloud by actors before the auditions.  An innovative idea by the Festival’s Artistic Directors, it’s now become tradition.

Last night (Dec 3), we heard Stalled by Eugenie Carabatsos (which will be directed by New Ideas co-founder Kerri MacDonald in Week One).  Carabatsos is a New York-based playwright, whose piece In Their Glory premiered as a staged reading at New Ideas 2012.  The reading and brief ensuing discussion of Stalled was taped for her use.  Stalled is a funny, charming, 25-minute play about Maggie and her relationship with her old car.  On her way (reluctantly) to the junkyard with her oddly human car – it provides appropriate noises to punctuate her musings! – Maggie re-lives her past experiences in it.  Family members, old boyfriends and could-be boyfriends pop up from the backseat to interact with her.

Next up was Revelation by Shirley Barrie, to be directed by Molly Thom, the other New Ideas co-founder.  Revelation was an audience favourite from NIF 2001, and is being remounted with its original director in celebration of the Festival’s 25^th anniversary – it will be the Festival opener.  Barrie describes this play as “a Tragicomedy of Errors”, and it certainly is!  On Judgement Day, John, who died young in the 1930’s, awakes in his coffin to find himself buried beside a crotchety old woman who claims she’s his wife Mary.  In 25 minutes, the audience gets turned around at least three times in their sympathies.  Or was that just me?

The final piece that was read will appear in Week Two of the Festival: Gina Femia’s Pieces of Penelope, to be directed by Janet Kish.  If the title makes you think of Margaret Atwood’s recent (and it’s coming back again!  Nightwood Theatre is remounting it at Buddies in Bad Times starting Jan 8.  http://www.nightwoodtheatre.net/index.php/whats_on/the_penelopiad) stunner The Penelopiad, and mentally assert that The Odyssey has already been treated to the definitive stage version, thankyouverymuch (or was that just me again?), think again.  This is totally different.  And not just because Femia is from New York, and can therefore be excused for not knowing about Atwood – unlike Toronto’s possibly-soon-ex-mayor and his brother…  But I digress.  Femia’s play ran a dense 35 minutes in the reading, which was also recorded for the writer’s use.   The non-linear script interweaves aspects of The Odyssey (faithful Penelope awaiting the return of her adventuring husband Odysseus, while piggish suitors take over her palace) with the modern-day story of two soldier’s wives (they’re married to brothers) who are desperate for their own husbands to return from war in one piece.  It incorporates beautiful image-laden language (example: “I put a story in the sky for her”), one actor playing multiple characters, and a script that presents – shall we say – some staging challenges!  Script-wise, I thought Homer’s Odyssey plot was very deftly handled with a few brief lines between Penelope and her handmaid Melantho, but Justen Bennett (who will direct Chloë Whitehorn’s The Deepest Trench in Week Two) wondered if everyone in the audience would understand the references.   A playwright’s note in the program & lobby display would be my suggestion.

Readers for tonight’s entertainment were:  Andrea Brown, Scott Dermody, Elisabeth Feltaous, Pat Hawk, Erin Jones, Neale Kimmel, Tina McCulloch, Sean Speake.  More tomorrow for night #2 of the cold reads!  I should mention again that these are very literally cold reads – the actors are recruited from past reading events at Alumnae Theatre, like Big Ideas or Write Now, and are handed a script pretty much as they walk through the door!  But this is not an audition, so there’s no pressure.  And speaking as a playwright, it’s a huge thrill to hear your words spoken aloud by someone else for the first time.