A few times have we done only three because of scheduling problems but we have done five plays on a couple occasions.
My first year we did four plays: An Enemy of the People, by Henrik Ibsen, The ABC’s by Beth Linnerson, The Tangled Yarn by Stephen Levi and The Country Wife by William Wycherley.
I have already covered what most of what happened with An Enemy of the People and having survived that first production and was ready to jump right into the next show.
The second production was a Children’s Theatre piece.
Children’s Theatre has always been big at Brockport and when I first came here it was a major part of our production program.
When I interviewed for my job in NYC one of the faculty asked me what I thought about Children’s Theatre and not knowing that she ran the program I opened my big mouth and told just what I thought.
My only real exposure to Children’s Theatre had been during Summer Stock six years at Gateway Playhouse.
At Gateway they used whatever set was on the mainstage at the time and produced their play in front of it the afternoons before the evening musicals for adults.
Most of the actors were from the pool of sixteen year old girls who were “studying” acting at Gateway and they wrote their own scripts based what they knew about the basic story lines of the classic children’s stories.
A few of the adult actors were used to help run the shows and we made a few small set pieces and props in the shop to make the shows work.
When they did Puss and Boots on the Candide set it looked pretty good, but I do not think it worked quite as well when it was performed in front of the Gay Bath House set of The Ritz a few weeks later.
I was not impressed by the results the plays.
Build it fast, build it cheap and then pack the Theatre with hundreds of screaming kids on hot summer afternoons.
Of course they would sell them candy and get them all sugared up before the show.
So I told the woman who ran the Brockport Arts for Children Program about this and that I saw Children’s Theatre as a bit of a rip off and I felt that they often talked down to the kids.
I heard later she was upset at my answer, but if you do not want know what I think then do not ask me.
In any case I did get the job and now I was ready to do a “proper” Children’s Theatre production, The ABC’s.
The target audience was three and four year olds, so you know this was going to rival Shakespeare.
About eight actors in pajamas running about the stage play with six large blocks with letters painted on them
The smallest cube was one by one foot and they got bigger and bigger with the last one being four by four feet.
The largest one set in the corner of the basement and I just got rid of it two years ago at the start of the building renovations.
“Hi kids, A is for Apple, B is for Banana and C is for what a pile of Crap!”
OK maybe I was being a bit of a Theatre snob, but it was not my favorite play and we would do much better Children’s plays in the coming years.
Maybe the play was not really all that bad and it would have worked better in a small Theatre or room, but it was lost on the big stage especially with the kids sitting down in the auditorium seats far away from the actors up on the stage.
I thought getting back to working on an adult play for the third play would be better but I was wrong.
The Tangled Yarn was an original play by a playwright somebody found and had brought in.
I do not know if he was someone’s friend or what, but I was not impressed by the script, I would tell you the plot but I never figured it out.
It was memory play about the main character’s mother, growing up with repressed sexual emotions, blah, blah, blah.
The set was an big open black void, a few acting cubes, a simple table and a big spider web of jute twine over the stage,
The Tangled Yarn,
get it,
do you need me to explain it,
I will,
you see . . . . .
The forth play of the year, The Counrty Wife, was much better and there were also many other productions to keep me busy that first year, senior projects, student plays, music events and more.
I will try to figure out the rest of my first year at Brockport and tell you more next time.
*
No comments:
Post a Comment