Theater

Theater Professor Ron Jenkins discusses his new work “To See the Stars”

by

Wesleyan Theater Professor Ron Jenkins was invited to present a new work at a Harvard University conference on race, class, and education called Disrupting the Discourse: Discussing the “Undiscussable’’, sponsored by the Graduate School of Education’s Alumni of Color, March 2-3, 2012. The work by Jenkins, which was commissioned by the Center for the Arts at Wesleyan as part of Feet to the Fire: Fueling the Future and was presented as a reading at Wesleyan on September 28, 2011 under the working title Recylcing Pain, has been revised and retitled To See the Stars.

The play is based on interviews conducted with participants of Jenkins’ prison education program inspired by Dante’s Divine Comedy and the Department of Justice Report on the Federal Prison Industry’s electronic recycling program. The play serves as a reminder that the importance of conserving and recycling the human resources in our jails is no less important than the challenge of conserving and recycling the natural resources of the planet.

“The play is an outgrowth of my prison outreach class,” Jenkins described. “I was happy to present it for a conference at Harvard that focused on the issue of race in education, because the prison system is one of the most blatant examples of racial injustice in American society, and the course gives students a chance to learn about that system from the inside and do something to help change it. The title of the conference was “Discussing the Undiscussable”, and I think it was important for the students of color in my prison outreach class to be part of a national discussion about race that included formerly incarcerated women of color, whose voices are rarely heard in public discourse. In addition to performing and participating in the post-performance discussion, my students had a chance to listen to Harvard Professor Sara Lawrence Lightfoot’s eloquent keynote address on the challenges that higher education faces in regards to social justice.”

Amber Smith ’13, who took the prison outreach class last year, expressed her experience at the conference. “It’s hard to come from an affluent college and go into prison, but these are people who are just like us. We are all related to them, because we are all affected by the prison system and we have to do something to help.”

Amber Smith ‘14, Esi Quagrainie ‘14, and Alma Sanchez-Eppler ‘14 sang during the performance. The performers with them were Saundra Duncan, Lynda Gardner and Deborah Ranger, who also performed at Wesleyan for Recycling Pain.

To See the Stars was also invited to perform at Brown University on March 1 as part of Arts in the One World: A Life’s Work conference. The conference focused on best practices for art in the prison system.

Spotlight on Seniors: Sarah Wolfe ’12 interviews playwright Ben Firke ’12

by

Ben Firke ’12 sits down with Sarah Wolfe ’12 to discuss his theater experience at Wesleyan, including the upcoming production of his play “Clem and Paul Build a Fort,” running March 1 to March 3 at 9pm in the ’92 Theater.

Ben Firke '12

Ben Firke ’12 has been writing plays for ten years, getting his start at theater camps when he was twelve. He was lucky enough to be able to see his in-progress scripts read by semi-professional actors, brought to the camp by director Elyse Singer, who runs the Hourglass Theater Company in New York City. These experiences, and finally getting to see his plays performed by the actors at the camp, gave him his first love for theater.

“I learned very early on in the process of being in theater to be flexible and roll with the punches. I learned that how you see it in your head isn’t how it’s going to be on stage, and also how it is in your head may actually be worse that what appears on stage. These actors know what they’re doing.”

This has been a motto for Firke as he’s written and produced plays while at Wesleyan. The plots of his scripts have been about as varied as the playwrights he considers inspirational, including his friend and mentor Amy Herzog (“4000 Miles”, “After the Revolution”, and “The Wendy Play”); Edward Albee (“The Zoo Story”, “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?”), who Firke was lucky enough to be pen-pals with for a time; Paula Vogel (go see “How I Learned to Drive” this weekend at 7pm in the ’92!); Sarah Ruhl (“Melancholy Play”, “Eurydice”); Ionesco; and Shakespeare.

Through Second Stage Firke has written and produced three plays, and directed two of them. The topics have been highly varied, from “How to Be a Man in West Belfast” (directed by Justin Wayne ’12), which was about growing up during the Troubles in Ireland, to his current project “Clem and Paul Build a Fort”, which opens this Thursday at 9pm in the ’92 Theater.

According to Firke, “Clem and Paul” is about “a bunch of young people who really care about doing the right thing but they don’t know what the right thing is.” The play addresses the concerns that all graduating seniors have, of what comes next, and how to make the right choices for the future, but it uses a unique lens to do so.

“Two students, Clem and Paul, have a one night stand, and ten months later Clem shows up and tells Paul that she’s decided to keep the kid, and he needs to decide whether he or not he’s going to be there for the kid.” More than just the issue of how to deal with early parenthood, the play is about the relationships that develop in college, between people who barely know each other and people who are already very comfortable with each other. Firke was especially interested in male friendships and how these relationships are different or similar to male-female relationships.

The Cast of "How to Be a Man in West Belfast"

Along with last spring’s “Shovels vs. Shubert”, which Firke wrote and directed, his fourth project at Wesleyan was also what he considered to be his first serious play, “Mark David Chapman: Live in Concert”. “It was a pretty dark drama about a record producer whose career has stagnated. He ends up producing an album (and then a concert) by Mark Chapman, the man who shot John Lennon, and how he finds himself identifying with rock n’ roll’s most notorious murderer.” It was done as a staged reading during Second Stage’s Outreach Weekend in the fall of 2008, but it was also produced in 2007 at the Blank Theater Company’s Young Playwrights Festival in Los Angeles. The production in this professional setting gave Firke an invaluable lesson in editing and working with constructive criticism.

What the budding playwright has learned throughout these experiences is that he just can’t quit –  not that he hasn’t tried. He related a notable experience in high school while working on a play that just wasn’t coming together. In the middle of his school’s library, he stood up, shut his computer and yelled “I’m done! I quit!” But sure enough, three days later, he was back at work again. His plans for after Wesleyan are still unclear, and he has wide interests including Government and Educational Policy, but he knows that no matter what he will continue writing plays and hoping to have people read and act them.

“Writing is a very solitary thing, you’re up in your own head space. And theater is a very different medium. But if I’m going to be a writer, I’m going to be a playwright, because that collaborative experience is something that I’d never trade for anything.”

Don’t miss “Clem and Paul Build a Fort” Thursday, March 1 through Saturday March 3 at 9pm in the ’92 Theater. Written and directed by Ben Firke ’12, Stage Managed by Jillian Ruben ’12 and starring Michelle Agresti ’14, Matt Lynch ’15, Eli Timm ’13 and Sarah Wolfe ’12.

Katherine Clifford ’14 talks to Artist in Residence Hari Krishnan about the Spring Faculty Dance Concert (Mar. 2 & 3)

by

Katherine Clifford ’14 interviews Hari Krishnan, Artist in Residence at Wesleyan University, on the Spring Faculty Dance Concert: March 2 & March 3, 2012 at 8pm in the CFA theater. Hari Krishnan is teaching the Bharata Natyam and Repertory and Performance classes this spring. The Spring Faculty Dance Concert will feature the U.S. premiere of “Quicksand” and the world premiere of “Nine.”

inDANCE. Photo by Miles Brokenshire.

The Wesleyan dancers performing the world premiere of “Nine” will include Abigail Baker ’12 and Aditi Shivaramakrishnan ’12 (both performances); Arianna Fishman ’13, Allison Greenwald ’14, Christian Lalonde ’13, Francesca Moree ’14, Cristina Ortiz ’15, Sarah La Rue ’12, and Rachel Rosengard ’14 (March 2); and graduate students Taylor Burton and Natalie Plaza, Dawanna Butler ’15, Arin Dineen ’13, Jessica Placzek ’12, Claire Feldman-Reich ’12, and Tess Scriptunas ’14 (March 3).

Q: Tell me about the piece “Quicksand,” which will be performed in the Spring Faculty Dance Concert; what does it explore, and how does your work combine South Indian Classical Dance, or Bharata Natyam, with contemporary influences?

A: Both pieces are about the search for identity, the search for selfhood. This is the overarching theme that binds the pieces together. “Quicksand” is a piece that I choreographed in March 2011 for a high profile dance festival in Canada. The work I do usually challenges dominant discourses about culture. I try to subvert popular culture, and I try to challenge stereotype and cliché. “Quicksand” is a prime example of this prominent theme. The inspiration of the work came from nine archetypal emotions popular in Indian classical dance. These nine emotions are usually hyper-exaggerated and done in a specific way by a classical dancer, usually female. I decided to subvert that popular depiction by using nine contemporary male dancers, and by creating a postmodern interpretation for those nine emotions.

“Quicksand” is like a metaphor for my life; my name is Hari Krishnan, my ethnicity is Indian, I teach Bharata Natyam and contemporary dance at Wesleyan. I have a dance company that does a whole range of work in Toronto, Canada. I choreograph and perform around the world: in Europe, Malaysia, Singapore, and India. Wherever I go and perform my work, some of the comments I get are that my work is not Indian enough, it’s too Western, or that my work is not Western enough, it’s too Indian. All those opposite reactions to my work put me in an interesting location as a dance artist and in terms of my identity. I use “Quicksand” as a metaphor to demonstrate that complexity; it is a personal meditation on identity and selfhood. From a dance point of view, it is an engaging, physical, high-energy work by nine top Canadian male dancers who are going to showcase a new, unique movement vocabulary that blends Indian classical gesture and contemporary dance body movements.

Q: What inspired your other piece “Nine,” and how does it further explore these themes?

A: As a parallel story to “Quicksand,” the Repertory and Performance class at Wesleyan will do the same interpretation as “Quicksand”, but in a “classical” mode, using nine dancers and the same nine emotions. By “classical,” I mean a classical Indian style of movement, but with contemporary presentation in terms of lighting design, spatial dynamics, and the dancers’ relationships with each other.

Q: What is unique about the show and how do the two pieces come together to form one coherent meaning?

A: What’s unique about this show is that it’s one idea, nine emotions, and two interpretations of this idea: one postmodern and one classical, which are displayed through radically different works. It is the culmination of my own artistic, research, and pedagogical practices. It also allows me to blend my two worlds; I’m artistic director of inDANCE, the Toronto-based dance company, and I’ve been at Wesleyan for over ten years now.

Q: What do you hope people will gain from the show? Why should people come see it?

A: This show is for anyone who is interested in dance, design and music. We have a U.K.-based composer who composed the music for “Quicksand.” He has combined electronic and computer-generated music with music from popular culture. “Nine” consists of an amazing Indian classical dance call, which is very lush and rich. Visual design and costume design are also very strong; “Quicksand” is a multimedia work. The lighting design for “Nine” has been specially lit by Theater Professor Jack Carr.

This is for anybody interested in movement and high-energy physicality. It is about celebrating diversity and experiencing humanity in various hues, colors, and tints. It is a bizarre look at life, and a fun, accessible, and engaging evening of dance. The dance department reflects the concert in terms of its openmindedness and the eclectic dance courses we offer in the dance department: from Javanese to Ballet to Modern to Bharata Natyam to West African. This is the kind of concert that can really thrive at Wesleyan, and it’s a testimony to the open-minded, progressive attitude at Wesleyan.

Finally, I tell people that it is a must see for “anyone interested in dangerous liaisons and delicious diversity.” I hope that the audience will come in with an open-minded attitude, and not expect either Indian or contemporary dance; this is “Wesleyan dance.”

Shira Engel ’14 reviews the annual Wesleyan performance of “The Vagina Monologues”

by

Shira Engel ’14 reviews the annual Wesleyan performance of “The Vagina Monologues”. 

This weekend marked the belated true meaning of Valentines Day for most Wesleyan students: The Vagina Monologues. More valued than pink candy hearts are the cast of student actors dressed in purple and black, spilling their souls out on the stage of the ’92 Theater. It is no surprise that all the shows were sold out.

Even though the audience was encouraged to shut off their cell phones, they were also encouraged to be loud when appropriate. For The Vagina Monologues, this meant screaming “cunt” in response to one particular monologue, and then cheering at enacted orgasms.

What is beautiful about The Vagina Monologues is that it balances the sad with the hilarious, the tear-jerking with the gut-wrenching. A part of the national V-Day movement started by Eve Ensler, The Vagina Monologues is a way to artfully spread awareness of the violence against women in the Democratic Republic of the Congo. And the proceeds of those $4 tickets that came straight out of student accounts went to Planned Parenthood of Connecticut and the national V-Day movement.

While a tribute to the Congo, the show is not only about Congolese women. The diversity of the monologues is their common thread. They range from the voices of sex workers to the voices of elderly women learning to rekindle their sexuality.

The actors were fearless. From freshmen to seniors, they rose to the task of reproducing a production that happens all over the country. It was their fearlessness that evoked a raw production that had the audience gripped, hooked, and responding emotionally. Even with the evident sadness, I left inspired and happy, satisfied by monologues that were about the expression of truth, in a variety of forms.

To learn more about The Vagina Monologues, visit the V-Day website.

Spotlight on Seniors: Sarah Wolfe ’12 interviews designer Evan DelGaudio ‘12

by
Evan DelGaudio '12

Evan DelGaudio ’12 is a senior specializing in lighting and set design for theater and dance. A Theater and Math double major, he is also on Second Stage Staff, and has worked on more than eleven shows as a designer here, from lighting “Yalta” his first year here, to doing set and lights for “Pillowman” this past week, and more shows to come this spring! Sarah Wolfe ’12 sat down to talk with him earlier this week about design, Wesleyan, Second Stage, and the future!

Q. You transferred here from Brandeis. Why did you choose to do so and are you happy with the choice?

I knew when I was starting college that I wanted to be a math and theater double major, and I could have done that at Brandeis, but I really did not like the math department there. And the theater department seemed really focused on their graduate students. People I knew that were very talented as undergraduates had the privilege when they were seniors of assisting a grad student on a design. And I thought ‘that doesn’t sound like a great way to learn.’ I think it was pretty obvious midway through the year that I wanted to transfer. I don’t regret anything about my transferring experience, I think it worked out great. I feel totally integrated into Wesleyan.

"Waiting For Godot" Set

I joined Second Stage right at the end of my first semester in the fall. I knew student theater was something that I wanted to do, it was something I’d done in high school and at Brandeis, so I applied. It worked out well that the Buildings and Maintenance Liaison, who is in charge of scenery, was retiring at the end of that year, so it gave me a role to step up into. I’ve had a great experience on Second Stage staff and I’ll be on it until the end of this semester.

Q. What are your plans for after graduation (the dreaded question…)?

I’ve worked for the last three summers at The Weston Playhouse Theater Company, a small summer regional theater in Vermont. I’m going back for a fourth summer, this year I’m going to be the Assistant Technical Director. They’re summer only, so in September I’ll be looking for jobs, probably in New York or Boston, but definitely staying on this coast. I’ve thought about a lot of things, I’ve thought about going on tour for a while, I think that’s a good thing to do while you’re young, doing a Broadway Across America tour or seeing what kind of permanent employment is available – hopefully designing and doing my own shows on the side.

"Blackbird" Set

Q. Can you talk about your recent experience with “Pillowman”, which kicked off the spring Second Stage season? 

Nate and I knew we were going to “Pillowman” since April, and I think we both see it as our big capstone project. I think the thing that appealed to me about “Pillowman” is that it’s completely free. It’s very much a blending of realities, it allowed a lot.

Q. What’s your first step as a designer, after you’ve committed to doing a show?

It always starts with the text. I’m very glad that I’m a theater major, because I do enjoy reading the plays. People often ask ‘Why do you go to Wesleyan, because you don’t really learn set design or set construction like you would at a conservatory.’ But it’s because I do enjoy the study of theater and reading plays, so it always starts with the text, pulling out the mood, action and theme of this piece, what the story is that this team wants to tell. Talking with the director and really just tailoring the vision to what we’re trying to create in this one piece. And I think from there it’s just read the text a lot. Get to know it really well. For the shows that I did last fall, I really worked over the summer – I thought about “The Last Five Years” almost every day, listened to the music, a song or two, kept it in my head. You’re trying to create a world for this play to take place in, so I just try to completely immerse my brain in it.

"Icarus or an Angel" Set

There’s always some moment in tech week or production week where it finally feels like the vision is up on stage. A lot of the time I don’t enjoy the building or the painting of it. That’s the boring part, I want to see it up on stage. But there’s definitely a time when most of the scenery is up, everything is painted just right, and you see it with the actors on it. I’d say the best part for me is getting to the day when the actors can actually start playing on the set. I can have drawings of things and they look great, I can build something and it could look great, but until someone can walk on it it’s kind of useless.

Be sure to check out the other shows that Evan is working on this semester, including “Mao the Musical” (February 23-25), “Title of Show” (April 19-21) and “Urinetown” (March 10-12).

Apply to tell your story as part of “RISK!” on Friday February 10

by

Do you have uncensored stories that you share with your good friends, that you want to try sharing on stage?

RISK!

“RISK!”, the live show where people tell true stories “they never thought they’d dare to share in public,” is coming to Crowell Concert Hall for two performances (7pm and 10pm) on Friday February 10, co-sponsored Desperate Measures Improv(e) Comedy and the Center for the Arts and featuring San Francisco-based comedian W. Kamau Bell (Comedy Central).

“RISK!” is looking for a total of 8 storytellers – 4 Wesleyan students, and 4 Wesleyan community members (i.e. faculty, staff, etc. ) – to be a part of these shows!

There will also be an audio podcast created of the performances. The stories are usually 8 to 10 minutes long, zero in on one incident (or series of incidents), and have a beginning and end. They can even be tragic, rather than funny.

Here’s two episodes so you can hear how it works!
Because we’re producing a podcast, “RISK!” creator Kevin Allison (from MTV’s “The State”) will need to see a pitch of your story to consider how it might fit into the show at Wesleyan. Your pitch should be somewhere between 100 and 250 words long. It should include how the story ends, and ideally it should cover these five points:

1) SET THE SCENE – Where were you in life when this began?

2) WHAT GOT THE BALL ROLLING – What incident made taking action necessary?

3) WHAT WAS AT STAKE – What hope or fear drove you? What did you stand to gain or lose?

4) HOW I TURNED THE CORNER – What finally changed this situation, for better or worse?

5) WHAT’S RISKY ABOUT THIS –  Why do you feel it’s daring to be sharing this?

Kevin will let us know if he is interested in hearing more about your story.

The theme for the stories at Wesleyan is “Discovery.” So, these might be stories where a person tried something they didn’t think they’d like, but did. Or when someone didn’t think they had it in them to succeed, but they did. Or when someone was confident they were on the right track, but life gave them a surprise they learned from.

Send your pitches to kevin@risk-show.com
W. Kamau Bell

If you have any other questions, write to Carrie Cohen ’12  ccohen@wesleyan.edu

And you can watch videos of W. Kamau Bell at http://www.wkamaubell.com

 “[RISK! is] jaw-dropping, hysterically funny, and just plain touching.”

–Slate.com

 

“W. Kamau Bell is ferociously funny!”

–Robin Williams

 

“W. Kamau Bell is the most important guy doing comedy right now. Do yourself a favor and go see him. He’s got the most astute, hilarious and completely righteous material going and he’s going to be a legend in his own lifetime like Richard Pryor and Lenny Bruce. Think Bill Hicks but slightly taller.”
–Margaret Cho

 

“W. Kamau Bell is in the vanguard of a new era of American comedy for an unsettling, troubling, and strangely hopeful time. Firmly in the fearless tradition of Mort Sahl, Lenny Bruce, Richard Pryor, and Chris Rock. Comedy as common sense purged of the absurd hypocrisy that is Our America.”
–Vernon Reid of the Grammy Award-winning band Living Colour

First Look: “Lift Your Head”, Senior Thesis Production by Sarah Wolfe ’12 (Dec. 8-10)

by

Shira Engel ’14  and Malik Salahuddin ’13 provide a first look at the senior thesis production by Sarah Wolfe ’12, “Lift Your Head” (Dec. 8-10).

Lift Your Head, a senior thesis production by Sarah Wolfe ’12, is a truly collaborative creative process. She and Mica Taliaferro ’11 and Emma Maclean ’14 followed a trail of inspiration that led them to this final production, which has been influenced by Wesleyan’s multimedia and collaborative approach to theater. From transforming short stories into short plays, to reading Euripides’ The Trojan Women, Lift Your Head is what a senior thesis should be – a culminating and productive representation of Sarah’s time at Wesleyan.

Click here to watch a preview video of Lift Your Head created by Malik Salahuddin ’13.

Ms. Wolfe retells The Trojan Women, using various modern adaptations and translations of the narrative to tell the story of Hecuba, her daughters, and Helen at the end of the Trojan War. The Trojan Women has been called by many the greatest anti-war play. These performances will examine its relevance throughout history as told by playwrights including Ellen McLaughlin, Charles Mee, Jean Paul Sartre and Karen Hartman. These performances are in partial fulfillment of Ms. Wolfe’s Honors Thesis in Theater.

Don’t miss Lift Your Head, playing from Thursday, December 8 through Saturday, December 10, 2011  at 8pm in the Patricelli ’92 Theater, located at 213 High Street on the Wesleyan campus in Middletown. Tickets are free, and will be made available of the day of each performance at the Wesleyan University Box Office, located at 45 Wyllys Avenue. Off-campus guests only may call the box office at 860-685-3355 after 10am to reserve tickets to be held in their name until fifteen minutes prior to curtain. On-campus guests must pick up their tickets at the box office. There is a two-ticket limit per person for free ticketed events.

Nicholas Orvis ’13 discusses “The Great God Brown” (Nov. 16-19)

by

This weekend Wesleyan’s Theater Department presents “The Great God Brown” by Eugene O’Neill, directed by Associate Professor Yuriy Kordonskiy. The play follows the life and conflicts of two men, Dion Anthony and Billy Brown, who are friends and rivals throughout their lives. Originally written for four actors, Mr. Kordonskiy has cast ten actors to portray the complexity of the relationships. Earlier this week, Sarah Wolfe ’12 sat down with Nicholas Orvis ’13, who is the Stage Manager for the show, to talk about the experience so far and what to expect this weekend.

Q: What do you think about Eugene O’Neill’s original play?

I think it’s a brilliant show. It’s a good chance for people to come see some of Eugene O’Neill’s edgier work. I actually have not liked most of the Eugene O’Neill I’ve read because a lot of it, especially Long Day’s Journey Into Night, I found dull and dragging. This one is a fast two and half hours (and that was after we cut 40% of the text). But it’s really a show where he took a lot of risks and created a really exciting, controversial, not simple piece of theater. It’s definitely not classroom Eugene O’Neill.

Q: Can you talk about how you’re doing this four character play with a cast of ten?

A lot of what the play deals with, is the idea is that we have multiple personas that we put forth. The way you act with your family is different than the way you act with your friends, and so on and so forth. O’Neill originally did this with the use of masks, which we are also using. But one thing we talked about in developing the play is that we think the idea that we have only two of these personas, our public one and our private one, is kind of an old fashioned, limited idea. So we decided to have multiple actors playing the same part. We have three men who are playing Dion. We have two women who are playing Margaret [the love interest], two women who are playing the fourth character, Cybel, who is a prostitute/mother figure to both of the men. And Billy Brown is played by one performer in the first half of the show and in the second half – I won’t spoil anything substantial by saying he begins to deteriorate and as he deteriorates we add more and more performers, so that by the end he is actually being played by five people simultaneously.

Q: Talk about the use of masks, and how that’s been in the rehearsal process with people who have used masks very little or not at all?

It’s been really great to watch. We began working with neutral mask (developed by Jacques LeCoq) while we were still reading the text. For a while we had parallel work with just the mask theory work and the text and discussion of the characters. At a certain point we merged them and began working with sketches of the character masks.

Q: Talk about working with Professor Yuriy Kordonskiy as a director.

Yuriy’s phenomenal. Watching him work with a cast is very rewarding. He has the ability to see choices in the text that make perfect sense but aren’t necessarily highlighted, but as soon as he suggests them, we all go “Ohh!” So that’s very exciting.

It’s been a little hectic too. He is a very well known director in Romania and there was actually a week in our rehearsal process where he was in Romania, opening a play that he had directed there over the summer. It was a good experience for all of us in the production, because it pushed us to work ourselves and to develop the material ourselves. At the same time it was a little bit terrifying because we thought, “What if he comes back and everything we’ve done is wrong? And then we’ve just lost the whole week of rehearsals!”

Q: What’s your favorite part of the rehearsal process been, do you think?

There’s always a point where it starts to come together in a way that it hasn’t before. When we cast the show, we didn’t put any of them in roles. So we spent a couple weeks working as a group with the text. We’d be switching roles around, we’d be doing multiple scenes at the same time with different size groups of people. Several weeks into the rehearsal process, Yuriy solidified the casting. That was the point where things really kicked into high gear.

Q: Has there been a particularly challenging part of the process, either for you or for the cast?

It is hard, because we have no one [in the cast] who has intensively worked with mask before, and mask is a very demanding aesthetic style. It’s very physically demanding, and there are also a lot of technical challenges. Making yourself heard is much harder when you’re wearing a full-face mask. So that’s been a challenge but they’ve risen to it beautifully.

Come see “The Great God Brown”, this weekend in the CFA Theater. Tickets are on sale now and selling fast. This exciting show is not one you will want to miss.

In addition to Orvis, the ensemble includes Bennet Kirschner ’13 as Assistant Director, Mandy Goldstone-Dahlin ‘12, Emily Hunt ‘13, Jake Hunt ‘12, Zachary Libresco ‘13, Paulie Lowther ‘13, Cat Lum ‘12, Joey Mehling ‘14, Julian Silver ‘12, Anna Sproule ‘14, and Eli Timm ’13. Performances are 8pm on Wednesday, Thursday, and Friday; and 2pm and 8pm on Saturday.

Submit your art to Swerved by October 26

by

Swerved is an online communal database of Wesleyan creativity, and starting this November 7 they will be hosting an exhibition at the Zilkha Gallery. Students are encouraged to submit any kind of art for the show. All forms of creativity are welcome, such as video and sound, 2D/3D art, photography, prose and poetry. The deadline for submissions is Wednesday October 26. You can enter by submitting your work to the Swerved website, at which point it will be automatically considered for entry.

To submit, email your work to hello@swerved.org or to emailSWERVED@gmail.com. They ask that submissions be under 10MB and that your include your name, class year, the dimensions of the piece, the title and the medium. Submitters whose work is chosen will be informed by email, and a hard copy will be requested for display.

 

Julian Silver ’12 and Michaela Swee ’12 discuss Second Stage

by

Sarah Wolfe ’12 talks with Julian Silver ’12 and Michaela Swee ’12 about their Second Stage experiences.

If you like to get involved in theater on campus, Second Stage’s presence is exciting and vibrant. Starting the first week of each semester, Wesleying is flooded with audition notices and calls for Stage Managers, Board Ops, Technicians, and Musicians. Some look by these and wait for opening night to see what Second Stage has decided to offer up this week, but there are some who make a point of never missing an audition. Earlier this week I sat down with Julian Silver ’12 and Michaela Swee ’12, two seniors who claim to have a “why not?” attitude when it comes to auditioning for shows.

“You don’t end up doing it all obviously, but the experience of auditioning is just priceless,” says Silver, and Swee agrees wholeheartedly. But for two who claim to not “do it all”, they’ve had an impressive run of shows in their time at Wesleyan. If you’ve gone to see Second Stage shows in the last three and a half years, you’ve undoubtedly seen one or both of them, featured in shows ranging from Comedy to Mystery to Musical.

Swee, a Psychology major, has been in seven shows, while Silver has been in a whopping eleven (with at least one more planned for the spring).

The two made an effort since becoming friends freshman year to perform together as much as possible. That wish became a reality in How to Be a Man in West Belfast (written and directed by Ben Firke ’12), Glass Menagerie(A Performance Project dir. Bennett Kirschner ’13), Black Comedy (dir. Shelby Arnold ’12  and Samantha Melvin ’12) and the recent production of Dog Sees God, which marks Swee’s last performance at Wesleyan, as she is graduating in December.

Both of them noted The Glass Menagerie as one of the most interesting experiences they’ve had at Wesleyan.“[It] was a pretty insane experience,” mused Swee. “I think that was the most frightening experience I’ve ever had as an actor.”

The reason for this was simple: the actors, under the direction of Kirschner, were told at the beginning of the process that they were not going to rehearse with each other. Instead, they rehearsed individually with Kirschner and had improvised family dinners between the actors playing Amanda (Ariela Rotenberg ’10), Tom (Silver) and Laura (Swee). Swee and Matt Alexander ’12, who played Jim (her gentleman caller) were not even allowed to see each other outside of rehearsals. The first time they interacted was in the play, on opening night, creating a very real environment of new interactions between the four characters.

Though both of them related the doubts they had at the beginning of the process, they came to value this production as one of the “most productive” in their careers here, simply for the challenges it offered.  “That is a testament to Wesleyan, and Second Stage in particular,” noted Silver. “It offers the opportunity to people to offer themselves. Some freshman can come up and say, I don’t want to rehearse the cast with each other!”

Beyond Glass Menagerie, Swee’s favorite productions at Wesleyan were Songs for a New World (dir. Elizabeth Trammell ’10) and Dog Sees God. The two shows are a good representative of the variety that Second Stage presents. One is a musical cabaret of sorts, filled with haunting, beautiful, occasionally comic and often tragic songs and no dialogue. On the other hand, Dog Sees God is an often funny, sometimes darkly disturbing glimpse into what could happen if the characters from the beloved comic strip “Peanuts” were to grow up and go to high school. Swee’s experiences could have been polar opposites. Yet in both her strongest memory is the joy of rehearsal – for Songs for a New World it was getting to sing with and look up to some of Wesleyan’s finest singers, and for Dog Sees God it was discovering the joy of a silly, over the top character who enlivened her fellow actors throughout the rehearsal process.

For Silver, a particularly notable experience was Dead Sharks (written by Will Dubbs ’14, dir. Dakota Gardner ’11) in which the cast traveled to New York City to perform the play as part of Manhattan Reperatory Theater’s Winterfest 2011. “We all got to go to New York and take the train every weekend with each other, so that was a cast bonding experience like one I’ve never experienced before. And it was semi-professional. That was one of the first times I walked out into the audience and I didn’t know anyone except a couple people.”

Other than Dead Sharks, Silver cited Yalta (written by Elizabeth Gauvey-Kern ’11 and directed by Gauvey-Kern and Hannah Weiss ’12) as one of the most challenging for him as an actor. He played President Roosevelt in the three hour production detailing the events of the Yalta conference. On another note, he too found one of his favorites in Dog Sees God, in which he played Matt (Pig Pen). He called the process for that, as well as Black Comedy, “pure fun”.

Both Silver and Swee continually come back to the people of Second Stage when discussing their past experiences. “The plays come and go,” Silver says, “but I haven’t regretted any of the experiences just because of the people I’ve been able to work with throughout the process. It never fails – the people who work in theater who are willing to put themselves out there in Second Stage, are consistently some of the most creative people on campus.”

Their experiences, from the variety of shows they’ve been in to their own growth as performers, truly speaks to the function of Second Stage. Both Swee and Silver knew they wanted to do theater at Wesleyan, but chose not to be theater majors and to instead pursue theater in an extra curricular form. Through their excitement in the audition process and their willingness to sign on to a huge variety of performances and directors, they have created an impressive repertoire of roles. And yet in reflecting back on their years here, their joy chiefly lies in the process of putting together a show rather than with opening night or the curtain call.

Both Swee and Silver plan to somehow include theater in their lives post-college. Though Swee plans on pursuing Forensic Psychology and Silver is moving to L.A. to try his hand at the film world, they both discussed the importance of theater in their lives, and their unwillingness to let it fall behind.

“I definitely want theater, and film,” says Michaela, “to be a part of my life… It’s such a crucial part of who I am as a person that I can’t really see living a life without it.”