Jack Hitt and I have two more exciting opportunities for MAKING UP THE TRUTH in the new year. In March, we will have a two week residency at 3LD. We will work with amazing video designer Aaron Harrow to develop the multimedia aspects of the piece. Many many steps up from the Power Point presentation we’ve been struggling with up till now. Then in June, we will be part of the New Haven Arts and Ideas festival. I’ll post details when I have them.

Happy New Year!

We’ll also be at New York Theater Workshop on Monday Oct 18 at 3pm.

Here’s all the info:

Jack Hitt tells extravagant, true tales – a yarn about the childhood neighbor who was one of the first men to become a woman, or his first apartment super with a deadly secret identity. But, the stories always lead people to ask, did that really happen? The Atlantic Monthly recently called This American Life contributor Jack Hitt “one of America’s best storytellers.” In his new show MAKING UP THE TRUTH, he shares his stories and learns that, of all things, new scientific breakthroughs point to an answer to that question: Do extraordinary things only happen to certain people, or do we all swim unaware in a sea of the uncanny and unbelievable?

Friday, Sept 24 at 7pm, Calderwood Pavilion at the BCA, 527 Tremont St, Boston

rsvp: huntingtontheatre.org/makingup

ALL DAY SUCKERS by Susan Dworkin, produced by New Feet Productions,  premieres at the New York International Fringe Festival. There’s only 4 more performances – come check us out!

By RACHEL SALTZ Published: May 7, 2010

The first thing you hear in “Milk,” Emily DeVoti’s offbeat, flawed new play, is the mooing of cows. A strangely comforting sound, it represents the domesticated life of the Massachusetts dairy farm where the drama is set. But this is no peaceable kingdom: bankruptcy threatens the farm’s existence, and something wild lurks just beyond the fence.

“Milk,” a production of New Georges and New Feet Productions at Here Arts Center, blends realism with a touch of the fantastic. That wild thing is Auroch (Carolyn Baeumler), the world’s last undomesticated cow. She can talk (and read), though only Meg (Jordan Baker), who owns the farm with her husband, Ben (Jon Krupp), hears her.

A strange New York businessman, James (Peter Bradbury), who wants to “collaborate” in the farm’s “living atmosphere,” provides its unlikely salvation. (Too unlikely.) He pays Meg and Ben a tidy sum, and parks himself and his daughter in the country with them.

Mr. Bradbury’s intensity gives James a sinister cast, and you wonder if this deus ex machina will bring supernatural trouble. But while aggressive — he wants to introduce bulls to the farm — he’s no monster, and the charge he brings to the farm is of the human, all-too-human sort.

In fact, with the exception of Ms. Baeumler’s cow-suited Auroch, the creatures in “Milk” are pretty ordinary, as are their problems. Meg is restless, and she and Ben have a teetering marriage; their son, Matt (an excellent Noah Robbins), is eager to experience life outside the milking shed; and James and his daughter (Anne Kull) are running away from pain.

Ms. DeVoti’s drama often seems ordinary too, or diffuse. Yet there is an engagingly original streak running through her writing. Her scenes don’t all work, but they can come at you from unusual angles, and she fills “Milk” with interesting details (lots of cow knowledge) and unexpected touches. For example, Meg, a graduate school dropout, isn’t a lapsed literary type, but a mathematician.

The director, Jessica Bauman, stages action deftly (especially nice is a wordless bit in which pails are handed back and forth from the house to the barn) and has assembled a fine production team. (Kudos to Susan Zeeman Rogers’s just-abstract-enough set and Amy Altadonna’s witty sound design.) But she doesn’t pull great things out of the actors. In the central role of Meg, Ms. Baker is too brittle to win our sympathy, and her decisive action at the end doesn’t pack an emotional punch.

Neither, finally, does “Milk.” Though it may send you home ruminating on its themes: city vs. country; wild vs. domesticated; stability vs. freedom.

By Ruth McCann Tuesday, May 4 2010

Milk is not a play about Harvey Milk—it’s about a small New England dairy farm in the 1980s. But don’t let that put you off. A New Georges–New Feet collaboration premiering at Here, directed by Jessica Bauman, Milk is rich, unexpected, and often enthrallingly vivid.

As big agro looms, the farm’s proprietors, Meg and Ben, find themselves cash-strapped, cabin-feverish, and flummoxed by their teenage son’s nascent rebelliousness. When James, a city-type with a private helicopter, offers to compensate the couple for the privilege of bringing his daughter to the farm to see how “real people live,” they can hardly afford to refuse. Values, aspirations, and wills collide; in the midst of it all, the world’s last wild cow begins appearing to Meg (the incredibly elegant Jordan Baker), urging her to be something of a wild bovine herself.

Milk suffers from a surfeit of genres; comedy, realism, and elegiac monologue share the stage with a talking heifer, which makes pacing tricky. And poetic introspection (infused with milk metaphors) gets laid on a bit thick. But put the excess material aside, and a dynamic story remains. Playwright Emily DeVoti has produced some perfect morsels of dialogue, vivifying characters who raise piercing questions about choice, consumption, death, domesticity, and the decidedly mixed virtues of the simple life.

Here it is:

Somebody recently told me that one of my plays, “The Understudy,” was “too funny.”

Comedy is historically undervalued, and one does wonder when we’re going to get over that. But “too funny”? Now we have to deal with “too funny”?

I started asking around about it. My friend Jessica Bauman, who is a wonderful director, felt like she understood the criticism and tried to explain it in a nice way.

“Your plays are so funny people don’t notice how serious they are,” she said. “They’re enjoying themselves too much. So they stop listening.”

For those of you who actually do want to read the whole thing, it’s quite smart and interesting. Check it out! http://artsbeat.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/07/01/theater-talkback-the-perils-of-being-too-funny/

by Emily DeVoti
directed by Jessica Bauman  

with Carolyn Baeumler, Jordan Baker, Peter Bradbury,
Jon Krupp, Anna Kull, Noah Robbins

design Susan Zeeman Rogers, Lenore Doxsee,
Amy Altadonna, Emily Pepper  

psm  Kat West    asm Emily Paige Ballou    props Ashley Gagner
line producer Lisa Dozier     assist dir Samantha Tella
casting Paul Davis, Calleri Casting     press Jim Baldassare  
associate producer Rehana Mirza
produced by Susan Bernfield & Sarah Cameron Sunde  

APRIL 26 TO MAY 22
Mondays through Saturdays
most performances 8.30pm
April 26, 27, 28 & May 3, 4, 5 — 7pm  

opening night Thursday April 29   

at HERE 
145 6th Avenue (enter on Dominick, 1 block south of Spring)    

$35 premium seats (reserved) / $25 general admission
Mondays pay-what-you-will (at the door only) tickets www.here.org or call 212-352-3101

Rural New England, just before Reagan’s second term.  Meg and Ben are a creditor away from losing their family farm.  To the rescue flies a high-powered businessman — in a private chopper no less — offering a tidy sum for a taste of farm life and the pure, raw milk that goes with it.   

Even before locavores roamed the earth, “back to the land” was hardly as simple as its promise; livestock and humans aren’t known for behaving as expected.  And so it is in MILK, an elegant parable of change set on the cusp of a shifting American landscape.  

www.newgeorges.org

Good things are in the works for this winter and spring. I’m in preproduction for MILK by Emily DeVoti, which is being co-produced by New Georges and New Feet at HERE, starting performances April 26. It’s a beautiful play – I’ve been working on it for years. We have great designers and are putting together a wonderful cast, including many who have helped us develop it. More details when I have them.

On March 8, I’m directing a reading of one of my favorite plays I’ve ever directed: MAIDEN VOYAGES by Honor Molloy and Bronagh Murphy. It was the first play I ever directed for New Georges at the old, decrepit Beckett Theater in 1992. We are doing the reading for the Working Theater’s 25th Anniversary season, featuring songs by Grammy winner Susan McKeown (who was in the original cast). The reading will also be a tribute to Bronagh, who died of cancer far too young last spring in Ireland. Again, all the specifics when I have them.

Other than that, trying not to get too discouraged and depressed about Haiti, Massachusetts, health care reform, unemployment, the stupidity of the American electorate and all the other ways the world is falling apart. But who isn’t?

And, of course, the real reason to have a website is to let people know what I’m doing and have done. I just directed “and it seems to me a very good sign…” by Harrison Rivers for the 24 Hour Plays on Broadway at the American Airlines Theater. Amazing cast – John Krasinski, Sam Rockwell, Naomi Watts and Amber Tamblyn. Crazy, fun day of theater boot camp in glamor land.

And for the future: please come to my workshop reading of “All Day Suckers” by Susan Dworkin. It’s funny, smart, very timely and has ukulele-accompanied songs.

Don’t Pet the Zookeeper, the newest show from the smart and adventurous folks at Rising Phoenix Rep, is a study in paradox. It is funny and it is sad; it is darkly satirical but at its heart it believes in something approaching pure and ideal love. It makes for a fascinating, entertaining, and sometimes challenging hour of early-evening theatre, and highlights the talents of a number of remarkable young artists.

It takes place in an office that—it is almost immediately apparent—is in no way affiliated with a zoo. Twyla, a young woman with a surprising background, has come here to apply for a job; Humphrey is conducting the interview. At first, the atmosphere is merely off-kilter, then surreal; Humphrey’s non-sequitor questions and, sometimes, Twyla’s unexpected replies are hilarious, the stuff of a Monty Python sketch:

TWYLA: What type of position am I being considered for?
HUMPHREY: Zookeeper.
TWYLA: Zookeeper?
HUMPHREY: No, beekeeper. Housekeeper. (Sure of it now) Zookeeper.

But things quickly get stranger, darker, more sinister. The play’s tone shifts into the blackest kind of absurdism as Humphrey starts singing about his magic shoes (and demonstrating how the shoes taught him to dance) and viciously beats up his receptionist (who, he says, likes it). Twyla reveals things about herself that lead us to understand that, despite all the evidence, she probably nevertheless is in the right place. And then the tables turn, the tone shifts even more dramatically, and Twyla and Humphrey find themselves in serious trouble. Possibly.

I hate to give away more; playwright Napoleon Ellsworth is good at surprising his audience, often with something joltingly funny but sometimes with stuff that’s just jolting. He says, in a program note, that one of the inspirations for Don’t Pet the Zookeeper was “how a person could possibly maintain his humanity in a situation as dehumanizing as, say, Abu Ghraib.” You will see how such a notion finds its way into a play that starts out as a silly job interview sketch if you see this show (and you should)….and how it can somehow give way to a musical finale that goes “We are animals in love.”

Director Jessica Bauman and producer Rising Phoenix Rep use all of the available space in the non-traditional Seventh Street Small Stage to great advantage. Rising Phoenix artistic director Daniel Talbott appears in a very small role (to strong effect); the rest of the cast is superb. Newcomer Jacob Murphy captures both of the potentially conflicting aspects of the enigmatic Receptionist and makes them seem organically part of the same rather brutal character. Julie Kline (who also choreographed the short dance sequences) similarly humanizes Twyla, making her very much someone that we care about, despite some of the facts we learn about her. As Humphrey, Denis Butkus gives a brilliant performance, one that takes in physical comedy, singing, dancing (the sequence with the magic shoes is priceless), and several shocking shifts in personality. Being able to witness such expert young actors in such intimate surroundings is one of the great gifts of Rising Phoenix’s aesthetic.

Don’t Pet the Zookeeper is upsetting in places yet somehow comforting; though you’ll leave the show (at about 7:10pm) primed for the rest of whatever your evening has in store for you, you’ll still be pondering and wondering about Ellsworth’s characters and what happens to them.

Review by Martin Denton · July 25, 2008