MONDAY NEWS!
The talented and charismatic Michael Garces will be awarded the Princess Grace Statue this year. I am so impressed and amazed by this man. We've known Michael since we were wee apprentices at Actors Theatre of Louisville and he was in town for Humana directing When the Sea Drowns in Sand (renamed Havana is Waiting for its run at The Cherry Lane) by Eduardo Machado, whose thoughts about grad school I've been rereading lately (please draw your attention to my buddy Isaac's blog), and who I last saw in the lobby of the Intar/Interart building when Atticus and Justin and I were loading out our LA FEMME set to drive it to 59e59 and Eduardo was waiting for the elevator, which we were breaking, and he walked up to the second floor and got it unbroken for us.
Theater. Yow. Small world.
Michael is writing a play for our Minstrel Show. This is a post I intended to write a few days ago, when I first read about The Princess Grace Statue, but I wanted to wait until I heard back from Michael who emailed me today to assure me his Minstrel Play is on its way so now I can relax and blog about how thrilled I am that Michael is writing for us. Last year he wrote a piece called Over Exposed for 1000 Words which Mary Kate Burke directed and a few months prior to that I directed a short piece of his, entitled off season for Prospect Theater Company. It starred Pat Dempsey, Lori McNally, and Joey Williamson and was the hardest stream of consciousness text three actors have ever had to learn. Plus they performed drenched in water (in an old church where the only tap water was freezing cold), I believe Joey was shirtless, and all three of them faced the audience dead on the entire time. It was a terrifying piece of text about thrill seekers riding out Hurricane Katrina in which Joey had an incredible long impassioned speech about the exhilaration of fear that he never quite learned all the words of. Next time you see him say "Screamhole". He'll know what you mean. And he'll shake with terror and scream like a bichon.
All this is by way of saying Michael's writing is so exciting and so angry and so funny and scenes are often beautiful tapestries of poetry, with characters finishing each others' phrases, lines repeated, and varied, and changed, and then repeated again, they are intense and they are wordy. He plays with text in a hyper-real way. It sounds natural but it's heightened. It lives in our reality and just above it. It's beautiful to listen to, challenging to work on, and a bitch to memorize.
Of course his contributions to theater don't stop there. When we first met Michael he was primarily directing, and now he serves as the Artistic Director of Cornerstone in LA. And he is still finding the time to write for our little company here in New York.
I'm so grateful that we have the opportunities to work with artists like Michael. It enriches our company. By continuing to reach out to other artists besides the actors we always work with we are able to create diverse work instead of enjoying a teeny tiny Shalimar theater bubble. It's important to keep our own little artistic community strong and thriving and it's also incredibly important to continue to contribute to the larger theatrical community, which I hope we are able to achieve in our own ways.
All this is by way of saying CONGRATULATIONS MICHAEL! There is noone more deserving of that statue than you.
Theater. Yow. Small world.
Michael is writing a play for our Minstrel Show. This is a post I intended to write a few days ago, when I first read about The Princess Grace Statue, but I wanted to wait until I heard back from Michael who emailed me today to assure me his Minstrel Play is on its way so now I can relax and blog about how thrilled I am that Michael is writing for us. Last year he wrote a piece called Over Exposed for 1000 Words which Mary Kate Burke directed and a few months prior to that I directed a short piece of his, entitled off season for Prospect Theater Company. It starred Pat Dempsey, Lori McNally, and Joey Williamson and was the hardest stream of consciousness text three actors have ever had to learn. Plus they performed drenched in water (in an old church where the only tap water was freezing cold), I believe Joey was shirtless, and all three of them faced the audience dead on the entire time. It was a terrifying piece of text about thrill seekers riding out Hurricane Katrina in which Joey had an incredible long impassioned speech about the exhilaration of fear that he never quite learned all the words of. Next time you see him say "Screamhole". He'll know what you mean. And he'll shake with terror and scream like a bichon.
All this is by way of saying Michael's writing is so exciting and so angry and so funny and scenes are often beautiful tapestries of poetry, with characters finishing each others' phrases, lines repeated, and varied, and changed, and then repeated again, they are intense and they are wordy. He plays with text in a hyper-real way. It sounds natural but it's heightened. It lives in our reality and just above it. It's beautiful to listen to, challenging to work on, and a bitch to memorize.
Of course his contributions to theater don't stop there. When we first met Michael he was primarily directing, and now he serves as the Artistic Director of Cornerstone in LA. And he is still finding the time to write for our little company here in New York.
I'm so grateful that we have the opportunities to work with artists like Michael. It enriches our company. By continuing to reach out to other artists besides the actors we always work with we are able to create diverse work instead of enjoying a teeny tiny Shalimar theater bubble. It's important to keep our own little artistic community strong and thriving and it's also incredibly important to continue to contribute to the larger theatrical community, which I hope we are able to achieve in our own ways.
All this is by way of saying CONGRATULATIONS MICHAEL! There is noone more deserving of that statue than you.
Labels: artsy angst, Minstrel Show, news
posted by SWC at 3:29 PM
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