by Lyle Zimskind for LAist
"Why does a man in a chicken suit cross the stage?" is not the only existential inquiry tackled by Charles Mee’s challenging but rewarding theater piece bobrauschenbergamerica. There’s also: "Does man have the power to forgive himself?" "What’s it like to swim in a giant martini?" "Do men and women deceive each other or themselves when they fall in love?" And, of course, "Did somebody make a mistake with the slide projector before the show started tonight?"
A series of 43 somewhat-related scenes collectively inspired by the “Combines” of genre-bending 20th-century collagist Robert Rauschenberg, bobrauschenbergamerica is Mee’s idea of what the master would have produced if he himself “had been a theater maker instead of a visual artist.” And like these Combines, the play initially greets its audience with a giddily disorienting juxtaposition of visual cues and gestures. Indeed, that slide projector presentation accompanying the play’s opening monologue so vexed the couple sitting next to me that they started talking back to the stage for a moment and clearly never recovered their equilibrium over the ensuing hour and a half.
Others in attendance, however, may well spend this interval getting progressively seduced into the charismatic bizarro world that TheSpyAnts Theatre Company production team, under the helm of guest director Bart DeLorenzo, creates in the Ford Ampitheater’s “[Inside]” performance space. Set designer Marina Mouhibian incorporates some of the objects found in Rauschenberg’s Combines, along with additional images she contributes on her own (including a gigantic bowling pin), into a fantastic junkyard playground for the ensemble cast to run - not to mention roller skate - around. And by the end of the evening you may be surprised, even moved, to realize how successfully these actors have done the work of building a coherently engaging emotional arc out of the rollickingly complex, sometimes esoteric raw material of Mee’s playful, peripatetic text.
Although bobrauschenbergamerica was first performed by Anne Bogart’s SITI ensemble in 2001, and included in the influential Brooklyn Academy of Music Next Wave festival two years later, the play is only now receiving its Los Angeles premiere with the current SpyAnts production, running Thursdays through Sundays until the end of February.
General admission tickets are $22.50 via the Ford Theatres’ own web site, $13.50 on Goldstar, and $12 through the LA Stage Alliance.
Thursday, January 28, 2010
Wednesday, January 27, 2010
BOBRAUSCHENBERGAMERICA: A ROMP TheSpyAnts Ensemble at The Ford
BOBRAUSCHENBERGAMERICA: A ROMP
TheSpyAnts Ensemble at The Ford
Clare Elfman
Literary Editor
Los Angeles, California – My bad. I did not do my research. So please, before you see this interesting kaleidoscope of a performance, do yours. I come from old school. A play speaks for itself. Linear. The last act leaves you with something concrete: a message, an emotion, a something. Charles Mee, with this — I guess you’d call this his homage to Rauschenberg — is non-linear, and if you are a careless reviewer who never has studied or appreciated the style of Rauschenberg nor read the text of the inserts in the black folder given at the box office, you will spend the first 30 minutes of this almost two-hour, no-intermission piece rather perplexed, asking what the merde is happening onstage?
I sat for that long in confusion, watching what, to me, looked like a mish-mash of unconnected bits and pieces of action, until finally one character did a monologue that moved me. I recognized that I was not giving the piece its due. I had not done my work as well as the company onstage was madly and non-linearly cavorting to present theirs.
If I had become more familiar with Rauschenberg’s collages, his combination of bits and pieces, thises and thats, unrelated stuff that, once assembled, create a whole, I would simply have known to sit back and let the action sweep over me. This concept of unrelated bits of action Mee has created to mirror the artist’s style of collage, so that, as the “play” progressed, a man professes love for a woman, she offers love to an unlikely character, a girl roller-skates by, a guy pushes a bathtub onstage…do I remember a goat? A guy in a chicken suit walks by, a mother shows old snaps (projections) of her artist son but the commentary does not match the pics… And what else? Suddenly the cast breaks into a Broadway chorus or they start to folk dance, or there is a murder, and I’m hanging there thinking, “What the f…” until a pizza guy enters and delivers an entrancing monologue of the three people he killed and another guy does a remarkable Walt Whitman piece, and it becomes quite something else.
So the piece is a non-linear version of Rauschenberg’s style, and to enjoy it, you simply have to let go and stop looking for logic. If I walk through a gallery, my own tastes have been so long developing that, unlike you and you and you and you, I love Matisse colors and Kirschner’s angular faces and Freud’s explicit nakedness and Bacon’s anguished etcetera etcetera, and you like something different. I love Theater of the Absurd because, when you finish with the absurdity, you have a message as clear as if you’d just picked yourself up from your stone bench in an ancient Greek theater. Once I saw a Kelly exhibit — a dirty old rug with an old teddy bear under it — and I asked, “What? What?” Okay, that’s me. Someone else saw it and was moved to tears. In a San Francisco museum, I saw a yellow canvas. Just yellow. What?? And the lecturer explained that it was the “yellowness” that made it so great.
Art is in the eye of the beholder, and if you (I) just let go of traditional notions and sit back and simply experience this one and then come out and hash over what you just saw…you’ve had a great evening of …an homage to Rauschenberg and a bit of a romp.
TheSpyAnts ensemble who performed this interesting piece are: Rollergirl, Breeze Braunschweig, Eric Bunton, Adam Dornbusch, Jennifer Etienne Eckert, Brett Hren, Mari Marks, John Charles Meyer who does a wonderful pizza boy, Danny Parker-Lopes, Mark Slater, Maria Tomas — a great bunch doing their wild thing.
So come prepared, just let go, and afterward decide if this left you with the same “feeling” as does a collage by Rauschenberg.
Interesting and challenging evening.
Ford (inside) until February 28th.
TheSpyAnts Ensemble at The Ford
Clare Elfman
Literary Editor
Los Angeles, California – My bad. I did not do my research. So please, before you see this interesting kaleidoscope of a performance, do yours. I come from old school. A play speaks for itself. Linear. The last act leaves you with something concrete: a message, an emotion, a something. Charles Mee, with this — I guess you’d call this his homage to Rauschenberg — is non-linear, and if you are a careless reviewer who never has studied or appreciated the style of Rauschenberg nor read the text of the inserts in the black folder given at the box office, you will spend the first 30 minutes of this almost two-hour, no-intermission piece rather perplexed, asking what the merde is happening onstage?
I sat for that long in confusion, watching what, to me, looked like a mish-mash of unconnected bits and pieces of action, until finally one character did a monologue that moved me. I recognized that I was not giving the piece its due. I had not done my work as well as the company onstage was madly and non-linearly cavorting to present theirs.
If I had become more familiar with Rauschenberg’s collages, his combination of bits and pieces, thises and thats, unrelated stuff that, once assembled, create a whole, I would simply have known to sit back and let the action sweep over me. This concept of unrelated bits of action Mee has created to mirror the artist’s style of collage, so that, as the “play” progressed, a man professes love for a woman, she offers love to an unlikely character, a girl roller-skates by, a guy pushes a bathtub onstage…do I remember a goat? A guy in a chicken suit walks by, a mother shows old snaps (projections) of her artist son but the commentary does not match the pics… And what else? Suddenly the cast breaks into a Broadway chorus or they start to folk dance, or there is a murder, and I’m hanging there thinking, “What the f…” until a pizza guy enters and delivers an entrancing monologue of the three people he killed and another guy does a remarkable Walt Whitman piece, and it becomes quite something else.
So the piece is a non-linear version of Rauschenberg’s style, and to enjoy it, you simply have to let go and stop looking for logic. If I walk through a gallery, my own tastes have been so long developing that, unlike you and you and you and you, I love Matisse colors and Kirschner’s angular faces and Freud’s explicit nakedness and Bacon’s anguished etcetera etcetera, and you like something different. I love Theater of the Absurd because, when you finish with the absurdity, you have a message as clear as if you’d just picked yourself up from your stone bench in an ancient Greek theater. Once I saw a Kelly exhibit — a dirty old rug with an old teddy bear under it — and I asked, “What? What?” Okay, that’s me. Someone else saw it and was moved to tears. In a San Francisco museum, I saw a yellow canvas. Just yellow. What?? And the lecturer explained that it was the “yellowness” that made it so great.
Art is in the eye of the beholder, and if you (I) just let go of traditional notions and sit back and simply experience this one and then come out and hash over what you just saw…you’ve had a great evening of …an homage to Rauschenberg and a bit of a romp.
TheSpyAnts ensemble who performed this interesting piece are: Rollergirl, Breeze Braunschweig, Eric Bunton, Adam Dornbusch, Jennifer Etienne Eckert, Brett Hren, Mari Marks, John Charles Meyer who does a wonderful pizza boy, Danny Parker-Lopes, Mark Slater, Maria Tomas — a great bunch doing their wild thing.
So come prepared, just let go, and afterward decide if this left you with the same “feeling” as does a collage by Rauschenberg.
Interesting and challenging evening.
Ford (inside) until February 28th.
LA Weekly review of "bobrauschenbergamerica" - GO!
Photo by Debi Landrie
Review by LA Weekly:
When Bob Rauschenberg's mother (Mari Marks) delivers her tender slide-show about the rural Texas childhood of her artist son, and none of the slides matches the descriptions she's offered, you have to know something's up, conceptually. Whether or not you're familiar with the '50s-'60s collagist painter-sculptor, Charles L. Mee's 2001 extrapolation of what Rauschenberg might have written in order to explain how he assembled junk into evocative reflections on our place in the world stands alone. Marina Mouhibian's set decorates the stage and the proscenium walls with vintage kitsch as the 10-member ensemble plays out a series of somewhat interconnecting sketches about romances gone awry, violence, politics and metaphysics - though there are digressions for a series of chicken jokes. Bart DeLorenzo's staging preserves the tone, inherent the text, that's both wry and frivolous, abstract and pop, with one breakout poetical excursion into Walt Whitmanesque grandeur, delivered by a hobo (Brett Hren) and accompanied by Dvorak's Symphony from The New World. [Inside] the Ford, 2580 Cahuenga Blvd. E., L.A.; Thurs.-Sat., 8 p.m.; Sun., 3 & 7 p.m.; thru Feb. 28. (323) 461-3673. SpyAnts Theatre Company. (Steven Leigh Morris) See Theater Feature.
Tuesday, January 26, 2010
Stagehappenings review of "bobrauschenbergamerica"
From Stagehappenings.com.
by Robert Machray
Robert Rauschenberg lived in the artistic period between abstract expressionism and pop art. His painting and sculptures display his belief that there is no difference between art objects and ordinary objects. He believed that an object became art when he said it was.
How would his art reflect itself as a live performance? Well, one answer is being presented by the talented and edgy SpyAnts Company, which, with the help of the ubiquitous Bart DeLorenzo, has put on bobrauschenbergamerica by the controversial playwright Charles Mee as part of the shared season at inside the Ford Theatre.
Playwright Mee is no stranger to experimentation. Here he has written a play intended to represent Rauschenberg’s view of America, presented as a play but also reflecting his paintings. Mee has stated, “In the mid 1980s, the whole world was Rauschenberg. We have lots of stories, and we are trying to figure out how to get along in a world where there are a thousand points of view.” So Mee conceived of a series of loosely connected stories (though they all involve love) and more or less threw them together to see how they would make a connection. For Rauschenberg there is always a connection and it's always alive and vital.
II must admit I was totally puzzled about what the hell was going on in this show. I was not alone. But as the piece unfolded I found my mind, as well as the characters, making connections, and the message was one of hope and love. In the rehearsal process Mr. DeLorenzo let the cast more or less improvise how they wanted to present the individual stories. When he liked what he saw it stayed in. The result is a piece that seems almost improvised, but with a structure that emerges as the play develops. The cast, Mee, and DeLorenzo are to be congratulated for this daring and provocative experience in the theatre.
bobrauchenbergamerica plays at Inside The Ford until Feb. 28th.
=====
ROBERT MACHRAY has appeared in over 150 plays and has worked at 14 Tony Award-winning theatres. He has been nominated for and won numerous awards. Robert has a B.A. from Yale and an M.F.A. from USC. He has taught at USC, UCLA, UCSB, and Pasadena City College.
by Robert Machray
Robert Rauschenberg lived in the artistic period between abstract expressionism and pop art. His painting and sculptures display his belief that there is no difference between art objects and ordinary objects. He believed that an object became art when he said it was.
How would his art reflect itself as a live performance? Well, one answer is being presented by the talented and edgy SpyAnts Company, which, with the help of the ubiquitous Bart DeLorenzo, has put on bobrauschenbergamerica by the controversial playwright Charles Mee as part of the shared season at inside the Ford Theatre.
Playwright Mee is no stranger to experimentation. Here he has written a play intended to represent Rauschenberg’s view of America, presented as a play but also reflecting his paintings. Mee has stated, “In the mid 1980s, the whole world was Rauschenberg. We have lots of stories, and we are trying to figure out how to get along in a world where there are a thousand points of view.” So Mee conceived of a series of loosely connected stories (though they all involve love) and more or less threw them together to see how they would make a connection. For Rauschenberg there is always a connection and it's always alive and vital.
II must admit I was totally puzzled about what the hell was going on in this show. I was not alone. But as the piece unfolded I found my mind, as well as the characters, making connections, and the message was one of hope and love. In the rehearsal process Mr. DeLorenzo let the cast more or less improvise how they wanted to present the individual stories. When he liked what he saw it stayed in. The result is a piece that seems almost improvised, but with a structure that emerges as the play develops. The cast, Mee, and DeLorenzo are to be congratulated for this daring and provocative experience in the theatre.
bobrauchenbergamerica plays at Inside The Ford until Feb. 28th.
=====
ROBERT MACHRAY has appeared in over 150 plays and has worked at 14 Tony Award-winning theatres. He has been nominated for and won numerous awards. Robert has a B.A. from Yale and an M.F.A. from USC. He has taught at USC, UCLA, UCSB, and Pasadena City College.
Sunday, January 24, 2010
[Inside] The Ford helps troupes without homes
[Inside] the Ford helps troupes without homes
Its New Play Series provides a venue and resources to companies lacking venues to call their own.
By Karen Wada
January 24, 2010
For TheSpyAnts Theatre Company, persistence pays. Eight years ago, the small, stage-less ensemble fell in love with a crazy new play called bobrauschenbergamerica -- Charles L. Mee's freewheeling romp through American culture. It requested permission to perform the piece but found the rights were tied up. Undaunted, it kept asking -- and kept getting turned down -- until now.
"Lo and behold, this time the rights were available," says producing manager Lori Evans Taylor. "Chuck Mee knew this little company in L.A. wanted to do his show and he said yes."
TheSpyAnts' tenacity also impressed the Los Angeles County Arts Commission. It chose bobrauschenbergamerica for the second season of its [Inside] the Ford New Play Series, which provides troupes that lack permanent homes with a venue and resources to mount productions they otherwise couldn't afford. Mee's play -- an L.A. premiere -- opens this weekend at the Ford Theatres in Hollywood.
"We created this series because one of the biggest impediments itinerant companies face is the high cost of renting," says Laura Zucker, the commission's executive director. "That often prevents them from focusing on putting money into the product onstage."
The commission selects three productions for each winter season at the 87-seat [Inside] the Ford theater, which is tucked into a hillside complex best known for its summer amphitheater shows. In exchange for a subsidized weekly rent of $1,000 -- well under the market rate -- groups receive access to the theater and its lighting and sound systems as well as box office, house management, marketing and publicity services. The cozy performance space has its quirks (notably, pesky pillars), but the Ford facility offers amenities such as free parking and ample restrooms.
"Going to the theater is a whole experience," Zucker says. "What you see on the stage is very important, but everything that happens from the moment you arrive to the moment you leave influences whether you want to return."
The idea of using practical assistance to promote artistic growth isn't sexy, but it seems to be effective -- both at enabling small theaters to pursue ambitious work and creating a showcase for that work. The first season began with two world premieres: Moving Arts' production of EM Lewis' morality-mortality tale Song of Extinction (which won the 2009 Harold and Mimi Steinberg/American Theatre Critics Assn. New Play Award) and Circle X Theatre Company's production of Jim Leonard's Battle Hymn. This season's opener, Ensemble Studio Theatre - Los Angeles' staging of Julie Hébert's Tree, debuted to strong reviews in November.
"We never would have attempted to produce Battle Hymn unless it was at the Ford," says Tim Wright, artistic director of the 14-year-old Circle X, which is based in Hollywood. "When we started production we had only the first act and a few pages of the second. Normally, we wouldn't operate that way. But working at the Ford is like working with a net. There's a lot more opportunity to take risks. We could focus on completing the piece with the writer and the director because we didn't have to worry about coming up with what ultimately would have been about $30,000 for the rental space alone. We could actually invest in development."
Last season's final entry -- Home Siege Home -- was a different kind of premiere, Ghost Road Company having worked on its adaptation of Aeschylus' trilogy, The Oresteia, for years. "This was the first time all the pieces were seen together," says Zucker. "If we didn't do it, it would not have happened."
The Ford tries to give a boost to companies as well as productions. With TheSpyAnts, says Zucker, "we went out on a limb because they are not as big or as established as some others. But the play is great and they brought in a great director in Bart DeLorenzo. Hopefully, this will propel them forward."
Evans Taylor says the Ford has "opened a lot of doors" for her 10-year-old ensemble, offering TheSpyAnts broader exposure and a chance to experiment in areas such as marketing ("we're running an ad at the Laemmle [movie theaters] on Sunset"). Also, she says, she and her colleagues are working with artists such as DeLorenzo, choreographer Ken Roht and "some wonderful designers who came on board knowing we would be doing the play here."
The Ford program is "a new model -- one the theater really needs," says DeLorenzo, founding artistic director of the Evidence Room, a company that has created and lost several homes, including a Beverly Boulevard location that was a hot spot of adventurous theater-going. "This is exciting because in one place you can see several different companies each pouring its resources into a production. Your shot at three good plays is higher than if you had one company trying to do three good plays in a row. I wish there were more examples of this."
A number of organizations provide or rent venues to specific groups or productions. What distinguishes [Inside] the Ford, says DeLorenzo, "is this is a curated series with quality control."
Terence McFarland, executive director of L.A. Stage Alliance, predicts more such ventures will start popping up given that, by his estimate, a couple hundred local companies and other groups that put on plays lack homes because they can't afford them, would rather invest in staff than overhead or fear the demands of running a theater might limit their artistic aspirations.
The Ford's indoor space has a rich history of nurturing writers and their work. It was created in the 1970s by the Center Theatre Group, which converted part of the 80-year-old amphitheater's storage area. CTG held the Lab -- which featured readings and workshops -- there first, followed in the '80s by the Taper, Too series of new and experimental pieces. When CTG's lease expired in the '90s, the arts commission remodeled the room and gave it its current name. The county joined with A.S.K. Theater Projects and the James Irvine Foundation to host the "Hot Properties" new play series from 2000 to 2004. The Flintridge Foundation helped to support an ensemble theater collective that lasted until 2008.
For [Inside] the Ford, the commission chooses participants through an open competition. (The application deadline for next winter is March 17.) Material that is new or, at least, new to L.A. is preferred. A minimum of three years of producing experience is required.
"We look for a combination of an interesting play and project team with a company that has enough administrative structure to pull it off," Zucker says. "We want each season to resemble a piece of music in that the tempo keeps changing."
This season began with Tree, an intricate unraveling of race and family relations. bobrauschenbergamerica, which runs through Feb. 28, is a collage of vignettes -- love stories, shootings, chicken jokes -- inspired by artist Robert Rauschenberg, the ultimate collagist. In March, Circle X will present the first production of Sheila Callaghan's Lascivious Something, in which an old lover disrupts an American expat's new life with a new wife on a Greek isle.
Even though the Ford series is young and relatively modest (a $182,000 annual budget), it's building momentum. Subscriptions have jumped five-fold, from 20 for the first season to 102 for the current one. LA Weekly included the program among high points of the last decade of local theater.
"It sure ignited things for us," says "Tree" author Hébert. "We not only got a venue -- which allowed us to do the play -- but we got a venue with a great profile that actually appeals to people. And you know how hard it is to get people to come out to see plays in L.A."
calendar@latimes.com
Copyright © 2010, The Los Angeles Times
Its New Play Series provides a venue and resources to companies lacking venues to call their own.
By Karen Wada
January 24, 2010
For TheSpyAnts Theatre Company, persistence pays. Eight years ago, the small, stage-less ensemble fell in love with a crazy new play called bobrauschenbergamerica -- Charles L. Mee's freewheeling romp through American culture. It requested permission to perform the piece but found the rights were tied up. Undaunted, it kept asking -- and kept getting turned down -- until now.
"Lo and behold, this time the rights were available," says producing manager Lori Evans Taylor. "Chuck Mee knew this little company in L.A. wanted to do his show and he said yes."
TheSpyAnts' tenacity also impressed the Los Angeles County Arts Commission. It chose bobrauschenbergamerica for the second season of its [Inside] the Ford New Play Series, which provides troupes that lack permanent homes with a venue and resources to mount productions they otherwise couldn't afford. Mee's play -- an L.A. premiere -- opens this weekend at the Ford Theatres in Hollywood.
"We created this series because one of the biggest impediments itinerant companies face is the high cost of renting," says Laura Zucker, the commission's executive director. "That often prevents them from focusing on putting money into the product onstage."
The commission selects three productions for each winter season at the 87-seat [Inside] the Ford theater, which is tucked into a hillside complex best known for its summer amphitheater shows. In exchange for a subsidized weekly rent of $1,000 -- well under the market rate -- groups receive access to the theater and its lighting and sound systems as well as box office, house management, marketing and publicity services. The cozy performance space has its quirks (notably, pesky pillars), but the Ford facility offers amenities such as free parking and ample restrooms.
"Going to the theater is a whole experience," Zucker says. "What you see on the stage is very important, but everything that happens from the moment you arrive to the moment you leave influences whether you want to return."
The idea of using practical assistance to promote artistic growth isn't sexy, but it seems to be effective -- both at enabling small theaters to pursue ambitious work and creating a showcase for that work. The first season began with two world premieres: Moving Arts' production of EM Lewis' morality-mortality tale Song of Extinction (which won the 2009 Harold and Mimi Steinberg/American Theatre Critics Assn. New Play Award) and Circle X Theatre Company's production of Jim Leonard's Battle Hymn. This season's opener, Ensemble Studio Theatre - Los Angeles' staging of Julie Hébert's Tree, debuted to strong reviews in November.
"We never would have attempted to produce Battle Hymn unless it was at the Ford," says Tim Wright, artistic director of the 14-year-old Circle X, which is based in Hollywood. "When we started production we had only the first act and a few pages of the second. Normally, we wouldn't operate that way. But working at the Ford is like working with a net. There's a lot more opportunity to take risks. We could focus on completing the piece with the writer and the director because we didn't have to worry about coming up with what ultimately would have been about $30,000 for the rental space alone. We could actually invest in development."
Last season's final entry -- Home Siege Home -- was a different kind of premiere, Ghost Road Company having worked on its adaptation of Aeschylus' trilogy, The Oresteia, for years. "This was the first time all the pieces were seen together," says Zucker. "If we didn't do it, it would not have happened."
The Ford tries to give a boost to companies as well as productions. With TheSpyAnts, says Zucker, "we went out on a limb because they are not as big or as established as some others. But the play is great and they brought in a great director in Bart DeLorenzo. Hopefully, this will propel them forward."
Evans Taylor says the Ford has "opened a lot of doors" for her 10-year-old ensemble, offering TheSpyAnts broader exposure and a chance to experiment in areas such as marketing ("we're running an ad at the Laemmle [movie theaters] on Sunset"). Also, she says, she and her colleagues are working with artists such as DeLorenzo, choreographer Ken Roht and "some wonderful designers who came on board knowing we would be doing the play here."
The Ford program is "a new model -- one the theater really needs," says DeLorenzo, founding artistic director of the Evidence Room, a company that has created and lost several homes, including a Beverly Boulevard location that was a hot spot of adventurous theater-going. "This is exciting because in one place you can see several different companies each pouring its resources into a production. Your shot at three good plays is higher than if you had one company trying to do three good plays in a row. I wish there were more examples of this."
A number of organizations provide or rent venues to specific groups or productions. What distinguishes [Inside] the Ford, says DeLorenzo, "is this is a curated series with quality control."
Terence McFarland, executive director of L.A. Stage Alliance, predicts more such ventures will start popping up given that, by his estimate, a couple hundred local companies and other groups that put on plays lack homes because they can't afford them, would rather invest in staff than overhead or fear the demands of running a theater might limit their artistic aspirations.
The Ford's indoor space has a rich history of nurturing writers and their work. It was created in the 1970s by the Center Theatre Group, which converted part of the 80-year-old amphitheater's storage area. CTG held the Lab -- which featured readings and workshops -- there first, followed in the '80s by the Taper, Too series of new and experimental pieces. When CTG's lease expired in the '90s, the arts commission remodeled the room and gave it its current name. The county joined with A.S.K. Theater Projects and the James Irvine Foundation to host the "Hot Properties" new play series from 2000 to 2004. The Flintridge Foundation helped to support an ensemble theater collective that lasted until 2008.
For [Inside] the Ford, the commission chooses participants through an open competition. (The application deadline for next winter is March 17.) Material that is new or, at least, new to L.A. is preferred. A minimum of three years of producing experience is required.
"We look for a combination of an interesting play and project team with a company that has enough administrative structure to pull it off," Zucker says. "We want each season to resemble a piece of music in that the tempo keeps changing."
This season began with Tree, an intricate unraveling of race and family relations. bobrauschenbergamerica, which runs through Feb. 28, is a collage of vignettes -- love stories, shootings, chicken jokes -- inspired by artist Robert Rauschenberg, the ultimate collagist. In March, Circle X will present the first production of Sheila Callaghan's Lascivious Something, in which an old lover disrupts an American expat's new life with a new wife on a Greek isle.
Even though the Ford series is young and relatively modest (a $182,000 annual budget), it's building momentum. Subscriptions have jumped five-fold, from 20 for the first season to 102 for the current one. LA Weekly included the program among high points of the last decade of local theater.
"It sure ignited things for us," says "Tree" author Hébert. "We not only got a venue -- which allowed us to do the play -- but we got a venue with a great profile that actually appeals to people. And you know how hard it is to get people to come out to see plays in L.A."
calendar@latimes.com
Copyright © 2010, The Los Angeles Times
Friday, January 22, 2010
John Charles Meyer's demo reel
John Charles Meyer (Terminus Americana, and currently a castmember in bobrauschenbergamerica) joined TheSpyAnts last year, and here is his current demo reel:
Link
Link
Interview with "bobrauschenbergamerica" director Bart DeLorenzo by Steve Julian of KPCC
Breeze Braunschweig in bobrauschenbergamerica
Pop art-inspired 'bobrauschenbergamerica' opening at Ford Theatre
Courtesy of Lucy Pollak
Steve Julian | KPCC
The late pop artist Robert Rauschenberg liked to delve into mixed media. He’d pick up disparate items as he walked around New York City, find ways to combine them, and add paint. The results placed him alongside Andy Warhol and Jasper Johns in the pantheon of 20th Century artists. Director Bart DeLorenzo says New York playwright Chuck Mee approached his work “bobrauschenbergamerica” in the same way the artist dealt with found objects.
"Chuck grabs his material everywhere – Internet, TV – but he loves the way people express themselves and the way he uses text is very much the same way Rauschenberg deals with objects," said DeLorenzo.
Eric Bunton and Jennifer Etienne Eckert in bobrauschenbergamerica
DeLorenzo directs Mee’s play at Inside the Ford Theatre in Hollywood. Looking through the dozens of scenes in the script, I asked him how many times he had to read it before it sank in.
"A bunch. A bunch," laughed DeLorenzo. "I read it and let it sit in me. And then it came to me like a voice from above."
For audiences, the experience of seeing this play may seem like viewing pop art – kind of disjointed.
"I don’t think it helps to ponder too much while you’re experiencing it, but to let it wash over you and let yourself be transformed by the experience and just enjoy the ride, and then, when it’s over, what sits in you may have some meaning for you in your life. I like to figure it out for myself later."
DeLorenzo said playwright Chuck Mee wrote this work as an homage to Rauschenberg – and to the second half of the 20th century.
"It’s not coincidental, it’s not accidental, the artist is drawn to certain things and the artist combines them, the sensibility within the artist will give them a kind of coherence, which will be an artistic principle in itself."
The play includes musical numbers, a parade and a giant martini-powered slip 'n slide. It alludes to Jack Kerouac’s On the Road, John F. Kennedy, Martin Luther King and the civil rights movement, and the changing role of women in society.
"It’s a very American play – but it definitely is trying to cover that period of time," said DeLorenzo. "Chuck said to me, the characters in the play are as if you got into a car somewhere around Pennsylvania, and you drove west, and dipped a little bit south, these are the people you would meet on your journey, and in a way, maybe the characters are archetypes of the late 20th century."
bobrauschenbergamerica opens Saturday at Inside the Ford Theatre in Hollywood.
Listen to the audio of the report here.
Thursday, January 21, 2010
LA Premiere of "bobrauschenbergamerica"
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L.A. premiere of 'bobrauschenbergamerica
January 20, 12:29 PM Candyce Columbus
TheSpyAnts Theatre Company presents the long-awaited Los Angeles premiere of Charles L. Mee's delightful, kaleidoscopic play, bobrauschenbergamerica. Director Bart DeLorenzo teams up with choreographer Ken Roht to dish up Mee's rollicking collage-montage tribute to Robert Rauschenberg that captures the happy, improvisational quality of the artist's singular vision. bobrauschenbergamerica opens at [Inside] the Ford on January 23, with Pay-What-You-Can previews on January 21 and 22.
bobrauschenbergamerica is a wild road trip through our American landscape, a play made as one of America's greatest artists, Robert Rauschenberg, might have conceived it if he had been a playwright instead of a painter. TheSpyAnts Breeze Braunschweig, Eric Bunton, Adam Dornbusch, Jennifer Etienne Eckert, Brett Hren, Mari Marks, John Charles Meyer, Danny Parker-Lopes, Mark Slater, and Maria Tomas create a collage of people and places, of music and dancing, of love stories and picnics and business schemes and shootings and chicken jokes and golfing, and of the sheer exhilaration of living in a country where people make up their lives as they go.
Artist Robert Rauschenberg (1925-2008) once said, "A painting is more like the real world if it is made out of the real world." This infatuation with art and everyday life led him to pioneer the idea of "Combines," provocative collages created out of nontraditional materials. Taking a single canvas, Rauschenberg would combine pictures, familiar prints, sculptures and everyday objects (like tennis balls and stuffed goats), blurring the line between art and sculpture, between art and life.
In bobrauschenbergamerica, the stage is the canvas, and TheSpyAnts create a living, breathing "Combine." The eclectic group of characters and collage of colorful vignettes and fantastical images may seem to unfold like juxtaposing elements, but when seen as a whole they produce a loving tribute to American life.
"The play is a celebration," enthuses DeLorenzo. "It's a collage play written by a collagist about another collagist - an appropriate homage to our crazy quilt of a country."
TheSpyAnts is a 26-member company that started as play reading group and quickly evolved into a formidable theater company that has developed numerous critically acclaimed hit productions including The Most Fabulous Story Ever Told, The Birds, Hellcab, Edmond, Infinite Black Suitcase, Rudolph The Red Hosed Reindeer, The Reunion and Kidnapped By Craigslist. TheSpyAnts strive to provide a quality theater experience while challenging the audience to "think outside the box."
bobrauschenbergamerica previews 8 p.m. Thursday and Friday, January 21 and 22 and performs 8 p.m. Thursday, Friday and Saturday and 3 and 7 p.m. Sunday January 23 through February 28. General admission is $20; $12 seniors and full-time students with ID; Pay-What-You-Can tickets are available for previews and all Sunday matinee performances when purchased at the door (subject to availability). Call 323-461-3673 or visit www.FordTheatres.org.
[Inside] the Ford is located in the Ford Theatres complex at 2580 Cahuenga Blvd. East in Hollywood just off the 101 Hollywood Freeway across from the Hollywood Bowl and south of Universal Studios. On-site, non-stacked parking is free.
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