A tiny glimpse of the Borrowers

Follow the link to see SCR's slide show of pictures from the Borrowers. Enjoy!

Borrowers Slide Show

Only 6 more performances and no more 8 AM calls - I was having to leave my apartment at 6:45 each morning to account for the "who knows what" of L.A. traffic. One show tomorrow night,  three on Saturday and two on Sunday to complete our run of 30 performances and then I'm off to the bigger SCR stage and another new play.

The following photo doesn't have any actors in it and is a pretty full view of our set - it is sort of set up for in between the acts - elements of both on stage that wouldn't happen in the run of our normal show but I think you can see most of the levels I was talking about. The platform I am harnessed into is hidden by the tree - you can just see the corner of it if you look very closely.

Last Thursday's Play

I was so excited to see Clybourne Park last Thursday I even posted about it on Facebook - and I am not one to update my Facebook status on any sort of regular "this is what I'm doing this second in my life" kind of basis. I first heard about Clybourne Park last year, I read a review of it somewhere and instantly new I had to see this show someday. Part of my fascination for this particular show stems all the way back to my senior year of high school sitting in one of my favorite classes - Theatre as Literature. In this particular class we read plays starting with the Greek masterpiece "Oedipus the King" and ending somewhere up in what we could term Classic American Theatre which belongs to authors like Arthur Miller, Tennessee Williams and Lorraine Hansberry.  I love Hansberry's play "A Raisin in the Sun." It is a beautifully told story of a not so beautiful time in our history.


First a little background on "Raisin." Hansberry authored "A Raisin in the Sun" and it debuted on Broadway in 1959.  The title comes from the poem "Harlem" (also known as "A Dream Deferred") by Langston Hughes. The story is based upon a black family's experiences in the Washington Park Subdivision of Chicago's Woodlawn neighborhood. Experiences in this play echo a lawsuit (Hansberry v. Lee, 311 U.S. 32 (1940)), to which the Hansberry family was a party when they fought to have their day in court because a previous class action about racially motivated restrictive covenants (Burke v. Kleiman, 277 Ill. App. 519 (1934) was similar to the case at hand. This case was held prior to the passage of the Fair Housing Act, which prohibits discrimination in housing and created the Office of Fair Housing and Equal Opportunity. The Hansberrys won their right to be heard as a matter of due process of law in relation to the Fourteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution. The Supreme Court held that the Hansberry defendants were not bound by the Burke decision because the class of defendants in the respective cases had conflicting goals, and thus could not be considered to be the same class.

Lorraine reflects upon the litigation in her book To Be Young, Gifted, and Black:

"25 years ago, [my father] spent a small personal fortune, his considerable talents, and many years of his life fighting, in association with NAACP attorneys, Chicago’s ‘restrictive covenants’ in one of this nation's ugliest ghettos. That fight also required our family to occupy disputed property in a hellishly hostile ‘white neighborhood’ in which literally howling mobs surrounded our house… My memories of this ‘correct’ way of fighting white supremacy in America include being spat at, cursed and pummeled in the daily trek to and from school. And I also remember my desperate and courageous mother, patrolling our household all night with a loaded German Luger (pistol), doggedly guarding her four children, while my father fought the respectable part of the battle in the Washington court."

The Hansberry house, the red brick three-flat at 6140 S. Rhodes in Washington Park which they bought in 1937, is up for landmark status before the Chicago City Council's Committee on Historical Landmarks Preservation.

If you have never read or seen "A Raisin in the Sun" I highly recommend it. Now, on to "Clybourne Park."  While "Clybourne Park" was written at a different time in our history than "Raisin" and by a different author, "Clybourne" doesn't exist with out "Raisin"; it was written as a response. 

Author Bruce Norris is quoted as saying about his play - "there's nothing better than the feeling of coming into the room and feeling that something dangerous is happening." His fascination with "Raisin"  began because it was part of school curricula in the 1970's. "That play resonated all through my life because I realized the only character I could identify with was Karl - I was a whitey in an all-white neighborhood in Houston, Texas." In "Clybourne" Norris focuses his lens on our past (1959 in Act One) and present (2009 in Act Two) consciousness of race and neighborly relations. Clybourne Park spans two generations fifty years apart. In 1959, Russ and Bev are selling their desirable two-bedroom at a bargain price, unknowingly bringing the first black family into the neighborhood (borrowing a plot line from Lorraine Hansberry’s A Raisin in the Sun) and creating ripples of discontent among the cozy white residents of Clybourne Park. In 2009, the same property is being bought by a young white couple, whose plan to raze the house and start again is met with equal disapproval by the black residents of the soon-to-be-gentrified area. Are the issues festering beneath the floorboards actually the same, fifty years on? Bruce Norris’s excruciatingly funny and squirm-inducing satire explores the fault line between race and property. 


From MIchael Ritchie the Artistic Director of the Center Theatre Group(or maybe just the Mark Taper Forum-it is unclear in the program) "One of the great things about putting these plays on the stage, giving them a forum, is that it gives everyone an opportunity, an opening, a doorway, a lens, through which they can talk about race - both from  a hisotrical perspective and also an immediate one. I can't imagine that people seeing these plays, regardless of what their perspecitve is, will be able to walk away and not have a conversation about race or family or property or opportunity . . . subjects that will never lose their importance.  We as a community can use these plays as a stepping-off point for further reflection and conversation."

This post is probably long enough and hopefully I haven't confused but have rather inspired you to read or a see a new play. I love plays when the third act is the act that plays out in your car on the drive home. My mind was racing as I replayed the evening in my head - the moments I was moved to tears and moments I laughed, the moments I cringed, the moments that I was mortified by the reactions happening around me. It was an amazing thought-provoking experience. If you get to see either "Raisin" or "Clybourne" let me know - I'd love to hear your thoughts!

Surviving

I seem to be weathering the winter storm warnings pretty well - its been a little touch and go but I think I will make it through.

Photo Taken: Firday, February 17th, 2012.

Winter Storm Warning!

I almost fell off the couch last night from laughing so hard when the Weather Man informed us that the area just a bit north and east of Long Beach was under a "WINTER STORM WARNING!" "So if you are headed that way keep an eye out for the possible 1/10th of an inch of snow that COULD be falling."

Instead of snow we got rain all day today which meant super slow traffic and as icing on the cake President Obama graced Orange County and Hollywood for various engagements today which managed to stop the flow of the freeways even more.

oh California . . .

Surviving Tech Week . . .

I apologize for the long time between this post and the last. The process encompassing "The Borrowers" has been occurring at a fast and ferocious pace, so if this post seems a bit all over the place please blame it on the lack of sleep and feel free to ask questions if you are confused.
We began "Tech Week"officially on the eve of February 3rd when the stage management team moved all the parts and pieces of our show up to the stage from our rehearsal space. We were all very excited to begin working on our actual stage the next day because our rehearsal space simply doesn't allow for the same kind of movement you get when you are actually on stage. We always tape out the floor so actors know where door ways, stairs and different levels are but actually moving from level to level just isn't possible until you are on stage.
Our production of the Borrowers utilizes four different levels on stage - the main floor, a level that is 2'8" above that, another level that is 5'8" from the main floor and a platform that is 12' raised form the main floor. The reasoning behind the first three levels has to do with the idea that we are working in different scales. The Borrowers are people that are roughly 5 inches tall and live beneath the floor boards. So we are representing two different scales on stage at the same time in some places. We have 6 actors. 2 of them play human sized humans and the other four play Borrower sized humans. When they appear on stage together they are either on different levels OR the Borrower sized humans are manipulating puppets that have been fashioned after the actors - it is pretty cool to see how similar they actually look. The puppets are controlled with three sticks on each - on attached to the back of the head and one attached to each wrist. It is fascinating to watch this mixed world of actors and puppets interact. The audiences seem to be following right along. We also in the puppet world have a cricket that is roughly the size of my dog Roxy, a giant crow that stands 9 feet tall, a giant screw driver, and a giant hand.
I was pretty excited to work on this show because I had already worked with this Stage Manager and Assistant Stage Manager. As a result of our previous working experience I was giving a fair amount of responsibility. I am mostly in charge of back stage left and have a fair amount of cues that I am responsible for responding to and making sure people are in place and ready to go for them. It always feels good when people trust you to be in charge.
I figure the easiest way of explaining my responsibilities is to walk you through the show and all of the things I actually do. I begin the show back stage left and give the stage manager a confirmation of our actress being at "places" for the top of show. Then when the show starts with a lighting cue I make sure our actress makes it on stage. The next thing I do is supervise a scene change and move curtains out of the way so set pieces make it stage with out getting tangled. I then cross over to back stage right to catch various props as the actors bring them off stage to grab their puppet characters and head on stage. After that transition I put on a full body harness and wait to hand props back to actors as they transition back from puppets to actor sized Borrowers. At this point I head up to the 12' platform, harness myself to the safety cabling and load in the giant screw driver, a cane chair, writing desk and birdcage. This is where the show gets pretty crazy. The Boy is looking for where the Borrowers live and begins to pry up a floorboard with a screw driver, as he sticks a screw driver into the floor, I manipulate the giant one to look like it is coming through the roof of the Borrowers home. The boy, having discovered their home beings to hand them things - first he drops a doll house chair to them, so I drop a life size chair to them, it is a very loud thud and kind of terrifying. After the chair drop Victor (another crew member) and I ready the giant hand and when the boy lowers his hand into the floor, down comes the giant hand. There are a few more hand and screwdriver moments before the Borrowers have to escape - they have been discovered by the evil cook who thinks they are mice and wants to "smoke 'em out!" The boy wants to save them and his idea is to carry them in a clothes pin bag so we have to lower  a giant clothes pin bag which the Borrowers climb into (and out the back) and then we raise that. At this point Victor and I are moving at full speed to get the clothes pin bag down from the platform, get out of harnesses and get set for our intermission change. We have roughly a minute to accomplish all of this and while this is happening back stage, the cook and her gardener are smoking out the Borrowers - enter fog effect. (Fog is always a cool effect but it took a bit to narrow down the amount we actually needed. When rehearsing/testing the machine we actually managed to set off the fire alarms - it was an exciting Tuesday morning for many of the SCR employees - oops! and to clarify I had nothing to do with this - the testing was done by the lighting/electrics department, I was manning a door making sure no one was entering or exiting the theatre space.)
Whew! We made it to our scene change over from Act 1 to Act 2. Now we have 2 minutes and 48 seconds to switch the stage over into Act 2. There are five of us that complete this change and we are all moving as fast as we can. Act 2 moves quite a bit faster and I stay put back stage left. I help move a giant boot on stage and off - the Borrowers live in it after they escape the house, I catch various puppets - the giant cricket, a giant wasp and the contraption that functions as a mustard lid boat that one of the Borrowers rides in. After the boat scene I start to get ready for the last scene of the play by setting furniture pieces in place for the actors to move them on stage. After the last scene I hold a curtain so the actors don't trip on a staircase that is close to their exit off stage after curtain call. THEN we reset everything to do another show. Tuesdays thru Thursdays we do two morning shows for school groups. Fridays we do one night show, Saturdays we do three shows and Sundays we do two shows. Which brings us to Monday - my day off.
Hopefully I'll be able to share some pictures with you when they are posted on the SCR blog or featured in reviews.
We had our first paid audience Friday night and it was so fun to hear the audience reaction to all the cool things that happen. Children laughing during a show is one of my favorite sounds. Kids our the toughest audiences because if you don't have their attention right away you probably won't have it ever. All of our audiences so far have seemed like they have really enjoyed the story being told on our stage.
I will end this post here because I am sure it is already a bit much to comprehend. We have a bit of a more relaxed schedule coming up where I hope to be able to post some pictures I've taken and also next Thursday I get to go see a play up in L.A. so I'll be sure to report on that. HAPPY MONDAY!!