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We’ve been hard at work the last few weeks working on a new project with Michael Perlman, the director and playwright of From White Plains.
In case you missed it on our Facebook and Twitter pages, today’s blog post is a video update from Co-Artistic Director Aaron Rossini.
Jimmy King and Karl Gregory rehearse From White Plains at the Kitchen The Kitchen Theatre in Ithaca, NY while playwright and director Michael Perlman looks on.
Today I’m up bright and early, ready to hit the road towards Ithaca, NY with Matt Clevy, Fault Line Theatre’s Director of Communications. After several weeks of rehearsal and months of planning, From White Plains begins it’s latest reincarnation at The Kitchen Theatre with the same cast and design team from our previous run in New York City.
Tonight, Matt and I will be attending the opening performance and reception. I’ve seen this show close to 100 times (literally), yet each time I see it I discover something new: sometimes I’m moved by an unexpected moment, other times a passage of writing jumps out at me in a way I never noticed. I think that is one of the joys of great theatre: when all the elements of drama (acting, design, writing, etc.) are functioning together cohesively to tell a poignant story, it can never get old.
Happy opening! And I’ll see you in Ithaca!
Playwright/Director Michael Perlman (far left) with the cast of From White Plains: Jimmy King, Karl Gregory, Aaron Rossini, and Craig Wesley Divino
Welcome to the shiny, new Fault Line Theatre website!
Though the website lay dormant for the last couple months, we certainly have not. There’s so much to talk about, but it seems fitting to begin right around where we left off…
Almost 18 months ago (back when I was still an intern), I sat in a small rehearsal room in Downtown NYC with the cast and creative team of what would become From White Plains for the first time. Michael Perlman (our fearless director and playwright) had brought along nothing but a few pages and some ideas about where they would go. We were set to open in just over a month.
As many of you know, the rest is history…
The run at La Tea Theatre in June of 2012 was an incredible success and the remounting at the Pershing Square Signature Center brought the show to an even wider audience.
In my opinion, the process of writing is almost an impossibly magical task; a writer must conjure characters out of thin air. Until these characters are embodied by actors, they exist only on the page and in the minds of those who read the play. By developing From White Plains with the actors and designers in the room from nearly Day 1, we were able to literally see the characters take shape in reality, rather than in our heads. The actors and the characters they played were in a dialogue with one another, each influencing the actions of the other. The task became not figuring out who these characters were, but instead, what would these people do if placed in these circumstances. The process felt immediate. A thousand versions of From White Plains were staged in that rehearsal room and it was the job of the artists to filter, distill, and decide which version told the clearest, most necessary story.
So where are we now?
It’s been 7 months since From White Plains closed at the Signature Center. Our goal in producing this show (as with any show) has been to share it with as many people as possible. We feel that it tells a story that needs to be heard at this moment in time. We feel like it shows the grey areas of an issue many people paint black and white… And we’re thrilled that audiences who have seen it feel the same way.
From White Plains now has a life outside of New York City. A remounting of the show, with the same cast and crew as our NYC production, opens THIS WEEKEND at The Kitchen Theatre in Ithaca, NY. In February, Fault Line Theatre Co-Artistic Director Craig Wesley Divino (who normally plays the role of John in the show) will be directing a production at Xavier University.
Productions of the play are also being produced by other companies across the country. The show can be seen in Chicago and Boston in the coming months (as well as other cities to be revealed soon…).
If you find yourself in Ithaca between now and November 11, head over to The Kitchen Theatre:
Artistic Associate and co-founder of Fault Line Theatre Tristan Jeffers has assisted set designer Eugene Lee on Grasses of a Thousand Colors by Wallace Shawn, a co-production between The Public Theatre and Theatre for a New Audience. The play is part of a retrospective celebrating the 40 year artistic collaboration between Wallace Shawn and André Gregory that also includes the first New York revival of Shawn’s The Designated Mourner.
October 7 – November 24, 2013.
The Public Theatre
425 Lafayette Street
New York, NY 10003
212-539-8500
Shawn’s most outlandish work to date, GRASSES OF A THOUSAND COLORS, is a disturbing and anomalously beautiful play that explores the role of human beings in nature and the role of nature in human beings, sexuality being as Shawn says, “nature’s most obvious footprint in the human soul.” The play’s central character is a doctor who believes he has solved world hunger when he figures out how to rejigger the metabolisms of animals to tolerate eating their own kind. This has unexpected consequences. The play tells a story about the doctor, his wife, and his lovers, that is also a story about human beings and animals and the planet we live on.
Photo by Valerie Bondura
From everyone here at Fault Line Theatre, have a glorious Independence Day!
“I’ve been to Canada, and I’ve always gotten the impression that I could take the country over in about two days.”
- Jon Stewart
As the lone Canadian in Fault Line Theatre, I just wanted to wish everyone a very happy Canada Day, especially to those fellow Canadians who couldn’t be at home celebrating with us in the Great White North!
Image courtesy of Personal Space Theatrics
Our friends at Personal Space Theatrics present Julien Schwab’s critically acclaimed, mind-bending comedy rogerandtom on the Mainstage at HERE for an extended summer engagement. rogerandtom is a comedy whose only boundaries are between imagination and infinity. The play uses a twist to challenge the conventions of theatre while raising a series of profound questions about the role of theatre in theatre itself. PREVIEWS BEGIN SATURDAY JULY 6TH, OPENING SATURDAY JULY 13. Join them for an opening night reception immediately following the performance. Half price tickets available during previews July 6 – 12 use promo code “Preview2013″. Here are some more details about the show:
July 6 – August 24, 2013.
HERE MainStage Theatre
145 6th Ave. (enter on Dominick)
New York, NY
212-352-3101
Fault Line Theatre mailing list subscribers receive a $10 discount on tickets!
*Appears courtesy of the Actor’s Equity Association
Julien Schwab’s rogerandtom was first produced by Personal Space Theatrics in 2003, as the company’s inaugural production. Since then, the show has been produced in Los Angeles, Philadelphia, Boston, at the Edinburgh Fringe, and, most recently, at the Dorothy B. Williams Theatre at HERE. Director Nicholas Cotz has worked with Schwab on many versions of the show, helping him polish the script and preparing it for its return to NYC.
“The writing and direction is brilliant and the production is flawlessly executed. I highly recommend checking this one out before it slips into a reality that we’re not privy to.”
- NYtheater.com
![Photo credit: Roger Pic (Bibliothèque nationale de France) [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons](https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5766ffe96a49633b4492d1d5/1473710238056-FEI8GU2I9SHK02SMATDU/image-asset.jpeg)
Photo credit: Roger Pic (Bibliothèque nationale de France) [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons
A couple fun facts about Samuel Beckett to get you through to the end of the work day:
First, Fault Line Theatre co-artistic director and co-founder, Craig Wesley Divino, has a framed quote from the famous playwright in his New York apartment. The quote reads:
“Ever tried. Ever failed. No matter. Try again. Fail again. Fail better.”
Second, I came across this article today by James Plafke at geekosystem.com about the unlikely friendship between Beckett and Andre the Giant.
“We don’t normally post many “today I learned” posts, but this one is just too awesome. Anyone who has ever watched wrestling back in the good ol’ days or has seen The Princess Bride knows that André the Giant was a massive, humongous — ahem, giant — guy. The famous Hulk Hogan was billed as 6 feet 7 inches tall, and everyone should remember this iconic moment between he and André, in which André made a guy who billed as the average height of an NBA player look tiny. When André was 12, he was already over 6 feet tall and weighed 240 pounds. He was too big to fit on the local school bus and his family didn’t have the money to buy a car that could deal with his weight if it drove him to and from school.
Samuel Beckett, Nobel Prize winner (literature) and esteemed playwright, probably most noted for Waiting for Godot, bought some land in 1953 near a hamlet around forty miles northeast of Paris and built a cottage for himself with the help of some locals. One of the locals that helped him build the cottage was a Bulgarian-born farmer named Boris Rousimoff, who Beckett befriended and would sometimes play cards with. As you might’ve been able to guess, Rousimoff’s son was André the Giant, and when Beckett found out that Rousimoff was having trouble getting his son to school, Beckett offered to drive André to school in his truck — a vehicle that could fit André — to repay Rousimoff for helping to build Beckett’s cottage. Adorably, when André recounted the drives with Beckett, he revealed they rarely talked about anything other than cricket.”
I think it’s safe to say we can now all rest easy knowing that Fezzik from The Princess Bride and the Irish eccentric who wrote Waiting for Godot were at one time close friends.
Happy Monday everyone!
As you may have noticed, our website has unfortunately been down the last couple weeks. This problem was sadly out of our control, but we’re excited to be back up and running again.
It seems like Summer has finally set in upon New York City. Aside from unbearably humid heat and sweaty subway stations, Summer in NYC means a flood of young, excited graduates from all around the world.
Recently, I visited Providence, RI to attend the commencement weekend of Brown University. Many of Fault Line’s founders are graduates of the MFA program at Brown (I, myself, was an undergraduate in the theatre department). So it is with great excitement that we would like to congratulate the new crop of talented actors and directors who graduated this year!
From all of us here at Fault Line Theatre: Congratulations Class of 2013!
![(Image via Abhijit Shylanath from Bangalore, India (h2g2) [CC-BY-2.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0)], via Wikimedia Commons)](https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5766ffe96a49633b4492d1d5/1473710574653-QQ6T45UILME2DLRTD2LD/image-asset.jpeg)
(Image via Abhijit Shylanath from Bangalore, India (h2g2) [CC-BY-2.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0)], via Wikimedia Commons)
If you’re anything like our friend Arthur from The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy (“This must be Thursday,’ said Arthur to himself, sinking low over his beer. ‘I never could get the hang of Thursdays.”), sometimes Thursdays can be difficult. With the weekend fast approaching, he are “10 Rules for Students and Teachers” from the enigmatic John Cage to motivate you.
(I would argue that these rules could apply to everyone, not just students and teachers…. but then, I would also argue that everyone is also both a student and a teacher…)
“RULE ONE: Find a place you trust, and then, try trusting it for awhile.
RULE TWO: General duties of a student – pull everything out of your teacher; pull everything out of your fellow students.
RULE THREE: General duties of a teacher – pull everything out of your students.
RULE FOUR: Consider everything an experiment.
RULE FIVE: Be self-disciplined. This means finding someone wise or smart and choosing to follow them. To be disciplined is to follow in a good way. To be self-disciplined is to follow in a better way.
RULE SIX: Follow the leader. Nothing is a mistake. There’s no win and no fail. There is only make.
RULE SEVEN: The only rule is work. If you work it will lead to something. It’s the people who do all of the work all of the time who eventually catch on to things. You can fool the fans – but not the players.
RULE EIGHT: Do not try to create and analyze at the same time. They’re different processes.
RULE NINE: Be happy whenever you can manage it. Enjoy yourself. It’s lighter than you think.
RULE TEN: We are breaking all the rules, even our own rules, and how do we do that? By leaving plenty of room for ‘x’ qualities.
HELPFUL HINTS: Always be around. Come or go to everything. Always go to classes. Read everything you can get your hands on. Look at movies carefully and often. SAVE EVERYTHING – it might come in handy later.”