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As the year is quickly coming to an end and The Faire, our first show of the season, rapidly approaches, Fault Line Theatre is looking to you, our friends, family, and fans for your support. The NFM group has generously sponsored a match campaign on IndieGoGo to help make The Faire possible.
Please take a moment to visit our IndieGoGo page and consider helping us out! Pass the link around! Tell all your friends!
Poster by Mandi O'Brien
We hope everyone had a safe and enjoyable Thanksgiving Weekend full of friends, family, and maybe a little football.
At Fault Line Theatre, we’re thankful for our extremely talented cast and crew for our upcoming production of The Faire! We are very excited to announce the following artists will be making this wonderful play by Crystal Finn come to life:
With From White Plains in Ithaca now behind us, Fault Line Theatre is moving full steam ahead into our season’s next show: The Faire. For those who don’t know, The Faire follows the behind the scenes lives of five performers at a Renaissance Faire somewhere in the backwoods of northern California.
Once upon a time, not so long ago, I incorrectly thought that Renaissance Faires were exclusively for children and geeky adults. My interest was purely ironic. My opinions were predominantly held due to stereotypes since I hadn’t stepped foot in anything resembling a Renaissance Faire since my 12th birthday party.
However, a few months ago, I accompanied my young niece and nephew on a trip to “Medieval Times”. If you’re not familiar with Medieval Times, it’s basically a medieval themed dinner theatre. Like a Renaissance Faire, the event is entirely immersive. In Toronto (where I saw the show), the building is made to look like an old castle. Before dinner, there are knighting ceremonies and pictures with the princess of the castle. For dinner you enter an arena of banquet tables surrounding a large dirt jousting pitch. Over the course of the next two hours, actors portraying knights ‘compete’ against each other in games of skill and courage. In the end only one knight is left standing.
The event is obviously rehearsed and none of the competitions focus on realism. The duels and fights aren’t particularly threatening. In fact, the entire event embraces a certain element of camp.
I was rapt from start to finish.
At first, my enthusiasm was in large part a performance of its own to make the day enjoyable for my young niece and nephew. But as the show went on, it was difficult not to get swept into the excitement of the event.
I think the key is this: every single performer fully commits to the theme of the event and their specific role within it. From the actor playing the king to the men playing knights to the waiters serving us food on steel dishware, everyone buys in. This is the commitment present in all great theatre. My ironic interest upon entering was in direct opposition to this commitment. An ironic interest, almost by definition, creates a barrier; inherent in irony is the act of commenting upon, rather than just the act of participation.
I think there will always be a place for irony, but in this case, I was thankful to be reminded that allowing myself to get swept up in the excitement and joy of an event is often better than attempting to remain a critical observer.
Image courtesy of The Play Company
Fault Line Theatre’s good friend, playwright Andy Bragen, is having his play This Is My Office produced by The Play Company this month in New York City and it’s shaping up to be an incredibly unique theatre-going experience. This site-specific piece is written for one actor who guides a small audience through an abandoned office space. However, because of its intimate nature, tickets are extremely limited… so get yours fast!
November 5 – December 8, 2013.
Chashama
210 E 43rd St.
New York, NY 10017
A guided tour through an empty office becomes the unexpected portal to a forgotten New York, and a father’s legacy. This is My Office brings you face to face with a narrator who finds his way through doubt, soul-sickness, and doughnut cravings, by telling you a story. Not the one he meant to tell, but a richer one about family, redemption and love.
From White Plains actor Jimmy King in Ithaca. NY (photo by Aaron Rossini)
After a fantastic run of From White Plains at The Kitchen Theatre in Ithaca, NY, Craig, Aaron, Jimmy, and Karl are heading home to New York City.
Ithaca has been a beautiful home for the last few weeks and all of us at Fault Line Theatre would like to thank the good people at The Kitchen Theatre for the opportunity to share From White Plains with new audiences.
Last week, Matt Clevy and I rented a car and took a road trip to Ithaca, NY to attend the opening night performance of From White Plains at The Kitchen Theatre.
We present, another Fault Line Theatre video update documenting our journey.
Crystal Finn as a child at Renaissance Faire
Even though From White Plains is still enjoying it’s critically acclaimed run at The Kitchen Theatre, there are still plenty of developments with our upcoming production of The Faire (coming in February of 2014). Feel free to check out our The Faire show page for updates on the production as they develop.
Additionally, I sat down with Crystal Finn, playwright of The Faire, to chat a little bit about her work, her life, and working with Fault Line Theatre:
Tell us a little about The Faire and the inspiration behind it.
I spent a large part of my childhood at a Renaissance Faire, working with my parents selling pottery. It was an early education in what theater is. Even as a very young kid you had a sense that this place was totally magical and totally absurd. I remember years later reading “Barthalomew Fayre”, the Ben Jonson play, and thinking: I know these people! I became very interested in the idea of a Fair as a kind of in-between place where normal social rules don’t matter. The setting in my play is not the literal Renaissance Faire I grew up in–it’s more of an imagined space.
Many people are familiar with your excellent work as an actor, but perhaps less so with your excellent work as a writer. Was writing something you found later in your artistic life or something you’ve been doing all along?
I was always very interested in writing and did a lot of it on my own. When I moved to New York I took a writing class with Tina Howe at Hunter college and she opened up my thinking about so many things. She was the first person who I think instinctually knew that my writing was an extension of my acting–that they were part of the same muscle. But writing is much harder than acting, for me. You’re alone struggling with this thing–and the thing is basically you. It’s terrifying. But also rewarding because of that.
What was your most important discovery about The Faire that came out of the development process with Fault Line Theatre?
I learned so much about the tone of the play. About how the style reads off the page. Mostly we focused a lot on the main characters journey–an actress who works at the Faire and wants to get out. Aaron [Rossini, director of The Faire] and I talked a lot about how to make that character’s journey reflect the journey of the structure of the play as a whole. The process helped me make some crucial changes.
Your husband, Andy Bragen, is also a playwright. What’s it like having two playwrights in the house? Do you bounce ideas off one another or do you tend to keep to yourselves when you’re working on project?
We do bounce ideas off each other. He is very supportive and I think has been the main person who has given me the confidence to keep writing. He understands what it is to really wrestle with a play and that has been the best model for how to approach trying to do this.
What’s next for you? Do you have any plays that you’re currently developing?
I just finished a first draft of a play about two best girlfriends who are high school debate partners. The play is interested in female friendship, which I guess is becoming a theme for me. I’m also trying to write this play about a dystopian future where nature has disappeared and some people get to live forever. I think it might be as bad as it sounds. I have been too scared to re-read it.
Video by Good Baby Films
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: