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(11/14/13 1:26am)
Long-time Saturday Night Live (SNL) Director Don Roy King, who was invited by the Middlebury College Activities Board (MCAB) Speakers Committee to give an overview of his storied career and insights into the world of entertainment, performed this past Thursday in the McCullough Social Space,.
In keeping with King’s sketch-comedy claim to fame, the improvisational troupe Otter Nonsense Players opened the show, performing an abbreviated set of scenes inspired by music randomly selected from an audience member’s iPhone.
“Keeping it short was important,” Otter member Adam Milano ’15 said. “It was a privilege to be asked to open for him, and we were excited to hear him speak as well, so we just got out there and did a short set and that was it.”
King took the stage after being introduced by MCAB Speakers Committee Chair Robbie LaCroix ’16. Though LaCroix’s introduction cited King’s many achievements, including four consecutive prime-time Emmy wins and creative directorships with CBS News, “Survivor,” “The Early Show” and Broadway Worldwide, King began his speech with self-deprecating humor.
“I’ve been invited here to teach a very important show-business lesson – never book an opening act more entertaining than you are,” he said, prompting another round of applause for the Otters.
He continued in a similar vein, making frequent jokes at his own expense as he denied being responsible for the “already insightful, witty, wry, inventive scripts with at least one fart joke in them” that arrive on his desk weekly, nor SNL’s iconic history and influence in American pop culture.
“Did Tina Fey’s impression of Sarah Palin affect the outcome of the 2008 election? Maybe,” he said. “Your guess is as good as mine. Actually, your guess is better than mine – you all have actually thought about these things.”
However, King’s easy conversational manner and clear instincts for showmanship belied his denial of any personal talent. He frequently prompted laughs as he relayed anecdotes from an awkward speech given at Pennsylvania State University following the Joe Paterno scandal, an unlikely friendship arising from rapper Ludacris’ appearance as a guest host and his unsuccessful stint as a boxer.
Though his tone was often informal and lighthearted, King did comment on the more serious issue of race in the media, which has been a concern throughout his long career.
“I started in 1969 at a black-and-white station, and like most stations in the country it wasn’t really black-and-white: it was white,” he said. “It was rare at that time to see a person of color as an anchor or a host, or even as an actor in a commercial.”
He spoke to television’s powerful influence in society, citing the character of laughable bigot Archie Bunker in the 1970s sitcom “All in the Family” as an effective critique of racism that allowed prejudice to be parodied rather than respected, effectively “turning fear into funny.”
When asked about the recent controversy concerning the relative lack of diversity on SNL, King joked that he thought the matter had been addressed adequately by the black female comedian Kerry Washington’s opening on last week’s show. He then went on to address the topic more seriously.
“I personally think we would have a much wider range of material we could attack, approach [and] deal with if we had a wider range of actors,” King said. “Because it’s become a point, I hope it is addressed more seriously than we did in that opening.”
King also offered advice for those aspiring to careers in the entertainment industry, espousing excellent work ethic and flexibility when working with many different kinds of talent as the common factors among successful producers.
“His experience coming through the industry is incredible,” said Jenny Johnston ’14, also a member of the Otters. “To hear the side of a director and how he works with comedians and writers and pulls it all together definitely puts it in a light that, as an improviser, you don’t necessarily get to see.”
Many questions fielded by King also concerned the more technical aspects of pulling off a show like SNL.
“I’ll get a script covered in three hundred post-it notes at 11 p.m. and have to completely change my meticulous plan, but it always ends up being better that way,” he said.
“The talk was cool in terms of figuring out how something like SNL gets orchestrated, opposed to just performing live,” Otters member Tim Baeder ’16.5 said. “The idea of how you rehearse those kinds of things and get them to production is such a complicated and interesting layer.”
King provided thorough and thoughtful insights into the entertainment industry and did so with the humor and charm one might expect of someone who has worked with the best in the business, but he’s not ruling out room for improvement.
“The demands of sketch comedy and staging actors were new to me at first, and I struggled. Eight years later, I’m still struggling in different ways,” King closed, inexplicably lifting up a vivid blue pant leg to reveal bright teal socks embroidered with flowers. “But at least I’m wearing much better socks.”
(10/30/13 10:42pm)
“It is the month of May for me,” he begins, oblivious or irreverent of the incongruous autumn leaves and woolen sweaters. Though the dark wood and dry books of the cloistered room seem to forbid speaking, the narrator persists, joined by a second, more feverish storyteller, then a third in the plaintive tones of a cello. Thus in a room more accustomed to the close of dissertations and research projects, a far more dramatic work attempts to find its ending.
So begins Beckett’s little-known radio play “Cascando,” a brief but potent journey through Beckett’s hallmark themes of existentialism and the end of language. Originally billed as “a radiophonic invention for music and voice” in its 1963 debut, the roughly 16-minute work was tangibly realized this past Sunday by a prominent cast including PBS Newshour anchor Jeff Brown as ‘the Opener’ and Assistant Professor of Theater Alex Draper as ‘the Voice’, the two spoken roles of the play. The work explores the efforts of the Opener, our chief narrator, to tell the story of a man called Woburn (who, in true Beckett style, never actually appears.) The narrative is told both verbally by the Voice and musically by world-class cellist Maya Beiser, performing a piece specifically composed for the production by Pulitzer prize-winning composer David Lang.
“What you’re hearing is the important thing,” prefaced director Dare Clubb, co-head of the Iowa Playwrights Workshop, though the four-person tableau behind him could not help but draw visual attention as well. Brown, seated at the sort of long table suited to an evening news anchor, was flanked by Draper on one side and Beiser and Lang on the other, a commanding dichotomy for the relatively intimate space of the room.
The project, initially conceived and staged by Clubb and Suzanne Bocanegro for the dance theatre in the Kevin P. Maheney Center for the Arts, was moved to Axinn when a plumbing issue rendered most of the buildings on Route 30 unusable for a public performance.
“We had done it in the [Abernethy] room the night before in the invitation-only performance, though, so it wasn’t a hard transition,” Draper said.
Though one might imagine how the acoustics of the spacious dance theater might have enhanced such a music-dependent production, ‘Cascando’ didn’t appear to suffer for being confined to a smaller space. On the contrary, the proximity afforded a close view of the dynamics between the players that might have otherwise been lost — the meaningful looks, the forceful gestures, the tense hovering of a bow above the strings. Draper’s frenetic delivery in particular benefited from the staging, an expressive performance that preempted the chiefly auditory nature of the radio play.
Draper, who has collaborated previously with Clubb, cited “the sheer amount of energy and drive that the Voice needs — to make sure you’re doing that without over-running the text” as the chief challenge of the role. “You have to resist the urge to make too much sense out of it for the audience, to over-interpret. You have to let them work it out for themselves.”
After the (first) iteration of the work reached its poignant close, the floor was opened to just that in a general discussion between the audience, performers, and director. “Thoughts? Questions? There’s no detail too insignificant,” Clubb invited, listening intently as audience members offered their observations on everything from the “gnarly-ness of the script” to whether the relationship between voice and cello was more of a competition or collaboration.
“The way it feels to me, at least, is that there are two sides of the story which need to be told: there’s what happens to this person and what this person feels, and we need both the words and music to tell that story,” Lang said. “I feel that in the end, when they overlap, Beckett is finally allowing them to help each other.”
After the open forum and a brief recess a second restaging of the play was performed, in which Beiser and Lang took the central space at the front of the room while Draper and Brown took to the mezzanines of the room in deliberately hard-to-spot positions. The result was such that, while in the first version almost all eyes were rapt on the performers, in the second more audience members were inclined to let their gaze wander or even close their eyes.
“The second time around there are way more people who are just listening,” Draper said. “They’ve thought about it and they’ve heard other people’s thoughts about it, and they don’t need to pay as much attention visually.”
Perhaps it was this shift from looking to listening or Lang’s comments on the cooperative nature of the different elements of the piece, but the second iteration certainly felt much more balanced between the players. Beiser’s haunting realization of Lang’s score was allowed to take a more central role, and while both versions delivered on Beckett’s work, the reprisal seemed closer to his original intentions for the audio play.
Ultimately ‘Cascando’ offered a rare chance for the best of both theater and music to be united by one piece.
“It’s one of his most puzzling plays, but with the talent we were able to pull in, it made the most sense to do Beckett with music,” Draper said. “They’re all astonishing people to be working with.”
(03/07/13 5:00am)
From March 14-16, theatre majors Sumire Doi ’13 and Rachel Goodgal ’13 will be performing their senior acting thesis in the Hepburn Zoo.
The show, ambiguously titled 17 ½, will be a collection of scenes culled from several modern plays, designed to explore themes of regeneration and starting anew.
“We wanted to do things that were new and fresh, so all the scenes are contemporary,” Goodgal said. “The oldest [scene] is from the 70’s, and the majority were written in the 2000’s.”
Goodgal explained that the process of selecting individual scenes was far from straightforward.
“We spent months at first trying to find just one play,” Goodgal said. “It’s very hard to find plays that have two equal-sized females leads, not many other characters and minimal tech. So by the time we decided to go the scene route, we had read a ton of plays and had a lot of material to choose from.”
“But then plays we liked didn’t necessarily work as just a scene, so it was a big process choosing what to include,” Doi said. “We didn’t finalize the material until the end of [winter term].”
For both actors, the selection process was ultimately based upon exploring new roles.
“It became basically about what would be an acting challenge, what would help me stretch,” Goodgal said. “I think we are both pretty good at comedy and heightening characters, as we both played in As You Like It, so we have a little bit of that and then some stuff that is totally outside what either of us has ever done before.”
“One of my most challenging scenes is one where I play a disabled rape victim,” Doi said. “I was really interested in what it means to be a victim. I feel like all the women we have played are all strong, tough characters that are somehow sort of broken, or in between the broken stage and restarting stage, and this scene is very much in the broken stage.”
The result is a broad range of both genre and character, from the provocative comedy of David Ive’s Venus in Fur to the bittersweet When You Cure Me by Jack Thorne.
“Some are very silly and outright comedic, and that’s their goal, is comedy,” Goodgal said. “There’s others that are very dark, and then a few that are in between — dark subject matter done humorously or things that seem on the surface to be everyday but have more depth. “
Rather than having one director tackle the thematic smorgasbord, Doi and Goodgal have enlisted Stephen Mrowiec ’13, Jake Schwartzwald ’14 and Matt Ball ’14 to direct scenes individually. “It turned out perfectly,” Doi said. “They really know their strengths and their different styles have helped us bring out different strengths as actors.”
In addition to these collaborative scenes, which will also feature acting by Noah Berman ’13, Charlotte Michaelcheck ’15, John Cheesman ’16 and Alexander Burnett ’16, both Doi and Goodgal will be performing monologues in which they have directed one another.
“I’ve directed Rachel before, so it felt natural,” Doi said. “But because they’re monologues, it’s still an individual process. I wrote my own monologue for the project about being a fragmented third-culture kid, and it’s scary. I’m going to be vulnerable, because I’m still figuring out what it means to be ‘me’ on stage.”
Finding a common thread can be difficult for such a highly collaborative production, but Doi and Goodgal have a unifying philosophy. “We use the word ‘showcase,’ which I’m not sure I like because I don’t want the project to be just about me acting in it,” Doi said. “We were very much about the production, making this project something that’s enjoyable for the audience, something that is whole despite having all these fragments and different directors.”
“We’re obsessed with the audience.” Goodgal said. “Aside from our acting, we wanted to enhance the audience experience and needed some way to tie it together.”
The actors are keeping some of their vision a surprise for opening night, but they did divulge that the show will feature live music composed and performed by Mrig Mehra ’13 and Mac Stormont ’13 of “The Casual Ales,” a music group on campus.
With so much emphasis on the audience experience, 17 ½ promises to be an un-missable performance.
“The feeling we want people to have at the end is hope,” Goodgal said. “The evening is kind of a roller coaster ride. Though some scenes don’t end hopefully at all, we want to demonstrate it’s possible to start afresh, to revive and to regain strength.”