Originally Posted by Jennifer Taylor, Marketing Associate, November 1, 2007
Everyone at Signature has been very busy getting Queens Boulevard (the musical) ready to begin previews this Tuesday, November 6th. Charles Mee and Davis McCallum (the playwright and director) were kind enough to take some time out of their very busy rehearsal schedule to sit down with us for an interview so that we could give you some insight into the play.
Originally Posted by Adam Wright, Production Management Intern, October 25, 2007
Chuck Mee’s Queens Boulevard demands that one of New York’s most colorful and diverse neighborhoods be somehow squashed down and thrown on stage, taking audience’s on a topsy-turvy journey through karaoke bars, bathhouses, underground clubs, and everything in between. As you can imagine, creating an accurate and lively representation of such a place has been no easy feat. So as one of the largest scenic designs Signature has yet to undertake in its 17-year history, set designer Mimi Lien and production manager Paul Ziemer should be commended for all the dedicated and exhausting work they have put into such an epic project. Finally, with load-in underway at the Peter Norton Space, Lien’s vibrantly bold, intricately detailed vision of Queens has finally begun to take shape, and the result, even in its half-finished state, is still, quite simply, stunning.
I missed out on load-out for Iphigenia 2.0, but as punishment I got to rip down all the FHM and Maxim girls that blanketed the USR walls by hand. (The new Radiohead came out the day before, so I jammed out on my iPod and made the most of the good music and the cute girls and it actually wasn’t all that bad.) Paul and I readied ourselves for the chaos to come, but fortunately we offered our theatre space to UCSD graduate showcase before load-in, so we had at least had one day of calm before the storm was to arrive. Shortly afterwards painters came in and began transforming the boards into pavement and pedestrian walkways, and soon enough, hoards of neon signs and steel beams began pouring in. The first few days of last week were spent getting up the walls of the set and Queens seemed to be growing into its own.
The wary informal meet 'n greet while the company slowly gathers gives way to the Artistic Director's address, contextualizing the production within the season. And then, anxiously scrutinized by the assembled company, the Director delivers his opening address and the cast speaks the words of the text aloud for the first time, after which, designers unveil their vision of the play that has been rendered concrete in the months of pre-production and preparation that precede rehearsal.
Originally Posted by Marianne Miller, Company Management Intern, October 11, 2007
Friends, family, loved ones, and Signature fans alike joyously rushed out of the performance of Iphigenia 2.0 on Sunday evening, October 7th, 2007. One observing might assume the rush was for the awaiting Brooklyn Brown, Brooklyn Lager, and Amstel Light in the lobby (and indeed, we had to fight a few guests off until the party officially began). Truly, however, the exuberant rush came from the final exhilarating performance of the first show in the Charles (or Chuck, as we colloquially refer to him) Mee Series at the Signature Theatre Company-Iphigenia 2.0.
As the Company Management Intern, I was absolutely blessed to work next to these actors in their final moments of this process. I shared conversation over a Pret-A-Manger banana nut muffin with Louisa Krause (a favorite pastime of ours) right before she warmed up for the final performance. She was all smiles mixed with a hint of nostalgia for the total process of the show. We talked about what came next for the young actress. She was hopeful for what would follow, and I was reminded that Iphigenia 2.0 is certainly not the last any of us will see of these phenomenally talented people. She then scurried off to put on her ballet shoes-the excitement for the evening had begun!
The house packed in quickly, and the show finished strong with a dynamic standing ovation, complete with daisy throwing by Sara Danielsen and me (I pat myself on the back-no injuries to the cast during this carousing, so to speak). Jim Houghton, Artistic Director, recognized a few very important constituents to the process: the designers and crew were praised profusely, director Tina Landau shyly stood up to welcome applause, the cast beamed at Jim's commendations, and Chuck Mee gave a quiet smile as the seated audience erupted to show their support for this man and the work he has completed thus far on Signature's stage.
Iphigenia 2.0 had, without a doubt, a glorious run. From the beginning stages of casting, designing, and rehearsal to the pizza, salad, and general communion of artists in the lobby after the final show, the entire artistic endeavor stayed true to a genuine execution of Charles Mee's first show of the season. The one-week extension attested to the powerful voice Iphigenia 2.0 had for its audiences.
What would happen if you took a random sampling of all of the people you met in each year of your life and invited them to a big party? Would they have anything in common? Would they know what to say to each other? Would the idea of hosting all those people from different parts of your world give you a conniption? Well, the Signature took that chance and threw that party this Sunday. And much to my relief, the first ever Signature Alumni Night was by all reports a huge success.
Let's go back a few months. Jim Houghton, the Signature's Founding Artistic Director, had been talking for a while about wanting to set aside one performance in each of the Signature's runs as a night for former Signature artists and staff to come together and see the show; a homecoming night of sorts, and a chance to make connections between all of the amazing people who've worked here over the past sixteen plus years. As the new Artistic Assistant, Alumni Night was handed over to me as my first project. After setting the date during the run of Iphigenia 2.0, my first big task was gathering email addresses for all of the people who'd ever worked at Signature (which brought me face to face with the fact that in 1991, the only people who had email addresses were working for the Defense Department). After we sent out an email invitation to as many people as I could track down, Marianne, the Company Management Intern, and I sat down with old copies of the contact sheets and started making phone calls. We had some charming conversations with past company members. We also left a lot of messages. I white-knuckled my way through my message on Parker Posey's voice mail. (She is one of my favorite actresses, but have you seen Dazed and Confused? The idea of actually reaching her on her cell phone made me a little nervous.) As we moved further and further into the past, the "disconnected" and "no longer at this number" messages became more and more frequent. All in all we reached out to over 700 people, which is only a fraction of the people who'd worked with Signature over the years but a good start for our first party.
The responses started coming in immediately. There were lots of people who couldn't attend because they were working out of town or in other shows, but they sent their congratulations and love to Jim and Signature. By the Friday before the event we had a full house, and I had to sit down with the seating chart and figure out where to seat everyone. Imagine the most complicated dinner table you've ever had to arrange. Do you seat all of the directors next to each other, or is it better to sit them with the designers they've worked with? Will the stage managers be shy? (Not at all as it turns out.) Should you sprinkle the actors amongst the house or seat them by cast? Who gets to sit next to Chuck? I dropped the seating chart off at the box office on Friday night with my fingers crossed. As it turns out, I shouldn't have worried about any of it. Once we managed to get the chatty crowd into the house and seated, they turned out to be the best, most enthusiastic audience a theatre could ask for. The Iphigenia 2.0 cast, who'd already had a matinee that afternoon and would have been justified in being a little low energy at the end of the week, responded to the liveliness of the crowd and gave a fabulous performance. Even a shower of flour over the first two rows in the final scene didn't dampen anyone's enthusiasm.
After the curtain call, Jim got up to welcome everyone to Alumni Night and to introduce Chuck. The audience gave Chuck a rousing ovation that went on for so long that witnesses say Chuck may have blushed a little. Everyone spilled out into the lobby for wine and snacks and more talk. I was working at the bar, so for a little while it was all a blur of handing out wine and champagne. Every time I looked up however, a new cluster of people were in front of me hugging and laughing and gossiping. I heard some great stories about the first production in the Peter Norton space. People who knew each other in different contexts realize that they had the Signature in common. Assistant designers and directors reconnected with their mentors and former interns passed on the word about their current projects.
Originally Posted by Sara Danielsen, Artistic Assistant, September 27, 2007
For two nights this week the cast of the Signature's opening play of the Chuck Mee season were in residence at the Guggenheim's Works and Process, bringing some noisy, messy, fabulous theatre to the Upper East Side. The Works and Process series is better known for its previews of significant dance companies, so it was difficult to guess what might be going through the minds of the Guggenheim patrons as Tom Nelis playing Agamemnon delivered his opening monologue on the ever expanding reach of an anxious empire. Chuck's play doesn't shy away from politics or implicit criticism of our current administration, and the opening monologue is an especially damning salvo to the politics of the right.
And then came the Macho Dance.
Which, of course, is preceded by the four actors playing the chorus of soldiers stripping down to their skivvies.
We're not at the ballet anymore, ladies and gentlemen of the Guggenheim.
The evening was not all shock and awe. Anne Bogart as the moderator led a fascinating conversation with Chuck and Tina Landau, the director of Iphigenia 2.0, on their working relationship and the creative process. Tina explained that for her the play isn't a thing that needs to be brought to life. "The text is one of many tracks, like in a piece of recorded music. We also have bodies, light, sound, and space to work with, and some third thing is created. I spend a lot of time busting the play open with the actors, creating an odd collage of the text and what the actors bring."
Both Anne and Tina had previously collaborated with Chuck, so the conversation was particularly intimate and revealing. Anne told Chuck that she heard he had been unable to write the play until his own daughters were grown up and out of the house. Chuck confirmed the story, explaining that he'd been given a stack of research materials on the story fifteen years earlier during rehearsals for Orestes 2.0, but couldn't face the idea of a father killing his daughter. The audience too, seemed particularly receptive to the family tragedy; they were riveted by the scene between Kate Mulgrew as Clytemnestra and Tom Nelis's Agamemnon.
Inevitably though, the politics of the piece were hard to ignore. An appreciative chuckle rippled through the audience when Chuck explained the choice to place the demand to sacrifice Iphigenia with the soldiers: "In a democracy it is the people to whom the politicians are answerable, not the gods."
With Iphigenia 2.0 nearing the end of its initial run, and gearing up for the extension, we are now looking ahead to Queens Boulevard - the musical. At the beginning of every Signature production, the Artistic Team (A Team, as we like to call it) produces a hefty binder of dramaturgical research that fleshes out the world of the play, its characters, and their preoccupations for the benefit of the production team of the new show. Inspired by an incredibly diverse range of sources, including Kottayam Tampuran's The Flower of Good Fortune, Homer's The Odyssey, Kalidasa's The Recognition of Shakuntala, James Joyce's Ulysses and the usual Meeist assortment of blogs, journals and news articles, Queens Boulevard - the musical uses the story of a new groom's impossible quest to find a Flower of Heaven for his bride as a structure to explore "The New New World," a series of plays in which Mr. Mee examines the interracial co-existence and pan-cultural fusion that he believes to be the natural condition of the society of today. (You learn this information after spending hours with the research binder, as I have!)
To augment the existing Queens Boulevard research for the mid-October start of rehearsals, A Team daytripped to Jackson Heights last Tuesday to scout the inspirations and locations of the play. Everything one assumes to be a New Yorker norm was arrestingly displaced: a lone Dunkin Donuts shop lost in a sea of ethnic bakeries and groceries, sari stores displaying their wares on mannequins that appear oddly Caucasian, a cheap lunch at a diner offering a buffet of curry, lassi and rice pudding with nary a burger or milkshake in sight. An extraordinary multi-lingual soundtrack accompanied the day's travels to a busy pan-cultural pre-school where parents waited in a cheerful gaggle to pick up their kids, an intimate Indian patisserie where tempers flared while customers haggled for discounts and personal care salons where manicures and pedicures were but two of a whole catalogue of services offered (other services ranged from bindi application to "monobrow separation"!).
In his essay Music, Movement and Text, Mr. Mee calls for a theatrical form that is more complex than the domestic psychodramas of Ibsen and Miller. He argues passionately that human existence and human understanding far exceed the tidy post-Freudian psychological conclusions dictated by what has become the normative mainstream theatrical experience. Life is more random, more imprecise, more enchanting than the inside of a living room, and Mr. Mee argues these ideas in a more thrillingly random, imprecise and enchanting arena than even that of the Greeks in Queens Boulevard. His vision of the theatre is the most compassionate of lenses to filter the melting pot of Queens toward distilling an understanding of what it feels like to be living in the world right now.
... we are asked to deal with reason and feeling head and heart
text and spectacle
amazement and wonder
precision and haziness
all at the same time
and this feels more like the complexity of life we all know
in our own lives ...
from Music, Movement and Text (Mee)
