Cabaret Collective, or, Yes, The Police Did Come And Take All Our Beer

Let’s address the elephant in the room first. Halfway through Kelley Sweeney’s rendition of an old Joni Mitchell tune, the Stony Brook University police came, knocked on the door, took all our beer and checked IDs. The Cabaret Collective has always had a spoken policy that it’s okay to discretely bring your own beverages. From what I understand, some people were coming to the Collective with open bottles in hand and mistakenly went into another performance in the same building, who thereupon called the police. I don’t know how disruptive these individuals were being, if at all. So the police came, stopped the show, and did their police thing. What I’ve heard is that Stony Brook has a wet campus, so our understanding was that there shouldn’t have been a problem. We were, obviously, wrong. According to the “State University of New York at Stony Brook Alcoholic Beverages on State Property Policies and Procedures,” (http://studentaffairs.stonybrook.edu/jud/docs/Alcohol_Policy.pdf):

“Unless a permit has been obtained from the State Liquor Authority, Division of Alcoholic Beverage Control (“SLA Permit”) by the sponsoring individual or organization, the consumption of alcohol or possession of an open container of alcohol anywhere on campus is prohibited. This includes, by way of example only, classrooms, grounds, parking lots, student lounges and bathrooms.”

So the cops were in the right, unfortunately, to take all our booze. However, I’m not convinced they had any right to ask for people’s phone numbers:

“Standard identification procedures are required at all campus functions and at establishments where alcoholic beverages are available. Acceptable forms of identification include:

U.S. or international passport

Valid driver’s license

NYS non-driver’s ID

Selective service registration card

Resident Alien identification card

An individual must be proofed each time s/he requests an alcoholic beverage or enters the alcohol service area. Alpha lists will be used to verify student dates of birth. University staff may spot check the legal age of any persons in the area of consumption. The use of false ID is prohibited. All false IDs will be confiscated and a disciplinary referral will be made.”

That aside, let’s talk about the art!

In spite of Becky Goldberg’s clarification of my last response to a Cabaret Collective (http://waylonlenk.blogspot.com/2011/12/inter-arts-collaboration-at-sbu-cabaret.html), I’m still seeing a substantial lack of interarts collaboration. I’m not saying there isn’t any. Lukas Kürten and Karl Hinze both foray outside of their own departments (Physics and Music, respectively) to participate in theatrical endeavors. In Kürten’s case, he was the originating artist of a bilingual reading of Goethe’s Zauberlehrling with Theatre’s Nancee Moes.

But those are only individuals. To all extents and purposes, this Cabaret Collective was a concert by the Music Department, with a couple theatrical acts and some art in the hallway. And the format of the Collective seems most conducive to music. Nearly all of the acts (this includes both of the theatre acts) read their pieces off music stands. The ten minute spots are perfect for musicians whose songs range on average from three to four minutes, and a dominate venue for singer-songwriters are bars anyway. As for us in theatre, especially dramaturgs, I think we’re a little used to having a little bit more time in our individual events to hold forth on some theoretical theatrical concept. Not to say we can’t get the audience up a tree and back down in ten minutes – both of the acts I saw last night, as have many others that I’ve seen at previous Collectives. All I’m saying is that it seems like a musician’s natural habitat, not necessarily a dramaturg’s.

And a performance-based venue is the opposite of a plastic artist’s natural habitat! Especially if you’re going to get sequestered to the hallway. Maybe a better idea, if the Cabaret Collective is really about fostering interarts collaboration, is to put the art in the room with the performances, and perhaps even have the artists there to say a few words about their work to associate their face more strongly with it.

I’m still very dubious about the overall effectiveness of the Cabaret Collectives. Yes, they have inspired a few individuals to cross over out of their departments, but I’m not seeing anything that brings the arts together in a way that blurs the boundaries between disciplines. If anything, it’s become a fun way for a bunch of Theatre and Music grad students (and I’m purposely excluding Art here, because they seem excluded by the very structure of the event), have a few beers, maybe get busted up by the cops, and play music and do skits for each other. Which is all very nice, if that’s what the Cabaret Collective wants to be.

Liz Sager's Spring Awakening

The cream rises to the top, and Liz Sager’s production of Frank Wedekind’s Spring Awakening in the Staller Center Cabaret is an excellent showcase for some of the best acting talent the Theatre Department at SBU has to offer. Caitlin Bartow and Eric Michael Klouda stole the show as Melchior and Moritz, respectively. Bartow was especially engaging with her adolescent boy bluster, and brought a good deal of depth to her character. From pretending to know more about sex than he did, to freaking out when Wendla (Molly Walsh Warren) had him beat her, to insisting on taking himself seriously in the graveyard, Bartow’s Melchior was the star of the play. Klouda (although he was a little hard to understand at first due to diction and delivering his lines at the floor) was the perfect opposite and scene partner to Bartow. Nervous and high-strung, he created a convincing character arch that culminated in a theatric tour de force in his suicide scene. They were perfectly cast as the two male points in the core Spring Awakening triangle. Unfortunately, I found the third point Wendla wanting. Warren seemed unable to deliver much beyond sighing innocence. She almost broke through into something incredible in the scene when she gets Moritz to beat her, and I was on the edge of my seat waiting for her to commit and meet Bartow’s energy, but she never did. Unfortunately, the rest of the cast was also split between those who owned the stage and those who seemed tentative, sometimes to the point where I thought they were grasping for their lines. I hate to say it, because it seems like Sager has been working hard on this for the past six weeks, but it read as under-rehearsed.

I would like to say a word about Sager’s directorial concept – this is her Spring Awakening and MFA project after all. From her program note, she is obviously interested in deconstructing the gender binary, and she approached this with gender-blind casting and costuming. The casting worked in part, and didn’t work in part. In a cast of twelve, she had nine women and three men. This meant that the preponderance of male parts was played by women, which audiences are used to in academic theater where we have more women than men. From the other direction, both Andrew Breslin and Chris Petty played women during the course of play. Breslin can be taken seriously as a concerned mother, and this is not the first time he’s been cast as such. It’s hard, though, to take the heavily bearded Petty seriously as a giddy school-girl. That choice seemed forced and heavy handed, as did Herr Gabor (again played by Petty) undressing Frau Gabor (Becky Goldberg) from her men’s clothing and re-dressing her as a woman when they decided to send the recalcitrant Melchior to reform school.

I left the theater feeling that a good idea was undermined by being under-resourced. With such a large dramatis personae, it seems that Sager was forced to cast actors who couldn’t meet Bartow and Klouda’s (among others) energy, and to cast a preponderance of women which I feel undermined the point of her gender-blind casting. And that's not even mentioning that a dozen actors is a lot of people to coordinate! Even half that would have been a handful. I left wishing that instead of attempting to do a translation of Wedekind’s entire play and super-impose a critique of the gender binary on it, Sager had instead adapted Spring Awakening to focus on those parts of Wedekind's story that best supported her critique.

Spring Awakening plays tonight (March 10^th) at 8PM and tomorrow (March 11^th) at 2PM in the Staller Center Cabaret. Last night was a full house, so reservations are recommended: http://www.facebook.com/?ref=logo#!/events/284882374915297/

"Coyote Hunts the Sun" Rehearsal Log, November 4

This baby has legs! Today we ran this sucker through twice, but before that, Becky and Christina helped Chris and I move the curtain across the space to create our backstage, and we set up the chairs. The space is what it’s going to look like now!

Then we did it for Becky and Christina. Man, that felt good to do it for new people! Ranae said it felt the same for her. B & C couldn’t get over how well she’s doing. They said this idea I had to give her lesson plans instead of lines is sheer genius! It definitely seems like Ranae and Darci are people that we’re all going to be keeping in mind when we cast future stuff.

After our first run, Darci had Chris and I run our lines for the Messiah and Makataimeshkiakiak scenes. It’s a little obscene how poorly I’m doing with memorizing two of the lines I wrote: “It smells good” and – shoot, I can’t remember the other one. Chris and I were a little afraid of Darci when we started doing it again, so the Messiah scene was kind of halting, but other than that the run went well. We’re down to 26 minutes now, and it’s feeling like nuclear fusion! Or fission! Whichever’s cooler. We just decided that before tomorrow night’s rehearsal, Chris and I are going to have to run lines. But once we’re running it, we just have to let it roll.

The Continuing Saga of "Coyote Hunts the Sun"

My friend Becky Goldberg has started a playwrighting workshop at SBU where folks who have written stuff get together and hear their work out loud. We've had two sessions, and I've gotten to hear "CHTS" read both times, and the feedback has been tremendously helpful. After our first session, I knew that the several episodes weren't congealing for the listeners. In response, I added back the Storyteller character from earlier drafts, but gave her a definite character. The key scenes for my proto-audiences seem to be the ones with dueling storytelling, and the key theme that of Native people reasserting an autonomous voice. As such, the Storyteller became a clear antagonist in the role of an academic, well-intentioned but speaking out of turn. This second reading made it clear that, as of now, she's troublingly one-sided. What I plan on doing is rewriting her speeches, or "lessons", as lecture notes or lesson plans, as opposed to scripted dialogue. It is also becoming increasingly clear that my play is heavy on visuals, especially towards the top. To really be sure if it works or not, I'm going to have to see it.