Storytelling Workshop at the Piggyback Fringe Festival

Yesterday, Chris and I did a workshop on telling family stories theatrically. We were in Wakefield/La Peche's brand new community center, and had a pretty substantial space. It was a smaller class with only four participants, but that meant we were able to give each group individual attention. But before we split them into groups, we did a warm-up for the whole class. It was one that Chris knows called "Wa", and it was fairly challenging with just six people (four students plus two teachers), but it did the job we needed it to do: got everybody into their bodies and playing around. Then we split them into pairs, and Chris and I each stuck with a pair to help them develop their skit. We called one partner "A" and the other partner "1" to get rid of any semblance of hierarchy - this was also a workshop in devising, after all. First A told a story from their family to 1, who told it back from the first person point of view. Then they switched. They selected one of the stories to develop into a skit to perform in front of the class. We got two very different, very good skits. I had the impression that it was a very empowering experience for the students: if they can accomplish that in an hour, just imagine what they can accomplish after three months of development and rehearsal!

"The Baskets" World Premiere

Last night The Baskets opened for the first time ever, anywhere. The audience wasn't has big as we would have hoped, but they were very appreciative. It was a great experience to gauge their reactions throughout the show. They loved the opening story - an old one about the Greedy Father and the creation of basket materials. When I finished it and jumped forward millenia to the 90s, it seemed like they were a little disappointed - they were just having so much fun in the world of the First People! But they really started to get into it when I began to hang pictures up on the network of clothes lines we rigged up above the stage. When I went back to an old-time story, I could feel them kind of sit up. Something's changed? What's happening? Then they got really curious - it was our Flood story, so it was a recognizable theme, and yet markedly different from the Bible version they're probably used to. After the show, Chris and the young woman up after me in the church told me that everybody was smiling as they left. Today we're going to hit the street (there's only one in Wakefield) advertising to see if we can't bring in a few more people for the Sunday show. Also, we're going to teach a class on devising theater based on family histories.

Oh, and when I asked if anybody had ever heard of the Hoopa Tribe during the play, about three people raised their hands. So right on, Hoopas.

Our venue.

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/

Inter-arts Collaboration at SBU: The Cabaret Collective and Shared Support Services

CORRECTION: As per Becky's comment, I'd like to retract my statement about the Cabaret Collective not contributing to inter-arts collaboration, and insinuating that it might in fact do the opposite. She brought up many interesting facts that I didn't know, and that I encourage you all to read. ~W.L., 12-12-2011

The Cabaret Collective is an event that began about a year ago at Stony Brook University as a forum to facilitate inter-arts collaboration. The Staller Center houses the Theater, Art, and Music Departments, which, until this semester, have been autonomous from each other. This autonomy lead to a departmental insularity that John Lutterbie, then head of the Graduate Theater Department, and now head of both Art and Theater, found troubling. Under his guidance, Chris Petty of Theater reached out to his colleagues in Theater, Art and Music to form the Cabaret Collective, a periodic variety show exhibiting work from the three departments with the motive to spark dialogue and collaboration between us. The December 9^th Collective was successful, but not in terms of facilitating collaboration between the arts.

This Collective showed that the Music, Theater and Engineering students (there was a comedy troupe from the Engineering Department) are tending away from self-gratification and towards performativity. It’s my opinion that art of any kind needs to be for the audience – it needs to talk to and with them, not at them. College departments are beautiful in the artistic freedom that they provide, but one of the dangers of this freedom is that the art that comes out of them can be self-involved. This Collective showed that we can experiment and still engage audiences. A good example was Levy Lorenzo’s Stick of Joy. Levy is a percussionist, but his instrument for this piece was a joy stick plugged into a laptop plugged into the speakers. He used the joy stick to manipulate audio to create a musical piece. Levy’s a-rhythmic style can be disorienting, and the lack of an identifiable instrument could have compounded that disorientation. Instead it did the opposite. The newness of juxtaposing a technology that I remember as reaching its heyday in the 90s with his style of music was intriguing, and the way Levy performed the piece by throwing his whole body into its creation drew and held the audience’s focus.

Where the Cabaret Collective doesn’t seem to be succeeding is in its intended purpose – inter-arts collaboration. The sole representatives of such a thing were Timothy and Mallory Vallier’s Kinetic Petals (a dance/composition piece using a Kinect), and Belsazar, a poetry performance by Becky Goldberg of Theater and Lukas Kürten of Physics. But I’m not sure if these instances of inter-arts collaboration can be credited to the Cabaret Collective. Timothy and Mallory are husband and wife, and Lukas is becoming a fixture of the Theater Department outside of the Collective. The rest of the pieces were specifically music or specifically theater. Our friends from Engineering, Monroe Comedy, are included in that with their sketch comedy act. But I’m not sure we can expect much more – two evenings a semester aren’t enough to facilitate inter-disciplinary work on any meaningful scale. What will do this is interaction across disciplines on a daily basis.

This interaction has been happening on the graduate level through the Staller Departments, as well as English and Philosophy, encouraging students to come take classes with them. But another form of inter-departmental interaction has been happening, one that is more controversial, and one that . What is happening at Stony Brook University is called “shared support services.” This means, to quote Alyssa Melillo of the Stony Brook Press, “the administrative staffs of two or three academic departments are merged into one central entity where staff members can specialize in a certain department, but be available and prepared to handle responsibilities outside their specialization.” You can read her full article here: http://sbpress.com/2011/11/shared-services-from-scratch/.

While faculty and student resistance from the Humanities Building is stalling the process, for the present, shared services have been incorporated between Theater and Art with hardly a cry of protest. There are two reasons for this, I think.

The first has to do with personalities. Last year, Art didn’t have a permanent chair, and there was an atmosphere of distrust towards Nick Mangano of Theater. John Lutterbie, who now heads both departments, seems to be fairly popular professor whose heart is in the right place – he has a sincere inclination towards inter-arts collaboration.

The second is that the Theater graduate students seem unable to organize themselves towards a common political goal. This is the result, I believe, of divergent personalities and a general business with graduate level course work and the creation of art. I cannot speak to the graduate student culture in the Art Department, nor to undergraduate culture.

It’s my opinion that positivity towards Professor Lutterbie and a strong focus on individual projects draw our focus away from the larger issues that, among other things, means continued disciplinary insularity between the arts. These issues include:

·         “Shared support services” mean merging of administrative staffs, not departments of disciplines.

·         The goals for shared support services are not to facilitate the interdisciplinary goals of Lutterbie and many others in the Staller Center. They are to adjust to an $82 million budget cut. For more, please read President Stanley’s statement: http://www.stonybrook.edu/sb/50forward/message3.html

·         There is a widespread concern that shared support services will inhibit faculty and administration to provide quality attention to the students. This concern has been expressed by our colleagues in the Music Department (http://sbpress.com/2011/11/shared-support-in-progress/), in the Humanities, and by the GSO calling for transparency on the part of the Administration (http://www.sbgso.org/files/u1/resolutions/RESOLUTION%20ON%20SSCs.pdf). These concerns are being met by the University Senate, who has called a moratorium on shared support services pending further investigation into their viability. 

The Cabaret Collective is an interesting experiment, and certainly a fun event, but fails to address the real impediments to inter-arts collaboration. In fact, by focusing our energies into the Collective, and our hopes in Lutterbie and shared support services, we may in face be distracting ourselves from more effective ways to facilitate inter-disciplinary work and contributing to continued insularity between departments.

"Coyote Hunts the Sun" Closing

Ranae Hedman

I tried things a little differently last night. Just before I left, I was listening to Jetty Rae on YouTube and got all inspired to be a musician. So I started playing on my box drum that I’m borrowing from my mom. I packed it with me to the theater, and when house opened, I was the

house music!

Ranae Hedman, Waylon Lenk

The show went fantastically again, and the talk back was once again longer than the show itself. People’s concerns about it maybe moving too fast in parts, script-wise, were apparent to me last night – it did feel like a race across the continent, as opposed to the 20 days one story says it actually took Pihnêefich. Afterwards, during the talk-back, we were able to focus in on where the play needs to be developed. I need to further develop Chris’ characters – the child, the Messiah, and Makataimeshkiakiak – and I need to explore the possibilities of setting it in a class room. After all, the Schoolteacher is the glue that holds Coyote Hunts the Sun together. And, to Ranae’s credit, she makes the role happen. I asked if maybe I should change her stories into the kind that exist in most text-books. Reidy Estevez, one of my students, showed me quite clearly that the answer is “no.” The Schoolteacher’s and Pihnêefich’s tellings of “Coyote and the Sun” form the bookends to the play and the journey – without her telling the colonial histories, there is little or no excuse for her to tell the pikvah.

Chris Petty

Waylon Lenk, Ranae Hedman

So what’s next for Coyote Hunts the Sun? Well, rewrites. I need to explore and develop the characters and their worlds. There are two stories that it seems I need to tell that don’t quite fit into Coyote Hunts the Sun. One is the Ghost Dance story – as I’ve mentioned earlier, I have a pretty strong bias against that particular ceremony, and what that tells me is that I need to learn more about it so that I’m not walking around carrying bad thoughts about those that did it. The second is the cannibal story that I try to tell during the Messiah scene. It was the first scene that I wrote for this play, but I’m realizing more and more that it isn’t part of Coyote Hunts the Sun, but is obviously a story that I feel compelled to tell. I need to tell it separately and get it out of the work at hand.

Ranae Hedman

It was a fun process, and now I have the post show blues. But while this phase of the project is over, we certainly haven’t seen the last of Coyote Hunts the Sun!

Waylon Lenk


 



Waylon Lenk



Ranae Hedman

Waylon Lenk, Chris Petty, Ranae Hedman, Darci Faye







"Coyote Hunts the Sun" Opening

That’s right folks! Coyote Hunts the Sun opened last night! Darci and I got there early to run lights, and that went pretty smoothly. She just needed a little more practice. Then we took a little break to eat dinner and set up the marquee and fold programs, and then Ranae and Chris got there. We ran through it with lights and only one hitch – Chris accidently got locked outside. So we ended up taping the locks down on the doors.

When we finished, we started to do a little photo shoot. I took the first picture, and then the room went dark. Apparently five lights, a laptop and a projector are too much for our poor little Cabaret, and we blew a fuse. We rushed to plug everything that needed to be plugged in to sockets that still had juice, and we tried to pick the lock to the breaker room. We couldn’t, though. I guess that’s I new skill I need to learn on YouTube.

But we got everything rigged up in the nick of time, we got Chris’ stigmata on, and we opened the house (special thanks to Erin Treat for agreeing to be house manager at the last minute).

I killed the house lights, and Darci brought up the stage lights. I gave my little intro about the play, and Native Arts Forum at Wompowog (of which this is the flagship piece – more about that later) and then we started.

Half an hour later we finished. The coyote was cooked and the sun was risen. We took a five, and then started the talk back.

What an informative event! I realized that Coyote Hunts the Sun is not even close to finished. Some of the things that bothered people – like the non-linearity and layered voices – are things that they’re not used too, but that I loved. They’re staying for sure. But I do appreciate that things moved fast, and that combined with the layering makes it easy to get lost. When I start rewriting, I’m definitely going to take more time to develop relationships between Pihnêefich, Wovoka, Makataimeshkiakiak and the Schoolteacher. When I was talking to the two Natives in the audience (that I knew of) afterwards, they brought up that the Schoolteacher was doing exactly what schoolteachers should do – they should talk about the Wounded Knee Massacre and the boarding schools – these are things that the dominant culture has a responsibility to address and take a responsibility for. In the new, longer version then, the Schoolteacher is going to have to tell the stories that we find in history books. You know, how Indians are in the first chapter and then poof! we’re gone.

This version is going remarkably well, though, and I’m really grateful to have Darci, Ranae and Chris on board. But I am finding out where this piece needs to go next, and I can’t wait to learn more tonight.

"Coyote Hunts the Sun" Rehearsal Log, Tech

Last night was our great big tech rehearsal, which went very smoothly. For the first hour, Chris and Darci and I focused the lights and got Darci set up with the light board. It’s her first time running lights ever, so that’s pretty exciting. She’s kind of nervous, but I’m confident that she’ll get it. At 8PM, when Ranae got there, we worked through all the tech cues, and then ran through it cue to cue. Darci’s still getting to know the light board, and, like I say, she’s nervous. But I know that once she familiarizes herself with it a little more, she’ll get confident and it’ll be a breeze.

The lights themselves are awesomely badass. We aren’t messing around with levels, so the high contrasts, along with the dramatic angles in which the lights are focused, give Coyote Hunts the Sun a film noire look. Combine that with the reds and blacks of our costumes, and I feel like I’m in an indigenous Nosferatu or something. The projections look cool, skewed and keystoned against the black cinderblock wall. The whole affect really augments the raw and driving atmosphere of Coyote’s hunt across the continent, and the conflict between him and the Schoolteacher.

"Coyote Hunts the Sun" Rehearsal Log, Dress Rehearsal

Last night we held our first and only dress rehearsal! And I remembered all my lines! Running them before with everybody helped. While we ran them, we painted stigmata on to Chris’ hands for the Messiah scene. He looks super badass/creepy in his black cowboy boots with his black shirt buttoned all the way up.

So we ran lines, and then we ran the show, which happened without a hitch. Darci didn’t even have any notes! She is getting nervous for tech though, because that’s going to be her one shot to learn the light-board. We’ll figure all that out on Wednesday.

Adding the costumes did give me some more information about the play, besides just how cool Chris looks as the Messiah. It didn’t seem to affect anything with Ranae – she always dresses like a teacher anyways – but adding in my hat gives me a good bit of business in the Messiah scene. In it, I have a line, “I have to go find the sun,” that I usually say as I go out the door. Chris’ line, “The sun? The sun will come in the morning. Wait here a while with me,” doesn’t seem to have the force to stop me. That’s always been an awkward part. But having the cap to put back on before I go outside does give me something to do before I open the door.

The blanket that Chris and I wear has a pretty cool effect, at least on him. I haven’t looked at the footage I took last night, so I don’t know how it looks on me. But it adds a substantial bulk to Chris in the Makataimeshkiakiak scene that makes him imposing without him having to really do anything about it.

All in all, a good rehearsal, and one that I filmed! Look forward to the commercial that I’ll be putting out on my YouTube channel (“WaylonLenk”) later today!

"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.

"Coyote Hunts the Sun" Rehearsal Log, November 2

Last night was a lower key rehearsal, due to my recent cold, in spite of it being our very first walk through. It was good to do the whole thing straight through and to see how it flows, which is nicely.

To start off, we plugged Ranae into the Makataimeshkiakiak sequence. It definitely makes a lot of difference having her teach the lecture notes as opposed to Darci reading them. It heightened the tension in that scene, making it, in my estimation, the most explosive in the play.

Then we walked through it off-book. The first time through we had a lot of stops and starts, mostly due to me not knowing all the lines that I wrote for Pihnêefich yet. But it worked, and ran about half an hour. The second time through was smoother and ran about 27 minutes. It’s great having Darci on the team as the objective eyes in the house. She helped us strengthen the visuals in the Makataimeshkiakiak scene by having Ranae, Chriss and I move into two lit playing spaces separated by a wall of dark, and re-blocking the Introduction by putting the Pihnêefich-Grant physical relationship on a diagonal across the audience.

Know that we all know our lines, we’re ready to run it a few more times on Friday, and then start putting in costumes and tech. We’re going to have a great show next week!

"Coyote Hunts the Sun" Rehearsal Log, October 30

It’s been one heck of a week, and what a productive way to cap it off! This afternoon Darci, Chris and I worked through the Makataimeshkiakiak, or Black Hawk, scene. I’m trying to refer to him by his name in Sauk. It seems more respectful.

Darci had to get there late today, so Chris and I read through the scene several times just getting the feel for it. Several textual changes were in order, but the blocking flowed pretty naturally out of it.

When Darci arrived, she watched the scene. Her note was, “It’ll be interesting to see how it works with Ranae in it.” In this scene, the Schoolteacher is trying to give a lesson while Makataimeshkiakiak and Pihnêefich have their jailhouse scene. The gist is supposed to be competing storytelling. But Ranae couldn’t be with us today, so I asked Darci to step in and read her part. I wasn’t sure it was working, but after talking to Darci and Chris when we were done, I’m convinced that the competing storytelling will work as compelling theater. But we’ll find out for sure when we plug Ranae in on Wednesday.

Now it’s time to rest up. I feel the start of a sore throat coming on.

"Coyote Hunts the Sun" Rehearsal Log, October 22

Last night we finished the second week of rehearsals with the Ghost Dance sequence. As a playwright, director and actor, I’m excited with how this scene is shaping up, especially since it’s descended from the first scene I wrote for this play. From a storyteller’s perspective, however, I’m concerned with how much I’m leaving out.

In this scene, Pihnêefich confronts the Ghost Dance Messiah, and begins to take control of the story away from the Schoolteacher. Ranae Hedman, who is playing the schoolteacher, is doing fabulously. She’s one of those awesome actors who have a penchant for research, and she came in knowing more about California Indian slavery than I do. She knows the stories better than she thinks she does, and so our process with her is just to get her out of her own head.

The confrontation really works. I hadn’t blocked it out before-hand: I wanted Chris Petty and me to do it and see what happened organically. With my assistant director Darci Faye’s help, we created a tense standoff between two vicious predators. Pihnêefich is, after all, Coyote, and there’s nothing lamblike about this Messiah!

And that’s where I feel I’m not doing the Ghost Dance story justice. I don’t think Wovoka was a bad person, and I think most of the Ghost Dancers did it with their hearts in the right place. After reading Mooney’s The Ghost-Dance Religion and the Sioux Outbreak of 1890, the seminal book on the Ghost Dance, it became clear to me that the tribes that really took to it had seen their religions decimated, and perhaps had already been pushed from their homelands. It’s easy for me, a 21^st century Karuk, to say they should have stuck with their own religions, but in too many cases that was impossible. Do I think they would have been better off if they had? Absolutely, and I take that stance strongly in Coyote Hunts the Sun. Do I appreciate that they were doing the best that they could? Yes, I do, but I’m concerned that that part of the story does not come out in my play.