Dessa Rose - Press Photos

Here are some photos from Dessa Rose.

Leigh Barrett as Ruth and Uzo Aduba as Dessa.Leigh Barrett as Ruth, Uzo Aduba as Dessa, and Todd Alan Johnson as Adam Nehemiah.

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"A House With No Walls" - Tech Week

If you want to know how tech week went, the best person to ask is the Production Stage Manager, so that is what we did. Carola Morrone, a member of Actor's Equity, is in her 5th season with New Rep. If anyone knows, it's her.

Backstage @ New Rep: So Carola, it looks fantastic, how did it go?

Carola: The tech for A House With No Walls went very smoothly, it hardly felt like work. The production team on this show really worked well together and made taking this piece to the next level, adding lights, sound, costumes & sets, easy. I think by the end of the weekend we were all finishing each other's sentences.

We kept this tech on schedule, created a beautiful show and managed to share a few good laughs a long the way. That doesn't happen every day.

Photo of the set:

Cast of A House With No Walls. Photo: Andrew Brilliant/Brilliant Pictures


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A House With No Walls - rehearsals underway

A House With No Walls is underway with rehearsals, and we took some photos recently to give you a sneek peek at the show.


l. to r. Kortney Adams (Ona), Johnny Lee Davenport (Salif), Riddick Marie (Cadence) and Michael Kaye (Allen) in A House With No Walls.

l. to r. Johnny Lee Davenport (Salif) and Riddick Marie (Cadence) in A House With No Walls.

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New Rep Studio - last day & performance!!!

Okay, so yesterday was our last day and we were all so so so sad to say goodbye. We did notes in the morning and then we had a run through that was by far much better than our previous ones. Everything came together, we had lots of energy, and we remembered all of our cues. After the run through we had more notes and then we broke for dinner. (It was definitely sad to be eating our last Panera dinner all together). After we came back from dinner we set our props, did our makeup, and waited for Lianne & Lina to call places. When it was time to wait in the wings we were all SO nervous.


The performance was AMAZING and as soon as we got on the stage, our nerves melted away. I want to congratulate all the girls for doing an amazing job. The audience really enjoyed it. Everything went so well, except the part where I fell out of the back of the wheelbarrow, but we just laughed it off. If we made any mistakes at all, people handled them perfectly and we all worked together to fix them. All in all, the show was fantastic.

As some of you may know, at the end of the show, it is a tradition to get the director a bouquet of flowers. But we had a better idea. Since Panera had become like our second home in these past four weeks, we decided to get ciabatta rolls instead. So at the end of the show we presented Suzanne (director), Dan (A. Director), Virgina (costumes), Kevin (music), Lianne (Stage Manager), Lina (A. Stage Manager) and Cheo (techy) with their very own rolls. I think they appreciated our creativity :)

After the performance we had a little reception where we all got to say our final goodbyes. About half way through, we all went down to the dressing room to get our things together and to just sit and talk before we split for the rest of the summer. There were tears and tons and tons of hugs. We must have sat and talked for at least 40 mintues. We talked about everything that had happened from first impressions, to the very last day. Eventually, our parents had to pry us apart.

Over 4 weeks, we have become like a family. I will always remember this camp and I know that we all stay in touch. I know that you girls will always have a place in my heart and I will always think of the good times we had.

I love you girls to death!!

Love,

Talia

New Rep Studio - Dress Rehearsal Photos

New Rep Studio- Chicago dance workshop

Hey everyone,

I forgot to mention on my last blog that we also had a dance workshop on Thursday afternoon. This guy came in and taught us a dance from Chicago, I forget the name of it but it was SOOOO SOO AMAZING. It was the funnest thing ever. The steps were pretty challenging and most of us broke a sweat but it was so worth it.

Anyway, just wanted to tell you guys we did that.
-Talia

New Rep Studio- Stage Managing workshop & Stumble through

Hey guys,

Sorry for posting so late, I had a really busy weekend. Anyway let me fill you in on what we did on Thursday and Friday. Thursday, we did a stumble through. For people who don't know what that is, a stumble through is when we run the whole show off book with mostly all the props. It went pretty well and even though we had to call for line a few times, we basically had our lines and songs memorized. Everyone did a really good job remembering all the blocking we did and remembering what props to set and how to build the barricade for the fight scene. It was really amazing watching the whole show come together after so much hard work and we were all pretty proud of ourselves.

On Friday, (my birthday!), Debra Rafson came in and did a stage managing workshop with us. We talked about all the responsibilities of a stage manager and let me tell you, they have a lot more stuff to do than I thought. One of their jobs is creating a relaxing environment for the actors and furnishing the rehearsal room so people feel relaxed. Besides working at New Rep, Debra is also one of the stage managers for Blue Man Group. For an activity, she brought in a tape of one of Blue Man Groups's performance numbers and also brought in the cue list. So what we did was we watched the tape so we became familiar with it and then we got to call the cues for the lights in the show. We read the cues off a piece of paper. (The cues coordinated with the words of the song so we knew when to call them). It was SO fun, although now I know that I definitely don't have a stage managing career ahead of me. Aside from my lack of talent, some of the girls were really good at calling the cues. It was a great workshop and we got a much better taste of what being a stage manager is like.

This coming week is our last week in camp. We're going to polish everything for the show and make sure we have everything down solid. It's going to be so sad to say goodbye-we've become so close!! It's really amazing being with 12 other talented girls around my age and putting on an extremely difficult show with minimal props and lighting. Seeing everything come together so far was such an incredible experience and we're not even done polishing things yet.

I'll make sure to keep reporting on how the show is coming along,
-Talia

The National Theatre

At several points, most notably in our meeting with the Manchester Guardian’s theater critic, Michael Billington, we discussed our different preferences

In theater, contrasting the didactic, verbal appeal of, say, LANDSCAPE performed admirably at the Cotesloe (?) stage in the National Theater from the truly astounding, effective, and surprising A MATTER OF … performed in the adjacent, Olivier Theater of the NT. It would be hard to find two such different visions of theater. Joe Penhal crafts a tight, four character play that challenges all of us, not just scientists engaged in developing weaponry, to consider the consequences of our acts. Should, for example, the manufacturer of shoes be governed solely by what sells for the biggest profit, or should he/she use replenishable materials, purchase manufactured products only from places that don’t exploit workers, concentrate on styles which improve posture and don’t damage feet …. (Apply your own ethical challenges.) I think he set up such discussions brilliantly partly because he did not pose great philosophers against each other, but rather traced the origin of the main character’s ethical growth to the clumsy dialogue of his flawed brother. Indeed, as someone in our group, I think it was Rick, said, neither the woman nor Brooks were compelling advocates for their side. They relied, not on social arguments but rather on convenience and barely disguised menace. Incidentally, I found certain physical elements in LANDSCAPE to be particularly good: the gradual physical degradation of the principal and Brooks’ menacing as he entered the scientist’s space, crossed behind him, and pranced around without a belt to his trousers. (Why? What that a wardrobe mishap?) Those of us who prefer such plays, I imagine, view theater as the opportunity to re-explore our own realities – not as entertainment as much as continued learning that burrows into some often hidden recesses of our minds and lives.

On the other hand, we learned in many ways that the state of theater does not solely depend upon intellectual fashion. Economics rules, even in the subsidized confines of the National Theater. Filling seats as well as increasing endowments are what, eventually, allow theaters to experiment. For some, theater provides a particular environment to release thoughts, not only in response to a didactic or language driven play, but also in response to an “event,” the merging of art forms in novel ways. In that sense, A MATTER OF … assaults us with metaphors. There is, of course, the spinning coin which dictates our fate. There is, also, the bumbling conductor who doesn’t always complete his assignment on time. But perhaps the strongest metaphor is our attempt to defy gravity, whether falling out of a plane or climbing moving beds.

Somewhere in the middle lies Equus. Directors have considerable choice in displaying the non-verbal elements of the play. In the production we saw last week, the malleability of the geometric set contrasted with the highly articulated versions of the horses, from reverberating hoofs to architected heads whose eyes hypnotically glowed until they were blinded. Dysart displayed the vulnerability of the analyst, the likelihood that in discovering Alan’s secret he is exposing his own secrets. A number of us commented on the one discordant choice, the beautiful, taller, seductive, and more experienced young woman drawn to Alan. Will she survive in tact? We don’t know.

- Bill

Photo Shoot Results

Leigh Barrett as Madeline True.











Todd Alan Johnson (Burrs), Marla Mindelle (Queenie), and Maurice E. Parent (Black)

Second Day: White People

Well here’s a first! We staged the entire play in one session. By the end of the day our brains were jello. Our conversational Freudian slips became increasingly frequent across the day, and hysterically funny; shocking the speaker more than anyone else. Not surprisingly, some of those slips revolved around the subject of race. I don’t want to give away any of the play’s secrets, but it is inevitable that a work of this nature would have us all looking inward, searching for evidence of racism in ourselves. The only thing that surprised me was how quickly it happened. I guess when you throw a play up on the stage in such a brutal rapid fashion it is inevitable that the impact will be magnified proportionally. Stage Manager Jen Cleary and I had discussed how a one-and-a-half week rehearsal process had its advantages, the greatest virtue being that you don’t have time to get in your own way. On the other hand, I doubt either of us anticipated what a roller coaster ride this might be.

Fortunately everybody seems to have enough confidence in this process
to permit the play to push us into uncharted territory. We owe it to
the material to go there.

As I mentioned in my last post, I blocked the play in advance to save time. The trouble is you never know if what you imagined is going to work in reality. (I once had a director envision blocking for me that, without exaggeration, defied Newton’s Law of Gravity.) I was pleasantly surprised to discover what had been mocked up on my little Macbook (base model – I couldn’t afford the Pro) sat rather elegantly in that downstage space, and went a reasonable way to addressing the spatial challenges posed by that quirky little theatre. My Assistant Director, Foster Johns, confessed to having experienced a small “Director-gasm” (his term). For your amusement there’s a page from this schematic pasted below. Set Designer Micheal Griggs teased me about the “beachballs” I had superimposed on his set.
Over the course of my directorial career I’ve invented a series of terms to describe staging. To modify a term a from physical therapy we worked on “Gross Motor Blocking” yesterday. This represents the basic traffic pattern and movement of bodies in space over the course of the play, This is the only aspect of the staging about which I feel comfortable making decisions without input from the actors. It is in this phase that I compose stage pictures, create and release physical and visual tension, and, more prosaically, make sure that everyone in the audience can see every moment in the play clearly. Somewhere in the midst of all that I also try to tell what I think is the playwright’s story. I identify “ranting room” for the actors for each
discrete section of the play. Ranting room is basically the perimeter of the designated playing area I’ve chosen for a particular scene. The next phase is what I call “micro-blocking”. We will go through the play chronologically and, working closely with the text and the actors, we will decide each twist and turn the characters make within that perimeter. “Do I pick up the briefcase here?”, “I think he would sit down after saying that”, etc. etc.

It’s a short rehearsal tonight (only 4 hours). We will probably only walk through the “gross motor blocking” for “muscle memory” (a term I borrowed from Choreography many years ago when I was a dancer). This should nail down the sequence of movements prior to turning our focus to micro-blocking, and the details of performance. This is the really exciting part, the most artistically rewarding aspect of the process, the moment-to-moment actions and choices. I want to carve as much time as I can for this in the next few days, prior to the technical rehearsals which swiftly approach five days from now (March 7th).

- Diego