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Performances at the Arts Bank, 601 S. Broad Street
For tickets and venue information available through the Live Arts Box Office HERE.
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The piece will have a semi-public workshop Jan 8 and 9, 2010 in Princeton. It will be workshopped again in July before travelling to Edinburgh, Scotland for an several week run. It will be premiered in the United States in Sept. 2010.
FREEDOM CLUB will be performed by New Paradise Laboratories and The Riot Group. It is a theatrical hallucination on national themes, where past and future collide. FREEDOM CLUB moves from a schizophrenic dream-play involving Abraham Lincoln and assassin John Wilkes Booth to Virginia, 2012, where a dwindling activist theater company tries to get more radical. FREEDOM CLUB will be presented in rough draft form as a full-tech, staged reading.
FREEDOM CLUB features NPL company members McKenna Kerrigan, Jeb Kreager, and Mary McCool performing alongside Riot Group regulars Drew Friedman, Paul Schnabel, and Stephanie Viola, with playwright and Artistic Director Adriano Shaplin taking roles as well.
The second piece, now beginning an initial developmental stage, will be called FUCK COMPUTERS. It will take form either as a strange terrorist action in a future war, a lecture-demonstration of android technology, a robot slave sale or a pitch for a new movie. Or as all of the above. FUCK COMPUTERS will eventually find form as a performance of New Paradise Laboratories and The Riot Group.
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By Judith Egerton
The Courier-Journal
Playwrights challenged each other to create "Batch"
Have you been the honoree -- or victim -- of a bachelor or bachelorette party?
Whatever your experience with prenuptial bashes, we suspect few of them will compare to the show the New Paradise Laboratories of Philadelphia has cooked up for Actors Theatre of Louisville's 31st Humana Festival of New American Plays.
"Batch: An American Bachelor/ette Party Spectacle" will be staged in the showroom of The Connection, a downtown nightclub known for its popular weekend drag shows.
Recently, that showroom was aswarm with activity. Costumers sewed seams while above them lighting techs put the finishing touches on a truss of lights they had erected above a newly built 14-by-14-foot stage.
The six actors -- three men and three women -- who will each play male and female roles in "Batch," will emerge from within the 4-foot-high square stage and disappear down into it throughout the show. All props and costumes used by the actors also will be hidden within the stage, along with two dressers, who will be crouched inside to help with costume changes.
On all four sides of the stage are 9-by-12-foot screens that will give the audience a 360-degree view of the action. Videotaped scenes, as well as live-action shots, will be projected on the screens. It's all part of a show designed as a sensory-infused, three-dimensional theatrical experience.
The two-year collaboration is the result of a decision by Marc Masterson, Actors' artistic director, to pair Los Angeles playwright Alice Tuan with Whit MacLaughlin and the 10-year-old experimental Philadelphia theater company, New Paradise Laboratories.
The support for the project from Actors Theatre and the Humana Festival gave the group the freedom to create a piece knowing that it would be produced for an audience, said Tuan. "And each step of the way, we were encouraged to be limitless about this -- to really go for it, which I find really rare, especially in regional theater," she said, adding that the collaboration was a national experience. "It's a West Coast-East Coast project that's premiering in the South," she said.
I talked with Tuan and MacLaughlin about their collaboration prior to a recent rehearsal of "Batch" at The Connection:
Q. Why is New Paradise Laboratories, which previously created an original work called "Prom," interested in these rituals of passage?
MacLaughlin: We are looking for ways to bring an experimental perspective to a larger audience. These are the kind of parties that everyone has experience with. And when you go to a party, you have high expectations that everything will be just great. A lot of cool things happen at parties. There's a kind of utopian idea at the heart of parties. New Paradise has been interested in utopias since the beginning.
Marc Masterson, artistic director of Actors Theatre, was the matchmaker who set you up as collaborators. How has that blind date worked out?
MacLaughlin: It was like computer dating.
Tuan: He was given three choices. . . .
MacLaughlin: Essentially, she's been really game. She wants to do something off the wall. And all along there has been negotiation.
Tuan: But we agree on the risk-taking.
MacLaughlin: In some ways, I think she is riskier than I am.
What was the creative process like?
Tuan: I would describe it as homeopathic. Everybody already has an idea or a concept of what (a bachelor/ette party) is, so it's distilling it down to its essence. And Whit and his company are really good at making these ravishing images, and they ask the audience to go along for the ride.
MacLaughlin: I like to travel, and I've read a lot of anthropology. What we try to create in these pieces is like traveling to a for
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by J. Cooper Robb
It might be an overstatement to say Philadelphia is the best-kept secret in American theater, but considering the rapid growth of the city’s theater community in recent years and the rising quality of their work, it’s unarguably true that Philadelphia hasn’t received the national recognition it deserves. That might soon change as both the InterAct Theatre Company and New Paradise Laboratories (NPL) prepare to launch productions this March at the Actors Theatre of Louisville’s prestigious Humana Festival of New American Plays in Louisville, Ky.
The premier showcase for new American plays, Humana attracts the nation’s critics, producers, artistic directors, literary managers, playwrights and casting agents—all searching for the next hot thing in American theater.
The inclusion of NPL (which has been commissioned by the festival to create Batch: An American Bachelor/ette Party Spectacle with playwright Alice Tuan) and InterAct (which is co-producing Sherry Kramer’s When Something Wonderful Ends with Actors Theatre) marks the first time in the festival’s 31-year history that a Philadelphia company will be represented.
According to New Paradise Laboratories artistic director Whit MacLaughlin, the company’s road to Humana began when Actors’ artistic director Marc Masterson saw NPL’s The Fab 4 Reach the Pearly Gates at the Philadelphia Fringe Festival. Several years later NPL teamed up with the Children’s Theatre of Minneapolis on the acclaimed Prom at Franklin Arts Works in Minneapolis. (The show is due to make its Philly debut in spring 2008.) Masterson asked if NPL would be interested in pairing with Tuan to create a new related work for Humana.
The second part in a planned trilogy (Prom was the first installment) focusing on parties as rites of passage, Batch (which will premiere locally at this year’s Philadelphia Live Arts Festival) marks NPL’s first collaboration with a playwright. Described by MacLaughlin as a hermaphroditic piece in which six characters posessing both male and female genitalia attend a bachelor/bachelorette party, Batch showcases the company’s fascination with parties as a cultural artifact.
“We wanted to use parties that everyone in the U.S. has either attended or purposely avoided,” MacLaughlin says, adding that the trilogy’s final installment will take place at a wake. “Our goal is to make experimental work everyone can connect with.”
Whereas NPL has been preparing for Humana since 2005, InterAct became involved only last October when Actors Theatre wanted to present When Something Wonderful Ends at the festival and learned InterAct had already acquired the rights. Following negotiations, the two companies agreed to mount a coproduction that, after opening in Louisville, will immediately transfer to Philadelphia, where it’s slated to begin performances at the Adrienne on April 6.
Wonderful focuses on a playwright who returns to her childhood home following her mother’s death. While packing her mother’s possessions, she comes across her old Barbie doll collection, a discovery that leads her to examine the years when America first tried to influence events in the Middle East.
InterAct artistic director Seth Rozin says the appearance at Humana provides national exposure for not just InterAct, but the entire Philadelphia theater community. “Being connected to the preeminent festival in the country is a wonderful thing for us as a small company and for the play in terms of the visibility we get,” says Rozin. “And to have two small companies from the same city at the festival tells a national audience that Philadelphia’s small companies are doing important new work.”
Rozin says that although Philadelphia is already considered a “vital theater town,” the recognition that comes from appearing at Humana could encourage even more artists to work and live in Philly,
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HERALD-LEADER CULTURE WRITER
LOUISVILLE --Whit MacLaughlin's theater troupe, New Paradise Laboratories, has always loved a good party.
"We've been fascinated with utopias, and how they develop and how they go wrong," says MacLaughlin, the troupe's founder and director. "It used to be that when I would go to a party there would be high expectations for amazing things to happen -- the sky was going to open up, and we were all going to love each other, and it was going to be pure fun, and pure getting lost in the music, or whatever you thought.
"A lot of our pieces tend to be about parties, so you have normal life and you have party life. So there's a utopian impulse behind parties."
With Batch: An American Bachelor/ette Party Spectacular, New Paradise is bringing the latest in a series of "rite of passage" party pieces to the Humana Festival of New American Plays. (The last one of these shows for Philadelphia-based New Paradise was Prom, produced with the New Children's Theatre Co. of Minneapolis.)
The production -- which tells the story of concurrent bachelor and bachelorette parties, with the same three male and three female actors playing both the bachelors and bachelorettes -- breaks traditions for most everyone involved.
It is a site-specific work, only the third off-site production in the 31-year-history of the Humana Festival. Batch is staged at The Connection, a gay nightclub in Louisville.
It also is New Paradise's first collaboration with a playwright, as all of its previous pieces have been collaborative efforts by the company.
"Actors Theatre of Louisville kind of arranged this marriage," playwright Alice Tuan said backstage at The Connection, under publicity photos of the drag queens who usually rule the stage.
It wasn't necessarily a marriage made in heaven.
"I spent the first year trying to figure out what my place was because they had never worked with a playwright before," Tuan says of the two-year process of bringing Batch to the stage. "Usually, the playwright is treated with such reverence in the rehearsal room, and here, I had to throw the ego overboard and almost become part of the company. They did not treat text in a way that I was used to."
Tuan says the actors would generate a movement first and then "just say, 'Throw that line in there, and that line there.'
"It was kind of shocking. It was traumatic."
But the playwright and company got in sync, and Tuan now regards the play as "an example of theater for 21st century."
Tuan says of MacLaughlin, "From the get-go, I thought, 'This is a man with lots of ideas, lots of metaphysical ideas, going to places where you'd think theater would go more often -- the more subliminal aspects of human life.
"A lot of theater now, it seems like it's just live television or movies, and it is just caving into the demand. People want to be entertained in a certain way."
From a technical rehearsal, it was clear Batch will be nothing like most TV or movies. For one, the production heavily incorporates live and recorded video and sound. And all of the entrances and exits take place through a trap door that leads to an understage, as opposed to a backstage. Each scene is ushered in with a deep-voiced announcer declaring, "Bachelor Party: The drunken blowout where your best friends knock you senseless."
MacLaughlin says, "It's like a boxing ring, or something. ... Bachelor parties are weird events, where you seek to lose your mind on the last night of freedom. So we're sort of riffing on the idea of, what is the last night of freedom about, and why do that before you get married? What really is that all about? You're trying to do something really intense with your best friends and cement that moment in time as a rite of
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Whit: We do have plans to undertake traditional marketing techniques at the same time as we carry out the online component. There have been ramifications to that. I am now writing grant applications with slightly grandiose claims about reducing the normal ratios of production to marketing costs. People are very hopeful about the efficacy of communication in cyberspace, but they are also increasingly
wary of slight changes in the atmosphere of online communication and it’s almost a totally commercial zone.
Andrew: Is there an absence of morality in virtual space? A relinquishing of responsibility?
Whit: I think that personal responsibility as a concept is in flux because of the interaction of fact and fiction in cyberspace. For instance, people have been entrapped for interacting sexually with under aged youth by policemen posing as youth. It’s difficult to tell where the crime really is. It seems to be an Orwellian sort of thought crime. And people have told me about relationships they’ve had with someone they’ve never met or seen online. They wonder if they are having an affair. I say, “do you have ’sex’?” They say, “well, yes, I guess”. And I say “you’re having an affair”. There’s just so much room for manoeuvring.
Andrew: I’m interested in this notion of blurring fact and fiction online, particularly in relation to building characters that inhabit social media space (Facebook, Twitter, Youtube, Flickr etc.). Could you describe the character development process and your online relationship with the actors as the director?
Whit: I should point out that the 13 actors working on Fatebook have never all been together in the same room at the same time – until this coming Monday when we start work on the real space show. The actors have devised characters
whole cloth out of their own lives. So much of the content for this show is autobiographical. I have been steering the
development of character - as co-author - remotely. Facebook and Twitter have been our rehearsal space so far. We created parameters, and identities - in collaboration - and then started interacting in these spaces in a variety of ways.
Andrew: Could you give an example of a parameter?
Whit: I watched and commented individually as I was devising ways of guiding the actors into the situations I envisioned. I wanted certain characters to be ’supernatural’ for example, but I didn’t tell them, I didn’t want them to ‘hit the nail on the head’ so to speak. So I guided them towards certain things by inference. Soon, one character, for instance, was devising a ‘revirginization’ procedure. Eventually, I took almost five months of online interactions and then started compiling, editing, and rewriting.
Andrew: I want to pick up on the term ‘real time’. We’ve used it several times now. It’s a term I associate with ‘real time Web’, often used to suggest a demarcation between a static text-based era of the Internet and the current (instantaneous) global communication platform that it has become. What does ‘real time’ mean in the context of Fatebook?
Whit: To me, it means I can communicate with you without making an appointment. We don’t need to get our bodies
anywhere and we just pick up where we left off, whenever we want. It’s realer than real time. I’m not sure whether that
describes the actuality of real time online, or perhaps more the experience of it.
Andrew: On the Philadelphia Live Arts Festival website Fatebook is described thus: “The action plays out within a labyrinth of screens displaying the shifting cityscapes and intimate spaces in which the characters live. Twelve projectors and live video feeds blur the line between the digital environment and the physical one.” What are the tensions in shifting between digital and physical interfaces in this performance? What does the physical dimension bring to the performance?
Whit: Well, that’s the point, I think. There will be such an immersion in illusion that I’m not sure the participant will necessarily know what is live and what is canned. The environments well be established then mutated. Characters will be communicating across the room, in ways that it will not be clear how much is live. There will also be live green-screened broadcasting. The whole milieu of the performance is illusion. Then there will be a complete meltdown of the piece that will plunk us all into real space and we’ll suddenly see and feel the unmediated room and hear unmediated sound.
Andrew: What do you hope will emerge at that moment of real space recognition?
Whit: I don’t know. I actually think that presence in real space is the holy grail of experience, and proximity against the odds is the miracle. So, I’m not sure what cyber proximity is going to do with the traditional structures of meaning and what cyber availability is going to do to our physical metaphors. I feel like I just want, at this point, to highlight the differences and make them really salient.
Andrew: Thank you very much for your time and insight into the workings of Fatebook.
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What is the nature of the interactions we experience in ‘cyberspace’ and ‘real space’? Where does this experience reside in the individual?
I encountered Fatebook via a tweet from director Whit MacLaughlin. I was drawn to the audio-video installation on the website, a praiseworthy creation in its own right, but also a visual metaphor for the ambitious, cross-disciplinary performance project that lies beneath. A later tweet connected me with one of the Fatebook cast members, and before I knew it I had become both audience and participant in this two-part ‘live’ performance that plays out in ‘cyberspace’ and ‘real space’. Conceived and created by Whit MacLaughlin and his award winning Philadelphia-based company, New Paradise Laboratories, Fatebook is a meditation on fate or destiny as seen through the lens of digital communication. The online strand of the project was launched in July this year and follows the lives of 13 characters as they interact with audience members across multiple social media networks.
Their stories evolve – with directorial input from MacLaughlin – through a new media narrative of Twitter and Facebook updates, YouTube videos and photos on Flickr; documenting scenes from their everyday lives in Philadelphia.
Each of these 13 online odysseys is heading for offline collision at the Philadelphia Live Arts Festival in September later this summer.
The real space performance is set to bring even more digitalia to bear. A myriad of screens, projectors and live video feeds will transform the space into an epic mediatised environment in which the borders between digital and analogue, live and recorded, fact and fiction merge in a “momentous night—the Fatebook party—where time stops, computers crash…and nobody can say what’s real.”
After an in-depth Skype exchange with MacLaughlin it became clear that here was an experiment at the bleeding edge of digital performance, evolving in sync with developments in social media. I wanted to find out more about the artistic and logistical challenges involved in creating performance online, to extend my ongoing exploration of performance work crossing the digital-analogue divide and to take stock (in a performative context) of terms in frequent but awkward circulation on the Web. Terms such as real (real time, real space, real life), physical (physical space, physical world), space (cyberspace, real space), and the fact/fiction binary.
Andrew: Such as?
Whit: Well, marketing for example. Who is it in a theatre organization that tells the story? I began to see that in cyberspace, the employees of an arts organization – the production team, the administration, the artistic leadership, the artists etc. – are the prime communication agents. Theatre is still used to creating a product, a thing, a production, and then hiring marketers, who shape the ’story’ of the thing and try to sell it to the public. In cyberspace, the artistic director, for instance, has direct access to the people who form the ‘audience’ for the piece. But artistic personnel are notoriously fastidious about talking directly to the public. It’s a status drop
or something. They think of their work as the primary focus of their relationship to an audience. But in cyberspace, that relationship is begging to be up-ended.
I saw an opportunity to build a community, where the marketing of the piece was indistinguishable from its content. So I began to say things like “its marketing is its content” which some people found disturbing; as if that couldn’t be the content of a theatre piece. Our partner organization found this aspect particularly challenging.
Andrew: So by virtue of its existence in cyberspace, the company was marketing the production at the same time that it was creating the story and characters for the piece?
Whit: I tend to describe the creative process of this piece as writing a novel on the fly that you are shooting at the same time as a film, that you are broadcasting as soon as you have the dailies, and rehearsing after you take the curtain up!
Andrew: Nice.
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MORT is a funhouse, a blind date,
a horn blast from deep in the forest.
MORT is a performance piece about the end.
Three distinct performances. Three times of day. One ticket.
Conceived and Directed by Whit MacLaughlin with Mary McCool
CAPLAN STUDIO THEATER, 211 South Broad Street, Philadelphia
SEE ALL THREE!
Mort (Twilight) - Sat & Sun 4pm
Mort (Evening) - Thu & Fri 8pm, Sat & Sun 7pm
Mort (Deep Night) - Thu through Sat 10pm
Buy tickets at www.uarts.ticketleap.org ($10/$5 student/senior) or call 877-281-6747
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