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Fringe Festival faves New Paradise Laboratories showed no Philly love for Prom, which premičred to great acclaim way out in Minneapolis in 2004, but they're finally making up for it by remounting what artistic director Whit MacLaughlin terms "a work of fake anthropology for young adults" with Drexel University's Mandell Professionals in Residence Project. A comic take on that bloated high school rite of passage — staged as a sporting event, students vs. chaperones! — expect Prom to be as physical, sensual, musical and mysterious as NPL hits Batch: An American Bachelorette Party Spectacle and The Fab Four Reach the Pearly Gates.
April 30-May 11, New Paradise Laboratories, Mandell Theater, Drexel University, 3300 Chestnut St., 215-923-0334, newparadiselaboratories.org.
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Like millions of American teenagers this spring, members of the New Paradise Laboratories theater company are dressing up and heading for the prom - or, in NPL's case, PROM, the company's new production at Drexel University's Mandell Theater.
However, if artistic director Whit MacLaughlin's own promgoing experience is any indication, expect things to quickly take a turn for the strange.
"I had this girlfriend," he recalls of his big night, "who was a year older than me. She had gone up to college, but had a lot of mental problems. She came home and was sleepwalking, and it turned out she had a whole multiple-personality thing going on. And so my prom was heavily influenced by what seemed like . . . grave intensities."
Those familiar with NPL's brand of dreamy, nonlinear "performance theater" probably won't be surprised by the irony of this idealized American experience finding its way into MacLaughlin's hands. After all, the company's work, like prom itself, is usually supercharged with eroticism and physicality, as well as a liberal sprinkling of humor. Batch - the second in NPL's planned trilogy about rites of passage, which had its Philly premiere at the 2007 Live Arts Festival - examined bachelor parties from the inside and was about as bawdy as the real thing.
"When we did Batch in Louisville [at the Humana Festival of New American Plays], no one under 17 was allowed in," he recalls. "And PROM is all about people 17 and under.
But MacLaughlin, who has a career outside the company as a director of children's theater, says he has no difficulty sliding between adult and universal themes.
"In our culture, it's not really the way you're supposed to think, but if you're a parent" - which MacLaughlin and his wife, actress Catharine Slusar, are - "you do. We're avant-garde for the multigenerational."
NPL first premiered PROM in a partnership with Minneapolis' Children's Theatre Company in 2004 and remounted it there in 2006, using a dozen high school students. This time, the work is being re-created as part of Drexel's Mandell Professionals in Residence Project, which pairs Drexel with artists so they can share resources and knowledge.
Project director Nick Anselmo says, "The artists can really use the talents of all these kids - they can go film in the green-screen room, somebody can edit video for them. Not only do students get to work with professionals, we get to produce something that's exciting for young people."
MacLaughlin is more pragmatic about the program's benefits: "We'd never be able to mount a production of this size on our own, and we'd never in a billion years be able to afford what we have available to us here!"
MacLaughlin "lurked" at proms around the country doing research on the piece. (Interesting facts he says he gleaned from lurking: In Los Angeles, the typical couple spend $11,000 on their prom; in Pennsylvania, he says, the figure is more like $1,500.)
He insists this PROM is not a retread; each production varies, as do regional prom customs. "It's all tailored to the people in it," he says. "It's not a play, it's a template."
His research led him to analyze party life. "I thought a lot about what you expect, what you want to have happen, how you want the lid to come off in an interesting way. . . . Even if it could be boring, you hope maybe something will happen, some rule will be suspended for a while."
He likens PROM to a football game - an apt comparison, as much of the set is taken up by an AstroTurf simulation of a football field. "Games always have certain aspects. There's a ritual: The teams enter, there are cheerleaders, they shake hands, there's a referee. The same thing is true of a prom. It all happens the same way, but how it happens and the players involved is what's
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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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The piece was an innovative experiment on a number of fronts. Conceived by both companies as a pilot project for CTC's Theatre for Young Adults initiative, PROM grew out of the experiences of its actors and featured NPL's trademark physical style.
The cast included company members of NPL and CTC as well as 12 teenaged actors from Minneapolis. The piece was developed in workshops and rehearsals conducted over a six month period and premiered in March of 2004.
The piece was developed in a site--the first movie theatre built in Minnesota--recently renovated into a sizeable art exhibition hall. The remount was performed in CTC's brand new Cargill Theatre. The production was environmental and experiential, and involved the audience in much the same way as spectators are involved at a sporting event.
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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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By Judith Egerton
The Courier-Journal
It seems that anything goes at bachelor/bachelorette parties these days. A bride-to-be might even wear a dress made of candy at her prenuptial party and invite others to take a nibble or two.
That's one of the outrageous ideas in the new Humana Festival play about the ritual of pre-wedding bashes, "Batch: An American Batchelor/ette Party Spectacle."
The script calls for a dress made of red Twizzlers licorice ropes. That posed a challenge to costume designer Rosemarie McKelvey of Philadelphia and Shana Lincoln, a draper in the costume department of Actors Theatre of Louisville, who helped craft the costume for the play.
McKelvey, 31, trained as a fashion designer at Moore College of Art and Design in Philadelphia and has created hundreds of costumes. She's used found objects as clothing and raided a hardware store for materials to make armor. But this is the first time she's ever designed a costume from "the edible world," she said.
"I started with what Twizzlers are. I thought the best way to use them was to treat them sort of like a bead. … The result is a fringy, beaded skirt of twizzlers. The top part is like a bra."
Twizzlers aren't easy to craft into clothing, however. It took some experimentation by Actors Theatre's costume shop because the Twizzlers needed to be tough enough to withstand tech rehearsals and 14 performances of "Batch," but not so rigid that they didn't resemble fringe.
Lincoln, 29, who made many of the costumes for "Batch," explained how the dress was made:
"First, we had to figure out how to attach the Twizzlers to the costume -- we don't normally work with candy. Because a Twizzler is hollow in the middle, we decided the best way was to make it like a barrel bead and thread through it. But Twizzlers are fragile. We had to reinforce them and figure out how to keep them from disintegrating from sweat.
"So we cut the ends off, microwaved them for a few seconds to soften them and pushed coffee-stirring sticks up through them to reinforce them. Then we threaded through the Twizzler and a retainer bead and then back up through the Twizzler. We hung them on hangers, then dipped them into shellac to seal them. … Once they were dry, we threaded them with large needles through spandex and a strong elastic netting that forms the body of the costume. So that was the Twizzler skirt.
"For the bra, we used the same idea but needed smaller beads. We cut them into smaller segments, dipped them into shellac and sewed them to elastic strips."
The costume turned out to be surprisingly heavy, she said. She estimated that it weighs as much as 15 pounds -- "more than my cat."
McKenna Kerrigan, the actress who plays the bride-to-be in "Batch," wears the dress only for a short time. Still, costume designer McKelvey is a little worried about how it and the other costumes will hold up.
"It's such a physical show, and everything has to be rigged for quick-changes," she said. In addition, the cast makes all their costume changes underneath and within the show's square, 4-foot-tall stage, which is designed to resemble a boxing ring.
"There are 31 costumes in a limited space with six actors and two dressers underneath" the stage, McKelvey said.
In case of a Twizzler emergency, extra bags of candy are on standby.
You can see "Batch" and the Twizzler dress at The Connection nightclub at Floyd and Market in downtown Louisville. The show, conceived by playwright Alice Tuan and director Whit MacLaughlin, will be performed by the New Paradise Laboratories of Philadelphia at 7 p.m. today; 7 p.m. Tuesday through Thursday; 8 p.m. Friday; 2 and 5 p.m. Saturday; and 3:30 and 7 p.m. next Sunday.
Reporter Judith Egerton can be reached at (502) 582-4
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