Season Five

I'm really excited about the upcoming year, our fifth season. On tap is Trickster, Iphigenia ... (a rave fable), and the Alcyone Festival.

For the first time I'm directing both shows in the main season. The last time I directed a show outside of the festival was in May 2007. Trickster is the first full length-play I've written since Tony Jr. was born, and the first play written specifically for Halcyon. I know it may be scoffed at, an AD writing and directing his own play in the season. But in the last four years, I produced 31 plays by (I think) 26 different writers. So, ya know, there's that.

Following Trickster we're planning on doing Iphigenia by Caridad Svich, one of my favorite contemporary writers, and the festival is a pretty huge/scary/thrilling experiment.

The next year is taking a whole lot of faith and leaping in head-first. It might completely blow up in our faces; but, it should at the very least be a hell of a ride.

What's on tap for Season Five:

Trickster by Tony Adams

The Blurb:

A displaced people torn between warlords and the spiritual world receives a mysterious visitor in this powerful re-imagining of Genesis, the legend of Don Juan and Coyote Trickster tales.

The Skinny

The show's a re-imagining of the legend of Don Juan, coyote tales and parts of Genesis. (Adam and Eve and Abram/Abraham + Sarai/Sarah + Hagar.)

It explores the odd societal dichotomy that sexuality and sensuality is bad, yet life is the greatest gift God can bestow; and how people are capable of more brutal things than most of us can imagine and extraordinary tenderness at the same time.

It takes place in-between the spirit world and a war ravaged southwest reminiscent of the dust bowl. The human world of the play is a cross between the southwest during the dustbowl-era and Juárez today. The spirit world will use masks and movement, and the characters on earth will be puppets. (Though not actual puppets, they'll be actors playing puppets.) It's bawdy and brutal, beautiful and brokenhearted. There'll be music and sex and fighting and lots of fun.

The first draft of act one currently stands at 73 pgs, 32 Characters, 8 songs, 7 deaths, 5 sex or post-coital scenes, 1 puppet raped, 1-heart ripped from chest and eaten. It's a small light-comedy, really. ;)

Right now we're looking at opening in early Nov., but I have to confirm that with the owner of the venue. (Space continues to by my nemesis)

Iphigenia Crash Land Falls on the Neon Shell That Was Once Her Heart (a rave fable) by Caridad Svich

The blurb: A rave fable inspired by Euripides' Iphigenia at Aulis, this play with music and video spins Iphigenia into dangerous orbit through an un-named Latin American country as she journeys through a meta-hell where she finds her body embraced and destroyed by a rock star named Achilles, and discovers she cannot escape a destiny set forth by myths ancient and modern.

The Skinny:

I've talked a lot how one of the strengths of the company is what can happen if multiple styles and traditions combine into something new, and I think Caridad's take onIphigenia is one of the first scripts I've found that is the living embodiment of that. Caridad has an innate ability to take existing styles and conventions and fuse them in to something new and fascinating. One of the amazing things about her work is how she can almost mainline myths and create something mythic, poetic and completely contemporary through her telling of them in a way that is entertaining and powerful at the same time.

I love the story of Iphigenia. As Travis Bedard said to me not too long ago, she's the only female Greek character who takes control of her own destiny, and doesn't also hack up her family in the process.

The way the video and music intertwines with the story, it's completely embedded in the spine of the play, will be a new technical challenge for us. I love challenges.

The Alcyone Festival 2011

The Blurb:

The theme for the Alcyone Festival 2011 will be Remixed, new works based off of classical texts by women.

The Skinny:

I know it's pretty common to rework the dead men of the cannon. No one is really re-imagining Gertrudis Gómez de Avellaneda or Elizabeth Cary. (At least not that I'm aware of.) We're looking at works using/adapting/sampling plays written by women from Hrosvita (c. 935 to c. 1002) through 1850. My hope is to celebrate both new and (really) old writers and see how the lineage of female playwrights over the past thousand years can inspire and inform contemporary audiences and artists.

I also want to try something new. Instead of picking scripts that have already been written, we're picking writers and taking off the brakes. While we can't afford to commission, we can commit to producing. And that's what we're doing.

Amongst all the talk of development hell, etc, I'm putting some of my favorite writers in the driver’s seat, and seeing what happens.

The only rules the writers have are: it has to be based in some way off a work by a female playwright written before 1850 and it has to be ready to go into rehearsal in April. No holds barred.