The King and She

We are so happy to announce that The King and I, a meditation on Australian life through the lens of King Lear, by Philippa Kelly—Cal Shakes’ beloved Resident Dramaturg, Grove Talk moderator, and all-around saucy Aussie*—will be published in late 2010. It will be the first of four books in Continuum Press’ “Shakespeare Now!” series, to be distributed in hardcover, paperback, and e-book all over the world at the end of 2010. While this is far from Dr. Kelly’s first published work—the Shakespeare scholar has published widely on Lear and the subject of individuality in 16th- and 17th-century England, among other topics—but it’s exciting nonetheless, as Continuum is exactly the press she had in mind when crafting The King and I.

Mazel tov, Philippa!

*Not to mention occasional contributor to this blog!

Photo by Jay Yamada.

2010 Season Artist Profile: Octavio Solis

In the months leading up to our 2010 Main Stage season, we’ll be profiling the creative minds behind the season’s productions—John Steinbeck’s The Pastures of Heaven, Mrs. Warren’s Profession, Macbeth, and Much Ado About Nothing—in our e-newsletters. For the inaugural installment, we are introducing newsletter subscribers to playwright Octavio Solis, a Cal Shakes Associate Artist and occasional contributor to this blog. Since 2007, Octavio has been working with us and Word for Word Performing Arts Company to adapt John Steinbeck’s The Pastures of Heaven, the first new play to debut at Cal Shakes in 25 years. What follows is the full transcript of my email interview with Octavio. To sign up for our email newsletter, click here.

Do you remember your very first piece of creative writing, or perhaps the piece that alerted you to the possibilities of the form?
Yes, a pair of poems I wrote in class when I was in the fifth grade. One was a tribute for my mother. The other was a poem called "Ode to a Prairie Dog" or something like that. I lived in Texas and we had these critters everywhere. I was very moved by a ballad I had read in class that practically sang to me: “The Highwayman” by Alfred Noyes. It really made me want to be a poet. Then I discovered Edgar Allan Poe and I consumed everything he ever wrote. All his fiction, all his poetry, everything. I loved him.

Is there a work (literary, musical, or any other form) that would be your dream adaptation project?
I would love to attempt sometime an adaptation of the life of Eva Hesse. She was a beautiful German-born American artist who was one of the biggest influences on Abstract Expressionism. She led a troubled life, surrounded with tragedy and death, from the Nazis to the brain tumor, which eventually took her life. I think her life is compelling enough to warrant a play or film.

What inspires you right now? Any particular music, current events, people, et cetera?
Music is a chief inspiration. I listen to jazz from every epoch, particularly the bebop era, and the jazz-flavored world music coming from the ECM label: Anouar Brahem and Arve Henrikson and the Tomasz Stanko Quartet. Really dark moody stuff. The music takes me to other worlds.

If you could have written any play in history, what do you wish it could have been?
A Streetcar Named Desire. Maybe Our Town.

Who are your favorite writers (theatrical and nontheatrical, living or deceased)?
That changes from year to year and mood to mood. Right now I like the fiction of Roberto Bolaño and the poetry of Mark Strand. I am enamored of the works of Mary Oliver too. And Thomas Hardy. His poetry is as rich in story and nuance as his novels.

You’ve been so very busy these last few years. Do you have any plans to slow down in the next months or years? Or are you just building up momentum to keep going at a similar pace?
I have slowed down. My body has buckled under me and imposed a period of rest. So I am laying low at the moment. I like it. I have been working at a pace that was killing me, and now I don't think I want to do that anymore.

Subscribe now to get the best seats at the best prices for John Steinbeck’s The Pastures of Heaven, and the rest of our 2010 season. Photo by Anne Hamersky.

New Works/New Communities play goes to Edinburgh Fringe!

This weekend, Oaklanders will get another chance to see Hamlet: Blood in the Brain as Oakland Technical High School's award-winning drama department presents the play for three nights. Naomi Iizuka's reimagining of the Shakespeare tragedy transports the scandalous classic to the drug-ravaged streets of mid-1980s Oakland; as American High School Theatre Festival winners, Oakland Tech will tour the production around the Bay Area this spring—including a Feb 24 performance at Stanford and an excerpt performance at Oakland's popular street festival. Art Murmur, on March 5—before traveling all the way to Scotland to present Blood in the Brain at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival!

Back in 2003, Cal Shakes partnered with renowned playwright Iizuka and San Francisco's Campo Santo—the resident theater company at Intersection for the Arts—to launch this first New Works/New Communities project. The play was developed over the course of three years of grassroots community engagement that included community conversations and public readings, and culminated in a sold-out eight-week run at Intersection for the Arts in San Francisco. (Pictured above, Sean San José and Ryan Nicole Peters perform at Intersection; photo by Dave Nowakowski.)

We are so pleased that Oakland Tech is performing this play, and we congratulate them on their AHSTF win. Break a leg!

Click here for more info on the Oakland Tech performances.
Click here for more info on New Works/New Communities, or get regular updates on our new play and community development efforts by signing up for our email list and clicking the box for New Works/New Communities.

Online volunteer registration and serving on a not-for-profit board

There’s some exciting news on several Cal Shakes volunteer service fronts that we’d like to share with you.

First, participants in our general volunteering program—ushers, Inside Scoopers, administrative office helpers, et cetera—will now be able to register and schedule online. In 2009, nearly 500 volunteers recorded more than 4,000 hours, and that’s a lot of us to keep track of. So this year we’ve made it easier by using Shiftboard online scheduling software. Once you’ve registered at shiftboard.com/calshakes you’ll be able to sign up for all of your favorite Cal Shakes opportunities. There are even a few new ones this year, helping out the Artistic staff, actors, and designers. PLEASE NOTE: Everyone—including returning volunteers—must register with Shiftboard in order to receive volunteer information and to schedule a shift. For more information about Cal Shakes volunteer opportunities, contact Jamie Buschbaum at 510.548.3422 x101 or jbuschbaum@calshakes.org.

Secondly, Cal Shakes will be participating in the Board Match event next Tuesday, January 12, 4:30–7:30pm at Moscone Center South in San Francisco. If you’ve ever considered deepening your commitment to Cal Shakes or another not-for-profit by serving on a board, then this free event is for you. The Volunteer Center’s Board Match is a job-fair style event featuring over 100 Bay Area nonprofits—large to small, focusing on everything from the environment to arts toYouth. Serving on a nonprofit board can provide fantastic opportunities for your personal and professional development. You can build new and skills, network and broaden your knowledge of the community and provide essential skills to community nonprofits. This may be the single best opportunity to talk to nonprofit leadership (including Cal Shakes Managing Director Susie Falk) from over 100 Bay Area nonprofits about board membership. Bring copies of your résumé and business cards—board members are the foundation of nonprofit organizations, and we’re looking for a few new recruits! For more information on the event, click theboardmatch.org.

Listen to interviews with Jon and JoAnne

A representative of the NEA's New Play Development Program came out to observe the final development workshop for John Steinbeck's The Pastures of Heaven last week, and conducted interviews with Cal Shakes Artistic Director Jonathan Moscone and JoAnne Winter, Co-Artistic Director of our collaborative partner, Word for Word. Hear the interviews at http://bit.ly/51f6RQ.

Heaven in Oakland—a Halfway Point

"In talking about the house on the Battle Farm, and how the townspeople in the Pastures of Heaven view it, I asked kids if they knew of places like this in their own lives. One student said there were ghost stories about a house he knew of where a person had died in the basement. Others said they knew of places that were really worn down. I said, 'Yeah, they may be abandoned, like how the Mustrovics had to suddenly up and leave.' Another student chimed in, 'We call those bandos.' I thought about our current economy and how it might be more timely than I thought to have empty, worn-down houses in their very midst due to foreclosures."

That's an excerpt of a blog by Emily Morrison, Cal Shakes Artistic Learning Programs Manager. She's teaching John Steinbeck's The Pastures of Heaven to eighth-graders as part of a residency at E.C. Reems, an Oakland charter school, and blogging about it at OER (Open Educational Resources) Commons. We'll be excerpting the blog and linking to it in this space as the residency continues, building toward a community event featuring student readings and artwork in mid-December. Read the full blog entry for a window onto Morrison's arts education experience.

Pictured above: Emily teaches at at a 2007 Cal Shakes Summer Shakespeare Conservatory; photo by Jay Yamada.

Entering into The Pastures of Heaven

So folks, we just ended a full week of workshopping the first complete draft of Octavio Solis’ adaptation of Steinbeck’s The Pastures of Heaven. We’re premiering it next year on our Main Stage, and it was quite a week.

Octavio’s play is, simply, beautiful. On the path to making a play, you look for its DNA: what it’s made of. Changes will be made—cuts, rearrangements of scenes, additions, etc.—but what needs to be there at one point is the play’s DNA. Its self. Octavio’s Pastures has real DNA. It has a genuine theatrical life, blending Word for Word’s sensibility of translating literature into theater with my love of the nakedness of storytelling in the hands of actors (as we explored in Nicholas Nickleby). But more importantly, it has heart. And poetry. It’s also very very funny. And that’s all Octavio. He pulls Steinbeck’s quiet words off the page and finds the juxtapositions between humor and pathos in a way that makes me happy to feel like I am in the hands of a Chekhovian writer.

We assembled a group of actors, some of whom had been with the process since it started two years ago, and some new actors. And all were splendid collaborators, able to make characters distinct and alive in an extremely short time; also able to ask smart questions of the text that will inevitably inform our next steps in the development of the piece; and most of all, united, in just six days, into an ensemble. Which is what this play celebrates: the storytelling of an ensemble of actors. It’s sheer theater—authentic and alive.

We invited some funders, board members, staff, and patrons to the “window on the work” yesterday, reading abou half of the play. The feeling in the room was palpable—there was something special going on here. I was, to be quite sentimental, extremely proud, moved, and almost speechless (and for those of you who know me, that is no small feat) by the presence of a wonderful new American play, inspired by one of our great American writers—a classic writer if you will—at a Theater that is taking a big leap forward in defining who it is.

The great folks at Arena Stage sent someone out to chronicle the process. They, along with the NEA, were partners in selecting John Steinbeck's The Pastures of Heaven as one of five NEA Distinguished New American Plays. This, along with support from the Irvine Foundation and other amazing foundations, is making it possible for us to do this piece. And our subscribers delight in the surprises we make for them. So their spirit was in the room as we made steps in the creation of this piece. And our staff, led by the great Jessica Richards, producer of the project, was there every step of the way.

Hence the pride, the being moved, and the almost-speechlessness. I couldn’t do this anywhere else but at Cal Shakes, and in the Bay Area, which is by far the best place in this country to take chances in theatrical expression.

There’s a lot of work still be done with the play, but Octavio knows where to go with it and what to do. Trust the playwright. Especially when it’s Octavio Solis, who listens more than he talks, takes in and thinks hard about what the actors and I are doing, and is open to the collaboration of the ensemble and myself.

I am genuinely happy about what happened last week, which is just a marker in the path of the making of this new American play. And our community engagement—with folks in Salinas, especially the young artists of Alisal Center for the Arts (whose mural inspired by The Pastures of Heaven will be on display at our Theater during the play’s run) as well as students in the Bay Area who are learning about Steinbeck and how to make literature come alive (via our excellent teaching artists)—makes this more than just a play-making process. It’s a community-building process. It makes it all bigger. It makes more impact. And it will forever change this Theater and, I hope, some of the communities we are reaching out to.

More anon.

Jonathan

Pictured above, from top: Jonathan speaks to project artists at the last Pastures workshop; Danny Scheie; Maya Lawson; Craig Marker; photos by Jay Yamada. View more at the New Works/New Communities Flickr page.