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The (For)Play Series is an experiment (one that's going really well, I think). And this blog is a bit of an experiment, too. We'd love to have audience feedback - if you're interested in posting a comment, just email Angie Flynn-McIver, and she'll add you to the contributors list. Don't be shy!

Angie's email is angie@ncstage.org

Audience Approaches...

Working as a cast alongside an audience these past few days has been a really cool new way to approach a script. Kevin Kline discusses self-consciousness for an actor: "on the one hand it can paralyze you- everyone is watching me, on the other hand, you can reveal yourself because it's not you..." (see the bottom of the this post for the full quote). Going about this process of discovery in rehearsal with the audience has taken them on the journey with us each step of the way. It hasn't ever been about who's watching who. They are participating in our discoveries and our struggles. They are allowed into the sacred space of creation. That may come across as high and mighty, but bringing a script to life is sacred, delicate, amorphous- and jagged.

We, the (For)players are building a relationship with this audience from day one where we know that they are there, but we combine forces and choose to focus on the task at hand- honoring this play and bringing life to it.

We'll see how tonight goes, but I think it will be a different experience for most of us than we know. I've done "staged readings" before- I've done two in NYC Off-Broadway for potential producers. Producers deciding if they should put tens of thousands of dollars behind this product. Did they care if they were "on the journey" with us? "Participated in our discoveries"? Maybe. Certainly they were there in the hopes of finding something they could stand behind, be proud of, and make money on.

But- this weeklong event- (For)Play, is much more than its name! It's (For)Work, (For)Discovery, (For)TheJourneyTogether. Okay, that sounded a little cheesy, but I think you'll find that this cast (although certainly class clowns at times) is one of the most professional ever assembled at NC Stage and our audience(s) this week has also raised the bar.

I look forward to continuing the work (and play) tonight as we move into the theatre and onto the stage. Let's make sure we bring the audience with us because they've been beside us all along and we don't want to leave behind some of the people that got us this far.

See you tonight! -JF (Joe, Prior 1, and Eskimo)

Here's the complete Kevin Kline quote regarding self-consciousness. This quote has been with me for 14 years. My Dean of Drama, Gerald Freedman from the NC School of the Arts, still has it taped to the door of his office (he's directed Kevin Kline several times). I am constantly reminding myself of this wonderful quote.

“Self-consciousness is interesting. On the one hand, it can paralyze you– “Everyone is looking at me.” On the other hand, acting is a mask– you can reveal yourself because it’s not you. Part of performing is knowing what impression you’re creating every second, and part is being completely ignorant of it as well, so open and vulnerable you forget what it is you’re going to say next. You submit, but you submit egocentrically. Of course you know how you look- you’ve just spent an hour making up, looking at yourself in the mirror– but paradoxically you then completely forget it. Both things are going on simultaneously and in harmony. Some actors spend years trying to overcome self-consciousness, but acting isn’t a matter of overcoming self-consciousness, it’s a matter of heightened and informed self-consciousness. You take it to its ultimate limit– and then you try to transcend it.”

Great first rehearsal

It was a good rehearsal last night. I really wish I had more time with this play--the script is remarkable, and the cast is just great. I was worried that having an audience for the rehearsal would affect the cast, but I don't think it did. Everyone stayed in the rehearsal mode, continuing to work on the objectives and main drive of each scene, regardless of the audience watching. I am looking forward to seeing how the reading progresses over the course of the three performances.

What an amazing opportunity to delve into a brilliant piece of theatre without the pressure of a full production to weigh it down.  I saw this play in NYC in '93 or '94 ... there were some seats available for $20 if you got to the box office by 6AM or something.  I remember waiting by myself with a group of others and we were all so excited to be there.  There was something in the air about this play.   Seeing the show that night was incredible.   I am looking forward to being in rehearsal, hearing the play, reading the play, exploring the play, meeting some new people.  This is a wonderful idea...thank you NCSC and away we go!

Here We Go!

It's an exciting day. I always get a little nervous before starting a new show, and even though this is a reading, not a full production, the nervousness showed up right on time anyway. Maybe it's because this play is...well, it's overwhelming. It's huge, it's literally epic, even though there are only 8 actors, they cover an enormous amount of theatrical territory. I know that this cast is going to bring a terrific amount of experience, talent, and passion to the project, and that assuages the nervousness somewhat!

Angels has everything we look for in a play: interesting, evocative language, dynamic relationships between the characters, and that magical evanescent something that comes to life most vividly and effectively in the theatre. I'm glad to get to play with this great work, even if only for a week.

seven years later...

I first saw Angels in America at Charlotte Rep in, I think, 1995. It was one of those rare, actually life changing events, and a real turning point in my thinking about the possibilities of live theatre, and my potential place in it.
About five years later, I got to play Louis Ironson at my alma mater, Guilford College, a year after graduating--it was a hugely terrifying and rewarding nine-month process. Last night, while looking through my script in preparation for this reading, I realized that I still had some notes from the director of that production in my script as a bookmark.
Re-reading them was interesting for a lot of reasons, not the least of which was that the dates of the notes were exactly seven years ago: the final days of October and first of November, 2000. We were about a week away from opening the play, and only a few days from the night we got out of rehearsal and breathed a huge collective sigh of relief upon hearing that Al Gore had won the presidential election. Of course, the next morning everything had changed. We kept on going, of course, despite the gloom that has suddenly descended, trying to face Bad News like the most generous of the characters we were playing on stage, with varying degrees of success.
Now, seven years later, Bush is somehow still president, pessimism and cynicism abound, and here we are about to spend a week sinking our teeth into this nearly twenty year old play set during the Reagan administration. I think Kushner's insistence on hope and beauty in the face of destruction and despair still offer a powerful tool to all who ache for change and realize that (as Amanda points out above) for better or worse, the world only spins forward. I'm sorry I will have to miss the WNCAP discussion on Monday evening. I'm glad it is happening.
One final thing: on a personal note, it is remarkably easy for me to see some good in the last seven years, and to wonder at the tricks of universal timing. The final performance of Millennium Approaches at NCSC will be on November 11th, seven years to the day since a casual acquaintance of mine saw me in the same play at Guilford and decided, at some point during the performance, to call me up for a date. This November 11th, she will again be in the audience - this time not as a relative stranger, but as my closest partner; my wife. And I will again be on stage, feeling so very grateful for the opportunity to work on this play that has helped mark some of the most important personal and professional milestones in my life thus far, as well as national and global ideas, events, and confrontations.
I am super excited about being part of this reading. I've wanted to work with many of these actors for a long time, and some of them were involved with that first Angels I saw in Charlotte twelve years ago. I'm glad that these words will again be spoken aloud, and will again challenge and encourage each of us to find the good, to hold stubbornly to truth, and to actively, aggressively create Hope.

Monday discussion with WNCAP

I just talked to Michael Harney from WNCAP, who has agreed to be our special guest at the Angels discussion Monday night. WNCAP stands for WNC AIDS Project, which is a non-profit that advocates, counsels, and provides assistance of all kinds for people living with AIDS. Michael is an Educator with WNCAP's education outreach program. Check out the WNCAP site at www.wncap.org.

We'll be talking about the context of Angels in America when it premiered in 1991, and now. Some things have changed, some haven't. In planning the discussion, I found this quote from Angels - might be a neat jumping-off place:

Prior: "We won't die secret deaths anymore. The world only spins forward. We will be citizens. The time has come."

Discussion is Monday November 5 at 7:00pm, in the theatre.
Can't wait!

Looking Forward To This!

I just received the email from Angie regarding the finer details about our first (For)Play, "Angels in America: Millennium Approaches". I look forward to working with all of you on this project.

Below is the NY Times review to whet your appetite!

Review/Theater: Angels in America; Millennium Approaches; Embracing All Possibilities in Art and Life

By FRANK RICH
Published: May 5, 1993, Wednesday

"History is about to crack open," says Ethel Rosenberg, back from the dead, as she confronts a cadaverous Roy Cohn, soon to die of AIDS, in his East Side town house. "Something's going to give," says a Brooklyn housewife so addicted to Valium she thinks she is in Antarctica. The year is 1985. It is 15 years until the next millennium. And a young man drenched in death fevers in his Greenwich Village bedroom hears a persistent throbbing, a thunderous heartbeat, as if the heavens were about to give birth to a miracle so that he might be born again.

This is the astonishing theatrical landscape, intimate and epic, of Tony Kushner's "Angels in America," which made its much-awaited Broadway debut at the Walter Kerr Theater last night. This play has already been talked about so much that you may feel you have already seen it, but believe me, you haven't, even if you actually have. The new New York production is the third I've seen of "Millennium Approaches," as the first, self-contained, three-and-a-half- hour part of "Angels in America" is titled. (Part 2, "Perestroika," is to join it in repertory in the fall.) As directed with crystalline lucidity by George C. Wolfe and ignited by blood-churning performances by Ron Leibman and Stephen Spinella, this staging only adds to the impression that Mr. Kushner has written the most thrilling American play in years.

"Angels in America" is a work that never loses its wicked sense of humor or its wrenching grasp on such timeless dramatic matters as life, death and faith even as it ranges through territory as far-flung as the complex, plague-ridden nation Mr. Kushner wishes both to survey and to address. Subtitled "A Gay Fantasia on National Themes," the play is a political call to arms for the age of AIDS, but it is no polemic. Mr. Kushner's convictions about power and justice are matched by his conviction that the stage, and perhaps the stage alone, is a space large enough to accommodate everything from precise realism to surrealistic hallucination, from black comedy to religious revelation. In "Angels in America," a true American work in its insistence on embracing all possibilities in art and life, he makes the spectacular case that they can all be brought into fusion in one play.

At center stage, "Angels" is a domestic drama, telling the story of two very different but equally troubled young New York couples, one gay and one nominally heterosexual, who intersect by chance. But the story of these characters soon proves inseparable from the way Mr. Kushner tells it. His play opens with a funeral led by an Orthodox rabbi and reaches its culmination with what might be considered a Second Coming. In between, it travels to Salt Lake City in search of latter-day saints and spirals into dreams and dreams-within-dreams where the languages spoken belong to the minority American cultures of drag and jazz. Hovering above it all is not only an Angel (Ellen McLaughlin) but also an Antichrist, Mr. Leibman's Roy Cohn, an unreconstructed right-wing warrior who believes that "life is full of horror" from which no one can escape.

While Cohn is a villain, a hypocritical closet case and a corrupt paragon of both red-baiting and Reagan-era greed, his dark view of life is not immediately dismissed by Mr. Kushner. The America of "Angels in America" is riddled with cruelty. When a young WASP esthete named Prior Walter (Mr. Spinella) reveals his first lesions of Kaposi's sarcoma to his lover of four years, a Jewish clerical worker named Louis Ironson (Joe Mantello), he finds himself deserted in a matter of weeks. Harper Pitt (Marcia Gay Harden), pill-popping housewife and devout Mormon, has recurrent nightmares that a man with a knife is out to kill her; she also has real reason to fear that the man is her husband, Joe (David Marshall Grant), an ambitious young lawyer with a dark secret and aspirations to rise high in Ed Meese's Justice Department.

But even as Mr. Kushner portrays an America of lies and cowardice to match Cohn's cynical view, he envisions another America of truth and beauty, the paradise imagined by both his Jewish and Mormon characters' ancestors as they made their crossing to the new land. "Angels in America" not only charts the split of its two central couples but it also implicitly sets its two gay men with AIDS against each other in a battle over their visions of the future. While the fatalistic, self-loathing Cohn ridicules gay men as political weaklings with "zero clout" doomed to defeat, the younger, equally ill Prior sees the reverse. "I am a gay man, and I am used to pressure," he says from his sick bed. "I am tough and strong." Possessed by scriptural visions he describes as "very Steven Spielberg" even when in abject pain, Prior is Mr. Kushner's prophet of hope in the midst of apocalypse.

Though Cohn and Prior never have a scene together, they are the larger-than-life poles between which all of "Angels in America" swings. And they could not be more magnetically portrayed than they are in this production. Mr. Leibman, red-faced and cackling, is a demon of Shakespearean grandeur, an alternately hilarious and terrifying mixture of chutzpah and megalomania, misguided brilliance and relentless cunning. He turns the mere act of punching telephone buttons into a grotesque manipulation of the levers of power, and he barks out the most outrageous pronouncements ("I brought out something tender in him," he says of Joe McCarthy) with a shamelessness worthy of history's most indelible monsters.

Mr. Spinella is a boyish actor so emaciated that when he removes his clothes for a medical examination, some in the audience gasp. But he fluently conveys buoyant idealism and pungent drag-queen wit as well as the piercing, open-mouthed cries of fear and rage that arrive with the graphically dramatized collapse of his health. Mr. Spinella is also blessed with a superb acting partner in Mr. Mantello, who as his callow lover is a combustible amalgam of puppyish Jewish guilt and self-serving intellectual piety.

The entire cast, which includes Kathleen Chalfant and Jeffrey Wright in a variety of crisply observed comic cameos, is first rate. Ms. Harden's shattered, sleepwalking housewife is pure pathos, a figure of slurred thought, voice and emotions, while Mr. Grant fully conveys the internal warfare of her husband, torn between Mormon rectitude and uncontrollable sexual heat. When Mr. Wolfe gets both of the play's couples on stage simultaneously to enact their parallel, overlapping domestic crackups, "Angels in America" becomes a wounding fugue of misunderstanding and recrimination committed in the name of love.

But "Angels in America" is an ideal assignment for Mr. Wolfe because of its leaps beyond the bedroom into the fabulous realms of myth and American archetypes, which have preoccupied this director and playwright in such works as "The Colored Museum" and "Spunk." Working again with Robin Wagner, the designer who was an essential collaborator on "Jelly's Last Jam," Mr. Wolfe makes the action fly through the delicate, stylized heaven that serves as the evening's loose scenic environment, yet he also manages to make some of the loopier scenes, notably those involving a real-estate agent in Salt Lake City and a homeless woman in the South Bronx, sharper and far more pertinent than they have seemed before.

What has really affected "Angels in America" during the months of its odyssey to New York, however, is not so much its change of directors as Washington's change of Administrations. When first seen a year or so ago, the play seemed defined by its anger at the reigning political establishment, which tended to reward the Roy Cohns and ignore the Prior Walters. Mr. Kushner has not revised the text since -- a crony of Cohn's still boasts of a Republican lock on the White House until the year 2000 -- but the shift in Washington has had the subliminal effect of making "Angels in America" seem more focused on what happens next than on the past.

This is why any debate about what this play means or does not mean for Broadway seems, in the face of the work itself, completely beside the point. "Angels in America" speaks so powerfully because something far larger and more urgent than the future of the theater is at stake. It really is history that Mr. Kushner intends to crack open. He sends his haunting messenger, a spindly, abandoned gay man with a heroic spirit and a ravaged body, deep into the audience's heart to ask just who we are and just what, as the plague continues and the millennium approaches, we intend this country to become. Angels in America Millennium Approaches By Tony Kushner; directed by George C. Wolfe; sets by Robin Wagner; costumes by Toni-Leslie James; lighting by Jules Fisher; music by Anthony Davis; additional music by Michael Ward; sound by Scott Lehrer; production supervisors, Gene O'Donovan and Neil A. Mazzella; production stage manager, Perry Cline. Produced in association with the New York Shakespeare Festival. Associate producers, Dennis Grimaldi, Marilyn Hall, Ron Kastner, Hal Luftig/126 Second Avenue Corporation and Suki Sandler; executive producers, Benjamin Mordecai and Robert Cole. Presented by Jujamcyn Theaters and Mark Taper Forum/Gordon Davidson, with Margo Lion, Susan Quint Gallin, Jon B. Platt, the Baruch-Frankel-Viertel Group and Frederick Zollo, in association with Herb Alpert. At the Walter Kerr Theater, 219 West 48th Street, Manhattan. Rabbi Chemelwitz, Henry, Hannah Pitt and Ethel Rosenberg . . . Kathleen Chalfant Roy Cohn and Prior 2 . . . Ron Leibman Joe Pitt, Prior 1 and the Eskimo David Marshall Grant Harper Pitt and Martin Heller Marcia Gay Harden Mr. Lies and Belize . . . Jeffrey Wright Louis Ironson . . . Joe Mantello Prior Walter and Man in the Park Stephen Spinella Emily, Ella Chapter, the Woman in the South Bronx and the Angel . . . Ellen McLaughlin