Whistler Wednesdays

Last night we launched our new play reading series Whistler Wednesdays with Vladimir Zelevinsky's A Brief History of the Soviet Union. The series consists of five evenings of free theatre of local playwright's work. During last Spring myself and other Whistler company members read over seventy plays of which we chose four full length and six ten minute pieces, the later making up our January series. I then spent the end of the summer into the fall contacting directors and actors and putting together a wonderful mix of old and new friends to join us in bringing the scripts we chose to life this season.

I cannot think of a better way to have kicked off Whistler Wednesdays than last night. Our audience was filled with friends and walk-ins off the street. I met Vladimir for the first time after months of back and forth e-mails and was delighted to find that he is as interesting and vibrant in person as he comes across in his work as a playwright. Our four actors Steve Barkhimer, Stacy Fischer, Doug Cochrane and Andrew Dufresne were lovely. Bridget O'Leary, who directed A Brief History... probably doesn't realize that she also helped me in the producer role by being a patience guinea pig of many e-mails and questions I had coming from someone who has never produced anything on this scale to someone who runs successful programs like this as a daily part of her life. So thank you Bridget!

Thank you to all who came out and supported us last night. I got into my car last night feeling confident that Whistler Wednesdays is going to be a success and something that continues into future seasons. And if you didn't make it out last night, check out our schedule for the remainder of the series. We'd love to have you in the audience!

Spotlight on Scott Sweatt

Having interviewed Joe before we got into the rehearsal room, I have now had the chance, inside rehearsals, to interview Scott. Part of the interview appears in our November newsletter, but this is the full thing unedited (mostly). If you're not on our e-mail list you can join us here.

1. What do you find the most gratifying about your job as an actor?

Maybe it has to do something with the bringing together of community. Bringing people together to hear a story and experience something. The chance to give back that reflection of what we are doing every day. It feels like a moment where people stop to take stock of our existence.

b. And the most challenging?

Actually finding what the minutia of what that (the experience, the story) is. To actually be able to honestly represent that. To find out what makes us tick, what are the little things that set us off, make us fall in love and what are those gestures or those forms that other people can recognize as what is happening. We don't always get to say "I've fallen in love with you!"

2. How would you describe your ideal theatre experience as an audience member?

Something where I'm reminded of my aliveness. Something that I'm reminded of the unexpected nature of life that I can't get ahead of. When I find myself breathing in the same pace as the people on the stage and I know that they are reaching beyond me because the rhythms of their vibes are effecting how I am experiencing everything on the other side of it.

3. What about In on It most excites you as you are about to enter into the rehearsal process?

I'm a daydreamer so the floating between narratives is something that instantly appealed to me when I read In on It, and now that we're hear doing it, it feels like that. It feels like some of the conversations I have dreamed of having with certain people. It's the way that we are always with someone even when we are alone but there are these voices and people inside of us that, though we may not have these crazy talking out loud moments, we are always talking to people. I like that. I like the idea that there is not so much a linear narrative, even inside of something that feels like it is going straightforward or right on track, there are all these little things going on inside of us all the time. I think this show really explodes what those little things are.

In my own words. Words of my own.

I had never done a Barker play prior to The Europeans. I'd read Barker, so I had some idea what I was getting into, but you can never really know what a project is going to be until you get into that rehearsal room and start speaking it, doing it. I've now learned that doing Barker is a little like doing Shakespeare...on acid...while being punched repeatedly in the spleen. I'm sure that doesn't sound appealing. It is though, if you're an actor...or maybe it's just me. It has much (everything) to do with the words Barker writes, the words you are then allowed to speak as an actor. There is beauty there, of course, in the words, and poetry, but it's not delicate beauty or dainty poetry. It is more like the poetry of a crime scene, or the beauty of a fetus in a jar of formaldehyde. It is gruesome and disturbing, and all the more beautiful for it.

It's a little bittersweet to be writing a "wrap up" post. Partly because I've never been very good at wrapping things up, but mostly because I wish I was writing about the end of our first week of rehearsal, and not the end of the thing as a whole. Two rehearsals and a reading just doesn't seem like nearly long enough to spend with Howard Barker's words (and certainly not long enough to spend with a really phenomenal cast). But the time spent was indeed good time, and I am grateful for it. Very many thanks to all of you who came out to see us on Wednesday, we'll see you at In On It!

Leslie Gore

You may think you don't know who Leslie Gore is, but if you've ever sang the lyrics "It's my party and I'll cry if I want to, cry if I want to..." then you would be mistaken. She is the "girl group era" sweetheart who brought us You Don't Own Me, Judy's Turn to Cry (the sequel to It's My Party), Sunshine Lollipops and Rainbows, and more.

This 1960's and 70's pop icon has been playing constantly through the not so great sound system of my computer speakers for the past month now. I consider myself an actor who moves really well, but by no means a dancer, so of course when asked how I wanted to contribute to In on It as a Whistler company member I told Meg I'd love to assist her and why not throw myself in as choreographer for the dance number in the script Sunshine Lollipops and Rainbows.

The assistant to the director part of my role will start this Saturday with our first rehearsal, but I've been dancing up a storm in my bedroom on a regular morning stringing together dance moves. As a non-dancer choreographer I have immersed myself in U-Tube videos galore. The script calls for something a bit aerobically challenging for one of the characters and overall just a lot of silly fun. I've been meshing 60's and 70's dance moves with a little bit of 1920's Charleston mixed in. Thank god for a co-worker who is an actual dancer and could break down some of the foot work for me!

So now I'm at the point where I've got a bunch of really interesting moves, some of them are strung together to actually fit with the music and the others are hanging around waiting for me to figure out just where they go and how they move from one to the other. A couple of weeks ago I thought "why did I want to do this again?" and now I am really looking forward to our first dance rehearsal at the beginning of November. Between then and now I'm going to keep dancing around my room getting a good workout and finishing putting this dance together, and perhaps you will google Leslie Gore and start adding her to your i-tunes soundtrack if she is not already a part of it.

Spotlight on Joe Lanza

Company Member Jen O’Connor recently interviewed actor Joe Lanza about his experiences in theatre and his upcoming role as This One in In On It.

1. What do you find the most gratifying about your job as an actor?

The first thing that comes to mind is once you get into performance because you're actually doing and sharing with the audience what you've worked on. The other thing is in rehearsals when you have those “Aha!” moments- when something makes sense to you that wasn't making sense before.

b. And the most challenging?

The most challenging thing (on the risk of sounding crazy) is the voices inside my head, the judges, the things that inhibit me from really going for it. I have an outside eye that is asking “how do I look?”, and that is not really the actor's job. [My job] is trusting that the director is going to lead me in the right direction.

2. How would you describe your ideal theatre experience as an audience member?

When I go to the theatre I like to see things that I haven't seen before. I like to be left with a memorable lasting impression.

3. What about In on It most excites you as you are about to enter into the rehearsal process?

I've known Meg personally for a while so I'm really excited to work with her. I love the play. The first time I read it I said “this is something I want to do,” so I'm excited that I get the chance to work on it. I want to put it in front of an audience and see what their reaction is.

Blood & Water: Season Five at Whistler

Welcome to Whistler's fifth season: Blood&Water - Ties of Biology and Circumstance.

It seems almost inconceivable that we are in our fifth season now - five years have never gone by so quickly! But we've learned and grown through the past four seasons, and I think that season five will be the most exciting yet.

With Blood&Water, we at Whistler are exploring definitions of family – what does family mean to you? Who are the people in your family? Are they bound to you by ties of love? By ties of blood? By random chance? Does your family provide you with comfort? Support? Frustration? All of the above? This season, explore these questions in three wildly different plays that challenge us to rethink our assumptions about the people closest to us and the way they shape our lives.

In Daniel MacIvor's In On It, two men attempt to define their relationship by examining it through the lens of a fictional family; Naomi Wallace's One Flea Spare quarantines four people who should never have met each other into a single room for a month of survival in a time of plague and Biljana Srbljanovic's Family Stories peeks through the keyhole at four children playing house in the ruins of a bombed-out Bosnian tenement block.

We start our season on October 21st, with our participation in 21 for 21, an international festival celebrating the work of Howard Barker. Whistler audiences were first introduced to Barker's work with our inaugural production of The Possibilities, and have had the chance to further explore his world with our productions of Don't Exaggerate (FeverFest 06) and A Hard Heart (Season 3). It is a true pleasure for us to have the opportunity to present a staged reading of one of this controversial playwright's most darkly beautiful plays: The Europeans.

Out of the chaos of war comes the birth of a new kind of order.

In the aftermath of the 17th-century siege of Vienna, the survivors begin to build their society anew. The Emperor and Empress would like order restored, and the poor just want to survive, but Starhemberg, the general responsible for the salvation of the city, seeks to forge a new world out of the ashes of the old. A harrowing love story, and an exploration of our personal freedoms and choices inside the maddening political structures that control our lives.

We also have the joy of working with some of the most talented actors in Boston. Returning to Whistler are Alex Simoes and Chuong Pham (both last seen in season 2's In Perpetuity Throughout the Universe), Lorna Nogueira, Melissa Barker, Jen O'Connor and Curt Klump. We also welcome five new actors to our midst: Christopher Webb, Hannah Husband, Zillah Glory, Scott Sweatt (who will also be seen in November's In On It), and imaginary beasts Artistic Director and dear friend Matthew Woods.

Please join us on October 21st for this incredibly special event. Ticket reservations came be made here.

A clean slate for season five.

Welcome back to Whistler's process blog - the most unreliably updated blog on the web! This blog seems to suffer from the same fate as pretty much every journal I've ever kept - flurries of information during rehearsals and production, and then long periods of silence. For Whistler's fifth season, we are going to try to rectify that, and use this as a forum to keep you posted on what's going on with us, but also to share special behind-the-curtains peeks at the development of the work we are doing.

And we'd love to hear from you as we move into this season - talk back to us about what interests you and tell us what you want to be hearing from us.