GSP (almost) goes to the Tonys!

George Street Playhouse has always attracted high caliber artists on and off our stage. We also work with burgeoning talents who maintain successful careers in New York on and off Broadway.

This year, GSP alumnae have accumulated a collective 8 2010 Tony Nominations for their work, and you saw them here...FIRST

Joe DiPietro and David Bryan are nominated twice this year for their musical Memphis, (technically bringing our alumni total to 10.) Mssrs. Bryan and DiPietro are both nominated for their score, while Bryan is also nominated for his Orchestrations (with Daryl Waters) and Joe DiPietro is nominated for his book to the musical.

Joe's currently working on Creating Claire here this month, and you saw their Toxic Avenger here last season.

Earlier this season we presented the musical Calvin Berger. The set designer for that show, Derek McLane, won last year's Tony for 33 Variations, and was represented on Broadway this year with three shows Ragtime, The Miracle Worker and Million Dollar Quartet, and was recognized for his tiered set for Ragtime.

Speaking of Calvin Berger, Martin Pakledinaz who created the chic high school fashions for our cast, is nominated this year for his costume design on Ken Ludwig's farce Lend Me A Tenor.

In another design category Robert Wierzel was nominated for his lighting design in the musical Fela! Mr. Wierzel was here two years ago with Theresa Rebeck's play The Scene.

Don Holder's lighting design for Come Fly Away is also nominated. Mr. Holder, who is incredibly busy on Broadway, was last at George Street Playhouse in 1998 during Voices in the Dark.

In Acting Categories, Rosemary Harris and Maria Dizzia are nominated this year in the Featured Actress in a Play. Ms. Harris who was here in Oscar and the Pink Lady is nominated for her extraordinary performance in The Royal Family at Manhattan Theatre Club earlier this season. Ms. Dizzia performed at GSP several seasons ago in Agnes of God, and is nominated for Lincoln Center's production of Sarah Ruhl's In the Next Room, or the Vibrator Play.

A hearty congratulations to all the nominees!

GSP TV!

Several weeks ago cast members of The Scene took time out of their break in rehearsal to speak with local television news program Edison On Stage about their roles and the production. If you haven't yet caught the show, there are 8 performances left. See it now through Sunday the 23rd. Special thanks to host Joe Vierno for the coverage.

Theatre Rocked!

On Thurday March 13 George Street teamed with New Jerey Young Professionals and the NJ Theatre Alliance for Theatre Rocks. Over 50 people attended a performance of The Scene and enjoyed samples of Zyr Vodka, our production product sponsor (who's stylish blue bottle appears in the show!) David Saint, our artistic director stuck around to meet the many new patrons to the theatre. Here's a look at the event. If you missed out, don't worry, another NJYP night is in the works for next season.

Special thanks to NJYP and the Theatre Alliance for their work in promoting this unique event to the atypical theatre crowd! NJYPer Steve (center; pictured below) was the lucky winner of a bottle of ZYR.

Play's words make perfect sense to Arkin

The Home News Tribune recently published a great feature article on Matthew Arkin, about The Scene. It's a great read and worth sharing for those of you who missed it.

By CHARLES PAOLINO, STAFF WRITER

If Matthew Arkin gets an early call, he's ready.

He got used to it when he was spending time watching his dad make movies.

Since then, Arkin, 47 — a soft-spoken and thoughtful man, and son of the noted actor Alan Arkin — has built an extensive career. His latest stop is the George Street Playhouse, where he will star in Theresa Rebeck's play "The Scene" — a co-production by George Street and Hartford Stage, to be directed by the Connecticut company's associate artistic director, Jeremy B. Cohen.

And although he gathered a substantial background for acting by watching his father, the performance he will give in this play will be his own. In fact, the performance is so not programmed, so unique to this particular work and production, that even he didn't know, as rehearsals proceeded, where he would be in his character the first time the lights went up.
His character is Charlie, one of four people who are trying to find their way in the New York entertainment world. The others are Stella, Charlie's wife, somewhat frazzled by the need to support him; Lewis, his close friend, and Clea, an ambitious blonde who never lets a scruple stand in her way.

Charlie has had a flash of success as a television writer, but the play finds him in the midst of a dry spell as he and Lewis first encounter Clea at one of an interminable series of parties.
The script gives a spare inkling of how these men and women came to this point in their lives, and Arkin doesn't care to speculate further about that.

"I had a discussion with an actress once," he said. "We were working on . . . "Lost in Yonkers,' and this actress came to me and said, "We talk about this incident in the past, and my character says this happened and your character says that happened. . . . I want to sit down with you and talk about what actually happened.'

"And I said, "I don't want to discuss that. Forget you and me. Our characters will not agree on what actually happened. And what informs our action in the present is not what actually happened, but our perception of what happened.' "

Kind of like real life, the actor observed, where "we also rewrite our pasts to make better stories or to justify what we've decided we want to do and be."
By whatever route Charlie came to the place where the play first finds him, it is quickly apparent that he is deeply conflicted — out of work, insecure, resentful of the industry that isn't knocking at his door, but unwilling to make any compromises.

"Charlie has this flaw," Arkin said, "this thing that he cannot let go of even if it's going to destroy him. He's got one piece that maybe you could call his artistic soul that he insists on keeping pure; and in order to keep that pure he's willing to pollute everything else in his life."
But that observation, it turns out, may be just a step in how Arkin's understanding of Charlie evolves during rehearsals.

"That's how I feel now and today," Arkin said, after the analysis of Charlie. "In a week I'll feel differently. At this point in rehearsal and discovery of who this guy is and what this play's about, that seems to be . . . "

His voice trails off, as though to emphasize that he knows he and Charlie are not through with each other. All the characters in this play, and Charlie most of all, take a caustic view of the same individuals and business they circle like moths. Again, Arkin finds this true to life.
"I think we all live in that place, being somehow with and somehow opposed to whatever society we're in," he said. "That great line in "Life of Brian' when he screams out the window, "You're all individuals,' and they scream back, "We're all individuals.'

"We are all individuals, and yet we all live in a larger society and we try and find our place in that. And every joining of the larger society is a threat to our autonomy and our individuality, and what I think is interesting about this play is the different resolutions to that conflict that each of the characters finds."

These resolutions unfold largely through salty dialogue that demonstrates Rebeck's ear for natural speech, and Arkin says that's an advantage to the actor.

"Some dialogue is next to impossible to learn," he said, "because the words don't come out of your mouth the way we speak, and Theresa's do. Once you figure out what the internal thought process is, the words you're saying make perfect sense."

If Arkin — like his brothers Adam and Anthony — wasn't destined to be an actor, he might as well have been, spending so much time, as he did, watching his father at work.
"One of the things that was formative for me," he said, "was just growing up on sound stages and on locations with my dad and in theaters when he was directing. . . .

"And I was a watcher. If his call was 5 o'clock in the morning to be picked up to go to location, I would be up at 5 o'clock in the morning to be out there with him. I'd spend some of the time running around playing like a kid, and I'd spend an awful lot of time just sitting and watching — often sitting next to the script supervisor to get a good view of what was going on and just watching it and soaking it up."

But, said Arkin — who works on stage, film and television — the knowledge he gained from all those hours of watching and listening later turned out to be, at least temporarily, a stumbling block.

"I started getting work, and my work was pretty good, I think, and I was able to get by, but I think I was getting by because I was imitating what I knew to be really good work, which is different from doing really good work as kind of an organic process where you've built a character or built a scene from the ground up.

But he got over that with the help of the legendary teacher of acting, Uta Hagen.
"She would watch my scene work in class and say, "That was terrific, you know; every moment made sense. The scene had a cohesiveness to it, but I knew what was coming every moment of the way.'

"What she was trying to say was that I was representing real life very well, but what she wanted to see was somebody living real life. And that was a real struggle for me, to sort of crack that nut."

And, Arkin said, that didn't mean that he had learned how to act once and for all, but rather that he learned what lay ahead with each new opportunity.

"It happens in every rehearsal process," he explained, "that you'll say, "What's wrong with this scene, why isn't this scene flying?' And you suddenly realize it's because you've made too many decisions about how the scene goes and where it's going to end up, instead of making decisions about where your character comes from and what is the reality that launched you into this scene. You have to know all of that, have a clear picture of all of that, all of your past, all of your experiences, all of the history, all of the world that this character lives in.

"But once the scene starts, you can't know what's going to happen. You have to allow yourself to live in this odd place in which obviously there's an actor who knows his lines and knows where this scene's going to end up. But as you're listening to the other character, you have to allow yourself to live in a place of uncertainty."

posted by Scott Goldman, Executive Assistant, photo of Christy McIntosh and Matthew Arking
by T. Charles Erickson

A sneak peak of "The Scene"

A few weeks ago, The Scene started rehearsals. Our Literary Apprentice, Jeremy Stoller, sat down with Jeremy B. Cohen, the show's director (and Hartford Stage’s Associate Artistic Director), to talk about this deeply funny and complex script byTheresa Rebeck. An excerpt of the interview is below.

George Street Playhouse: As a playwright, Theresa Rebeck is a rigorous supporter ofstructure. On multiple occasions she has mentioned admiring melodramas for the waythey plot their action.

Jeremy B. Cohen: Theresa is incredibly adroit with dialogue and structure, but thisplay, along with her newer plays Mauritius and Our House, proves she’s still very much challenging herself and raising the bar with each new play she writes. If you look at major American writers of the last century—Edward Albee, Tony Kushner, August Wilson,Jose Rivera, Tennessee Williams, Naomi Wallace, Tina Howe, etc.—they all have a distinct voice; a rhythm to their language. Theresa has that in spadesShe’s lived an incredible life and imbues her plays with such complexity and color. Ands he’s at the top of her game right now. It’s really fantastic to witness someone whose artistry is at its peak.

GSP: The play takes place in Manhattan, and the location—not just in its present state, but the way it has changed—has a great effect on the characters. And it’s a contemporary play that includes entertainment bigwigs that doesn’t take place in Hollywood.

JBC: People have referred to this as an industry play—about film people or the theatricalworld—and it’s a world Theresa knows well, as she’s been both in Manhattan and outin LA doing film and television. But I think she’s actually written something much moreexpansive than that.The city has a major effect on people. It makes them think of themselves in a sort of greater than/less than way. It can be a very lonely place. And this play finds Charlie thrust out into the middle of it, as he goes searching for a sense of honest connection.

GSP: You talked on the first day of rehearsal about how this play has similarities to ancient Greek drama.

JBC: Yes, it feels very Greek to me: in its stakes, in the “if only” nature of the story,and in the way characters interact. You think, “if only they would say what they reallyfeel to one another;” or “if only she would walk into the room right now, then everything would change.” But they don’t. And at the same time, it’s also very modern in its embracing of the many complexities of relationships. The challenge in this play is how tobalance the ranges of emotion, and how to negotiate those shifts with what’s so inherentlycomedic and human about it.It’s also very difficult because all four characters must be accountable for what happens in this play. If one person becomes the bad guy, the whole paradigm goes wonky. If wegive the audience a moment to hate a certain character, they’ll shut that character out. And so, in a way, it becomes like a perverse game of whack-a-mole. Each time we get to these moments in rehearsal, where it seems one character is taking the blame, we stop,and investigate why… and shift it.

GSP: You said on the first day of rehearsal that it’s a very funny play, but that it’salso a really dramatic text as well.

JBC: For all of you who have embraced the great, brave, ridiculous, complex, dif-ficult, joyful, thrilling privilege of marriage as I have… I salute you. With this production, we certainly have endeavored to shed some light and truth on the whole institution. My husband is the most patient, loving, and generous guy out there and we all need to remember to remind our partners of their marvelousness… all the time.

I suppose when the audience is reading this, they’re already in their seats, so all I’ll really say is… fasten your seatbelts, and enjoy the ride!


posted by Jeremy Stoller, Literary Apprentice