Join me, Curlee McGhee, as I get the inside scoop on all that the Berkshire Fringe has to offer! Show reviews! Interviews with artists! Behind-the-scenes snapshots! Concert snippets! Slips of the tongue offstage! Professional silliness! Words of wisdom from the artistic directors! Tips for up-and-coming theater-makers! AND MORE!
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Monday, July 25th 2011: PROPOCALYPSE REPORT!
The notorious Fringesters kicked off the 2011 season with a kick-sass gala of Propocalyptic proportions! No worries if you couldn’t pronounce the name of the event by the end of the evening: good times were had despite the artistic directors’ seeming ploy to engage you all in tongue-twistery theater games.
Several local artists were assigned the task of creating shows around three items: a wheelbarrow, an orange, and an unopened letter. This task was taken extremely seriously by everyone. The Pi Clowns in particular. The result was a myriad of walking corpses, conversations between objects, questions about one’s own stupidity, brutal Alexandrian torture, fruit burials, and, of course, a mocking recap of the entire evening by certain red-nosed californians.
The music was hoppin’! The bar ran as freely as the nearby Housatonic! Young and old traded dance moves as the night wore on! All kinds of fabulous items were sold in the silent and not-so-silent auctions led by Olson & Son, and generosity towards the Fringe flew out of people’s pockets like lost earrings under a metal detector!
All in all, the gala was one of Propocalyptic success! (By the way, that’s proe-paw-kuh-lip-tick. You’re welcome.)
Yours truly, Curlee McGhee
Wednesday, July 27th 2011: Missing: The Fantastical and True Story of My Father’s Disappearance and What I Found When I Looked for Him.
Missing is a show not to be missed! (Har har har.) This incredible one-woman show has an amazing soundtrack that sends the audience to another world… A world that Jessica Ferris reaches when she literally climbs through her chair in search of her imaginary friend Burt. Using extremely precise movement to create a strange dance with the household objects that best represent the characters in her life, Ferris takes us on a whirlwind tour of her family as well as the inside of a sociopath’s head in a heart-wrenching attempt to understand her own father. The kind of show you walk out of with tears in your eyes and a tickle in your belly. Curlee gives it a big ol’ fashioned facebook “like.”
Thursday, July 28th 2011: The Erotics of Doubt, Undimmed Episodes of Love, Endless Love, or Seduction.
Join choreographers Sarah Konner and Austin Selden in their exploration of what it means to love and be loved. At times silly, at times desperate, always honest and in-your-face, this evening of dance is sure to leave you with a lot to think about. And keep your partner awake with at night. From the lonely but comforting rim of a toilet seat to the exhausted exchange of roles played in a relationship that smells like glazed, roasted duck, this piece embodies the many ways in which we love (or don’t). Curlee says don’t let the hot dancer bods intimidate you and come on out for a great night! Who knows? You might meet someone!
Sunday, August 7th 2011 !CLOSING NIGHT OF “OUR MAN”!
Curlee is sad to say that tonight at 6 pm will be the last performance of Our Man here at The Berkshire Fringe. If you haven’t already, it is definitely worth the muggy trip out to your nice, air-conditioned ozone-unfriendly car to drive over and see this amazing show. It’s not even raining anymore, people. Set entirely in a 5x5x5 glass box, new rules are established for a bizarre little eco-system inhabited by two barefoot radio-announcers. As a result of the physical boundaries that surround the men, they sleep differently, play differently, fight differently, and even stand up or sit down differently. Their mission? To narrate the life of Ronald Reagan in his role as “The Gipper” as he writes home to his wife from the front lines of battle. Extremely fast-moving dialogue and laser-precise choreography keep the show sharp as a whip, and the imaginative playfulness is a wonderful way to escape your own boundaries and enjoy watching someone else struggle with theirs. You’ll be reminded of how much you hated sharing a room with your little brother! You’ll never feel comfortable owning a hamster again! Curlee says the thunderstorm isn’t forecasted until 9 pm so you’ll have plenty of time to get home safe and dry after the show, no excuses. See you there!
And by the way, speaking of lightning, if you’d watched MassAppeal the other day when Sara Katzoff and the Pi Clowns were on, you would know that Martha Stewart has been hit by lighting NUMEROUS TIMES!! That woman’s unstoppable! (My apologies to Seth from MassAppeal for stealing his unstoppable line.)
Xoxo, Curlee McGhee
Sunday, August 7th 2011: INTERVIEW WITH THE AMAZING HAERRY KIM, writer and performer of “Face.”
Curlee McGhee: What is your background in theater like?
Haerry Kim: I’ve always wanted to be an actor but I grew up in Korea so my parents didn’t want me to be one. I majored in political science in undergrad and after that they said I could do whatever I wanted. I came to America and got a second BA in theater from the University of Iowa. Tennessee Williams actually went to that school. It has an old, old theater department with a great playwriting program. After that I went to San Francisco for a year and then I got an MFA from Columbia. My theater company in NYC started with a lighting designer, a projection artist, and a sound designer. All of my shows so far have involved projections, but I don’t know what is going to happen in the next play.
CM: Was there a reason that you chose American theater over Korean theater?
HK: At that time Korean grad schools did not have MFA programs. I thought to myself that I would rather spend those years in America learning from great teachers. I lived for twelve years in New York City and now I travel back and forth between New York and Korea.
CM: Where and how did your show “Face” originate?
HK: I had learned about the “comfort women” in history class of course, and when the first woman came out in 1991 it was huge news because people knew about it but no records were public. The records are kept secret by the Japanese government, of course. I knew about it but… I thought I knew about it and then I read the testimonies. The testimonies were recorded and researched by a feminist organization in Korea. The organization interviewed over a long period of months because it was all dependent on the women’s memories and sometimes those have holes, so they wanted to get the most complete and accurate accounts. The book of testimonies came out, and I discovered it when I was just visiting Korea during a summer break from grad school. I read the book and it just completely shook me and at that point it was about how can I translate that into a theater piece? I was really inspired and shaken so I started writing but I was working on my thesis and trying to get agents and all that so I couldn’t really sit down and do it. Then I went back and over the years researched and accumulated all the materials and in 2009 I finally said to myself that it was now or never: I have to really sit down and make this piece come to life. I made it, and first it was shown at the Solonova Festival in NYC, and then I did it at the Here Arts Center, then one more time in Connecticut, and then last year for one month I performed it in Edinburgh. Not that many people in the states or in Europe know this story so I knew it was really important to perform it. A year later, I’m here. I performed it once at the Centennial Women’s Day Celebration in Korea but I did excerpts of it in English because the event had been organized by foreigners and ex-pats. Now I’m rewriting and translating the script into Korean to perform it there for a wider audience soon.
CM: Will it be very different from typical Korean theater, do you think? Is American theater very different from Korean theater?
HK: I think modern theater is all very similar but probably the audience will be very different. Especially for this piece I think the audience will have a similar expectation to what I had before I read the book. They will think they know about it but hopefully afterwards they will have a different, more personal experience.
CM: Can you tell us a little bit about the creation of the show? Was there a director involved?
HK: First I started with an image and then I built a scene around it. They were all separate scenes and then I started thinking about the journey and how to thread them together. I started with a script first but it was much more based in visuals. I would read a story and then I would see a butterfly and a little girl and it would start from there. Sometimes the scenes are based on how I felt after reading a story. It’s not all narrative. Then I thought about one person’s journey, where it should start and end. I started threading it together, discovering the missing parts. I didn’t have a director but eventually I thought that I needed an outside eye so I asked one of my teachers, Mary Conway, an excellent actor, to come in and help me out.
CM: What would you like your relationship with the audience to be? What would you like for the audience to walk away with?
HK: That’s a really hard question. I don’t have anything very specific that I want the audience to feel or think. The main character is trying to revisit and revive her memories so that they are not lost, and in one of the last monologues she talks about the same things happening all over the world. There are always women who are suffering and I thought this story was very universal. It isn’t specific to a time period or a place. I want these women’s voices to be heard and for the audience to feel compassion for these women and for them to want to know more about their stories and maybe do something about it. Just people knowing more about it would be so helpful for these women. I saw an interview clip of one of the grandmas. She said she knew that even after her death, generations following her would remember her story and keep her thoughts alive. I think that’s very inspiring, I think somehow these stories resonate in different ways with different audiences but to make any change at all in people is great. I don’t consider myself an activist, but I am very much interested in social subjects. I want to be more of an artist. I try to create one or two new shows each year, and I’m traveling to different countries with them.
CM: What does the foreseeable future hold for you?
HK: Right now I’m making a play about love. There’s a huge bathtub in the middle of the stage and then mirrors. I don’t know what’s going to happen with that but I’m going to workshop it at the end of this year and then hopefully produce it next year.
Your devoted blogger, Curlee McGhee.