Atley Loughridge and Mark Megill

 If you keep up with our blog, you have probably been reading recently about the Youth Ink! Festival (which ended on Thursday with incredible success). I thought I might take this moment to let you know a little bit more about what happens in the McCarter Education Department, while we have your attention. The Education Department stays busy year-round, and with more than the encouragement and development of young playwrights. I am the Education Teaching Artist Intern, and, like many of the other interns, I had the privilege of working on the Youth Ink! Festival, both as a co-teacher on one of the residencies earlier in the year and as the Assistant Stage Manager and Production Assistant for the Festival itself (a lot of words to say I ran a lot of errands and helped everyone out wherever I could!) And, in addition to teaching in our after-school program, First Stage, and in-school residencies, I am also the Student Matinee Coordinator.

Whenever appropriate, we invite students from schools all over New Jersey and parts of Pennsylvania to see McCarter’s mainstage productions as a part of our Student Matinee Series. This season, we had at least one matinee performance for Stick Fly, Tartuffe, A Christmas Carol, Argonautika, and A Seagull in the Hamptons. Some teachers really take advantage of the program and bring their students to more than one production per season. Mr. Mark Megill of Allentown High School in Allentown, NJ, is one such teacher. His drama students are regulars in our matinee audiences, and it is always a treat to see them; they are consistently well-prepared and, as a result, invested in every production.

So, when Mr. Megill told his students to post a “Citizen Response” to Argonautika on our blog, Adam was overwhelmed with a flood of insightful, relevant, and challenging questions and comments. I could be wrong, but I haven’t seen that many comments posted on one of our blog entries before or since! Adam approached the Education Department to see if we had any ideas about how to respond to all of these questions. As it turned out, we had just the thing. You see, the cast members of Argonautika, whose blog entries you may have enjoyed reading in the past, are a remarkable group of people, both on and off the stage. The Education Department was blessed with their involvement in several of our projects while the show was in residence at McCarter. So, even though Argonautika had closed and the actors had moved on to other projects, we knew just who to call. Atley Loughridge (Medea and others) had been particularly involved with the Education Department while she was in Princeton, and it was a rare and thrilling delight to work with a professional actor who understands the goals of our Education Department. When we asked if she would be willing to take the time to come back out to New Jersey to visit the students at Allentown High School, she immediately said yes!

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We’ve posted a few time-lapse videos of what it looks like to load a set into the theater (a process that takes several days), so last Monday, Rich (our IT genius) offered to create a time-lapse video of the “strike” for Argonautika, when the set gets taken out of the theater (and, in this case, partially recycled and partially dumpstered).

See below for a time-lapse video of the day’s events. Please note that some computers/browsers may require you to adjust your security settings in order to be able to use the Windows Media Player plugin. If you have trouble, you can always download the video using the links below. Enjoy!

Posted by Adam Immerwahr, Producing Associate at McCarter Theatre.

Atley Loughridge

An interesting question came up during the last talk back. A middle-aged man asked me something like, “This seems like a very gut wrenching performance. How do you do it over and over, without letting the effects spill over into your life?”

A very interesting question because, in the theater (as opposed to film), you may very well do a performance 200 times. Whatever choices you make in the rehearsal process, you’ve got to live with them.

When I originated this role in Chicago, it was the fall of my senior year at Northwestern. It was my first time working with Mary Zimmerman, my first time in a professional show, my first time playing a leading role. I went to school for what Mary does, adapting literature to the stage, not acting. So, suffice to say, the role was a challenge. I really didn’t have the strength, maturity, or experience to contain a very strong performance. The slightest show of emotion would send my person into left field. Although in my head I knew the play was a play, it was as if my physical body could not distinguish the play from reality. I felt depressed, and my performance suffered.

Luckily, Mary did not drop me. To the contrary, she put me in two more of her plays that year. She kept believing in me, kept giving me a chance to learn. She would challenge me and then, at my breaking point, accept my limitations with one of her glittering smiles.

But the real shift came when I spent a month practicing at Tassajara, a Californian Zen Monastery, this past summer. (Perhaps you have heard of the Tassajara Bread Book?) There I learned about meditation. For someone of such competitive and headstrong nature, I learned the gifts of clearing the mind.

Spending two hours a day staring at a white wall, I watch my own egotistical thoughts pass by. In the act of observing the self, “I” am something other than the self. “I” am something that sees these thoughts as other and therefore, dispensable. In letting go of all thoughts, “I” become acutely aware to the present, I become the present, become one with all time, all existence, and disappear.

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At McCarter, we pride ourselves in the bold and risk-taking work that we produce on our stages. As a theater dedicated to producing new plays and re-investigating the classics, we often deal with scripts, subject matters and performances that touch on some of the more controversial issues of the day. Since Argonautika is set in ancient, mythological Greece, we assumed that the cultural references and depictions were were making would not offend.

We were wrong, and for this we apologize wholeheartedly.

To those who have recently taken action against McCarter, we respectfully remind you that we offer several different forums in which you can express your views on any of our productions, including audience discussions, electronic surveys and, of course, this blog.

To the prankster who signed off as “Poseidon” in his e-mail message: flooding all the bathrooms in the administrative hallway is not an appropriate response to your feelings that Argonautika mocked one of your relatives. Although we suspect you meant it only as a prank, your act of vandalism was further compounded by the lightning that repeatedly struck McCarter during Sunday’s matinee of Argonautika—several of our audience members mentioned how odd it was that lightning would strike only when the actors said the name “Zeus” onstage.

We received a very threatening letter (signed with the pseudonym “Aphrodite”) that threatened dire consequences unless the Greek gods and goddesses were treated with more gravitas. Her threat was unspecific (just garbles about “Eros” and “arrows,”), but from my office it sounds like the marketing department has had some serious mood-alteration over the weekend. I can’t go into any details on the blog, but let me tell you that there are some strange noises coming from that office.

In retrospect, we realize that the light-hearted approach to Greek mythology portrayed in Argonautika could be offensive to some deities. We also apologize to those gods (and demi-gods) who feel that they were unjustifiably left out of the story—due to the nature of theatrical performance, it is not possible to represent all of the Olympian gods in our production, and we hope that the “protest party” that “Dionysus” is throwing in the Lockwood Lobby will end as soon as possible, because the Princeton Police are threatening to revoke McCarter’s alcohol license.

Thank you for your understanding.

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Below, you can see a time-lapse video of the load-in of Argonautika’s set and lights and the light focus that followed. The whole set arrived from DC in a 53-foot truck, and our Production Staff, many of whom had traveled down to DC to see the production there, loaded it into the space. As you can see in the video, the set was designed to fit into many smaller pieces so that it could easily come in and out of the truck. One of the interesting things our staff had to do was to modify the bridge over the stage so that in the event of an emergency, our fire curtain could still operate. During a section of the video, you can see the fire curtain in the space so that could be figured out.

This video is a bit different than our last time-lapse video. It was shot from the balcony, instead of the house, and used a different camera than we used last time. Every two seconds, the camera captured one video frame, which means that each minute of video is equal to an hour of real time on the stage. Enjoy!

Posted by Adam Immerwahr, Producing Associate at McCarter Theatre.

Chris Kipiniak

People get sick.  It happens.  They get sick.  Or hurt.  Or lost.  Or stuck in traffic, or hired, or fired, or a friend comes to town, a relative leaves town, or any number of things that fall under the rubric of “something came up” which prevents everybody, at one point or another, from going to work on a given day.  It happens.

Actors don’t get sick often because we don’t work very often and so when we do work we’re very loathe to allow ourselves to lose a show.  They’ll have to pry our performance opportunities out of our cold, dead, hands.  But it happens.  So many theaters have understudies which are other actors who are trained and prepared to go on on the off chance that someone does go down.  McCarter, however, does not.  So, it was a little bit scary when somebody got sick.  More accurately, it was VERY scary when THREE people got EXTREMELY ILL.  As I said, actors are nothing if not egotistical, so we all soldiered on in the face of phlegm.  We pushed on and just looked forward to the next day off in which to rest up.  We knew that if we could just make it to Monday.  But, at some point on Thursday afternoon, all our phones started ringing.  Emergency rehearsal.  An actor had gone down and wouldn’t be doing the show that night.

We got together and Mary, the director, started divying up the roles that this actor played.  This person got this line, this person made that cross, etc.  One part, however, was not given out.  The only people who were free during these scenes in Act II wouldn’t fit in the costume.  At the same time, Anjali Bhimani, an actor Mary has worked with many times before, was on her way up from New York on a train to have dinner with Mary and to see the show.  She didn’t get to see it.  Because as soon as she got off the train and walked in the theatre, before even a hello or introductions, a script was shoved at her, and a quick fitting was done.  Instead of being a member of the audience, Anjali Bhimani would be a member of the cast that night.

The show turned out great.  The changes reinvigorated all of us.  Anjali was/is an excellent actress and, in this case more importantly, a quick study.  She did a wonderful job and the show did—as cliche as it is—go on.

Posted by Chris Kipiniak, who plays “Castor” and others in McCarter Theatre’s Production of Argonautika.

We’ve finally done it! McCarter’s first home-brewed video podcast! A video backstage tour of the Argonautika set. I stayed up way too late last night working on it (instead of cleaning my apartment), but I’m really happy with what came out! Many thanks to Jesse J. Perez, who narrated the backstage tour, and Elizabeth Edwards, the videographer.

Enjoy the video, and post your comments below!

Posted by Adam Immerwahr, Producing Associate at McCarter Theatre.

Sofia Jean Gomez and Lisa Tejero sat down with Todd Reichert from the Princeton News Network to talk about working with Mary Zimmerman on Argonautika.

Posted by Adam Immerwahr, Producing Associate at McCarter Theatre.

Before it came to Princeton, Mary Zimmerman’s Argonautika performed at the Shakespeare Theatre Company in Washington, DC. Straight from their YouTube channel, here’s a sneak peek of one of my favorite moments of the play: role call!

Posted by Adam Immerwahr, Producing Associate at McCarter Theatre.

Atley Loughridge

Yesterday was a fun day. My college roommate came from Chicago on Wednesday, and we stayed up until 4am talking. Not just about boys! We actually had to figure out what we were going to teach the next morning, because I’d promised the McCarter education department that I would teach 60 2nd graders something from 9am to noon on Thursday.

Can I just say—the education department at the McCarter is incredible. Every member of the department seems charged with the positive strength of people who love what they do. Their programming is broad and robust, helping children k-12 from all walks of life to learn and love through drama. I introduced myself to the Program Manager Jim on the first day, and he found me classes and meetings to participate in within minutes. I later learned that they had already placed my co-worker Chris Kipiniak with a program called “Homefront,” dedicated to children without permanent housing. Chris has also worked for the McCarter’s after school outreach program called First Stage Company. There, children create characters and Chris, a writer for Marvel comics, wrote those characters into a play for the kids to perform.

Last week the whole cast went to see the production of Jason and the Arrrr-gonats performed by a small cast of eight-year-olds. The show was hilarious. The actors were well rehearsed, relaxed but focused. The writing truly captured the heart and humor of the children on stage, and the staging was endlessly imaginative.

I was standing in the back with our sound designer, Andre Puess, (the room was packed) and we just kept throwing each other looks of astonishment. It was awesome.

Yesterday morning was no less moving. My friend Anne, Rachel (a member of the touring show The Odyssey Experience), and I met around eight to inhale buckets of coffee and discuss what we were going to teach. By nine fifteen we were in the midst of a storm at sea, with thirty jumping bean second grade Argonauts falling back and forth in their school library (that was now on the sea!). You wouldn’t believe how excited they were to undulate fabric and make wave sounds, to run around as fairies of the wind or boom the will of Boreus above all the cachaphony.

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