Photo by Frank Wojciechowski

This is the sixth and final segment of our interview with Yehuda Hyman, writer and performer of IN-Festival Spotlight Production The Mad 7. Read the fifth segment here. The play is based on “The Seven Beggars,” a story by Hasidic Rabbi Nachman of Breslov, and follows a character named Elliott as he encounters six storytellers from various regions of the world. Each one shares a mystical story through music and dance, propelling Elliott on a spiritual journey of self-discovery.In the following section, Yehuda discusses the play’s ending and its implications.

Well, we’ve been speaking for a long time and I don’t want to keep you, but I would love to address one final point, which is the fact that we don’t hear the final story—that it doesn’t end, that it’s not told. So, what is your take on that? What is the significance of that fact; what are we waiting for?

Well, there’s a couple of things. First of all, Rabbi Nachman was dying when he told this story. He died, what, three weeks after? It’s the last story he told. So he was definitely looking at his own death. And his work in this world, in this realm, what he was trying to accomplish. Maybe he felt that he wasn’t going to be able to accomplish it, in this realm. But I think he did have a—I mean I don’t think, I know, because he said it—he said that his teachings, his spirit, would grow stronger and stronger and stronger after his death.

That’s why it’s so important not to strangle these stories. “You tell a story simply.” We prepare, we do our best, we do everything we can. But then when it comes to it we just tell it. Because the real finish to the story happens through the listener. It’s what they do with it.

And so in “The Seven Beggars,” it’s like story, story, story, story, story. But the real finish, the real end to the story is yet to happen. It’s something alchemical that will hopefully take place in the future. And hopefully what is being created in the theater that night is the possibility of something happening in the future. That’s what I really believe.

Posted by Elizabeth Edwards, Literary Intern at McCarter Theatre.

Nikkole Salter and Danai Gurira in In the Continuum, photo by Rubin Coudyzer

Playwright Danai Gurira has been developing her newest play, “Eclipsed” at McCarter. She and Nikkole Salter read excerpts from the play in last year’s “IN-Festival,” and the play will receive its first reading at McCarter on March 6, 2007. In researching the play, which explores the effects of war on Liberian women, Danai traveled to Liberia through a TCG New Generations grant, which she applied for with McCarter Theatre. She came back with a journal of her experiences, which I will be sharing excerpts from on the blog. Part I is here. Part II is here. Below is Part III:

My workshops commenced after my days of interviews. They went exceedingly well, though we got to a bumpy start. They were a little loose on the concept of classroom decorum: staying in the room, not talking on the phone in the room, etc. So we ironed that out by the end of the first day—I became very free with them—yelling when I felt the need, they responded positively, thankfully. They became aware, I think, that I was trying to make them the best they could be and impart a great deal in a very small window of time and that I was not going to tolerate anything less than their full effort. Teaching proved challenging in certain areas; I tried to expose them to scripts and how the structure of one can work, it was tricky, they had never read full scripts before, nor prepared a piece from a script, Juli later told me many of them had only learned to read recently, they were largely young adults she had rescued from dire situations and brought to the city and sent to school. Slowly but surely we gained some ground, I worked them pretty hard, and often forgot to give breaks. They loved certain corrections I made to their performance style like the issue of telegraphing, a term they could not get enough of. It was so revelatory for them to realize what they had been doing wasn’t the way to perform at their best. We ended on wonderful terms, with all of them asking for my return. Juli, in typical phenomenal woman fashion, made a few phone calls and set up a press event for the day of my departure—to present the participants with a workshop certificate and let the press know of the work we were trying to do. We wanted to include the US embassy’s participation in the press so that they would feel compelled to bring me back when Juli and I proposed it later this coming year so that I could do more intensive training. Amazingly, everything fell into place just as Juli described it and the next day I was handing out certificates and making speeches while smiling for the Liberian press. My friend Fred in South Africa forwarded me a Liberian newspaper snippet quoting me discussing my project. Juli is something else.

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A few weeks ago I stopped by the Production Office to check out a system they were using to test the video projections for The Mad 7. The play uses pre-recorded video (and supertitles) juxtaposed with live acting, and the video is played on three different surfaces. All told, this requires four video projectors all coordinating their projections from one source. In order to make this possible, the Production Staff coordinated with our IT staff to rent some new technology. I got a chance to take a sneak peak of the set-up and snap a few photos, and I’ve finally had a moment to put them up online. The five monitors you see in the picture were being used to test the five different outputs that the system will have to generate (one for the operator’s screen, three for full motion video, and the fourth for supertitles). In the actual performance space, there will be only one screen, and the other four monitors will be replaced with video projectors.

Rich Tepper, who is our IT super-hero, explained it all to me. The projections are run from an Apple Mac Pro, which we rented specifically for The Mad 7. It has dual Quad-core processors at 2.66ghz and 4gb of RAM. It also has three Dual head PCI-E video cards (with 256mb of video RAM each) installed. That gives us the possibility of having six total outputs. With one of those reserved for the operator’s screen, there are actually five possible presentation outputs, and we are using four of those (three for the video, the fourth for supertitles).To coordinate all this, we use a piece of software called Qlab that is produced by a company called Figure53. It is a free download for the Mac OS (so give it a try at home) that runs playback of audio, video and MIDI. It sort of works like SFX (which I discussed in a previous blog post), except it is a heck of a lot cheaper and is capable of controlling video as well as sound (and integrating the two into the same media timeline).

Posted by Adam Immerwahr, Producing Associate at McCarter Theatre

Photo by Frank Wojciechowski

This is the fifth segment of a six-part interview with Yehuda Hyman, writer and performer of IN-Festival Spotlight Production The Mad 7. Read segment IV here. The play is based on “The Seven Beggars,” a story by Hasidic Rabbi Nachman of Breslov, and follows a character named Elliott as he encounters seven storytellers from various regions of the world. Each one shares a mystical story through music and dance, propelling Elliott on a spiritual journey of self-discovery.In the following section, Yehuda discusses the various approaches one can take to the story, and the many levels upon which it can be experienced.

The play consists of seven individual stories told by seven different storytellers. Is there an overarching theme, or something that ties each of the individual stories together, in this piece?

That’s a tough question because I don’t want people to come in with a lot of preconceived explaining of what this is or isn’t about. Because it’s going to be completely different for every person.

It’s open to many, many interpretations. Through the process of this, I’ve come at each story from a different angle several times. It’s fluid; it’s like water. It’s always changing for me. One day it means something, another day it means something else a little bit. And I think it needs to be that—whenever it gets stuck, it’s dead. You know?For instance, there are seven beggars. There are seven days of the week. There are seven days of creation in the Torah, the Hebrew scripture. So that’s one way of looking at it—what happened on each of those seven days, what was created, what came into being. That’s one way of encountering the story.

But then the second story, for me, is also connected to the Sephardic experience. The story talks about this magnificent city. Well, in Sephardic culture, there’s the idea of a Golden Age, which was when they lived in Spain before the expulsion of the Jews in 1492. That was a peak, beautiful time, where Jews and Christians and Muslims all lived together and got along. And the Jewish population was in a very good situation. And it was lost—they were expelled, they were all forced to leave or convert. Just like the magnificent city in the story is lost. So, that’s another way of encountering the stories—on a historical level.

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Playwrights and artists
Come to the IN-Festival
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Singing fairy tales
Liberian soldier girls
Dancing Jewish dude.

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Reserve early, please.

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Posted by Adam Immerwahr, Producing Associate at McCarter Theatre.

The Princeton News Network has once again done an interview with one of McCarter’s artists, this time with Mara Isaacs. In addition to being McCarter’s Producing Director (my boss), Mara is directing The Mad 7. For those of you who have spent the last six months living under a rock: The Mad 7 is the spotlight production of this year’s IN-Festival. If you have any comments or questions, post them below by clicking on the “comments” link.

Posted by Adam Immerwahr, Producing Associate at McCarter Theatre.

Photo by Frank Wojciechowski

This is the fourth segment of a six-part interview with Yehuda Hyman, writer and performer of IN-Festival Spotlight Production The Mad 7. Read segment III here. The play is based on “The Seven Beggars,” a story by Hasidic Rabbi Nachman of Breslov, and follows a character named Elliott as he encounters seven storytellers from various regions of the world. Each one shares a mystical story through music and dance, propelling Elliott on a spiritual journey of self-discovery. In the following section, Yehuda discusses his artistic influences.

Are there any specific artistic influences that you’ve had, from other dancers or writers…?

In this particular piece?

Mm-hm.

God, there’s so many. From a very early age the person that most excited me about theater was Peter Brook. I remember I saw a piece of his in Germany, in an armory. It was an African folktale called The Bone, with a multi-national troupe. They did the piece in French mostly, which I’m not fluent in, and some German, a little bit of English—so basically I couldn’t understand what was being said. They did it on a bare stage; I think it was six actors and a percussionist. And it was—I’ll never forget it—it was one of the most enjoyable, funny, powerful pieces I’ve ever seen.And it was very much integrated with the audience. So that idea of that, and the simplicity of a folktale—because that piece was about hunger, it was about a village that was hungry. So it just tapped something, in all of us. All of us can relate to that. So his work was really, really an influence to me.

I also remember, on my first trip to Israel, there was an international theater festival. I don’t know who this woman was, I wish I did, but she was from India, and she was on this tiny postage stamp stage, and it was just her, and she told stories and danced them. And I thought—this is it, this is the whole experience. She was so highly skilled. She really brought everything to life, and she did it with her body and her voice, and so… Whoever that woman is, I don’t know, but… It’s the kind of thing I’m attempting. (more…)

If you have been reading this blog at all (have you?), you know that The Mad 7 is part of McCarter’s IN-Festival, which takes place in “The Room” in the Berlind Theatre. Traditionally The Room is a rehearsal room, so we hired award-winning set designer Narelle Sissons to transform it into a truly unique and theatrical space that would work not only for The Mad 7 but also for the other events that will be a part of McCarter’s IN-Festival. She came up with a brilliant design—a room within The Room, complete with a periwinkle blue floor, 4 walls, and 7 doors. The audience sits with the actors inside this new environment, and it’s very very cool. I stopped by on Thursday to see our Production Staff installing it, and I took a few pictures.

One of the interesting things about installing a set in The Room is that at the end of the run, we have to turn it back into a rehearsal studio. That means the sprung floors still need to be safe for dancers and actors, which means there can’t be screw holes, nail holes, or crusty glue residue. Obviously, painting the original floor periwinkle blue would be out of the question, so our staff is installing a new floor on top of the old one. Since the new floor can’t be screwed, nailed or glued into place, they had to rely on a neat cabinet-maker trick to hold the whole thing together. The floor is made up of many pieces of 3/4 inch plywood, which are held together with “biscuits” (see below). Once they are all attached to one another, the weight of all the floor pieces will keep them in place. In other words, the floor stays in place with biscuits and gravity. Which is a lot like biscuits and gravy, only not as tasty.

In this case, the biscuits aren’t tasty treats, but instead are small, thin, oval shaped pieces of wooden hardware that serve to lock together two adjacent pieces of wood. They are often used in the making of cabinets to avoid using screws or nails. The carpenters use a “biscuit joiner” to cut oval shaped indentations into the side of each piece of floor. They then slide the biscuits into the indentations (see the picture above) and line them up with the indentations on another piece of flooring. When they slide them together, the biscuits act to hold the pieces together (sort of like the edges of a puzzle piece). The whole floor is created this way, without glue, nails or screws. Pretty cool, huh?

If you’ve got any questions, you can post them below by clicking on the “comments” link.

Posted by Adam Immerwahr, Producing Associate at McCarter Theatre

As always, the folks from Princeton News Network have come out to McCarter for a quick video interview with one of our artists. Today’s interview features Yehuda Hyman, playwright, performer and choreographer of The Mad 7, which is the spotlight production of this year’s IN-Festival. Enjoy!Posted by Adam Immerwahr, Producing Associate at McCarter Theatre.

Photo by Frank Wojciechowski

This is the third segment of a six-part interview with Yehuda Hyman, writer and performer of IN-Festival Spotlight Production The Mad 7. Read the second segment here. The play is based on “The Seven Beggars,” a story by Hasidic Rabbi Nachman of Breslov, and follows a character named Elliott as he encounters seven storytellers from various regions of the world. Each one shares a mystical story through music and dance, propelling Elliott on a spiritual journey of self-discovery. The piece will be directed by Mara Isaacs, Producing Director at McCarter Theatre.In the following section, Yehuda discusses the history of past projects which have contributed to the development of this current piece, and the experience of performing the story as a one-man show.

Brian Sostek and others in a production of The Mad Dancers at Mixed Blood Theatre

What has the developmental process of this piece been like since you first became inspired to explore Jewish cultures and spiritual awakening through the “Seven Beggars” story?

Well, I feel like this is a fresh start, this piece. [I have explored the story in several different forms and from several different angles, but] I don’t feel like, “Oh God, I’m hauling this thing out again.” Because it actually is really new for me.

[When I first started working with this material,] I was living in San Francisco. I had given up my career as a choreographer and become a temp, and was writing, and creating performance pieces in little clubs around San Francisco.

At first I was just working ten-minute increments on nights where you could go up and try stuff out. I did that for about a year, and eventually it became a forty-five minute piece—just the first story [out of the seven]. And it seemed clear that there was something of interest to an audience. So that was the beginning.

Then at a certain point I didn’t want to be in it, because it was too big, and I felt that I needed to be outside of it so that I could look. And that impulse eventually culminated in a play for seven actors [called The Mad Dancers]. And that is that play, and that’s a different entity. And I feel good about it.

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