Darron L West is designing the soundscape for McCarter’s production of Me, Myself & I. His McCarter productions include Crowns, Hamlet, The Bells, Miss Witherspoon and Stick Fly. A sound designer and company member of Anne Bogart’s SITI Company, his work for dance and theater has been heard in over 400 productions on and off-Broadway as well as nationally and internationally. Along with numerous nominations, his accolades for sound design include the 2006 Lortell and AUDELCO Awards, the 2004 and 2005 Henry Hewes Design Awards, a Princess Grace Award, a Village Voice Obie Award and an Entertainment Design Magazine EDDY Award. I asked him seven questions:

What’s your hometown?
I moved around quite a bit as a kid all over Kentucky, but I’d have to say the longest residence was nine years in Elizabethtown KY. So, I’d consider that my hometown.

What do you like most about being a sound designer?
The simple answer is being able to take an enormous love of music and literature and use that to help tell a story to a live audience in the moment. Also, every show is different and has different needs, so it keeps you on your toes. I come at every show with a very dramaturgical slant to the design, asking: What can the sound design do to help tell the story, where can it provide context, emotional clarity, etc.? This involves a great amount of research and interest, so the learning and research aspect is important to me in any project I do.

What’s on your iPod?
Too many to list here of course, but right now I’m digging on:

• Ryan Shaw—This is Ryan Shaw: He’s this young amazing soulful new singer in the mold of Wilson Picket.

• Purcell—Four Suites for Orchestra: I’m just in this Purcell kick lately; go figure.

• Radiohead—In Rainbows: It’s Radiohead! It’s brilliant! Nuff said.

• The Weakerthans—Reunion Tour: Great song writing with a tasty pop sheen from 4 witty Canadians.

• Matt Nathanson—Some Mad Hope: A favorite west coast singer songwriter. Buy it, you’ll love it, trust me I’m a professional.

• Esa-Pekka Salonen’s new recording of Rite of Spring with the LA Phil: The best recording yet of this ahead of it’s time Stravinsky piece.

• And of course always present are the full collections of The Old 97’s, Will Kimbrough, and the best band of all time XTC. Oh yeah - and first 3 REM albums and every podcast of WNYC’s Radiolab. Some things come and go but, those collections are always in there.

(more…)

Danai Gurira in In The Continuum

As I mentioned in this previous post, I am trying to detail each of the events in this year’s upcoming IN-Festival so that blog readers get a chance to know what’s coming up. One of the most exciting events is a reading of Danai Gurira’s new play, Eclipsed. Danai’s emergence on the theatrical scene was explosive. With her NYU MFA classmate Nikkole Salter, Danai co-wrote and performed In the Continuum, a two-woman play which was produced by Primary Stages in September, 2005. The play, which dramatizes the devastating problem of HIV/AIDS among African and African-American women, was lauded by the critics. The New York Times’ Charles Isherwood wrote:

“In the Continuum” humanizes the painful stories it has to tell with such emotional vibrancy that the play leaves behind a warm afterglow, of human struggles explored, illumined and embraced.

After an international tour of In the Continuum, Danai traveled to Liberia on a TCG grant, and is now beginning her new play, which tells the story of Liberian female freedom fighters during Charles Taylor’s rule. In Danai’s own words:

The emergence of female rebel fighters (most specifically in Liberia shortly before the end of Charles Taylor’s reign) caught the attention of the global media in 2003. It was in that year that their stories caught my attention, their defiance of the traditional role a woman is expected to play in societies-even during war time-and their agency to take their situations and destinies into their own hands in the face of indescribable hostilities. Their pictures (once on the front of the New York Times) shattered the western concepts of the African woman during wartime-indeed the African woman in general: there they stood, berets cocked to one side, tight-fitted jeans, fashionable slinky tops and permed hair, with AK 47s slung menacingly over one shoulder. The steely stare in each pair of eyes told a million stories. Their voices, though worthy of a global audience, are presently barely audible.

On March 6, 2008, McCarter’s audiences will get a chance to hear Danai’s new play read aloud for the first time. Join us for this free event at the IN-Festival. Tickets are free, but reservations are strongly encouraged.

Posted by Adam Immerwahr, Producing Associate at McCarter Theatre.

The IN-Festival is McCarter’s laboratory for new play development. It is a place for us and our audiences to hear new voices, discover new forms, and travel in new directions with established artists. If you say that last sentence out loud, you may discover a humorous homophone.

This year is our second IN-Festival, and as we gear up and get ready, I am a planning a series of posts to tell you a little bit about each of the things we have planned. The IN-Festival features a centerpiece production, around which swirls a series of readings, workshops and other events. This year, the centerpiece is The Mad 7, Yehuda Hyman’s mystic, moving, and magnificent story of one man’s quest of self-discovery. What makes this piece particularly exciting is Yehuda’s spectacular performance. He is an astonishingly talented actor, writer, dancer and choreographer, and his charismatic and virtuosic performance promises to propel this enchanting and interweaving story forward.

The photos on this post are all of Yehuda, and I think they give a taste of his unique abilities as a performer. You can read more about the show (and buy tickets) by clicking here.

Posted by Adam Immerwahr, Producing Associate at McCarter Theatre. All photos by Frank Wojciechowski.

Simplicity is incredibly difficult. Tom Lynch, the set designer for Me, Myself & I made 19 models of the set in order to arrive at the perfect proportions that are now being built in our shops. The design features a bare stage, three beds, and wire outlines of a cube in space. It looks mind-bogglingly simple, but looks can be deceiving.

Turns out that the “bare stage” in Tom Lynch’s set design will be the largest set that McCarter’s production crew has ever installed in the Berlind Theatre. When measured in square feet, this thing is simply enormous. It covers a huge amount of floor and wall space, and also extends beyond the proscenium and into the audience area. In order to avoid seeing horizontal seams on the enormous white wall that makes up the back of the set, the shop has had to use enormous planks to build this. It is a monumental undertaking, and will be quite complicated to install.

So, as a sneak preview, you can see a snapshot I took of the inside of Tom Lynch’s exquisitely detailed final model for Me, Myself & I. He even cut out the outline of audience members heads, which you can see in silhouette at the bottom of the photo. Of course, the set itself, under brilliantly designed theatrical lights, will shimmer and shine in a way that this foam-core model never can, but at least it gives you a taste.

Posted by Adam Immerwahr, Producing Associate at McCarter Theatre. Photo: Tom Lynch’s model for the set of Me, Myself & I at McCarter Theater.

Photo by Annie Gribbins

Merry Christmas, blog readers!

For your holiday gift, I got you this picture from McCarter’s Holiday party. Yes, that is McCarter Managing Director Jeffrey Woodward, sitting on Santa’s lap.

I bet he’s asking for a seven-figure gift to the endowment fund. Or maybe a corporate sponsorship from New Jersey Transit (you can’t imagine how much money we spend on train tickets!).

What do you think Jeffrey Woodward wants for the holidays? Post your guesses below by clinking on the “comments” link. If we get a few suggestions, I’ll ask J-Woo to pick his favorite, and there may be a prize!!

Posted by Adam Immerwahr, Producing Associate at McCarter Theatre.

Hi, everyone! Just a quick note from Erin, the Associate Publicist, before we all depart for the holidays.

Some of you may be curious about the casting of our upcoming world premiere of Me, Myself & I. Specifically, what are we going to do about the two identical twins named Otto? The two actors playing the twins, Colin Donnell and Michael Esper, are not real twins. In fact, they’re not related at all, and they had never even met before arriving at McCarter for the first rehearsal last week. When I first saw them, they were two guys who looked vaguely alike, but certainly not identical. So, I was skeptical about how they were going to pull this off…until this morning.

You see, earlier today I got to sit in on a TV interview with Colin and Michael. Since last week, McCarter has has dyed Michael’s hair and gotten him colored contact lenses to match Colin’s hair and eye color. And when they walked into the room, side by side and both wearing the exact same shirt, there was a split second when I wasn’t entirely sure which one was which.

As if their appearance wasn’t enough, they actually act like twin brothers. Throughout the entire interview, they joked around and finished each other’s sentences as if they’d known each other their entire lives. At one point they even paused, looked at each other, and started laughing at the exact same moment. Even the interviewer couldn’t tell them apart; he called each of them by the wrong name!

So who knows? If in a few weeks we can’t tell Michael from Colin and Colin from Michael, McCarter might have a case of life imitating art!

Posted by Erin Breznitsky, Associate Publicist at McCarter Theatre.

At any given performance of McCarter’s production of A Christmas Carol, there are at least 20 crew members backstage (or in the dressing rooms, the booth, or the wardrobe room) making the show come together flawlessly every night. And all 20 of them agree that Kerry is magic in the bedroom.

In fact, Kerry has been magic in the bedroom for three years now. What does that mean? Well each member of A Christmas Carol’s crew has a title that describes what they do, like: “Spot #1,” “Wardrobe Supervisor,” or “Child Supervisor.” Kerry’s title is “Magic in the Bedroom.” Kerry operates nearly all of the magic tricks that take place in Scrooge’s bedroom, including Christmas Past #1’s magical appearance, the trunk that opens and spits out a hat, and the flying cane (and many many more!). It takes her and a colleague about 30 minutes to set up the entire bedroom sequence before a show. With two new pieces of magic this year (the flying cane and the flame above the door right before Marley appears), Kerry often only has a few seconds between one cue and the next. If I had her job, I’d be a total stress-ball.

So next time you see Kerry shopping in downtown Princeton, turn to your friends and say: “Hey, I hear that girl is magic in the bedroom!”

Posted by Adam Immerwahr, Producing Associate at McCarter Theatre.

A few months ago, when I was new to blogging, I wrote this post about the trap doors on the stage floor of the Matthews Theatre. The post proved very popular, and according to our web stats, we actually have quite a few readers who have come to the blog after googling “theater trap doors.” Ever since then, I’ve meant to write the sister post—about the trap room which sits underneath the stage—but I just haven’t gotten around to it until today.

The picture attached to this picture is the trap room, set up for A Christmas Carol. The entire ceiling of the trap room is made up of removable panels, each for a different trap. From the trap room, the beggar children enter onstage, the puppeteer who controls the Marley door-puppet enters, the entrance for Old Joe’s warehouse appears, Scrooge disappears at the end of Act 1 and the flaming tombstone arises. The big structure that you see in the picture is a set of platforms and stairs that allow people to go from ground level to ceiling level in the trap room (and therefore to floor level on the stage). Underneath the platforms is storage. On top of the platform, you can see a thick blue mattress-like thing - that is where Scrooge falls at the end of Act 1 (he basically rides the rug down a slide and tumbles onto the blue padding).

One of my favorite moments of backstage choreography that happens is during the Marley door-puppet sequence. The door flies in, a puppeteer comes out of the trapdoor behind it, operates the puppet, and scampers back into the trap. Onstage, the next thing you see is Scrooge open the door and walk off (over the trap). “But,” you ask, “how is he to know that the trap has been closed and locked?” Good question! The assistant stage manager (Hannah) stands offstage with a headset and a blue flashlight (actually the flashlight is black, but the light is blue). When the trap operator tells the ASM that the trap is locked, she flashes her flashlight at Scrooge, signaling him that it is safe to open the door and walk across the trap. If something delays the trap operator, Scrooge can fumble with his keys and the door handle for a while until he gets the all-clear.

Posted by Adam Immerwahr, Producing Associate at McCarter Theatre.

I just wanted to remind all you blog readers that you can subscribe to the blog via e-mail, just by entering your e-mail address in the form below. Sign up today, and you’ll never miss another post!!!

Posted by Adam Immerwahr, Producing Associate at McCarter Theatre.

Apparently there is something in the drinking water at McCarter. On December 12, we had our annual staff Holiday party. It was a great success and everyone brought their families and had a marvelous time. As I was imbibing some holiday cheer, I happened to notice that I was surrounded by children. Mostly babies. And as I was glancing around, I started to get worried. Had I had too much holiday cheer? I was starting to see double. I quickly poured myself a cup of coffee, but it didn’t get any better.

Turns out that among the many babies that McCarter staff members brought to this party, there were three sets of twins (including identicals Gus and Charles Peterson, pictured above). And playwright-in-residence Will Power has twins as well. So the moral of the story is: don’t drink the water at McCarter…

Maybe it is fitting that we’ve got so many twins around, as we are currently in rehearsals for Albee’s Me, Myself & I, a play that concerns a set of identicals (both named Otto). Here are some twin factoids to ponder: About one in 90 human births result from a twin pregnancy, but fertility drugs have made a huge increase in the twin population. In 2001, 5.8% of all children born in the U.S. were twins (21 out of every 1,000 IVF deliveries result in twins).

Identical twins occur when one fertilized egg divides into two embryos, so they are genetically identical. Depending on when this happens, there are several different types of identicals, including dichorionic, diamniotic twins (two placentas, two amniotic sacs), monochorionic, diamniotic twins (one placenta, two amniotic sacs) and the very rare monochorionic, monoamniotic twins (one placenta, one amniotic sac). Although identical twins have identical DNA, epigenetic modifications (environmental influences which cause certain genes to be switched on or off) can make enormous difference in characteristics and behavior. So many identical twins end up seeming quite different, as I think you’ll see in Me, Myself & I.

Posted by Adam Immerwahr, Producing Associate at McCarter Theatre.