Atley Loughridge

Argonautika closed a week ago in DC. We have a bit of time off before we start tech next Wednesday in Princeton, and I have been traveling from friends in NYC to the Obama campaign in RI to family in CT to meetings in LA to family in PA! And during all these hours of watching the countryside pass by my window, I’ve been thinking about this screenplay I’m writing.

It’s about a girl who undergoes a genetic engineering procedure for DARPA (a subsection of Department of Defense, dedicated to developing radical technology). The point is to engineer a human that works well with bidirectional computer interfaces. These are computers that pick up on the bio impulses of the neurons firing in your brain and translate these ideas into electrical impulses, sans communication. The girl, to be played by yours truly, undergoes a “knock in, knock out” genetic procedure that omits proteins and attaches synthetic proteins to key fragments of her DNA to improve her visual-spatial thinking at the cost of her verbal skills.So the procedure is done, and the gal can’t talk but she has heightened visual-spatial skills. (They’ve slipped her those forget-yo’-trauma pills so she’s not freaking out.) And I’ve been thinking about what comes next…How has she changed?

My mind is drawn to Einstein as an elevator operator, watching the clock, thinking about how by the time the light hits the clock and then bounces to his eyeball so that he can read what time it is, it is already a tad later…the beginnings of his Theory of Relativity.

So I’ve been thinking about dimensions.

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Today is Jeff Woodward’s last day as the managing director of McCarter Theatre Center. He has been leading McCarter since 1991, and will be heading to New York State as the managing director of Syracuse Stage and Syracuse University drama department. While I have certainly teased Jeff in the past (see blog posts here, here, here and here), I wanted to take a moment on the blog to express how sorely he will be missed by me and the rest of McCarter’s staff. Also I had a funny picture of the two of us, so I thought I needed a good excuse to put it online before he left for good.

When I first arrived at McCarter, I was a directing/producing intern. I sat in an office directly in between Emily Mann’s office and Jeff Woodward’s office. From the get-go, Jeff was incredibly kind, supportive and attentive. He used to proof the minutes I took on our weekly Department Heads Meeting, and my goal was always to try to sneak in some editorial comments and make him laugh. He cut most of my zingers (artistic censorship!!!), but I felt like it was a fun game we played together.

As my internship ended and I joined McCarter’s full-time staff, I came to view Jeff as a collaborator. During my brief stint as Grants Writer, I was in Jeff’s office several times a week, strategizing a grant proposal or asking questions about our funders. One of the highlights of that year was working with Jeff on the New Jersey State Council on the Arts “Building Arts Participation” grant—a grant to support this blog and McCarter’s online media.

To all of us on staff, Jeff is fair, thoughtful and considerate. Under his leadership, McCarter has added an additional theater space to our building (the Berlind Theatre, a $14.1 million dollar campaign) and McCarter’s endowment has grown from $300,000 to $12,000,000. More importantly, staff retention during Jeff’s tenure has been enviable; our current full-time staff has worked at McCarter an average of 9.8 years—a testament to Jeff’s leadership and the health of our institution.

Thank you, Jeff, for everything you have brought McCarter. We’ll miss you terribly, but hopefully we’ll keep seeing you around the building. Although now, you have to pay for your tickets.

Posted by Adam Immerwahr, Producing Associate at McCarter Theatre.

Here’s another video from The Shakespeare Theatre Company of Mary Zimmerman describing the process of creating Argonautika. Very enjoyable.

Posted by Adam Immerwahr, Producing Associate at McCarter Theatre.

One month from today, McCarter’s blog will be celebrating our “blogday”—the birthday of our blog (April 5). I know you’ve all been waiting for this for a long time…

In addition to cake, party-hats and general festivities (hint hint, someone at McCarter should organize a party), I’m hoping to have a “best-of-the-blog” feature. But I need your help.

Please take a look through our archives (you can navigate by category or date at the left, or use the “search” function at the top right) and nominate your favorite blog entries. There’s no limit, so feel free to nominate a bunch (or make up some categories, like “funniest blog entry, ” or “most likely to offend someone”). E-mail me the titles of your nominees, and we’ll collate them and publish the “best of the blog” in a big blogday extravaganza.

If you’re lucky, I might even invite you to the party.

Posted by Adam Immerwahr, Producing Associate 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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Chris Kipiniak

The cast of Argonautika’s on dinner break between the matinee and evening shows here at the Shakespeare Theatre in Washington DC. It’s always quiet in the green room between shows—the crew actually eats, and are polite enough to keep their conversations low, but most of the cast scarfs stuff down as quick as they can so they can spend the bulk of the time napping, sprawled on couches, chairs, floor, what have you. It’s a tiring show and Sundays are particularly tough because it’s the end of the week and we have a five-show weekend (Friday, two Saturday, two Sunday). Today’s a little different because it’s our last day. In a couple hours we can check off another city.

Most of us have been with the show since October, having signed up for the full, three stop, co-co-co-production, though there were two actors who only did Berkeley, and there are four cast members who have been on the Argo even longer, having been part of the show’s development back in Fall of 2006 in Chicago. They got a cake for their 100th show a month before the rest of us. And they wouldn’t share.

The last show on a tour like this has an awkward, in-between feeling. We’re closing but we’re not closing. We’re done but not done. We’re still in DC, but the preparations for Princeton have already started, including having our new Stage Manager Alison, a McCarter mainstay, calling the show. Plus we got to meet some of the McCarter backstage crew when they came down to see a show earlier in the week. Everyone in the cast’s got their plane/train reservations and is close to being packed. You feel like you should get weepy when you’re saying goodbye but again—it’s goodbye to one, and hello to another. I asked one woman on the run crew what she was doing with her time off and she looked at me blankly before reminding me that there’s another show coming in right behind us and that the crew is called at 8:00 am on Tuesday morning.

So, there’s no need to worry about goodbyes. Who’s got time? In a week, we’re off to the McCarter! All that’s left is to actually do the last show. Which we haven’t done. And, since I didn’t have a nap like the rest of them, I’m going to grab a cup of coffee.

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