Earlier today, I had an “instant message” interview with McCarter’s graphic designer, Danny Garber, about his work at McCarter, and what goes into designing and laying out the programs that the audience read before each production. We had some technological struggles at first with incompatible instant-messaging clients, but eventually we figured everything out.

Adam (01:06:12 pm): Hey, you there?

Danny (01:06:25 pm): It works now!

Adam (01:07:34 pm): Yeah. Sorta. This is harder than it has to be. Why can’t you be on a PC like everyone else?

Danny (01:08:38 pm): Ugghhhhh! Bite your tongue! ( not really that, of course, would hurt)

Adam (01:10:34 pm): No, really. Why does the graphic designer need a mac?

Danny (01:12:41 pm): Well, let’s put aside the thousands of reasons FOR a Mac and look at it from a print standpoint. Most printers prefer Mac-created files and the reasoning and arguments can get pretty technical and borring.

Danny (01:13:03 pm): That would be “boring”

Adam (01:13:47 pm): Gotcha.

Adam (01:13:49 pm): Huh.

Adam (01:14:07 pm): So you just sent the files for the A Seagull in the Hamptons program over to the printer today, right?

Danny (01:15:40 pm): They’ll be going shortly. We have one possible addition, so rather than invoke the old cliché, “Stop the presses!” we are in a bit of a holding pattern as the 3:00 pm deadline approaches.

Adam (01:16:20 pm): But the show doesn’t open for another 22 days, 19 hours and 3 minutes. Why is the deadline so early?

Danny (01:19:50 pm): The proofing process. Our printer will generate a full-color proof which we’ll have to pour over with a fine-toothed comb and a very serious attention to detail. Its basically our last chance to catch any possible errors before the entire job is printed in the thousands of quantities. We usually receive the proof within 2-3 days of submitting the files. Once approved, its back to the printer who fits the job into their print schedule.

Adam (01:20:14 pm): Gotcha.

Adam (01:21:02 pm): So, let’s start from the beginning. How do you start to put a program together? My program for Argonautika was 56 pages, it seems like an overwhelmingly big job.

Danny (01:26:04 pm): In the case of a program you have to remember there’s a lot of Ad pages. Some of these are seasonal, some one-offs and ALL have to be in way ahead of actual literary content. The larger the number of pages usually reflects a greater number of ads and in some cases increased literary content based on the production. Argonautika was a pretty big production and we had some great images to work with and did our best to have them “showcased”

Danny (01:29:20 pm): The key is to have an established template to start with many of the repeating elements already keyed in

Danny (01:31:19 pm): We use Adobe InDesign and take full advantage of the software’s robustness. Everything from Master Pages, Libraries, Character, Object and Paragraph Styles and GREP.

Adam (02:02:14 pm): That’s really neat. But how do you figure out the artistic approach for each play? Colors, design, etc?

Danny (02:07:39 pm): THAT’S the question! Sometimes its a direction or idea that comes from the director and, in some, cases, they have full approval. The ideal situation is to sit with the playwright and discuss what’s going on, (the play, the production, what their vision is). If that’s not possible, the next best is to work in conjunction with those that do have access and/or are assigned the task of putting into words the entire experience, namely the literary department.

Danny (02:08:12 pm): I’ve got a perfect “for instance” if I can name names. . .

Adam (02:20:06 pm): Name names!

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Eugene Lee, one of my favorite set designers, is designing the set for McCarter’s production of A Seagull in the Hamptons. I saw a lot of Eugene’s work when I was in college, because he was the resident set designer at Trinity Repertory Company, which was quite near my school. And I’ll wager that most of you have seen Eugene’s work as well, as he is the set designer for NBC’s Saturday Night Live (a position he has held since its first episode). On Broadway, he’s currently represented by Wicked, which is apparently a fairly popular musical.

Eugene is the kind of set designer who asks a lot of the technical staff. For this production (set on a beach in the Hamptons), he’s asked for a lot of sand. Eighteen tons of it, to be specific. The sand—which will cover 1,300 square feet of stage floor, 3 inches deep—is arriving soon. So everyone is getting ready. Before it comes, the Production staff is covering the stage floor of the Berlind Theatre with two layers of plastic and a layer of sand-colored marine carpet. Four-hundred and fifty bags of the sand (each weighing 80 pounds) will arrive all at once, and will be spread out across the floor. The sand will be mixed with 8-9 gallons of sea-shells.

During the production, the sections of the sand will get wet (I won’t tell you how!), so every night after the show, the sand will have to be raked so that the wet sand is evenly distributed. At one section of the play, a 1,700 lb walnut hardwood dining room floor that will be hanging vertically over the stage will descend and be placed horizontally on top of the sand.

I guess if there were a thesis statement for this blog entry, it would be that there is going to be a lot of sand.

What will we do with all the showbiz sand at the end of the run? Princeton University will come with some big trucks, we’ll shovel it into wheelbarrows, take it out to the trucks, and send it off to the Princeton University volley-ball courts and playgrounds.

Posted by Adam Immerwahr, Producing Associate at McCarter Theatre.

If you’re an avid Star-Ledger reader, you may have noticed the story last week about The Odyssey Experience, a project of McCarter’s Arts Education Program that brings a team of performers into local schools to create a performance of “The Odyssey” for and with the students. In the interactive process, the students are first invited into the story, and then end up taking on roles themselves as they begin to guide Odysseus on his journey home from the Trojan war. The result (which I saw recently at a school in Trenton) is fun, engaging and compelling for student audiences.

This coming Sunday morning (after you’ve recovered from Saturday night’s Rufus Wainwright concert!) you can see The Odyssey Experience for yourself. A “family performance” will take place on the stage of the Matthews at 11:00am. Bring your children (8 and up) for a funtastic journey. The show is almost sold out, so make sure you reserve tickets in advance.

This is one of the fun (and kinda insane) things about working for McCarter. We just have so much going on that sometimes I’m not sure how our Production and Front of House staffs deal with it. Here is the performance calendar for this coming weekend.

• Friday, 8:00pm - Berlind Theatre: Princeton University Dance Thesis Show
• Saturday, 11:00am - Matthews Theatre: Ralph’s World
• Saturday, 8:00pm - Berlind Theater: Princeton University Dance Thesis Show
• Saturday, 8:00pm - Matthews Theatre: Rufus Wainwright
• Sunday, 11:00am - Matthews Theatre: The Odyssey Experience

Amazing, huh? And we don’t even have a Theater Series production running right now!

Posted by Adam Immerwahr, Producing Associate at McCarter Theatre.

Two weeks ago, McCarter launched our new Facebook page. Just in case you’ve been living in a cave for the last five years, I should explain that Facebook is a social networking site that allows users to create personal profiles and then join one or more networks, which can include schools, geographic regions, fan-groups, or favorite theater companies. Users can also link to their friends’ profiles, and within each network users can post messages, videos, photos and meet other users.

McCarter’s Facebook page features a mini-feed of this blog, YouTube videos, upcoming events, and a list of “Fans of McCarter Theatre,” which includes an interesting blend of McCarter patrons, staff and artists (including several actors who have recently appeared on our stages). In the two weeks since launching, our new Facebook page has garnered 135 “fans,” and growing every day.

This gets me wondering about the role that social media can play in arts participation in general. Social Media, in all its many forms, is becoming an ever-present and ever-important component of the modern world, and as libraries, universities and other not-for-profits are moving beyond blogs and podcasts and toward new media like Second Life, Twitter, Flickr and YouTube, a whole new world opens up for deepening and broadening the participation of an organization’s patrons. In the case of the arts, what makes these new media (which all integrate technology and social interaction) even more appealing is that the early adopters of these technologies tend to be younger folk, which is exactly the group of people who are not flocking to theaters across the country. By using the internet to expand arts participation beyond the physical walls of the institution, shouldn’t a theater be able to attract a wider (and younger) audience to participate in the arts?

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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.

For those of you who haven’t yet marked it on your calendars, Saturday was Blogday—the one-year birthday of McCarter’s blog. Since we started the blog last year, we’ve had 236 blog posts and 133 comments. The blog has received 43,557 page-views in approximately 14,600 individual site visits. We have posted about 35 entries for each of our mainstage shows.

A month ago, I asked readers to nominate their favorite blog entries for the Blogday Extravaganza Birthday Bash, and today I present those winners (and a timeline of the McCarter Blog). So come join me on a walk down memory lane:

The reader-nominated favorites:

• Lots of condoms and batteries
• Mann interviews Albee part I, part II, part III, part IV
• Top ten challenges of my Stick Fly experience
• Top ten rewards of my Stick Fly experience
• The dog blog
• Floor or subway map
• Albee and Mann podcast
• For the guy in the window
• In the market for a shovel…?
• Woof
• Albee says the darndest things

A blog timeline:

• April 5, 2007: The first blog entry (by Doug Langworthy)
• July 25, 2007: My first attempt at writing a blog entry (on cooking… my other passion)
• July 29, 2007: Our first entry by a visiting artist (Shirley Jo Finney)
• August 15, 2007: Our first multimedia blog post (we’ve had 24 since then)
• September 15, 2007: Our first actor blog post (we’ve had 33 since then)
• November 9, 2007: Our most popular blog entry is posted (it has received nearly 2,500 views)
• November 28, 2007: My favorite informative blog entry (okay, I’m biased…)
• December 4, 2007: Our first time-lapse video (A Christmas Carol)
• December 31, 2007: Our first 7 questions interview (Darron L. West)
• March 12, 2008: Our most blogged-about blog entry (how meta)
• March 28, 2008: Our first in-house YouTube video (Argonautika backstage tour)

Posted by Adam Immerwahr, Producing Associate at McCarter Theatre

Every once-in-a-while, we get a cast together that is so exceptional (even by McCarter’s lofty standards) that it’s worth drawing specific attention to. For me, the cast of McCarter’s A Seagull in the Hamptons is one of those dream casts: incredibly talented performers who have astonishingly impressive credits. Here’s a brief run-down:

Jacqueline Antaramian (Paula): Jacqueline recently appeared in Stephen Wadsworth’s Iphigenie in Tauride at the Metropolitan Opera opposite the incomparable Susan Graham and the legendary Placido Domingo—I saw it, it was great. In Philadelphia, she won the Barrymore Award for Leading Actress in a Play for her work in Nine Parts of Desire. Her Broadway credits include Coram Boy, Julius Caesar, and Wrong Mountain.

Morena Baccarin

Morena Baccarin (Nina): Okay, do you remember that cult-classic sci-fi TV show Firefly that was created by Joss Whedon (the dude who made the TV show Buffy the Vampire Slayer)? Well Morena played the character “Inara” (the “companion” aboard the ship) and also appeared in the movie version: Serenity. Okay, my sci-fi geek side comes out when I say that I totally love this show!! Morena’s also a Juilliard grad with lots of theater credits, as well as plenty of other fun film/TV creds.

Laura Heisler (Milly): If you see a lot of theater in New York, you’ve certainly seen Laura Heisler, whose trademark deadpan brilliance has made her a crucial part of many hip, urban comedies by some of today’s hottest emerging writers. Recently, you might have seen her in Doris to Darlene at Playwrights Horizons, The Mistakes Madeline Made at Naked Angels, BFF at Women’s Expressive Theatre or, of course, The Nightshade Family at last year’s New York Summer Play Festival.

David A. Macdonald

David Andrew Macdonald (Philip): If you’re a soap watcher, you’ll most definitely recognize David Andrew Macdonald who, in addition to several Broadway credits, appeared as the villainous Edmund Winslow on Guiding Light for six seasons (before his character was imprisoned for a host of nefarious activities).

Matthew Maher (Harold): Matthew is another terrific New York actor with tons of wonderful credits. He received the 1999 Obie Award for his work in The Race of the Ark Tattoo, and has recently been seen on stage in Hello Failure, Richard III, Coriolanus, and Have You Seen Steve Steven?. He has a recurring role on HBO’s surfer show, John from Cincinnati and he’s an Associate Artist with The Civilians and Salt Theater.

Read on for the rest of the cast!
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At McCarter, we use Google Analytics to track who is visiting our blog. In general, I think Google is one of the coolest companies on the planet, and not just because the company is a McCarter Donor (at the Impresario Level) through their not-for-profit wing, Google Grants.

One of my favorite things about Google Analytics is that you can track the search words people entered into their search engines to get them to your site (in this case, McCarter’s blog). I love trying to figure out how each search term would point you to one of our 200+ blog entries. Here is a selection of my favorites from the last 25 days (exactly as typed):

• “abu ghraib” theater
• “code salmon”
• “sally wingert” jewish
• “speaking in iambic pentameter”
• +conscious +time +travel
• albee yes
• are there trap doors in theater?
• argonautika for kids
• argonautika princeton youtube
• argonautika storm
• can a buddha time travel
• beauty and the beast costume rental
• centaur costume
• condoms and batteries article
• different rooms in tartuffe
• feeling of moving backwards in time consciousness
• flying harness padding
• gay pride
• golden fleece priceton theatre
• how to make twins
• how to make theater props alice in wonderland
• identical twins
• identical twins factoids
• if i could tell you what the play was about in one sentence edward albee
• i’m interested in what it means for a large institutional
• making identical twwins
• out of the box ideas for acting
• picture of trap room
• princeton university theatre seagulls
• rabbi nachman dance music
• time-lapse loadin video
• tiny tim’s last line dickens’ a christmas carol
• what does the name hyman mean?
• what can you learn from tartuffe?
• what does a christmas carol represent?
• when we fly away

This is a very “meta” blog post, but that seems appropriate since it is officially my 150th blog post at McCarter, and tomorrow is the blog’s birthday!

Posted by Adam Immerwahr, Producing Associate at McCarter Theatre

Rufus Wainwright

It isn’t often that I blog about our Specials, mostly because I don’t always know a lot about them—because my job has to do solely with the Theater Series at McCarter. But the other thing about the specials is that they often sell out. What is the point in telling you about them if there are no tickets left? That just seems downright mean.

But every once in a while, an artist gets added to McCarter’s roster at the last minute, and a show that would normally be sold out still has plenty of good seats available. Such is the case with Rufus Wainwright, who is coming to McCarter on April 19th for an 8:00pm show. Rufus’ work is smart, sexy, vulnerable and just downright awesome. He recently performed an extraordinarily well-reviewed show covering Judy Garland’s songs at Carnegie Hall. At McCarter, he’ll be performing a solo acoustic show. I’ve reserved my tickets already!! You can get more details and reserve your tickets here.

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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