Wednesday, October 26, 2011

Time Stands Still goodbye

Well, TSS has closed to overwhelmingly positive reactions.  Although I never get sentimental about any productions, I will miss working with those four people. But now, it's on to the next one. Spent the last two days striking the set, and it's all gone! Last step is cleaning up and storing what I'm going to keep, and then it's time to really focus on Santaland Diaries. Jonathan Anderson will be here in a couple of weeks to begin rehearsals. If he's anywhere near as good as he was last season in Fully Committed, SD will be a great show. We're going to have some real fun working on this one.

Before I get on to building the set for SD, I have to design the set. But before I can do that, I thought I'd share some photos from TSS.

Mandy the event-planner

Jamie under threat

Sarah remembers Tariq

Jamie changed his copy for their book

Richard takes a stand

Mandy remembers the elephants

Jamie and Sarah home again

Final image in the show - listen to Brandi Carlile's "Downpour"

So, . . . one down and four to go. Heading down to New York in a week and a half to audition people for shows 3,4 & 5. Brandy has become my casting agent in New York, and we have some really good people lined up to audition. Can't wait to tell you about what happens. And while I'm there, I've snagged a ticket for Theresa Rebeck's new show. Review to follow.

Here we go!

Friday, October 14, 2011

Time Stands Still review

Well, the review hit the paper yesterday. And as promised, here it is:


In her provocative 1989 essay The Journalist and the Murderer, New Yorker writer Janet Malcolm famously asserted, “Every journalist who is not too stupid or too full of himself to notice what is going on knows that what he does is morally indefensible.”
In Malcolm’s withering, too-cynical assessment, journalists and murderers are not so far removed from each other in their arrogance, penchant for self-rationalization and instinct for closing in for the kill, an irony that is at the heart of Time Stands Still, the Donald Margulies play currently running at Shaker Bridge Theatre in Enfield.
The ethical dilemmas that face reporters and photographers who cover the big stories are mined by Margulies for their innate dramatic conflict. How can photojournalists and reporters stand aside from the action, recording, in the midst of chaos? What is reporting and what is exploitation? Is it possible to be objective? What kind of toll does the work they do, particularly in war zones, take on them? Are the heightened emotions aroused by working in a war zone to be trusted?
In the case of Sarah, a photojournalist with something of a messiah complex, and James, her longtime partner and a free-lance journalist, the personal and the political are so intertwined that it’s almost impossible to discern the line between the two; particularly for Sarah, who seems to be atoning for a childhood of lonely privilege by throwing herself into the dangerous, unforgiving work of documenting life in Afghanistan and Iraq during the American occupations.
James, a freelance writer, has a harder time attracting notice. His talent and ambition don’t burn as hat as Sarah’s, he doesn’t seem to work as hard, and there’s the implication that he really doesn’t have the stomach for the big important stories that she does. So when Sarah comes back to Brooklyn after a long recuperative stint in an Army hospital in Germany, she and James are at odds. She doesn’t want to talk about what happened to her in Iraq; he does. He wants a commitment from her; she’s hesitant.
Enter Sarah’s former lover and close friend Richard, a middle-aged photo editor at a big Vanity Fair - like magazine, and his sweet young thing, Mandy, a guileless, seemingly not-very-bright naif who inserts foot into mouth the moment she sets foot through the door. Sarah takes one look at the pretty, youthful Mandy and is dumfounded. “She’s a sprite!” she exclaims sardonically.
But Mandy, it turns out, may well be the smartest, most empathetic and most intuitive of them all. She has Sarah’s self-righteous number down cold, and she has the knack for putting her finger on people’s vulnerabilities, but not in a mean way. She wants to love and be loved, and to start a family. What’s wrong with that, she asks Sarah, who doesn’t really have a good answer to such an elemental question.
Margulies has an ear for sharp, confrontational dialogue, a facility that’s shown to best advantage in the play’s second act when James and Sarah finally come to grips with the holes in their eight-year relationship that they’ve casually papered over. It’s a painful, lengthy process. Time stands still for no one, least of all for two people who have now reached a critical fork in the road where the things each wants from life are radically different.
As Sarah, Zarle brings a brittle intelligence to the role, and a quiet passion that flares up when she feels defensive. She resists the temptation to try to win the audience’s affection. As James, Tim Rush conveys the frustration of someone who loves Sarah without necessarily understanding her. Dan Weintraub is appealing as Richard, miming bemused helplessness in the face of Mandy’s charm, youth and adoration; adoration it seems safe to say, that the prickly Sarah never lavished on him.
Caitlin Glasgo, as Mandy, is deft and funny in the way she turns Sarah and James’ ironic skepticism aside with her sincerity and the way she unerringly puts her finger on the heart of the matter. when she asks tearfully why a team of wildlife photographers shooting the separation of a baby elephant from its mother in a sand storm didn’t intervene to save it when they could have, she gets back, in her own way, to the conundrum posed by Janet Malcolm. When does a journalist serve a story, and when does that involvement veer over into something manipulative and self-serving?
Director Bill Coons has a real way with actors, and he is fearless in bringing to the Upper Valley new and challenging material. As the playbill notes, this is the premiere of Time Stands Still in New England, which is so small feat for a smaller company like Shaker Bridge when you consider it is competing with companies like Trinity Repertory Company in Providence, Long Wharf Theatre in New Haven, American Repertory Theatre in Boston and Northern Stage in White River Junction.
Time Stands Still is topical, it’s entertaining, it has plum parts for its four actors, it’s frequently witty and it explores some of the big questions of the day. But Margulies’
play has flaws, chief among them the fact that Sarah and James don’t really talk like journalists. They talk like someone’s idea of a journalist, with big, sweeping, programmatic statements about responsibility and morality. Journalists are often deeply affected by the work they do, and are serious about how they do it.
But many reporters, by inclination and training, have a gallows humor and irreverence that rarely makes itself felt in the play. 
Further, when introducing Mandy, Margulies makes her sound so fatuous that it’s unbelievable. An event planner who arranges big corporate parties at places like the Metropolitan Museum’s Temple of Dendur, Mandy can’t even pronounce the word “sarcophagus,” and has to ask her boyfriend Richard what the word is. Would a 20-something event planner in Manhattan really be that unschooled, when most kids half her age know what a sarcophagus is? Will the other characters enter the zone of stagy speech? Often, they do.
I had the sense sometimes that Margulies was busily marshalling arguments pro and con on a given subject, as if we were in a coiurtroom.
Court rooms are theatrical by nature, of course, so there’s nothing wrong with that except that it impedes the characters’ drive toward that magical moment when they take on their own life on stage, rather than acting out the playwright’s directives.

- Nicola Smith, 10/13/11


Pretty well written, with only a couple of out-of-place assumptions. Overall, a nice review. I would like to refer her to an interview that Margulies did last year in New York. With him were Laura Linney and Eric Bogosian, as well as one photojournalist and two international journalists. A comment made by one of the journalists (and vigorously seconded by the others) wondered if Margulies had been eavesdropping on her conversations at home with her spouse. They all said that yes, they talk that way. None of the language seemed inauthentic or forced to them in any way - quite the opposite, actually. Margulies pointed out that several friends who are photojournalists and media reporters read the drafts of the play while he was developing it.

Maybe there was something in the way I directed this piece that led Ms. Smith to see the language as somehow inauthentic.  We sure spent many, many hours trying to make it immediate and real. Oh well.

Sunday, October 9, 2011

Time Stands Still is open!

Act One, scene two


Well, it was opening weekend for the SBT production of Time Stands Still. Objectively speaking (if that's even remotely possible), it was a huge success. People loved the show, were blown away by it. The review comes out soon, and I'll post it (whether I agree with it or not).  here's a photo of a moment from the second scene of the first act. From left to right, it's Sarah (Brandy Zarle), James (Tim Rush), Mandy (Caitlin Glasgo) and Richard (Dan Weintraub). Four amazing actors and a wonderful script. Pinch me.

- Bill