New Ground Theatre Festival Digs Deep @ Cleveland Play House
By Elsa Johnson & Victor Lucas
We recently got sucked in and spent three hours watching video and reading reviews of The Better Half by Lucky Plush. We thought they look like good dancers doing a funny, entertaining riff on a melodramatic old movie, Gaslight, with Ingrid Bergman and Charles Boyer. We felt that our readers — modern dance audience and theater audience alike — should know more about this.
But we also felt an obligation to step out of our comfort zone — dance — and learn a little more about theater, specifically the Cleveland Play House New Ground Theatre Festival, of which The Better Half is only a part. The Artistic Director of Cleveland Play House, Michael Bloom, graciously took time to answer our questions. Bloom not only directed Rich Girl, which opens New Ground, but he provided unexpected insights into each of the six plays in the Festival. We caught up with Bloom by phone.
Cool Cleveland: What is the organizing principle of New Ground Theatre Festival?
Michael Bloom: New Ground Theatre Festival is our annual exploration of new work and developing new work in theater. It has really come to be focused more on theater than before; when it was called Fusion Fest it was more of a multi-arts kind of festival but now we’re doing a deep dive into new plays and new theater. And Lucky Plush does fit into that because it’s really dance theater with spoken word in it.
All the other pieces in the festival are really new theatrical work. Rich Girl is one of the funniest and smartest new comedies I’ve come across in a long time. It did very well in its first incarnation at George Street Playhouse in New Jersey and now it has come to us and it’s exciting because it’s in a different space, a different configuration in our Second Stage. And also I’d say that with two Tony nominees in it — Dee Hoty and Liz Larsen — it’s one of the best casts we’ve ever had.
We understand that there’s a connection between Crystal Finn, the actress who plays the “rich girl,” and another piece in the festival, Becoming Liv Ullman.
Yes, I happened to have a conversation with Crystal when we were rehearsing Rich Girl and I found out that she’s a playwright and she’s written a play that’s only been done once — at the New York Fringe Festival last year. She gave it to me to read and I thought it was absolutely hilarious and really plays into her strengths as a comic actress. She is really one of the more gifted comic actresses I’ve come across. So we’ll be doing Becoming Liv Ullman twice. I think when people see Crystal in Rich Girl they’ll be excited to see her in her own play.
It’s a two person play and the person acting with her is one of our Case MFA acting students,T. J. Gainley. We had all our MFA men audition for the part and Crystal selected T. J.
So Gainley plays the boyfriend that Crystal Finn has to bring around by becoming Liv Ullman?
No, he plays the guy in the audience who’s a kind of heckler, disputing what she’s saying about Ingmar Bergman films.
That’s funny! A Bergman wonk. Tell us about another play, Marjorie Prime.
Marjorie Prime is written by Jordan Harrison who has had a number of plays produced in Cleveland. He’s an outstanding, widely-produced young playwright, the winner of this year’s Roe Green award. Last year’s Roe Green Award winner, Quiara Alegria Hudes, promptly won the Pulitzer two weeks later.
Marjorie Prime is a very interesting play, not science fiction but futuristic, about how we create, not avatars, but beings that help us with our grief over the death of our loved ones. It’s quite mysterious and intriguing. A brand-new play, it has not yet been produced.
Say a word about that unknown actress in Marjorie Prime, Dorothy Silver. Is she any good?
Yeah, right. It’s wonderful to have Dorothy working here. There aren’t that many good parts for women of a certain age, and this is a really great part for her. I think we’re all excited to see Dorothy and she has her own following, so we expect a good audience for Marjorie Prime.
Tell us about Margie and Mike.
Margie and Mike is very interesting, a classroom matinee touring show which has already been seen by over 8000 students around Northeast Ohio. It’s a 45-minute play based on the themes of Good People which we produced recently. It’s a very aggressive piece for K through 4th grade audiences. We’re going to have some children and some adults watching this. We wanted to present it because it’s a world premiere, a new script that we commissioned by Pamela DiPasquale.
The final event is Informed Consent, a reading of a play that we will be producing next year, so this will be a sneak peek, a chance for our subscribers to see an early version of a play that’s still very much in development.
We gather that Informed Consent is, again, not science fiction, but…
It’s kinda’ ripped from the headlines, because it’s so much about genomic science and the idea that we can know a lot of things, but the question is “Should we?” Based on a true story about a law suit between the Havasupai Indian Tribe and Arizona State University, it brings up a slew of fascinating ethical questions. And I thought that for a community (like ours) that’s so science and research-oriented it’s a very relevant play.
Ah, yes. we read about that case. Thanks for the interview. We’re excited to see as many of the plays in New Ground Theatre Festival as possible.
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We signed off with Bloom and immediately contacted Julia Rhoads, Artistic Director of Lucky Plush, the better to appreciate The Better Half.
Cool Cleveland: We notice that the dancers do a lot of talking in The Better Half. [See video here]. Is talking on stage new to Lucky Plush?
Julia Rhodes: Lucky Plush Productions has been a dance theater company and used language for many years, but in our past works a lot of the dialogue was generated by the performers themselves. In The Better Half we go into more of a narrative arc with character development.
Leslie Buxbaum Danzig of 500 Clown is listed as co-creator and co-director. Are you two long-time collaborators?
Leslie and I have known each other for a long time as family friends. We met through the theater scene in Chicago and we were very aware of each other’s work. And we were both very interested in engaging audiences with work that’s inclusive and funny. But The Better Half is our first collaboration.
We originally considered doing something with Anna Karenina, the novel by Leo Tolstoy, but we soon realized it was too loaded with details. But the Gaslight story is pretty simple and Leslie had already worked with the play Angel Street on which Gaslight was based. And we realized that in both scenarios the central female characters were trapped inside of their narratives, their lives, and basically wanted to jump script. We can become trapped in the habits and patterns of relationships and wonder how we can get out of them. That became an early central theme for The Better Half.
The construct of The Better Half is, the 5 performers — not yet the characters — come to the theater knowing they’re going to be in a show, but they don’t entirely know what the show is going to be. There’s a role call and they’re assigned characters without knowing much about their characters; a stage manager character has a mysterious notebook. So gradually the performers and the audience get little bits of information.
(All this rang bells in our heads, English majors that we both once were. After the interview it hit us. Duh! The same construct as Six Characters in Search of an Author, Bald Soprano, and any number of other absurdist and modernist plays! Repurposed, of course, for The Better Half.)
Two of the characters are Mr.and Mrs., “So, presumably, we must be married,” and those 2 characters try to decide how they’re going to be married. So, with a sort of a loop structure and a series of restarts, the show grows into the Gaslight story.
(Yep. Bald Soprano.) How does The Bourne Identity come into play?
One of the performers learns that her character is a “stout, subservient woman of 50.” She doesn’t like this very much so she proposes a new script, The Bourne Identity. That seems to her like it will be a lot more fun. So we have multiple scripts, but one of the major themes that emerges is resiliency in long-term relationships. Things happen but how are you going to stay together in a marriage?
Who did the music in The Better Half?
Mikhail Fiksel constructed the score by sampling various music and foley effects. All the design elements in The Better Half — music, lighting, and video — are like characters in the work. In the very beginning of the show, the lighting tells the characters where to go; later, the characters start to make their own choices and the design elements follow that.
Just one more question about how The Better Half is constructed. We gather this is not your grandparents’ story ballet.
Yeah, we’re contemporary dancers and everybody has ballet training, but we don’t use movement to illustrate a dramatic scenario. For example, when the Husband character looks for his keys, it’s a bare stage but he mimes the action of searching in a desk; we abstract choreography from that mime and the audience is taught to see the desk in that choreography.
Yes it sounds like breaking a code and yet everything is immediately clear to the audience. Funny and accessible. Looks like a good show. We’re looking forward to seeing it at the Allen.
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Lucky Plush Productions performs The Better Half at 8pm on Thu 5/2, Fri 5/3, and Sat 5/4/2013 at the Allen Theatre in PlayhouseSquare. Rich Girl runs through 5/19 at Second Stage. $15 to $69. For times and tickets to all New Ground Theatre Festival Events, call 216-241-6000 or click here.
From Cool Cleveland contributors Elsa Johnson and Victor Lucas. Elsa and Vic are both longtime Clevelanders. Elsa is a landscape designer. She studied ballet as an avocation for 2 decades. Vic has been a dancer and dance teacher for most of his working life, performing in a number of dance companies in NYC and Cleveland. They write about dance as a way to learn more and keep in touch with the dance community. E-mail them at vicnelsaATearthlink.net.
Cleveland, OH 44115