Historical Moments
by Benno Nelson, Dramaturg for LiveWire Chicago Theatre’s Hideous Progeny
Emily Dendinger’s Hideous Progeny is part of a small but fruitful subgenre of historical/biographical fictional works that focus on the true-to-life confluence of interesting people in a specific moment. Unlike a typical biographical work that takes a long view of a person’s life and times, these “Moment plays” take advantage of the clutter of historical and personal forces in a discrete period of time that’s easily playable – an evening, a summer, etc. Here are some examples from literature, theater, and film:
The Symposium, Plato – 4th Cent. B.C – Socrates, Aristophanes, a famous tragic playwright, a doctor, a lawyer, a student, and the Navy Admiral that would doom Athens in the Peloponnesian War, all get together to get drunk and give speeches about Love.
La cisma de Inglaterra, Pedro Calderón de la Barca – 1627 – This play treats the divorce of Henry VIII and his first wife Katherine, and his excommunication from the Catholic church.
Travesties, Tom Stoppard – 1974 – Tristan Tzara, James Joyce, Vladimir Lenin, and a English consular general Henry Carr converge around an production of The Importance of Being Ernest in Zurich during World War I.
Gothic, dir. Ken Russell – 1986 – A horror movie that’s also about Byron and the Shelleys’ summer in Geneva. Gabriel Byrne plays Byron and Natasha Richardson plays Mary Shelley.
Shakespeare In Love, Marc Norman and Tom Stoppard – 1998 – Inasmuch as Richard Burbage, Christopher Marlowe, John Webster, William Shakespeare, and Queen Elizabeth are all running around getting into scrapes, while Shakespeare is composing Romeo and Juliet. This one’s a stretch because it’s a total work of fiction, but, hey, it’s fun.
Copenhagen, Michael Frayn – 1998 – This play dramatizes a meeting between the quantum physicists Niels Bohr and Werner Heisenberg in Copenhagen in 1941, touching on the ethics and science of atomic weapons.
Million Dollar Quartet, Floyd Mutrux and Colin Escott – 2006 – A musical about a recording session at Sun Studio in Memphis where Elvis Presley, Carl Perkins, Jerry Lee Lewis, and Johnny Cash were all present.
Little Ashes, dir. Paul Morrison - This movie was released in 2009 and depicts the young lives of Salvador Dalí, Luis Buñuel, and Federico Garcia Lorca who were friends at the University of Madrid in the early 1920s.
Can anyone think of any others? Frost/Nixon perhaps? I don’t think I’m a Celebrity Get Me Out of Here! should count, but…
blueprint vs literature
by Jeff Phillips, playwright for Bosto script as part of XIII Pocket Incubator
Some things we’ve been considering as we read and discuss each piece is how other groups may approach the text. I know most everything that I have written for the stage or screen has been something that I’ve been directly involved in bringing to life. A strong question lingers as to how much you set in stone with the text, and what elements shall be left up to the director. Of course the set, sound, music, lighting will be altered, as well as character textures will changed from show to show. But there are certain ambiguities that of course provoke questions, but at what point do let each production take unique liberties with choices to fill in the life between the lines? At what point do you run with detail to really paint the picture of locale? It’s a curious boundary as a playwright, between setting a blue print for production and a piece of literature.
The Displaced
by Anthony Nikolchev, playwright for The Displaced script as part of XIII Pocket Incubator
I wrote The Displaced - starting writing it - in 2005. Since then, the play has taken many turns, developed with new characters and new ideas, while, simultaneously, I have changed as well. I just returned to Chicago and its exciting theatre scene after 14 months of doing my own searching for theatrical growth abroad, mainly in Wroclaw, Poland. During that time, I was inundated with many different forms of theatre. Sure, there is still the ever present get-audiences-in-seats more standard idea of productions, but Poland stands out in its willingness and enthusiasm to explore the unknown in theatrical expression.
This exploration manifests in a form encouraged by a master of experimental, laboratory theatre - Jerzy Grotowski. His is not a method, nor a style that can be emulated, but rather a way to approach the work for the theatre creators. That being a rigorously disciplined focus on what the actor is capable of. It is asking that question, “What IS the actor capable of?” How does one find that out? Thus the naming of his and his followers’ theatre as “experimental.” Like scientists experimenting in a lab. Also: Laboratory theatre. It can take years to find the way that a certain text must be read, or a movement be performed that makes the creator and the audience understand what truth is. So for me to be getting more and more addicted to this line of questioning over the last 14 months makes it a challenge for me to enter a play that I starting writing 5 years ago. How to go back?
8.18.10
by Jeff Phillips, playwright for Bosto script as part of XIII Pocket Incubator
Anthony Nikolchev is back from Poland, and this week we’ve begun work-shopping his play The Displaced, which he started several years ago and has since gone through several drafts. It’s been exciting to play with, as there’s not that many science fiction plays out there, at least that I’m aware of. Set in 2063 it follows the development of “the method” and examines complexities in class struggle and ethics in scientific solutions to over population. Monday marked the first day of jumping into The Displaced and Anthony was able to come back Tuesday with another draft to examine. One of Anthony’s big focuses on the outset was using text as a place to start work rather than set work. And it’s clear ensemble is a huge component to him in creating a work, in creating a world on the stage. In the piece technology is such a part of the world, that it becomes not a bridge to a communal disconnect but is the pulse of human living, attempt to usurp all human variable. In an age of iPads and BlackBerrys, constant electrical distractions, its refreshing to reflect on that and put on its feet a commentary, a satire, that can be communicated through a medium which I’d like to think is the best medium for such a theme...the gathering of a cast and audience, a community, in a dark theatre, with perhaps minimal technology needed for the presentation.
Bosto update - the script has continued to grow. Various questions and ideas posed during the first week of work-shopping have “sprouted” into new pockets of story and stakes for each character in the Bosto environment. I’m excited to bring it back to the table.
Hideous blog post #1
by Joshua Aaron Weinstein, Executive Director of LiveWire Chicago Theatre
Fun Facts from the Hideous Progeny creative team:
From Danielle O’Farrell (Claire) referencing Young Romantics: The Tangled Lives of English Poetry’s Greatest Generation - We’ll be opening our show 194 Years TO THE DAY that Shelley, Mary, and Claire left Lake Geneva. (Well, planned, Dendinger… You sneaky minx.)
From Emily Dendinger (Playwright) in regards to bears - When Byron found out that Cambridge had rules against bringing dogs to the school, he brought a pet bear with him instead.
Danielle re: Frankenstein-lore - A pleading letter from Claire to Byron said, “A Creator ought not destroy his Creature.”
From Emily - There’s some pretty entertaining podcasts about these guys on “Stuff You Missed in History Class” (11/9/09 - “How Lord Byron Worked”, 10/26/09 - “The Birth of Frankenstein and the Vampyre”, 11/11/09 - “Who was the Enchantress of Numbers?” (about Ada Lovelace, Byron’s daughter)
From Jessica Hutchinson (Director) - Here’s an interesting passage I came across in Year without Summer. Due to a huge volcanic eruption and unusually low solar activity global temperatures dropped a full degree causing widespread crop loss and food riots. It also lead to the founding of the Mormon Church and the invention of the Velocipede.
From Jess - Mary & Shelley’s shared journal in 1814—Thursday, July 28: Shelley writes about their escape together: “The night preceding this morning, all being decided, I ordered a chaise to be ready by 4 o’clock. I watched until lightning and the stars became pale. At length it was 4. I believed it not possible that we should succeed; still there appeared to lurk some danger even in certainty. I went; I saw her; she came to me.”
Hideous Progeny opens August 26th! Purchase tickets now by clicking HERE
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