happy new year!

Had a great rehearsal with Kate Ferber yesterday in preparation for next week's One Child Born performance in Philadelphia. The show returns to World Cafe Life on Wednesday, January 25th-- click here for more information and tickets. A new character will be premiering in the piece next week-- a Rolling Stone journalist who's lobbying Jann Wenner to nominate Laura for the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. Prior to our rehearsal I was not aware that while hundreds of people vote-- less than five have the power to nominate. Interesting I thought. I love this new woman though and I'm anxious to hear how her appearance affects the work as a whole.
Colt Coeur has been super busy as well-- we spent two weeks diving into the Immortality/Technology Project with Steven Levenson, received two of the grants we applied for, and are otherwise in the thick of fundraising now... Want to make a donation?!
Next week I head out to San Francisco to start working on Will Eno's Flu Season at ACT. So excited. For so many reasons.

air travel

From one 3-day workshop to another-- I really love the luxury of getting to spend this time with a group of actors and a playwright and their nearly-newborn baby. The playwright is Max Posner and the play is The Thing About Air Travel, which is Colt Coeur's 2nd Play Hotel of the 2011-2012 season.
Our cast is: Teddy Bergman, Katya Campbell, Erin Felgar, Maya Kazan, Kate Roberts and Matt Stadelmann and Katya is doing double-duty as the 'hostess' of the evening: she's making mulled wine and frosted sugar cookies... and we found some very comfy chairs on our last Materials for the Arts run. See you there.

THIS ROUGH MAGIC

Had a great first day of a three-day developmental workshop with playwright Richard Manley on his wildly-plausible but also stunningly disturbing alternate-present drama, This Rough Magic. We have a great cast including Katya Campbell, John Henry Cox, Simon Feil, Celia Keenan-Bolger, Jason Kravits and Peggy Scott, with Amy Groeschel stage-managing. Since Colt Coeur is also deep in Technological Singularity/Futurism research for our upcoming Immortality/Technology project-- it was very fun to enter the world of this play today. In the someone's-running-late-wheels-spinning-bagels-and-juice chunk of the day we talked a lot about humans' propensity towards anthropomorphizing everything. Chairs. Cars. Computers. Reminded me of this undertaking... which will BLOW your mind.

working with one of my idol/heroes.

I think I played it cool.
It was really fun though.
I think I reference Waiting for Guffman in some way or another at least once a day, usually to myself, but still. In my notes on Jonathan Marc Sherman's script for this Playwrights Horizons Benefit play I even wrote, and I quote: = 'we know the terms.'
Christopher Guest and everyone in that movie is a genius. Especially Parker Posey.
I love my job.

october rushes

September flew by in a haze of grant deadlines, research and new play reading. After almost three years of back-to-back rehearsal periods my brain was very grateful to have time and space to re-charge and feel open-ended and expansive again. I spent an incredibly restorative and imagination-stretching weekend in Vermont and have been enjoying fall in NY so much. I also just got Final Draft as a gift from a generous and "believe-in-you" friend and am excited to be playing with screenwriting. And Colt Coeur is super-busy. More on that soon...

This week I have been in rehearsal a bit though-- One Child Born: The Music of Laura Nyro goes up at the Estherwood Mansion in Dobbs Ferry, NY this evening, and this weekend I get to direct Parker Posey and Josh Hamilton in a wildly charming little play by Jonathan Marc Sherman for Playwrights Horizons 5 Stories on 5 Stories Benefit. I am so in awe of all three of those talented folks, I'm truly going to try and just stay out of their way. Well, maybe I'll make a few suggestions. I think it would be amazing if Parker's character wore a giant fascinator or hat (a la those Brits at that British wedding) since she is playing a woman who is doing her laundry. I love the idea of running out of all of your normal clothes and being FORCED to wear something extremely fabulous to the laundromat. Or the theater as it were.

A great thought to remember.

"How can you tell when it's really good? I honestly don't know. If you look at rushes cerebrally, staying outside it, you can be wrong. If you 'root it home' you can be wrong. So it comes down to what I live with from the moment I've decided to do this picture: I can be wrong. So what? That's the risk. Critics never take it. Nor do audiences, except for the $8 they put down. I try to look at it the other way: What if I'm right? Then I might get another job. And that gives me a chance to be right or wrong again. And to go back to work at the best job in the world." — Sidney Lumet, Making Movies.

MMM in the Berkshires, RECALL in LA

Sad to see Mormons, Mothers and Monsters close this past weekend. And also sad I was remiss in posting more about it. My only excuse is that it was a truly insane past few six weeks. Colt Coeur's second show "Fish Eye" closed, Will Aronson, Sam Salmond and I embarked on the journey of mounting a new musical together (MMM at the inimitable Barrington Stage), I suffered temporary blindness, our lead actress got a throat infection the day after opening and had to be replaced for the rest of the run, and I came to LA and did a reading of a super-sick new play by Eli Clarke called Recall.
Here is a picture of much of the MMM team:


Two people who are not in the picture who really made the show possible, and also helped it become what it grew into... are Bill Finn and Julie Boyd. I was very lucky to get to know them, and collaborate with them. They are geniuses. Also a huge shout-out to Christiane Tisdale who heroically stepped into the massive void left by Ms. Jill Abramovitz when she had to leave the show on doctor's orders.

And a link to the awesome Boston Globe review of MMM.

The cast on this one was: Jill A., Stanley Bahorek, Adam Monley and Taylor Trensch. Creative team was Brian Prather (scenic), Grant Yeager (lighting), Paloma Young (costume) and Ryan Peavey (sound). Vadim Feichtner was our Music Director and Shakina Nayfack, Mr. Fancy Drama League Musical Theater Fellow was our Asst. Dir/Asst. Choreographer. Natasha Sinha was our producer and Rose Marie Packer our Stage Manager.
THANK YOU ALL!!!

Also, here's what I've been up to in LA.

Fish Eye opens tonight!

Colt Coeur got our first feature article-- very exciting...
Also, here's an image from the show. (Featuring the stunning Betty Gilpin and the strapping Joe Tippett.)


Click here for more info and tickets. It runs through June 18th at HERE in SoHo.
Please come!!!

Huge thanks to everyone in this picture and especially Amy Groeschel (our fearless producer, who is not in the picture because she was out very generously procuring waters for our patrons on the day the A/C wasn't working last week)!

the fruit of our labors

April is JUDAS-time.

I'm so, so proud of the students I've been working with up at Yale and thrilled with how this production is coming along. Please come check it out!

The Last Days of Judas Iscariot

By Stephen Adly Guirgis
Directed by Adrienne Campbell-Holt

Yale DRAMAT Spring 2011 Mainstage Production
Wednesday-Saturday, April 13-16, 2011 (all performances at 8pm, additional Saturday matinee at 2pm)
University Theater
222 York Street, New Haven, CT

For tickets click here, or email me and I will be happy to arrange them for you.


Stephen Adly Guirgis' THE LAST DAYS OF JUDAS ISCARIOT is a wildly inventive and irreverent imagining of the trial of Judas, perpetrator of the "ultimate betrayal." Set in a corner of Purgatory called Hope, our courtroom meets the likes of Sigmund Freud, Mother Theresa, and Satan himself. With a jury comprised of souls stolen from Hell-- the trial is only half of the drama. Combining rich religious historicity and radical revisionism, Guirgis' play is deeply moving and relentlessly funny. The play's driving theme-the power of the human spirit-is universal and epic, and this visceral production will inspire audiences to examine their definitions of loyalty, faith, justice and betrayal.

Creative team:
Scenic Designer: John McDermott
Lighting Designer: Grant Yeager
Costume Designer: Sofija Canavan
Sound Designer: Amy Altadonna