Last night I stumbled upon this blast from the past, a short promo video I cut together for in-house use as a preshow warmup  before the premiere screening of Lady in a Box in 2006.  This short music video is assembled from rehearsal outtakes and on-set bloopers.  Featuring Sarita Choudhury, Sean Hayden, Luke Rosen, John Lordan, myself, and behind the camera Peter Olsen.

http://www.brain-on-fire.com/lady/breathless

Enjoy.

My new show Beautiful Zion: A Book of the Dead is staggering to its feet again this Thursday at 3:30pm at Plays & Players in Philadelphia. Please feel free to sit in on this free workshop of a work-in-progress and offer your feedback.

Back in Feb the Philadelphia City Paper’s Critical Mass arts blog sed nice things about it,  so you should probably come:

Theatre Preview by Matt Cantor
“It’s a one-man show, but award-winning playwright Jeffrey Stanley isn’t the only one in it. At least, he hopes not. Beautiful Zion: A Book of the Dead is a 60-minute ‘autobiographical black comedy’ whose supporting cast is made up of ghosts — if they’re willing to make an appearance, Stanley says. An adjunct faculty member at New York University’s prestigious Tisch School of the Arts, Stanley is workshopping this free work-in-progress in Philadelphia — his new home — at the historic Plays & Players theater.

“Years in the making, the new play combines elements of earlier works, including another black comedy Stanley performed in New York at the Gershwin Hotel under the curation of Andy Warhol pal Neke Carson. Mix that with ‘inept dream interpretation,’ family history, and a Ouija tent, and the result is Beautiful Zion: A Book of the Dead. The play is ‘about communication between family members while they’re alive and maybe even after they’re dead,’ Stanley says. Expect humor, but also ‘a lot of death, a lot of suffering, a lot of human misery.’

One-man shows or otherwise, Stanley’s works focus on shared experience: in performing his CONT’D AT CITY PAPER>>

I’ll be appearing next Tuesday, March 8th at 6:30pm at the NYU Bookstore at 726 Broadway, New York City, corner of Waverly Place, to give a free, 30-minute talk on the fine art of subtext and writing naturalistic dialogue (in fiction as well as film and theatre) and signing copies of my previous plays Tesla’s Letters and Medicine, Man, both of which will be on sale at the bookstore.  I was asked to do this by NYU’s most excellent School of Continuing & Professional Studies to help promote their writing program where I often teach Playwriting I: The Fundamentals and The Art & Craft of Dialogue as an Associate Professor in Creative Writing, in addition to my screenwriting courses across the street at my alma mater NYU Tisch School of the Arts.  Don’t be a stranger now.  More info HERE.

If you liked The Golden Horseshoe: A Lecture on Tragedy, you’ll love the followup, Beautiful Zion: A Book of the Dead. Join me as I try to resurrect a hidden and dangerous history. Which of you will dare to enter the terrifying Ouija tent of the damned and open a channel to the Other Side for me, live onstage?

Beautiful Zion: A Book of the Dead is a surreal, 60-minute, autobiographical show about the impact of ghosts – the real kind — and of dream interpretation — the inept kind — on one’s past, present and future.  It’s tragic, and it’s also hilarious.

It’s also a work-in-progress. I’ll be performing it with limited set, script partially in hand, followed by a Q&A, one night only, with support from my friends at the historic Plays & Players in Philadelphia.   The Philadelphia City Paper’s ultra-cool Critical Mass arts blog sez it’s probably going to be good, and they’re probably right, so you should probably come.

City Paper Critical Mass Theatre Preview by Matt Cantor
“It’s a one-man show, but award-winning playwright Jeffrey Stanley isn’t the only one in it. At least, he hopes not. Beautiful Zion: A Book of the Dead is a 60-minute ‘autobiographical black comedy’ whose supporting cast is made up of ghosts  — if they’re willing to make an appearance, Stanley says. An adjunct faculty member at New York University’s prestigious Tisch School of the Arts, Stanley is workshopping this free work-in-progress in Philadelphia — his new home — at the historic Plays & Players theater.

“Years in the making, the new play combines elements of earlier works, including another black comedy Stanley performed in New York at the Gershwin Hotel under the curation of Andy Warhol pal Neke Carson. Mix that with ‘inept dream interpretation,’ family history, and a Ouija tent, and the result is Beautiful Zion: A Book of the Dead. The play is ‘about communication between family members while they’re alive and maybe even after they’re dead,’ Stanley says. Expect humor, but also ‘a lot of death, a lot of suffering, a lot of human misery.’

One-man shows or otherwise, Stanley’s works focus on shared experience: in performing his CONT’D AT CITY PAPER>>

Surely you’ve heard by now that international theatre legend Ellen Stewart died last week on 1/13/11 at the age of 91.  By the time I got to New York in the late 1980s LaMama Experimental Theatre Club, which she founded, was already legendary.

I was thrilled to be a footnote in LaMama’s history years later in 2002 when a short play I wrote, a weak pastiche of a Broadway musical called “The Monkey of Oz,” was performed there as a part of a larger evening.

LaMama; March, 1965. Donald L. Brooks' play "Fly." From left to right top: John Brooks, Joel Thurm (stage manager), playwright Donald L. Brooks, JOEY LONDON (standing in the overcoat). Seated: Anthony Bastiano, Frances Mintz. Brooks generously altered the schedule of his play to allow for the 'Cino at La Mama' season after the Cino fire, canceling "Fly's" final performance to make room for Tom Eyen's Cino production of "Frustrata." La Mama’s site lists “The Fly” as opening Mar. 10th, 1965.

Then there’s my Uncle Joey, a wise and aged actor from back in the day who has often spoken to me about being there “at the beginning” as one of Ellen’s regular ensemble of actors who were fixtures there and at its immediate predecessor Caffe Cino.  He also happened by Caffe Cino on the morning of March 30, 1967, the day that Joe Cino had gruesomely hacked himself up with a kitchen knife, and he saw the blood-spattered floor shortly after Joe had been rushed to the hospital.  Joe’s suicide attempt was successful — he died a few days later.  Uncle Joey recounted how two years later in 1969 a play by Donald L. Brooks was produced about Joe Cino called Superfreak: The Death of Joe Cino, which depicted his suicide in all its gore.  This upset some of Cino’s associates and led them to organize a boycott of the show.  Ellen Stewart also joined the boycott and banned Brooks and the entire cast and crew from ever having their work produced at LaMama again. In Uncle Joey’s eyes this was the only black mark in Ellen’s career, because, he says, she never actually went to see Superfreak herself.  He considered it a powerful and meaningful show.  He tried explaining that to Ellen,  but she just smiled and walked away.

Still, he remained a loyal and unshakable Ellen fan.  A few years ago when an article about Ellen winning (yet another) prize appeared in The New York Times, Uncle Joey pulled from his obsessive, personal LaMama archive a similar article written many years earlier.  The articles make terrific companion pieces and nicely sum up LaMama.  I photocopied the two articles onto a single sheet and still use it today as a handout when I include theatre history as a component of my playwriting classes at New York University.

The first article is from the Village Voice, 1969, written by theatre critic Jerry Tallmer, the man who coined the term Off-Off Broadway in a 1960 Voice article.  The Voice also gave the first Obie award in 1965.

The second article is from the Times, 9/21/2007; no author given.

I quote liberally from them now:

Village Voice, 1969 (unsure of month and date)

CLOSEUP column by Jerry Tallmer

And From the Wings…

So now it is eight years and maybe 300 new plays presented by Cafe LaMama, and a new Off-Off-Broadway home at 74A E. 4th St. with two theaters stacked one above the other, the cement still wet on opening night, and Ellen Stewart recognized around the world as mama to a whole new generation of playwrights.

“My biddies,” she calls them, urging that every single one be named so that no feelings are hurt. That being impossible, we will just say she has started on their way “at least 100 playwrights, maybe 150″ of every conceivable variety, some of whom are already up in the big time.

Ellen Stewart doesn’t like much to talk in any detail about herself or the past. These facts do emerge:

She was born in Alexandria, La., “and spent my life in Chicago.” She is a handsome woman of enormous class and style and joy of life, and her speech is geechee – “Zthees is Cafe La Mama, dedicated to zthee playwright” — coming down to her by way of the Negro slaves along the Ogeechee River in Georgia who were her ancestors.

“I didn’t come from a hard-life kind of thing,” says Ellen, whose mother was a schoolteacher.  “I went to Arkansas State College in Pine Bluff, and after college I didn’t even teach school, which is what I was supposed to do. Shall we say, I drifted around, so to speak?  The truth is,” charmingly put — “I was kind of pretty, you know.”

And she became a mother. Her son, Larry Hovell, used to be a teacher and now works in advertising in Chicago. His is the father of her granddaughter, Sorata Ellen, 2.

“Oh,” says Grandmother Ellen. “I can give you one job. I worked in electronics. I went to Western Electric and I was too dumb to do anything in electronics so they put me in school at the Illinois Institute of Technology.”

It was around that time that a doctor told her “that I had some brains and that I would have more trouble, like a stroke, if I didn’t use them.”

So, in 1950, wanting to become a fashion designer, she flipped a coin. “Heads I go to San Francisco, tails to New York. Blacks couldn’t go to fashion school in Chicago.”  It came up tails and New York. She landed a job in the powder room at Saks Fifth; three months later they made her an executive designer. Seven years later she went off into freelance designing, the means by which she still supports herself with lines of playwear for Victor and Joseph Bijou of University Place.

It was in 1961 that she started to fulfill a lifelong dream by opening the first Cafe La Mama in a tiny basement on E. 9th St.  She had in mind for her first playwright her foster-brother Fred Lights, who is today a stage manager for NBC.  Subsequently driven from pillar to post by every form of city and union officialdom, she survived it all, moving, going on, moving, going on, at last receiving a big Rockefeller grant ($65,000) and a bigger Ford grant ($139,000) which have made this last move to E. 4th St. possible.

If lots of previously unknown people have been helped by Ellen, lots of people have helped her, not least Tom O’Horgan, the director who started with Ellen and who now has contributed $10,000 to LaMama out of his proceeds from “Hair,” and Jules Weiss, a retired builder “who has helped me in everything,” most particularly the renovation at the new building which is an old building going back to when it was put up for a German music society in 1863.

************************************************

The New York Times, September 21, 2007

La MaMa Founder Wins Prize

Ellen Stewart, founder and artistic director of the LaMama Experimental Theatre Club in the East Village, joined the Israeli pianist and conductor Daniel Barenboim and the Swiss architects Jacques Herzog and Pierre de Meruon as winners yesterday of the $125,000 Praemium Imperiale arts awards…Given by the Japan Arts Association and announced at the Japanese Cultural Center in Paris, the accolades [are] for lifetime achievement in the arts in categories not covered by the Nobel Prizes…In a telephone interview from Italy, where she is working, Ms. Stewart, 87, who created her Off Off Broadway theater club nearly 46 years ago and has been its director ever since, said of the prize: “It caught me by great surprise. Although America doesn’t realize it, we are kind of known just about everywhere in the world.”

[images via caffecino.wordpress.com and playbill.com]

Brooklynite Theresa Rebeck

Today I’ll let Theresa Rebeck do my whining for me, via her smart discussion about her new play The Understudy now in previews at the Wilma Theatre in Philadelphia; a play in which she says “she has tried to strike a balance among three needs – to entertain; to tell the truth about our lives; and to let that spiritual thing called drama happen” (Philadelphia Inquirer).

“A lot of what happens in show business is just horrible,” she says, drawing on her experiences in film, TV, and theater, “and with next to no reason for it. Your life is out of your control. Constantly, you’re wondering, ‘Why did they pull the plug on that production? Why did they do that to me? What are people behaving like this for?’

“And after a while I came to see that the capitalist cruelty growing out of the drive for profit was behind it,” she says. “It’s a kind of senseless, dehumanizing, totalitarian force. The New York theater world is very often just as weird as the world of TV and film.”

Couldn’t agree with her more. Looking forward to seeing The Understudy.  Full Inquirer story by John Timpane here.

[image via philly.com]

The modern wellness professional?

Welcome to YogaLeaks.  So the other day I’m sitting on the bus from Borough 6 to Borough 1 minding my own business looking over people’s shoulders at what they’re reading, and there’s a woman sitting in front of me patiently writing something over and over again in a lined composition book.  I can’t make out the words but I can tell it’s the same sentence repeating line after line.  She flips through the book, presumably to check her count so far, and I see that it goes on for pages and pages and pages.

I subtly lean forward and squint harder at her neat cursive, and see that it reads

again and again and again.  It must have been hundreds of times. This is clearly a major, life-changing project for her. Now, I’ve listened to Coast to Coast AM enough times to know witchcraft when I see it. This was a textual version of a rain dance; that or she’s following up on a tip from some entrepreneurial self-help book. 

I am  struck by the small amount of money. Why not make it a million?  I infer that she’s a simple, modest witch who sets realistic goals for the supernatural. But what strikes me most is that it doesn’t say “make” or “earn,” but receive. “I will receive $10,000,” as though the universe will be magically granting it if she writes it down enough times, sort of a secular version of legendary huckster-minister Reverend Ike’s money prayers (and if you’re ever visiting New York, forget St. Patrick’s Cathedral. You haven’t lived until you’ve visited Reverend Ike’s church uptown.)

A few minutes later I check in on her again and watch her flip through her many, many pages of money mantra to a section in the back with notes, apparently taken during a seminar.  Here are the snippets I was able to catch:

free of strategy

free of judgement – write down some words you don’t like hearing (free of judgement)

 concretize to actualize – make it real

my goals:

have a thriving home practice: 10 clients per week

establish a network of other wellness professionals

be seen as an authority on any topic

I’m struck by that last line, which is similar to her money mantra; not “become” an authority on any topic, which is absurd enough, but “be seen as an authority.”  This must be some entrepreneurial course on how to hoodwink people.  Ironic that she’s training to be a wellness professional.  Is she perhaps a yoga or Pilates instructor?

Beware, wellness consumers.  Even new age practictioners, even your friendly, neighborhood Namaste-spouting yoga teacher,  just might be working an angle, or more to the point, working you like a limbered up voodoo doll.

[image via potentwealthsystem.com]

Oh well, MTV Desi has me pegged.  They’re exactly right about me but at least they acknowledge that I also acknowledge that I am one more gawking American.

And I can’t complain about being named an honorary Desi, sort of.

New York Press Delves Into the Paan Game
by Abdullah

When I first saw the headline “Confessions of a White, Middle-Aged Paan Eater” on the cover of this week’s New York Press, naturally, I grabbed a copy and asked myself the question you’re asking yourself right now; What the hell is the New York Press?   Well, it’s a paper that’s running a cover story about something inherently Desi that’s breaking into mainstream culture. And why not? It didn’t take long for Americans to adopt the more… CONT’D AT MTVDESI.COM>> 

The Asia Society also commented and was a tad less snarky than MTV (but who am I to complain about being snarky in a blog post from time to time, eh?).

A Paean to Paan
by Aliya Sabharwal

…From describing his initiation into the practice of paan-chewing to drawing interesting comparisons to the tobacco-dipping culture of his Appalachian relatives, Stanley seems to have seriously and diligently researched this “local” practice. But the result is a riot for those familiar with paan chewing or chewers, if only for the novelty of reading an eloquent homage to the substance.  CONT’D AT ASIASOCIETY.ORG>>

Well, now it’s just too much. My paan habit has also made the celebrity gossip page of India Abroad, the major newspaper for Indian expats around the world, getting top billing over Tom Cruise’s tweets to Anil Kapoor (see p. 6).  I’m truly honored and humbled.

Jeffrey Stanley is Addicted to Paan…CONT’D AT INDIA ABROAD>>

[images via mtvdesi.com, asiasociety.org, and indiaabroad-digital.com]

I heart paan

I bought tobacco paan from this walla near the Belur Math monastery along the banks of the Ganges in West Bengal, India.

This week’s New York Press, ”New York’s Plummy Weekly Newspaper,” cover story is my monologue thinly disguised as an essay, ‘Confessions of a White, Middle-Aged Paan Eater’, the title a loose parody of Thomas de Quincey’s scandalous 1821 memoir Confessions of an English Opium-Eater.

Enjoy the article, go to your nearest Indian grocer and enjoy some meeta paan, and if you’re craving more dope on the delicacy here’s a short clip of me ordering it from a paan walla just across from the ancient Udayagiri and Khandagiri Caves in Bhubaneswar, the capital of the state of Orissa in eastern India, this past January (footage courtesy of documentary filmmaker David Gaynes).

*

And the article…

Confessions of a White, Middle-Aged Paan Eater

JEFFREY STANLEY is addicted to what may arguably be India’s most disgusting export

I pull my hat low as I pound the rain-slicked sidewalks of Curry Hill around noon on a frigid November weekday. I look about furtively as I walk up Lexington, stopping outside of a DVD shop before I dart inside. There I meet my sugar man, a Punjabi who only goes by the nom de commerce Arora.  By now I know his real name, but he likes to go by the one-word moniker.  I’m happy to…CONT’D AT NYPRESS.COM>>

[IHeartPaan logo, paan walla photo and video are property of me. Logo via nypress.com]