Jefe's House

My friend John tossed me this book to review for monthly arts and politics journal The Brooklyn Rail about one of the 20th century’s first women playwrights, crime reporter turned dramatist Maurine Watkins, author of Chicago, which was a biting, satirical straight play long before it was a Kander, Ebb & Fosse musical.  Enjoy the review, or, more importantly, enjoy the book.

Douglas Perry
The Girls of Murder City: Fame, Lust, and the Beautiful Killers Who Inspired ‘Chicago’
(Viking, 2010)

Close on the heels of Deborah Blum’s The Poisoner’s Handbook: Murder and the Birth of Forensic Medicine in Jazz Age New York (Penguin, 2010), comes Douglas Perry’s true crime history The Girls of Murder City: Fame, Lust, and the Beautiful Killers Who Inspired Chicago, which turned out to be a welcome companion piece.

The former is a dissection of New York City’s use and rapid improvement of nascent forensic medical techniques during the Prohibition era.  Murder after murder is lovingly recreated—especially those involving poisons—and then deconstructed by über CSI experts. The latter book takes us to Prohibition-era Chi-town, where the weapon of choice wasn’t poison but pistols, and the bad guys were bad gals.    **CONT’D HERE>>

Sorry, Target. You had me at cheap shorts but I didn’t realize you were anti-American.  I mean anti-gay marriage.  Same thing.  I will no longer buy your inexpensive sweatshop threads.  Best Buy, I already hated you so no surprise there.  Go, guerrilla theatre.

Shareholders weigh in on Target and Best Buy’s political giving

Take that, commerce.  I love a theatre company that practices what it preaches, and the wonderful folks at The Collective have done it again.  I first became aware of this creative, inventive, smart, political, funny, driven, earnest bundle of talent a few years ago when I met member Lisa Kicielinski at Naked Angels’ tuesdays@nine reading series; since that time they’ve done two in-house readings of my works-in-progress UFOs Over Brooklyn and The Great Age as a personal favor to help me out in my creative process, and allowed my award-winning short film Lady in a Box to ride their coattails into the Global Awareness Project’s Strand Film Festival shown on the IMAX screen in Myrtle Beach, SC.

Their stage productions  usually have brief runs at this point, like bright bottle rockets going off in New York’s ocean of indie theatre while they continue to get their sea legs. If you’re having trouble navigating that vast sea, the Collective are a terrific port in the storm.

They often write and produce their own works in film and theatre, and sometimes produce modern classics by others like this Frank MGuiness play up there on the left.  There will only be 12 performances of this play, scattered throughout the summer, but here’s the truly unorthodox part that brings a tear to my jaundiced eye:  half of the tickets for each show will be given away. 

 ”In a struggling economy, art is both undervalued and underfunded,” said Collective member Kevin Kane.  “We want to make quality professional theater available to all. We want to have no empty seats.  To the struggling student, to the theater lover who has been priced out and to the first timer who can’t afford to fall in love, we say that we would rather perform for you for free than to have one empty seat in the house.”

Playwright McGuiness has allowed the group a special arrangement to produce his play. You can take part in the campaign by

• BUYING an $18.00 ticket and seeing the show. Simple enough.  Go here to purchase:  Smartixx

and/or

• SENDING A DESERVING STRANGER to see the show by DONATING a tax deductible $18.00. Follow the instructions for how to donate here: NO EMPTY SEATS

or

• SEEING IT FOR FREE WITHOUT BUYING ANYTHING if you cannot afford a ticket.  The work in this play has merit, this play’s message is relevant, resonant and important.  Don’t miss it. Order a free ticket and pay nothing for it.  Smartixx

This is high level theater at low level prices.  The play opens one week from today, next Thursday, June 17th.

Help them kick it off the right way by buying one ticket for yourself and one ticket for a stranger.

Tagore Celebration in Kolkata, 5/8/10

Rabindranath Tagore (May 8, 1861 – August 8, 1941)  the first Asian to win the Nobel Prize for Literature, was born 150 years ago this weekend.  Celebrations are underway in India, especially in his hometown of Kolkata, West Bengal, and across the globe.  Would that I were there.

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A few of my pix from the historic Tagore family home Jorasanko, winter 2010, Kolkata.

I had the pleasure of visiting the Tagore family home, Jorasanko, earlier this year, which continued to turn me on to this Bengali Renaissance Man’s works in poetry, theatre, fiction and music.  Today Jorasanko is a museum operated by nearby Rabindra Bharati University named in Rabindranath’s honor and focusing on performing arts and the humanities.  My fellow travelers and I were fortunate to have a personal tour guide at Jorasanko, music faculty Prof. Ghosh.  He also took me to visit the campus and meet with the Performing Arts chair and some of the faculty, and I wound up giving an impromptu lecture and Q&A about contemporary US theatre to the bright, informed and eager undergrads in an Ancient Greek Theatre class.

The visit to Jorasanko and the university campus wound up indirectly turning me on to the works of Tagore’s precursors such as Ishwar Chandra Gupta (1812-1859), largely forgotten today in Tagore’s long shadow.

I leave you with one of Tagore’s poems:

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Leave this chanting and singing and telling of beads!
Whom dost thou worship in this lonely dark corner of a temple with doors all shut?
Open thine eyes and see thy God is not before thee!

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He is there where the tiller is tilling the hard ground and where the pathmaker is breaking stones.
He is with them in sun and in shower, and his garment is covered with dust.
Put off thy holy mantle and even like him come down on the dusty soil!

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Deliverance? Where is this deliverance to be found?
Our master himself has joyfully taken upon him the bonds of creation;
he is bound with us all for ever.

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Come out of thy meditations and leave aside thy flowers and incense!
What harm is there if thy clothes become tattered and stained?
Meet him and stand by him in toil and in sweat of thy brow.

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The above poem is very Walt Whitman, eh?  It’s from Tagore’s Nobel-winning collection Gitanjali.

The man, the legend, Rabindranath Tagore. Statue at the entrance to Rabindra Bharati University, winter 2010, Kolkata.

Einstein and Tagore keepin' it real in Berlin, July 14, 1930

[pix taken from indiablooms.com and schoolofwisdom.com; the rest are mine]

If you’re spending summer in NYC consider this 8-week, non-evaluative summer course.  This lecture and workshop class in dramatic writing and theatre history covers the exact same content I teach to undergrads in a 3-credit, full semester course.  You’ll write a lot, you’ll learn a lot, you’ll have fun.  Click to learn more and enroll.  Operators are totally standing by.

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Originally posted 3/10/10 by jefevonstanley on MediaElites.com.

Rachel Corrie

Theatre changes nothing, but at least it changes that. The BBC reports that the Rachel Corrie murder trial is finally underway in Israel. Well, okay, it’s a civil suit but still. Never heard of her?

Seven years ago, idealistic human rights activist Rachel Corrie, a Seattle native, was killed by an Israeli bulldozer on the Gaza Strip. Four years ago this month, the US premiere of the play based on Corrie’s poignant if naive political and philosophical ruminations, My Name is Rachel Corrie, was canceled by New York Theatre Workshop. The play, pieced together by actor Alan “Severus Snape” Rickman and Guardian editor Katharine Viner, had had a successful run in London in 2005.

NYTW’s PR nightmare began when conflicting reasons were given for the cancellation. Had they merely postponed it due to scheduling difficulties, or was it canceled because they’d consulted with New York City religious leaders who’d insisted the play was anti-Semitic and incendiary so they chickened out of premiering it? Hard to believe; after all, this was the organization that brought us Shopping and Fucking. Then again that play featured Philip Seymour Hoffman, so if he was bugged by the cancellation (see below) then maybe something was up after all. 

Continued here – http://mediaelites.com/2010/03/10/rachel-corries-ghost-gets-her-day-in-court.

“Most of these people are coming to see a show they’ve seen before. At the same time, most of them are coming to see a show they’ve never seen before. How is this paradox possible? All of them are on their way to see Too Much Light Makes the Baby Go Blind, the ever-mutating cornerstone performance of an unruly 20-year-old company that calls itself the Neo-Futurists. This may be an ugly stay-at-home-with-slippers-and-bourbon night in Chicago, but the Neo-Futurists are eight people short of a sold-out house.

“Remarkably, something similar is going on this very night some 700 miles away in downtown Manhattan, where the skies are clearer and the line for an 11 p.m. Neo-Futurist show is wending down East 4th Street across from La MaMa E.T.C. If you’re heading out after a performance at that renowned venue and see the line across the street, you should consider getting in it. More important, if you ask the Neo-Futurists really nicely (or offer them enough cash), a line like that could form in your town, too.”

Read Justin Maxwell’s full story here.

Dear Friends and Family:

It’s your Uncle Jeff, a.k.a. the New York Neo-Futurists’ Board President. But don’t worry, this isn’t a request for money.  It’s just a holiday letter! From our crazy family to yours.

Now I’ve never actually written a holiday letter before, so I asked the Internets for help. And they gave me five rules that are guaranteed to produce maximum holiday-letter goodness.

Rule No.1:  Keep it short, focus on highlights.

Our main show, Too Much Light Makes the Baby Go Blind, is still running 50 weeks a year to ever-larger houses and ever-more notoriety. Yes, the kids are famous now!

They’re talented too! Last season’s primetime show, (Not) Just A Day Like Any Other, received a 2009 New York Innovative Theatre Award for Outstanding Ensemble. The gang was also crowned Best Performance Artists in the 2009 Village Voice annual readers poll, named among 2009’s People of the Year by nytheatre.com, and dubbed the year’s Best Arts Organization by Artists Forum Magazine.

Our 2009 primetime show, Laika Dog in Space, debuted in the Ontological-Hysteric’s Incubator series, garnering amazing reviews. Better yet, the show has been picked up for a six-week run in Chicago in 2011.

Oh, yeah—one more thing: we turned five this year, and our first major benefit raised over $15,000. We might just have to do the same thing again next year. Only completely different.

Rule No. 2:  Don’t be too boastful.

Oh.

Rule No. 3:  Don’t forget anyone. And identify everyone. (“Jane had a baby girl!” might be confusing; “My sister Jane had a baby girl!” isn’t.)

The Ensemble— Christopher Loar, Dan McCoy, Lauren Sharpe, Adam Smith, Lusia Strus, Alicia Harding, Jill Beckman, Desiree Burch, Eevin Hartsough, Joey Rizzolo, Rob Neill, Christopher Borg, Erica Livingston, Kevin R. Free, Ryan Good, Cara Francis, Jacquelyn Landgraf and Jeffrey Cranor— had a baby girl! I mean, they had a productive, creative and exciting year.

The NYNF Alumni and Guest Artists— Bill Coelius, Greg Allen, Lindsay Brandon Hunter, Regie Cabico, Claudia Alick, Heather Kelley, Lori Peeples, Sarah Levy, Chloë Johnson, Jenny Williams, Marta Rainer, Chris Dippel, Joe Basile, Mary Fons, Yolanda Kaye Wilkinson, Connor Kalista, John Pierson, Michael Cyril Creighton, Eliza Burmester, Katrina Toshiko, F Omar Telan, Sharon Greene, Justin Tolley and Molly Flynn—also had a productive and exciting year.

So did our Tech Crew Lauren Parrish, Chris Dierksen, Laura Schlachtmeyer, Meg Bashwiner, Marisa Blankier and Arthur Peters.

And so did my fellow Board of Directors members—Kyle Spencer, Cory Greenberg, Gary Belsky and Brad Rolston. We’re awfully proud to be a part of this dynamic organization that brings so much joy and profundity to so many New Yorkers.

Rule No. 4:  Remember to think about others.

Happy Holidays, Everyone! Here’s to Having Had a Fabulous 2009 and May We All Be Blessed With a Miraculous, Stupendous, Joyful 2010.

Rule No. 5:  Include a photo. Even folks who ignore your letter will appreciate seeing how the fam is looking these days.

With much sincere love and gratitude from the entire New York Neo-Futurist family,

Uncle Jeff

PS – If you did want to give us something—no pressure but, like, if you wanted to—just a little stocking stuffer—you could do so by going to http://www.nynf.org and clicking the big DONATE button.

Gavin Lawrence as Simon Cato in Pure Confidence

A favorite repost of mine from ASSME, now MediaElites.com.

A Theatre Review? Sure, Why Not.

Pure Confidence, now running at the sleek 59 E. 59 (with a great little bar upstairs), is part historical drama about slavery and part sitcom. How these two genres get successfully combined is a mystery. The alchemy’s not perfect but the amalgam holds for two hours and after that it doesn’t matter because you’re out the door on the way home anyway and having an animated discussion about it.

The subject is Simon Cato, a diminutive slave and star jockey in the deep south on the eve of the Civil War. He’s owned by two white children whose father, a lawyer, regularly hires him out to a horse-betting Colonel… continue here, http://mediaelites.com/2009/05/24/assme-takes-in-a-show/

Now that the Cold War is over, maybe Paul Robeson can finally get a little respect

(Originally published in Time Out New York, 1/15/98.)

Jeffrey Stanley is the author of Joe Glory, a script about the Peekskill riots, written for director Barbara Kopple.  “Paul Robeson, A Centennial Retrospective” runs January 16-27 at Film Forum.

Big Fella: Robeson Reconsidered

If Bugs Bunny can have a stamp, why not Paul Robeson?  One of the greatest entertainers of the century, Robeson was a Broadway legend (one of the first black Othellos), an opera singer, a movie star and an outspoken political gadfly at a time when so-called Sambo roles were the norm for mainstream black performers.

Blackballed for his politics, Robeson is only now–on the centennial anniversary of his birth–receiving a measure of the respect that was denied him during his lifetime.  In addition to receiving a posthumous Grammy, he’ll be honored with special events in LA and Chicago, and beginning January 16, Film Forum will screen a retrospective of his films.  But the stamp is just too much to ask:  last month, the idea was rejected despite nearly 90,000 signatures on his behalf.

As Eugene O’Neill’s Emperor Jones–a role for which the Columbia law-school graduate was handpicked by the playwright–Robeson became the first black actor on the white stage to portray a character who was not a stereotype.  Possessed of a mesmerizing baritone purr, he sang in some 20 languages.  And his commitment social justice would shame today’s most committed Hollywood celebs:  in 1933, he gave all his earnings from the film All God’s Chillun Got Wings to Jewish refugees fleeing Nazi Germany.

Between 1924 and 1943, he starred in 11 pictures, including the screen version of The Emperor Jones and black auteur (continue reading…)