Pirandello’s Henry IV

Happy New Year! Red Bull Theater’s first Revelation Reading for 2012 will be Luigi Pirandello’s Enrique IV, in a new translation by Tom Stoppard, coming up on Monday January 9. This haunting inquiry into madness by the Italian master of illusion sparkles in this new version by a contemporary linguistic virtuoso.

The reading will be directed by Jack O’Brien. There will be a post-reading bull session with Pirandello scholar and translator Roger Oliver.

The brilliant cast for Henry IV includes Richard Easton, John Elison Conlee, Jennifer Ehle, Victor Garber, Darren Goldstein, Aaron Krohn, Mamie Gummer, Patrick Page, Daniel Stewart Sherman, Benjamin Walker, and Paxton Whitehead.

The response to this reading has been overwhelming, and HENRY IV IS SOLD OUT! Please check back for cancellations: tickets will be released for sale if they become available. While there are no guarantees, we are sometimes able to seat patrons on standby. Please come to the theater box office at 416 West 42nd Street one hour prior to the performance to be added to the wait list.

Henry IV
Monday, January 9, 7:30 p.m.
The Mainstage Theater
416 West 42nd Street
New York City

For more information about Red Bull Theater’s Obie-winning Revelation Readings and this season’s full schedule, please click here.

Next up in the Revelation Readings series is Beaumont and Fletcher’s A King and No King, coming up on Monday, January 23. Dont be left out! Click here to reserve your tickets.

The Government Inspector

A Boxing Day treat for Red Bull Theater fans: Gogol’s satire The Government Inspector is coming up in our Revelation Readings series on December 26!

Gogol’s popular play is a comedy of errors, allegedly based on an anecdote told to Gogol by Alexander Pushkin. Gogol had written to his friend asking for inspiration: “Do me a favor; send me some subject, comical or not, but an authentically Russian anecdote. My hand is itching to write a comedy…. Give me a subject and I’ll knock off a comedy in five acts—I promise, funnier than hell. For God’s sake, do it. My mind and stomach are both famished.” Pushkin complied, and the comedy that arose his story is indeed “funnier than hell,” satirizing human greed, stupidity, and the extensive political corruption of Imperial Russia. The play prompted outrage from the press when it was first published, and it was only produced as a result of the personal intervention of Tsar Nicholas I.

Red Bull Theater’s reading will be directed by Artistic Director Jesse Berger and will use a hilarious new adaptation of The Government Inspector by Jeffrey Hatcher.

The wonderful cast for this holiday treat includes Phil Ashby, Laurie Birmingham, Jarlath Conroy, Mathilde Dratwa, Glenn Fleshler, Adam Green, David Greenspan, Marsha Mason, Jesse J. Perez, Everett Quinton, Stephen Spinella, Henry Stram, and Derek Smith, who’s just been announced as a winner of Equity’s Joe A. Callaway Award for his chilling performance as Dog in Red Bull Theater’s production of The Witch of Edmonton last season .

Please join us for this always-timely comedy.  To buy tickets for The Government Inspector, please click here.

The Government Inspector
Monday, December 26, 7:30 p.m.
Theater at St. Clements
423 West 46th Street (between 9th and 10th)
New York City

For more information about Red Bull Theater’s Obie-winning Revelation Readings and this season’s full schedule, please click here.

It’s not too late to remember Red Bull Theater in your year-end charitable giving. Please click here to make a tax-deductible donation and help us keep the rich tradition of classical theater alive in New York. Thank you for your support!

Travesties of Shakespeare

Red Bull Theater fans are in for a special treat on Monday, December 5, as the Revelation Readings series presents “Travesties of Shakespeare,” a talk by John Wolfson, Curator of Rare Books of London’s Globe Theatre.

The tradition of Shakespearean travesties began in the late 1700s, with parodies of the copious annotations of the first “critical editions” of Shakespeare’s plays. Travesties proliferated throughout the Victorian era and were associated with the rich pantomime tradition of the time. The genre was wildly popular: scholar R. Farquharson Sharp traced 59 Shakespearean travesties produced between 1792 and 1895. Mr. Wolfson’s talk will trace the development of the travesty and will feature scenes with Randy Harrison and John Douglas Thompson.

Please join us for this fascinating event!  To buy tickets for Travesties of Shakespeare, please click here.

Travesties of Shakespeare
Monday, December 5, 7:30 p.m.
Theater at St. Clements
423 West 46th Street (between 9th and 10th)
New York City

For more information about Red Bull Theater’s Obie-winning Revelation Readings and this season’s full schedule, please click here.

Next in the Revelation Readings Series: The Shoemaker’s Holiday

On Monday, November 28, Red Bull Theater presents a reading of Thomas Dekker’s charming City comedy, The Shoemaker’s Holiday. Fans will recall that Dekker was one of the co-authors of The Witch of Edmonton, presented last year by Red Bull Theater to rave reviews.

The reading also represents a reunion for many of the wonderful cast members of The Witch of Edmonton. Everett Quinton directs, Sam Tsoutsouvas plays the ebullient Simon Eyre, and fellow Witch alumni include Justin Blanchard, André De Shields, Adam Greene, Christina Pumariega, and Miriam Silverman. Joining them will be Eureka, Lara Knox, Brent Langdon, Roberta Maxwell, Alex Morf, Nomi Tichman, and Margot White. The post-play Bull Session features Professor Jean Howard of Columbia University.

The Shoemaker’s Holiday was first produced in 1599 by The Admiral’s Men and was performed at court before Queen Elizabeth, probably on New Year’s Day, 1600. The play, described by Arthur Kinney as “the first important play about Elizabethan citizen life,” is a lively romantic comedy that also delves into issues of class, social mobility, commerce, and war.

To buy tickets for The Shoemaker’s Holiday, please click here.

The Shoemaker’s Holiday
Monday, November 28, 7:30 p.m.
Theater at St. Clements
423 West 46th Street (between 9th and 10th)
New York City

For more information about Red Bull Theater’s Obie-winning Revelation Readings and this season’s full schedule, please click here.

The Aeneid – PROGRAM NOTES

About the PLAYWRIGHT

Playwright Olivier Kemeid is was one of the founding members and is co-artistic director of the theatre company Trois Tristes Tigres. He has written, among other plays, Bacchanale (2008), created at the Théâtre d’Aujourd’hui and The Aeneid (2007), his adaptation of Virgil’s epic poem, that he directed himself. The play is published in French by Lansman editor, and translated in English by Judith Miller, in German by Frank Heibert and in Hungarian by György Kassai. The Aeneid has been produced or read in France, Belgium, Germany, Hungary and United States. In July 2008, The Aeneid was read at the celebrated Avignon Festival. Olivier Kemeid was also the artistic director of Théâtre Espace Libre in Montreal, from 2006 to 2010.

About the PLAY 

The principle source of this play is Jacques Perret’s very beautiful translation of The Aeneid, which appeared in 1977 in a collection of the Universités de France, under the patronage of the Guillaume Budé Association. It was subsequently published in 1991 by Gallimard.

The play was written during a writer’s residency, made possible through a grant from the Conseil des arts et des lettres du Québec [The Quebec Arts Council] at the Centre national des écritures du spectacle (CNES) [National Center for Theatre Writing] at the Chartreuse of Villeneuve-lez-Avignon, France, in 2007. The author also had the opportunity to participate in a workshop at the Centre des auteurs dramatiques (CEAD) [Center for Playwrights] in Montreal in 2007. 

From the PLAYWRIGHT

In Aeneus’s destiny – the man who must leave Troy in hopes of finding a country for his young son – I kept seeing the trajectory of my grandfather, Charles Kemeid, an Egyptian of Lebanese descent who was forced to leave Cairo in 1952 in the wake of the rioting and fires that led to nationalist revolution.  Like my family, Aeneus and his companions are exiled by force, they fight to survive, they often want to give up.  They know they are condemned to perpetual exile, but they look for a stopping place for their children.  Not for them, it’s already too late.

Two thousand years later, I still hear the moving song of that attempt to establish a just and new State, one delivered from old animosities, delivered from the cycle of revenge.

“We will never sing alone, for in the woods of human forests everything echoes.” Virgil, The Aeneid

– Olivier Kemeid

From the DIRECTOR

Olivier Kemeid has brought us an epic for our time. He tells the story of a contemporary Aeneas, a searcher whose fate may be in his own hands, a modern Dido (Elissa) who struggles to survive as a powerless woman in a hostile culture, a practical but majestic Lavinia, who combines competency and empathy, and an Anchises and Creusa who guide from the Elysium Fields.  These all echo Virgil, but also speak directly to us and our constantly shifting world, teetering between violence and freedom, individual identity and ancestry.  To me, the expanse of the story cries out for song and choreography, so tonight we are sketching in some of the music and finding its thread through the piece.

Thank you for joining us for our first reading of The Aeneid.  I hope you will return for our In-The-Raw workshop production later in our 2011-2012 Season, when the play will be accompanied by a full musical score and movement choreography.


                                                                  -Kay Matschullat

Exit, Pursued by a Bear – PROGRAM NOTES

About the PLAYWRIGHT

Lauren Gunderson received her MFA from NYU, her BA from Emory, and is an NYU Reynolds Fellow in Social Entrepreneurship. Her 2011, 3-city rolling world premiere of Exit, Pursued By A Bear, developed in PF’s Rough Reading series in 2010, continues across the country. Rock Creek: Southern Gothic was featured in the Bay Area Playwrights Festival 2011. Her play Silent Sky premiered at South Coast Rep this April, and will run at Marin Theatre Company next year. Emilie: La Marquise Du Chatelet Defends Her Tonight was commissioned and premiered at South Coast Rep in 2009, now published by Samuel French and running across the country. Fire Work was developed at The O’Neill National Playwrights Conference, and is a 2011 winner for Aurora Theatre’s Global Age Project. Her first musical for The Kennedy Center, The Amazing Adventures of Dr. Wonderful and Her Dog!, opens this fall in DC. She is commissioned for 2 musicals with The Kennedy Center, a musical with Harry Connick Jr., and new plays for South Coast Rep and SF Playhouse. She has developed plays with Second Stage and Primary Stages in NYC, New Rep in Boston, Playwrights Foundation, Crowded Fire, Aurora Theatre, and The Magic Theatre in San Francisco, Kitchen Dog Theatre in Dallas, Synchronicity, Actor Express and Horizon Theatre in Atlanta, JAW/West in Portland, WORDBridge, Brave New Works, and others. She received a Sloan Science Script Award (2008) for her screenplay Grand Unification. She teachers and speaks on the intersection of science and theatre, and writes for The Huffington Post. She is currently developing a television series for MTV about science fairs. LaurenGunderson.com

About the PLAY

To me, the stage direction (exit, pursued by bear) is hilarious because of its direct simplicity.

Shakespeare: No really. I want a bear to chase him offstage.
Producer: You want a – ?
Shakespeare: Bear. Yeah. A real one.
Producer: Uhh…
Shakespeare: Trust me, it’s gonna be awesome.
Producer: (long pause) Let’s do this thing.

This is a play I’ve always wanted to write – a violent play that glitters. A play that calls out the insipid denigration of women in America by laughing at idiots… before leaving them for dead. The moral of the story is “freedom at all costs”, but the play has “flexible” morals. This play is mean and beautiful, uncalled for and giddy, feminine and burly. The play equates things that aren’t the same: women=deer, National Geographic Magazine=feminism, commitment=Clorox, freedom=karaoke. The aesthetic of Exit, Pursued By A Bear is part I Love Lucy, part Jacobean revenge tragedy, part feminist manifesto, part beautiful ballet, part nature special, and part 80’s power ballad. I love my home-state of Georgia, and its mountains (like this play) are rough, worn, lush and vibrant… and yes, there’re bears in both.

Based on The Winter’s Tale, Bear shifts the category of “Jacobean revenge comedy” to “modern revenge comedy.” As Nan says, “Revenge is a core American value, I just don’t want to hurt anybody.” As Wendy Wasserstein says, “”Humor masks a lot of anger, and it’s a means of breaking up others’ pretenses and of not being pretentious yourself.”
The Winter’s Tale is a strange play, one of Shakespeare’s last. The first half is vicious and full of dread and injustice. The second half is a rom-com. It’s this blending of tones (delightful and dreadful) and structure (drama and comedy) that Bear attempts to echo. The characters in Bear do not know that they’re in a comedy. The threat of violence is charming, until its not. And here’s a spoiler: whereas Shakespeare ends his comedies with a marriage and song, Bear ends with a road trip and karaoke.

This play is full of contradictions and juxtapositions – humor about serious things, the Southern and the Shakespearean, love and hate and violence and justice and bears and karaoke. The structure is anxious and self-correcting, the world is hopeful and hopeless, there’s grandiosity and the achingly trashy. But that is real life exactly. So that is what I wanted this play to expose. In a confusing, upturned world, what is clear is that good friends, self love, and high standards save the day – and maybe save the world.

– LAUREN GUNDERSON

Revelation Readings Series Continues with “The Aeneid”

On Monday night, November 7, Red Bull Theater is delighted to present a reading of The Aeneid, a new play by Olivier Kemeid inspired by Virgil’s epic poem. Translated from the French by Judith G. Miller, this powerful work transports Aeneas’s search for a homeland into the modern world of Middle-Eastern revolution.

Director Kay Matschullat tells us that The Aeneid “had this uncanny resonance of the Arab Spring when I first read it. Then I found out Olivier had based it on his grandfather’s emergency exodus from Egypt in the 1950’s, so it was soulfully linked. Because he has based his story of Aeneas on his grandfather, it has a combination of the intimate and the epic that is my favorite landscape, and I can’t wait to work with actors and singers to bring it to the stage.

“I knew the material would appeal to Duncan Sheik, and he did immediately agree to compose the score. We both recognized that some of the moments needed to be sung, and overall it called for an abundance of underscoring. He has now lyricized some of Olivier’s text, so we have songs when appropriate, and his underscoring will drive the story. The Aeneid is in places like an action movie, and the music and sound will make the episodes flow at times and roar at others.”

A VIP reception will be held at The M Club, 450 West 42nd Street, from 6:00-7:00. Please click here for tickets.

The Aeneid stars Michael Cerveris, Estelle Parsons, Mary Bacon, Mia Barron, Aysan Celik, Sevan Greene, Tommy Shrider, Matt C. Webb, and Rasha Zamamiri. Music by Duncan Sheik.

To buy tickets for this reading of The Aeneid, please click here.

The Aeneid
Monday, November 7, 7:30 p.m.
Theater at St. Clements
423 West 46th Street (between 9th and 10th)
New York City

For more information about Red Bull Theater’s Obie-winning Revelation Readings and this season’s full schedule, please click here.

Exit, Pursued By a Bear

On Halloween night, Red Bull Theater has a special treat for you: a reading of the new revenge comedy, Exit, Pursued by a Bear. The play is a razor-sharp feminist power-ballad with a Jacobean twist – perfect for this season of surprises.

Exit, Pursued by a Bear is set in the North Georgian mountains. This setting, according to playwright Lauren Gunderson, provided “a natural place for me to release a comedic voice, a fast voice, a voice that is acutely Southern but at the same time universal.”

Directed by Jackson Gay, Exit, Pursued by a Bear features Cassie Beck, Patrick Jones, Celia Keenan-Bolger, Pedro Pascal, and Lauren Gunderson.

See you on Halloween!

–Laura Brown–

Exit, Pursued by a Bear
Monday, October 31, 7:30 p.m.
Theater at St. Clements
423 West 46^th Street (between 9^th and 10^th)
New York City

To buy tickets for this reading of Exit, Pursued by a Bear, please click here.

For more information about Red Bull Theater’s Obie-winning Revelation Readings and this season’s full schedule, please click here.

Classical Acting Intensive This Saturday

Red Bull Theater offers one of its wildly popular classical acting intensives this Saturday, October 22. The full-day session, “Acting the Classical Audition,” focuses on voice and text, as well as monologue preparation. Instructors include Heidi Griffiths, Stuart Howard, Kate Wilson, and Red Bull Theater’s Artistic Director Jesse Berger.

A second section of the intensive has been added due to popular demand. Slots are going fast! Click here to enroll.

Future sessions in this series will include

Living the Language (January 28-29)

Creating the Character (May 11-13)

Setting the Scene (July 16-19)

Click here for more information about these intensives and Red Bull Theater’s other educational initiatives.

See you Saturday!

Program notes from VOLPONE

About The Playwright
Aside from Christopher Marlowe and William Shakespeare, Ben Jonson was the most influential dramatist of the English Renaissance. Born on 11 June 1572, probably in or near London, Jonson began his literary career as both an actor and playwright. In 1597, he was imprisoned for collaborating with Thomas Nashe on The Isle of Dogs, and the following year was convicted of killing Gabriel Spencer in a duel. In prison, he converted to Roman Catholicism. Between 1599 and 1601, he participated in the Poets’ War, satirizing Shakespeare, Marston, and Dekker, and criticizing their approaches to drama. This did not, however, prevent him from also joining together with Shakespeare, Marston, and Chapman, in the wake of the failed Essex revolt in 1601, to assemble a volume of poems appended to Robert Chester’s Love’s Martyr.
Throughout his career he wrote for both public and private theaters, offering some of his best pieces, such as Volpone and The Alchemist, to Shakespeare’s company. Between 1604 and 1625, he became the chief masque writer of the Jacobean court, although he was imprisoned again in 1605 for his part in mocking James I and his entourage in Eastward Ho. Jonson’s 1616 publication of his First Folio became a model for the Shakespeare First Folio of 1623, to which he contributed two dedicatory poems. Although he wrote in several dramatic genres, including tragedy and history, he is primarily known today for four comedies: Volpone (1606), Epicene (1609/10), The Alchemist (1610), and Bartholomew Fair (1614). He suffered a paralytic stroke in 1628 and lived on in a diminished state until he died on 6 August 1637. His greatest achievement in drama was to invent a hard-edged urban satire that posed an alternative to Shakespearean romantic comedy.

About the Play
Volpone, or The Fox, is generally considered the greatest non-Shakespearean comedy of the English Renaissance. Designed to be a shocking and even brutal play that tested the very meaning of comedy, it was an instant success. In its main plot, Volpone, a Venetian magnifico, with the assistance of Mosca, his parasite, fool Voltore (an advocate), Corbaccio (the old father of Bonario), and Corvino (a merchant married to Celia) into giving him gifts in expectation of being made his heirs.
Volpone’s scheme works so well that the doddering Corbaccio promises to disinherit his son, making Volpone his heir, and the jealous merchant Corvino offers his wife to comfort the ailing magnifico. Yet the plot falters when Bonario rescues Celia from rape by Volpone and has him arraigned, until Mosca preserves the swindle: he has Voltore accuse Bonario of attacking his father and characterizes Celia as a whore, winning a counter-suit against them. To support his lies, Corbaccio, Corvino and even Lady Would-Be perjure themselves as witnesses.
Wanting to experience the complete humiliation of the legacy hunters, Volpone has Mosca tell them that he has died and made Mosca his heir. Outraged, Voltore re-opens the case he had won, admitting perjury, until Volpone (who stands by in disguise) secretly convinces him that all this has only been a test, at which point Voltore pretends to have been demonically possessed. Then, Mosca – springing what he calls “the fox trap” – turns on Volpone, refusing to acknowledge that he is still alive until he agrees to split his wealth. But rather than capitulate, Volpone reveals his identity. As a result, he is sentenced by the court to be confined to a hospital for incurable diseases and his parasite is banished to the galleys.
Among the play’s many sources is the beast fable of the fox (Volpone) who pretends to be dying in order to attract predatory birds–vulture (Voltore), raven (Corbaccio), and crow (Corvino)–only to prey on them.
Volpone was first performed by the King’s Men (the company to which Shakespeare belonged) in 1606 at the Globe Theatre. The comedy remained a staple of the English repertoire until the 1770’s, when its bawdy cynicism, not to mention Jonson’s Latinate allusions, fell out of favor.
But beginning in 1921 with the first major English revival, the twentieth century has adored the play. The notion of two con artists outwitting the world and then each other has had vast popularity. Here are just a few of the productions:
1928: Broadway. Produced by the Theater Guild and found to be “morally objectionable”
1930: Broadway. Sanford Meisner and Clifford Odets in minor roles
1947: Broadway. Donald Wolfit directed and played Volpone
1948: City Center production starring and adapted by Jose Ferrer
1957: French production directed by Jean-Louis Barrault
1976: Broadway. Sly Fox. an adaptation by Larry Gelbart starring George C. Scott
1995/6: Olivier Theatre, U.K. Directed by Mathew Warchus, with Michael Gambon as Volpone and Simon Russell Beale as Mosca
Influences of the plot are many, stretching from Puccini’s opera Gianni Schicchi in 1918 to the Steve Martin film and Broadway musical Dirty Rotten Scoundrels.
– James Bednarz, George Mayer, Heather Violanti, Dramaturgs