COME SEE PERICLES!
7:30 PM THURSDAY-SATURDAY
2:00 PM SUNDAY
HALL AUDITORIUM
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@oberlintheater
COME SEE PERICLES!
7:30 PM THURSDAY-SATURDAY
2:00 PM SUNDAY
HALL AUDITORIUM
PERICLES by William Shakespeare Directed by Paul Moser Hall Auditorium December 4, 5, 6 - 7:30pm December 7 - 2pm Shakespeare’s late romance tells the story ...
Oberlin's Puppet History!
Pericles (opening this weekend!) incorporates puppetry into its storytelling. But this isn't the first prominent example of puppetry here...
Oberlin College has certainly been a nexus for puppetry with strings attached to many creative students, professors and alumni, including world-renowned director, Julie Taymor (‘74). This season, students in the Theater Department's main stage show, Pericles, have worked with set designer, Christopher McCollum who built the puppets for Hesperides, Antiochus, and Diana used in the production. With Paul Moser's direction and Holly Handman-Lopez's choreography, students in the cast learned to operate the puppets so that they would be seamlessly integrated into the action of the play. Moser coached the students to animate the puppets with movement at all times to create the illusion of living, breathing beings. Look out for the puppets of Pericles this December 4th-7th! Over the years, many professors, course offerings, and departments have also provided opportunities for students to explore puppetry at Oberlin. In the late 1960s and 70s, the Inter-Arts Department enabled students to engage in a variety of traditional and experimental theater mediums. It was through this department that alumni such as actor and clowning expert, Bill Irwin (‘73) and Julie Taymor trained and performed. In the early 2000s, instructor, Pete Koschnick, taught the Exploration of Puppetry Through Characterization & Construction class in the Theater department, which focused on the history of puppetry as well and design/construction. Within the last five years, students Sarah Jick (‘13), Julia Perez (‘14), and Jasmine Eshkar (‘15) found an avenue to study puppet making through a private reading. One of their puppets, which they affectionately named Wilma the Dragon, is currently displayed in the lobby of the Warner building today. Additionally, Oberlin Professor Emerita of English, Phyllis Gorfain taught and advised many Oberlin students, such as Ms. Taymor, whose independent studies incorporated puppetry, mythology, folklore, and storytelling for over 20 years. Furthermore, Wes Sanders, a former professor of both English and Theater, taught Taymor while she was a student and worked with Herbert Blau in the Inter-arts program. Sanders directed a hugely successful Mainstage production incorporating Japanese Bunraku style puppets into Brechtian drama in the 1970s. He ultimately resigned in 1978 and founded his own company, The Underground Railway Theater, along with Debra Wise, which specialized in puppet theater in the Boston area. While at Oberlin, Julie Taymor sought to expand her educational opportunities by creating her own major entitled “Mythology and Folklore.” Through this major, she studied Javanese shadow puppetry, Indonesian masked dance, and avant-garde theater with director, Herbert Blau. Upon graduating in 1974, she earned a Watson Fellowship that allowed her to continue the study of puppetry and mask work in Japan and Indonesia. Today, she has gained huge popularity for her Tony-award winning direction and costume design of the Broadway musical, The Lion King, yet she has directed numerous other highly-acclaimed operas, plays, and films, often featuring her innovative masks and puppets. Other notable alumni who have done extensive work with puppetry have gone on to form innovative theater companies. Will Weigler (‘82), who was an English Literature major and Theatre minor, began focusing on affecting community change through theater while at Oberlin, and has since gone on to do his doctoral research on that subject. While he was a student here, he worked with Longman Emeritus Professor of English, David Young, to create a performance of poetry by Miroslav Holub incorporating puppetry in King 306. He is a very prominent director and performer today based in Canada. Puppeteer, Blair Thomas (‘85) co-founded Redmoon Theater in Chicago with choreographer, Lauri Macklin in 1990 fusing puppetry and movement. While Thomas no longer works with this group today, they still specialize in creating puppet theater in alternative, public spaces that enable community engagement. Thomas went on to found Blair Thomas and Company in 2002, which focuses on presenting puppetry in more intimate, “living-room” settings. Jon Levin (‘07) and Josh Luxenberg (‘06) made their own experimental theater when they were students at Oberlin and certainly have not stopped producing new, exciting theatrical work beyond college. After graduating, they founded the Brooklyn-based company, Sinking Ship Productions specializing in visual storytelling through puppetry and other mediums. They have premiered large-scale work at the New York International Fringe Festival such as the critically acclaimed Powerhouse (2009) in addition to presenting bi-monthly short-form puppetry shows. Theater artist, Alexis Macnab (‘01) has created exciting new work that often defies genre, including the use of puppetry in live theater. As an actor, dancer, and puppeteer herself, she has performed with groups like Redmoon. She has also adapted and devised various works such as Madeline L’Engle’s A Wrinkle in Time and Antoine de Saint Exupéry’s The Little Prince, which she directed at the Oberlin Summer Theater Festival in collaboration with puppet designer, Anya Kazimierksi. In 2013, she earned an M.F.A. in Directing for the Theater from the California Institute of the Arts. Current Oberlin Theater Professor, Paul Moser has enjoyed puppetry since childhood and later went on to work with the Bread and Puppet Theater company during their residency at Brown. Before teaching at Oberlin, when Moser was the Associate Director at the Indiana Repertory Theatre, he created a huge puppet show adaptation of Charles Dickens’ A Christmas Carol. The show included many puppets ranging from three to thirty feet tall, while one person narrated the story accompanied by a full orchestra; the whole production was in collaboration with the Indianapolis Symphony Orchestra performed in the Circle Theater. Once at Oberlin, Moser continued to incorporate puppetry into his work. He most recently used and designed puppets when he directed Shakespeare’s The Tempest for the Oberlin Summer Theater Festival.
Here are some Pericles rehearsal and tech photos! Check out the show December 4-7 in Hall Auditorium.
Here are some production photos from PROOF! Don't forget to see it TODAY at 2 and 8 and TOMORROW at 2!
PROOF opens tomorrow! View our new trailer and subscribe!
Interview with Pericles Director, Paul Moser!
You should come see Proof this weekend and Pericles in just under a month! Here's an interview with Director Paul Moser about why his version of the Shakespeare classic is different and should be seen by the Oberlin community.
So you have done a lot of work with Shakespeare’s plays. Is this the first time you’ve done Pericles?
This is the first time that I’ve done “Pericles”. I’ve only seen the play performed once, as a grad student at Yale Drama School (w both Chris Noth and Patricia Clarkson in the cast!)
Over the years, I have directed many Shakespeare plays, from comedies like “Twelfth Night” (4Xs) and “Midsummer Night’s Dream” (3xs) to tragedies like “Romeo and Juliet” and “Hamlet”, to histories like “Henry IV” and “Richard II” to problem plays like “Merchant of Venice” and “Measure for Measure”. While the structure and content of these differ a great deal, they all share a continuity of writing style, dramatic action and staging conventions that are distinctly “Shakespearean”; this is not the case with “Pericles”. It is an oddly UN-Shakespearean play in many ways: it is heavily dependent upon narration, the writing style of the first two acts do not match the last three acts, many of the characterizations are extremely two dimensional, it contains multiple spectacular or fantastical episodes, and it’s dual plot story is so episodic that the play defies all Aristotelian unities. This has made it an especially challenging, yet fun and fascinating play to conceptualize for production.
Why did you choose the play?
As Theater faculty, we try to be responsive to the needs and interests of our students. Last year, in an effort to coordinate our season with the AMAM’s realism exhibit, the department presented three realistic plays. “The Promise” – post-Soviet Realism. “Nellie’s” – Contemporary American Realism. And “Ghosts” – the quintessential naturalist play. Several of my students voiced their desire to get away from so much realistic work, and do something else, particularly Shakespeare. And so I tried to think of a fitting project. I was drawn to “Pericles”; in part because it had a lot of women’s roles and an episodic structure that would allow for an ensemble approach. I am also intrigued by plays which attempt to create what Peter Brook called a “Holy Theater” experience – where the original impulse is to draw the audience into a greater awareness of the “invisible” within human condition. Specifically, “Pericles” portrays the role of Providence – or “the miraculous” – as central to human experience; it sprawls over vast space and time, with strong folklore motifs and a heavy reliance upon music, spectacle, and dumb-shows, all framed by unabashed old-fashioned story-telling
What is your concept for this show?
In a nutshell – I might describe my approach to the show as Story-Theater Shakespeare. The more I researched, analyzed and puzzled over this play, the more I saw it as a celebration of story telling rather than as a play per se. Lots of the dialogue just consists of characters providing expositional back-story; but more importantly, a central device of the original script –somewhat unique to Shakespeare - is the inclusion of a narrator figure – John Gower (the author of the first English novel, which included a version of “Apollonius of Tyre” on which “Pericles” is based) who Shakespeare “resurrects” to tell the story himself intermittently as a kind of chorus figure. I decided to adapt and assign this function to the whole ensemble cast, employing a style borrowed from Story-Theater –the improvisation-devised theater pieces originally applied to Grimm’s Fairy Tales, by Paul Sills’ company ( which eventually evolved into Second City) Sill’s techniques were inspired by his mother, Viola Spolin’s actor training methods (which is how I studied acting growing up) : self-narration, actors playing multiple characters, mask work, clowning, theatrical puppetry, and actor-created environments and sound-scapes.
So, rather than creating a theater piece dependent upon an invisible fourth wall, and sophisticated scenery and acting to create an illusion that suspends our disbelief – this relatively low-tech production consists of an ensemble of twelve actors who “tell a story”.
What is your design concept for this show and which orientation of Hall are you using?
The seating for Pericles will be on the stage as I find that both audience and performers appreciate the intimacy of that set-up. The seating is purposely meant to echo the shape of an amphitheater. The set is very simple - composed of concentric circles, drawing from medieval notions of the geometry of the cosmos but also reflecting magic circles of rituals or Jungian notions of mandala. A sail, a few props and changes in lights will aid the actors in establishing the numerous locales.
Are you drawing on inspiration from anything in particular that you’ve found either in your dramaturgical research or elsewhere?
The story of “Pericles, Prince of Tyre” is partially based upon John Gower’s version of the antique story of “Apollonius of Tyre” in Confesso Amantis (1390), still popular in Shakespeare’s time. Even though a quarto version of “Pericles” sold more copies than any other Shakespeare play during the playwright’s lifetime, curiously it was not included by his fellow actors in the first folio of his collected works. This raises the question of whether Shakespeare even wrote “Pericles”, and scholars have continued to dispute its authorship over the years – offering various theories: that Shakespeare didn’t write any of it; that it’s a corrupted script marred by the faulty memory of whoever pirated it for its original printing; that it was co-written by Shakespeare and at least one other playwright (various suspects have been hypothesized); or, that it was a very “early” Shakespeare play that was later resurrected with few mature revisions. Probably some combination of these theories is correct. My study and work on the play leads me to think that he at least co-wrote the last three acts but that his poetry and dramatic sophistication are missing from the first two acts. We will never know. Assuming that Shakespeare had at least some hand in the writing of the play, given the known dates of its first performances, it would have been his first attempt at inventing a new dramatic genre, now usually referred to as his Romances, also including “Cymbeline”, “The Winter’s Tale” and “The Tempest”. The play has different similarities to each of these three final plays.
Shakespeare’s plays are the ultimate Rorschach Inkblot Test; people invariably project themselves and/or their own age’s agendas onto his work – thus, many contemporary scholars present him as a feminist, anti-colonial, multicultural, environmentally-sustainable gender-bender. But some have attempted to interpret Shakespeare’s work within the context of his own biography, time and cultural influences, rather than our own. I have found this critical approach more enlightening, and frankly much more useful to me as a practitioner when interpreting his work. Especially helpful for me, has been research about the Shakespeare family’s Catholicism, and its suppression by a sometimes-violent Anglican regime. F.D. Hoeninger, the editor of the Arden edition of “Pericles”, hypothesized that the play’s peculiar narrative style and episodic structure may be a reflection of an attempt by its author to draw upon the Miracle (or Saint’s) Play tradition, popular entertainments performed at Catholic churches throughout England, from medieval times until the Protestants banned them and many other folk festivities which they considered to be pagan (Celtic) or papish (Catholic). These didactic plays each recounted the lives and miracles of one of the Church’s saints with narration, simple dialogue and characterizations, spectacle, music and a final moral. Miraculous acts of the Saints included surviving shipwrecks, resurrection from near death, relieving populations of famine, experiencing visions of the Virgin Mary, finding lost relics, escaping imprisonment, defending ones virginity against all odds, and astonishing family reunions. These “miracles” all happen over the course of “Pericles”. Theoretically then, Shakespeare borrowed the core of the classical “Apollonius” story with its Greco-Roman (non-Christian) Gods and characters to make the play ostensibly non-religious to get it past the Puritan censors, but in actuality, he was resurrecting a popular outlawed folk tradition in disguise. Maybe. Embracing this notion, this production has both presented various events in the narrative as miraculous, while also trying to incorporate a celebratory festive energy.
How have you utilized puppets in the past and how are you going about incorporating them in this show?
I have used puppets and masks in other productions. For instance, many years ago I directed a theatrical-puppet production of Dicken’s “A Christmas Carol” for the Indianapolis Symphony – utilizing over three dozen puppets ranging in size from three feet to thirty feet. One actor narrated the show (and did all the voices) at a music stand while the entire symphony accompanied the show from behind a scrim. And more recently, my OSTF productions of “A Wrinkle in Time” and “The Tempest” integrated various kinds of puppets.
How would you describe your process of collaborating with the choreographer, the sound designer, and the ensemble for this production?
I’ve worked a lot with both Holly Handman and Sam Fisher, mostly for OSTF; so I know I can trust these guys. They are both very skilled story-tellers, but while I come to theater thru acting, they come to it thru choreography and music. After outlining for them my basic ideas throughout the production, I give them a lot of room to develop and explore their own ideas – before giving them feedback – and they also give me feedback on what I’m doing. We enjoy collaborating.
What departments/classes are relevant to your play?
English. Classics.
Are there any specific organizations you would like us to direct publicity to? (Kendall, etc.)
Kendall, OSTF Shakespeare audience.
PROOF opens this weekend!
The perennial favorite play, Proof, opens this weekend in Little Theater! Take a look at our poster and learn more about the show!
On the eve of her twenty-fifth birthday, Catherine, a troubled young woman, has spent years caring for her brilliant but unstable father, a famous mathematician. Now, following his death, she must deal with her own volatile emotions; the arrival of her estranged sister, Claire; and the attentions of Hal, a former student of her father's who hopes to find valuable work in the notebooks her father left behind. Over the long weekend that follows, a burgeoning romance and the discovery of a mysterious notebook draw Catherine into the most difficult problem of all: How much of her father's madness—or genius—will she inherit? Performances are November 13 at 8, November 14 at 8, November 15 at 2 and 8, and November 16 at 2 in Little Theater. Tickets may be purchased at CTS in Hall Auditorium, Monday-Friday from Noon-5. General Admission: $5 tickets.
THIS WEEKEND: 4000 MILES
Oberlin College Theater Presents 4000 Miles
By Amy Herzog
directed by Abigail Barr
THIS WEEKEND: Thursday, October 9 at 8, Friday, October 10 at 8, Saturday, October 11 at 2 and 8, and Sunday, October 12 at 2.
Little Theater
Tickets: $5, available at CTS in the Lobby of Hall Auditorium, open Noon to 5 PM Monday-Friday. SATELLITE SALES are happening in Warner and Wilder from 12-5 through Friday, check our Facebook for details
After suffering a major loss while he was on a cross-country bike trip, 21 year-old Leo seeks solace from his feisty 91 year-old grandmother Vera in her West Village apartment. Over the course of a single month, these unlikely roommates infuriate, bewilder, and ultimately reach each other. 4000 MILES looks at how two outsiders find their way in today's world.
Come join Oberlin College Theater as we kick of the season of Labseries shows directed by students!
Dessa Rose Auditions
AUDITIONS
Flexible meetings for credit second module of Fall Semester
DESSA ROSE
Based on the novel by Sherley Ann Williams
A musical by Lynne Ahrens and Stephen Flaherty
A Winter Term Project
Performances in Hall Auditorium February 6-9
Directed by Caroline Jackson Smith
Musical Direction by Courtney-Savali A. Andrews
Choreographed by Adenike Sharpley
Monday, September 15 7-10PM
Tuesday, September 16 7-10PM
Wednesday, September 17 7-10PM
There is a movement callback Thursday, September 18 7:30-9PM
Vocal callbacks are held Saturday and Sunday (September 20 & 21)
Please prepare a monologue and acapella song of your choosing.
To hear the music, see a script, or if you need to schedule an alternate audition time, please email Hannah Montgomery, Stage Manager.
SYNOPSIS:
Alabama, 1847: Dessa Rose, a pregnant young Black woman, is on the run after leading a rebellion against her slavers. She escapes to the isolated farm of Ruth Sutton, a white woman deserted by her husband, who uses her land to harbor runaways. Rooted in real historical events, Dessa Rose follows the women as they form an unlikely alliance against the hostile world around them, scheming for freedom and discovering friendship along the way.
AUDITIONS!
Missed your chance to audition for LabSeries shows? You can still audition for 4000 Miles, and Proof at 7-10 tonight in Warner Studio 2!
Tomorrow, Roger Copeland's "The Debris" is auditioning in Studio 3.
And next week, Dessa Rose, the Winter Term Mainstage Musical is holding auditions.
More info can be found in Warner, see you there!
Be social! Come hang out with your friends and eat ice cream!
Current Oberlin students, faculty, and alums are making theater happen this summer.
If you're in the Oberlin area, all the Oberlin Summer Theater Festival shows are now open and free to the public! Details here: http://www.oberlinsummertheaterfestival.com/ In NYC, Professor Justin Emeka's production of Romeo N Juliet is open and free at The Classical Theatre of Harlem! Details here http://www.cthnyc.org/now-playing/productions/ Later this summer in New York, a new play called Ravishing Medusa will go up at the Theater for a New City's Dream Up Festival, with a cast and crew that features 6 Oberlin students and alums! Details here:https://www.indiegogo.com/projects/ravishing-medusa-by-rachel-graf-evans What theater are you up to this summer?
CONGRATS ON GRADUATING, SENIOR OBIES!
Congrats to our seniors on graduating today! Thank you for your artistry, time, wisdom, and efforts in creating so much dynamic theater in classes, productions and beyond! You will be missed. Don't forget to stay in touch!
This Wednesday to Saturday in Little Theater!
Announcing the Oberlin College Theater Season for 2014-15!
We're so excited to share our next season with you! Dates for the shows will be announced shortly.
Come work with us!
Are you interested in Arts Management, Marketing, Publicity, Graphic Design, Public Relations, or Educational Outreach? Then apply to join the Oberlin Theater and Dance Publicity Department! We are looking for highly motivated staff writers and graphic designers who will be PAID to work on publicizing plays, dance concerts, and other exciting events. Please contact [email protected] and [email protected] for more information and for an application.