Saturday, Jan. 21 from 1 to 4 p.m.
Saturday, Jan. 28 from 1 to 3 p.m. (callbacks/snowdate)
at the Wonderstone Gallery, 100 N. Blakely St., Dunmore PA

Auditions will be held in the yoga studio. Sides will be provided.

Roles are open for two men and two women in Common Play Factory’s production of White Matter Surplus by Alicia Grega to be directed by Mark Zdancewicz. Show is scheduled to run the last weekend in March 2017 in the JCC of Scranton Koppelman Auditorium.
White Matter Surplus is a play about liars, lovers and saints, art, gentrification and karma set in Scranton circa 2010.

Cast of characters includes:

Merce “Frisk” Hornbeck: The Junkie. Late 20s/early
30s. Aspiring artist and transient handyman.

Carmine Kuchwara: The Landlord. 50-60s. Lawyer & gallery owner, self-proclaimed big shot from New York City.

Bathsheba Perrone: The Shapeshifter. Late 20s/early 30s. Keeps
reinventing herself as she searches for her purpose and place in the world.

Romona Elizabeth Tsadora: The Servant. Late 40s-50s. Widow in recovery with 20 years sober living a simple life cleaning houses. Sheba’s Aunt.

Email dramastruction@gmail.com for more information or download script at https://newplayexchange.org/plays/15400/white-matter-surplus.

From The Library of Congress:
Kiran Singh Sirah discusses the power and artistry of storytelling as an ancient art form and as the world’s oldest form of communication. He also discusses what he describes as one of the greatest community-building tools that we can use to foster, cultivate and strengthen peace and collaboration in our communities, and will also explore how we might collectively use new storytelling forms in the arenas of peace and community development to help establish a conflict-free world.

http://media.loc.gov/player/flowplayer.commercial.swf?0.20888237669453535

From the National Theatre’s 2016 staging of Cleansed.

Meanwhile, while most everyone in the Scranton theatre community is getting ready for the Fringe kicking off at the end of the month, I’ve finally finshed the third draft of White Matter Surplus.

https://newplayexchange.org/plays/15400/white-matter-surplus

We are ready to move on to the next phase. Submitting while continuing the search for a venue. I still really want to see this one staged before it starts to feel too old.

-ag

What is the responsibility of the writer?

“To speak from a place of genuine emotion, and to evoke in others a sense of humanness.” – Nathaniel Bellows, PEN America interview

Shouldn’t be that hard to do, yet …

It’s not logistically conceivable to take Mariah McCarthy’s class at this time, but I love this bit from her workshop pitch:

“Write the play you want to write.
It’s theatre. It’s already impractical. You might as well do what you want.
And the most resonant work comes from the heart, not from compromising your imagination before you’ve even begun.”

-ag

Inspired by the real life case of convicted and executed murderer Ruth Snyder, Sophie Treadwell’s 1928 play Machinal is on the list of plays under consideration for future production.

The 2014 Broadway revival received four Tony Award nominations, all for design. Here’s a clip – https://youtu.be/_RU63DBTMP4 from the Roundabout production and here is the entire show of a recent production at Savannah College of Art and Design, which at quick glance, appears unusually tolerable. https://youtu.be/obVRAoZkvxA

Here’s a .pdf of the script online: http://www.ciaranhinds.eu/pdf/machinal.pdf

-ag

Just saw Ibsen’s The Master Builder on a D. Trump syllabus because of the apparent parallels an am most intrigued because I’ve never read or seen it.

It is in the public domain and is available via multiple sources online. e.g. http://www.archive.org/stream/themasterbuilder04070gut/mbldr10.txt ; http://www.fullbooks.com/The-Master-Builder1.html ; http://www.gutenberg.org/files/4070/4070-h/4070-h.htm

The work could probably use some modernization in order to be fully accessible to a contemporary lay audience. And without doing extensive research, I’ve already found info on a 2014 Jonathan Demme film of Andre Gregory and Wallace Shawn’s film adaptation. It’s available via the Criterion Collection.

Even without having read it, I’m thinking it might be fun to deconstruct it and put it back together again in a highly visual stage structure, maybe with some improv and/or genre or media fusion under a variation on the title.

If you have thoughts, I’d love to hear them.#homework

And in the meantime, it’s on the CPF list of potential projects which I will post when it becomes legitimately long enough to resemble a list. 😉

-alicia

How hard can it be to find a large, empty space to make plays?

Seems like it should be easy enough.

We’ll work without tech if we have to. We understand this is a money-based economy and nothing is free. We don’t have any money, but we will work to make art. What if we ask the audience to bring their own chairs?

We are creative. We can make things out of no things.

But we need a room with an address where we can invite people to come and sit down around a play and forget they are in a room. 

The search continues …