Common Play Factory is pleased to announce the cast of our March 2017 production of White Matter Surplus.
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
For the record, Common Play Factory would be honored to stage work in an abandoned power plant, even if only for 17 days.
We love this description of the Fun Palace: “a repurposed space for the arts and sciences that (can) accommodate different fields of creativity and ways of life.”
Luminato Festival spent $2 million dollars making this space accessible for culture that will accommodate 850 artists participating in 162 events drawing more than $600,000 visitors yet it might be torn down after the 17-day festival because … investors are no longer interested in making a long term commitment to community soulwork and cultural philanthropy. They are more interested in the power of the dollar than their power to nurture people, more interested in the financial return than the karmic one.
What can we do to change this?
-ag
Common Play Factory of Scranton 