Angie takes me on a tour of the Beauty Queen set

Had a great opening weekend with lots of people attending Beauty Queen and some great performances turned in by some really talented and skilled actors. Check out the Asheville Citizen-Times review! Good review. The headline is "Delicious staging shows off 'Beauty Queen of Leenane'" and it speaks about the set and technical elements as well as the performances. So, since Actors' Equity Association won't let me show you the performers doing what they do in the show, I thought I'd show you the set! I made Angie take a break from the office and tour me around the set and show me some of the cool things about it. So I hope you'll check it out!

I'm Back!

Hey! Been a bit of a break, but we're getting ready to open up the brand new season. First, I want to share a shameless self promotional video of an interview with a person buying a subscription to our 2009-2010 season. I happened to be in the lobby when this person came in to buy her subscription and I asked if I could whip out the Flip Video Camera (man I love that thing. So handy) and ask her a few questions. She didn't disappoint!

Second, check out this post from Angie Flynn-McIver, director of our first production, Beauty Queen of Leenane. They are two thirds of the way through the rehearsal process. Angie comes home from rehearsals both exhausted and exhilarated and from what I know about the play and the people in the cast, I can totally see why. Check out the cast bios. You'll see some people you will recognize from some of best productions as well as a face you might remember from 1980s TV (She's in the middle of the back row between Bruno and Shorofsky). Perhaps those of you NOT watching the Cosby Show.

Director speaks about rehearsing "Beauty Queen"

I asked Angie Flynn-McIver, director of our first production of the 2009-2010 season, co-founder of NC Stage and my wife of 9 years as of October 14th, to write something about her experience while directing "Beauty Queen". Hope you enjoy and come see it!

Just a collection of thoughts about The Beauty Queen of Leenane as we head into the final week of rehearsal:

Twelve days into rehearsal. We’ve got Monday and Tuesday of the coming week to continue to work scenes and polish moments, then we start running the show, then tech, then first preview the 21st. This thing always happens when I’m directing—by the second day of rehearsal, I’m bone-tired. I don’t know if it’s because of the extra hours at work or the intense focus it takes, but I can’t get enough sleep. The actors say they are having crazy dreams—we’re all being taken on quite a ride by this play.

Here’s some stuff I’ve spent time thinking about the past two weeks:
• Who is lying?
• Who isn’t lying?
• How would the world of the play be different if this lie were true?
• How much sex has the main character had?
• What is the ideal ratio of perceived threat to unquestioned actor safety that can be achieved in front of an audience (in other words, how real can it be before it’s too real?)
• What outfit says “I’ve given up” versus “I may give up soon”?
• How do you pronounce “Leenane”?

Mag and Maureen Folan are mother and daughter. They live together in a small cottage in a small town in Ireland, and they spend almost all of their time together. However, instead of, say, taking up cooking or cross-stitch or volunteering at the church food pantry, their mutual hobby is tormenting each other. Mag nags at Maureen constantly, insisting that she be waited on hand and foot though she’s capable of doing many, if not most, things for herself. Maureen takes petty revenge by only buying cookies her mother hates at the store and leaving lumps in her nutrition drink. Thank god for the funny moments in this play—there are a lot, and they can’t come too often for me!

This play is challenging. It’s different from Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead—that was a very heady play, plus a hell of a lot of blocking and problem-solving. “Beauty Queen” is tough because it's all heart, no head--the main characters are stuck in a terrible relationship, and they are not people you want to spend a lot of time with in real life. And in fact, though their behavior is extreme, I can still see myself in it. I am a mother and I have one; I am a daughter and I have one. I am not the caretaker for any elderly relatives, and I certainly don’t plan to emulate any aspect of the relationship depicted in this play. I do think, though, that anyone can find themselves behaving badly towards those closest to them, indulging in petty comments, striking at the most vulnerable places because we can. There’s a reason this play was an award-winner and has had many, many productions in many countries—the rhythms of domestic annoyance are familiar to us, as familiar as the faces of our loved ones. The way they play out in this story is extreme, even epic, but their structure is repeated in homes of every size and location.

I didn’t go into theatre with the goal of learning about myself, or questioning my own behavior, or analyzing my relationship with my kids or my parents or my husband. But the incredible gift of this kind of work is that it happens anyway. The cast and I are sitting around talking about the play, figuring it out line-by-line, and parallels spring up in my mind, and in the minds of the actors. Everyone has an illustrative story to share, a metaphor, an “oh, yeah, that happened to me”. And when we make these links, we learn. Maybe we identify an aspect of our own interactions that isn’t all it could be, or we think more about kindness, or, frankly, we just become better theatre artists because we’ve expanded our experience.