The blog of North Carolina Stage Company co-founder and Artistic Director, Charlie Flynn-McIver. There is no particular theme or subject matter to which this blog is devoted, save for the musings, observations and thoughts of me, Charlie Flynn-McIver... and some other NC Stage contributors
Hi there - I'm currently in Raleigh for Arts Day (click the link and get involved! we need you!), but wanted to share something from our Managing Director Amanda. I'll be back in Asheville tonight for the Butler performance - I think there are a few tickets left if you haven't seen it! - Charlie
If you've seen our current production of What the Butler Saw, I'm sure you quickly realized that there is no actual butler in Butler. So why the title?
"What the butler saw" refers to a type of peep-show that was common in Britain in the early part of the 20th Century. Essentially, it's early pornography. The viewer looked through a small peephole (or perhaps a keyhole) at a series of photos of a woman undressing - as if he were a butler spying on his mistress.
Here's a photo of an actual "what the butler saw" machine, from Wikipedia (photo by Linda Spashett). If you'd like to see the photos inside, you can do your own Google search!
Joe Orton chose the title deliberately, knowing that it would immediately remind his audience of the voyeuristic peep-show.
Or, as the really excellent website joeorton.org says: "What the Butler Saw appalled and enraged certain audiences with its blatant sexual overtones, attacks on authority and conventional morality via its invitation to view other people’s sexuality and sexual identity from the position of voyeur."
One audience member hit the nail on the head when she told me after the show, "So there is a butler in What the Butler Saw. It's us."
Wednesday, May 5, 2010
So I'm over at Usual Suspects having a drink with Ron Bashford, the director of What the Butler Saw, a few nights ago after a designer run through. It was a rough run-through, what they call a "stumble through" (and in our case that night at some points, a blunder-through) but a lot of the humor came through and a lot of the subversive elements as well. And then Ron and I started talking about the playwright, Joe Orton, and Ron filled me in on some really interesting facts about Orton. I asked him to write some of them down so I could post them in our blog.
Check out the interesting background information below and then get tickets to Butler I. recommend next Friday May 14th, which includes a talkback with the cast after the show.
And I love this 1967 interview with Orton. Cheeky!
If the above video doesn't work for you, see the original at YouTube.
Joe Orton contributed to an exciting working class arts movement that swept through Great Britain in the 1960s. Orton was born in Leicester, England in 1933, and won a scholarship to the Royal Academy of Dramatic Arts in 1951. A promiscuous and openly gay man at a time when homosexuality was actively persecuted by the police, in the mid-1960s Orton was the rising star of an ‘alternative British intelligentsia’. Jailed for the creative defacing of library books, Orton brought his unique perspective and experience with persecution to unveiling the corruption behind the legal, class and religious systems of his time, fearlessly paving the way for other artists to use unconventional humor and diverse understanding to the liberalization of British society.
Orton was murdered by his lover in 1967. What The Butler Saw is Orton's last play, a cross-dressing sex farce set in a psychiatric hospital. Until 1968, plays in Great Britain were officially censored by the Lord Chamberlain. In his work, Orton cleverly undermined efforts to censor his work by using physical humor, double entendres, and seemingly absurd characters who reflect the underlying hypocrisy of the time. What The Butler Saw also goes beyond the limitations of conventional sex farce by hilariously exposing the psychological confusion created by powerful people in their attempts to normalize the behavior of others of differing social, political and sexual backgrounds. Orton's plays are both challenging and generous: he combined insight into his own culture with his desire to undermine societal forces that inhibited personal freedom.
Although we now think of the 1960s as a period of liberalization, Orton was ahead of his time. It was not until a 1975 revival of What The Butler Saw at London's Royal Court Theatre, that the play was truly recognized as a work of genius, several years after an expurgated version of the play was presented on Broadway. Even the Beatles, who broke so many class and artistic barriers, wouldn't follow through with the plan to appear in the screenplay Orton wrote for them, in which the Fab Four appear in bed together at the end!
The website www.joeorton.org has lots of additional information on Orton.
Below is a letter that went out to local folks who might be interested in acting classes from Dusty McKeelan. Also, here's a link to a post with a bunch links to give you a better understanding about Stella Adler and what she stood for. Take a look and come on by if you're interested!
Dear Actor, Director, or Theater Person of Any Sort,
This is an invitation to a Free Open House for professional actor training in conjunction with North Carolina Stage Company. The Open House will take place in the Atrium at The Haywood Park Hotel on Tuesday, March 9th at 8:00 pm, 1 Battery Park Place, mere steps from NC Stage. If you walk up the hill on Walnut Street, cross Haywood Street and turn left, the most direct entrance is just before the curiously named Chocolate Fetish on your right. Google maps measures this walk at 324 feet.
My name is Dusty McKeelan. My wife and I have just moved to Asheville from New York City, where I was on the faculty at the Stella Adler Studio of Acting. Tom Oppenheim, the Artistic Director of the Studio and Stella's grandson, has asked me to create a professional actor training program here in Asheville. He is hoping that we can develop a blueprint for this type of program in an artistically vibrant community other than New York or Los Angeles. Upon my arrival, I began discussing the possibilities for this program with Charlie Flynn-McIver, the Artistic Director at NC Stage. He painted a picture of a very dedicated and talented community of actors who have full-time jobs and full-time families ... and therefore limited time or money for anything other than productions.
As I am sure you all know, the restrictions of a production's rehearsal schedule tend to prevent an actor from deepening his/her relationship to the character, the play, the cast, the crew, and therefore the art of acting. The mission of the Stella Adler Studio is based on the assumption that growth as an actor and growth as a human being are synonymous. We are hoping that this program can provide a venue for all of us to grow as actors and as human beings.
Charlie and I are not in the same situation as the vast majority of actors in the area. He runs a company, and I just moved here. We need your input in order to create a program that will actually work. I realize that this is an unusually verbose invitation, but I am deeply passionate about what actor training can give a person. I want to be sure that I pass along not only my intentions but also the root of those intentions. Artists need to be surrounded and supported by other artists on a regular basis in order to avoid complacency ... or worse, depression. I do not know what this program will look like, but I do know that it has the potential to give us all a place to call our artistic home away from home.
If you have any questions or suggestions, feel free to call or email me (404.966.6336, dusty@stellaadler.com). Also, please forward this information to anyone you think might be interested. Otherwise, I hope to see you all on the 9th!
Hi, everyone. If you are interested in learning more about Stella Adler and the philosophy in which I was trained, check out these links. Stella passed away in 1992 at the age of 91. Although I arrived at her studio too late to have met her, her passion and spirit are the root of my training. The two videos are brief glimpses into the inspiration that Tom Oppenheim, her grandson who gave me rights to the Stella Adler name, has asked me to carry on here in Asheville.
If you are taken aback by the boldness of some of Ms. Adler's statements, remember two things. First, those videos were shot shortly before she passed on (she taught practically until the day she died), and she was simply trying to make the point that acting is not about the actor but the character, the play, and the audience. Second, I am not Stella Adler. I am merely trained in her spirit. I believe that I can translate that spirit into a practical understanding of the craft, and that is why her grandson has entrusted me with her name. Clearly, her methods work. The list of her students goes on and on:
Marlon Brando Robert De Niro Warren Beatty (Honorary Chair) Martin Sheen Benicio Del Toro Kevin Costner John Ritter Christopher Guest Salma Hayek Candice Bergen Melanie Griffith Bryce Dallas Howard Harvey Keitel Mathew Modine Judd Nelson Mark Ruffalo Cybil Shepard Holland Taylor Many others: http://stellaadler.com/alumni.html
If I even could add a list of students of her students, the students of those students, and so on, it would leave out few professional actors. To give you some idea of her impact on the art of acting, check out what Robert De Niro and Marlon Brando had to say:
Marlon Brando on Ms. Adler (Preface to her book, The Art of Acting, compiled and edited by Howard Kissel):
"To me, Stella Adler is much more than a teacher of acting. Through her work she imparts the most valuable kind of information - how to discover the nature of our own emotional mechanics and therefore those of others. She never lent herself to vulgar exploitations, as some other well-known so-called "methods" of acting have done. As a result, her contributions to the theatrical culture have remained largely unknown, unrecognized, and unappreciated.
As far as I know, she was the only American artist who went to Paris to study with Konstantin Stanislavski, who was himself a skilled observer of human behavior and a most prominent figure in Russian theatre. She brugh back to this country a knowledge of his technique and incorporated it in her teaching. Little did she know that her teachings would impact theatrical culture worldwide. Almost all film-making anywhere in the world has been affected by American films, which has been, in turn, influenced by Stella Adler's teachings. She is loved by many and we owe her much.
I am grateful to the inestimable contributions she has made to my life and I feel privileged to have been associated with her and her family professionally and personally throughout my life.
-Marlon Brando"
And finally, if you have some time, I encourage you to watch the American Masters special on Ms. Adler. This documentary gives a detailed account of the history that culminated in today's Stella Adler Studio of Acting. It is divided into six sections so that it could be posted on Youtube:
Thank you all for your interest in the program we are trying to create. I hope that we can pack the Free Open House discussion on March 9th at 8pm. And again, if you have any questions or comments, feel free to contact me directly.
True West is opening up this week and we're really excited to get this one up and running. Scott Treadway and I are having a great time working on stage together. He's a very generous actor and a real joy to hang out with. Also in the cast are Kay Galvin, who you might have seen on any of the various stages around Asheville, and Lance Ball, an actor who has worked with our good friends at Immediate Theatre Project in their production of Copenhagen last year.
Had an invited dress rehearsal on Tuesday night with about 40 people in the audience. It went really well but it's always interesting the first time you perform a play you've been working on in front of people besides the artistic team of the theatre. Sometimes you discover things that are funny that you didn't realize were funny. You hear a laugh and think, "the hell???". Then, when you have a chance to think about it, you realize that it is funny. On the other hand, you do something during performance that consistently made the director and the sound designer laugh and then you do it in front of an audience and...nothin'. So you cut it. Oh well.
The most important aspect of the first audience is to see if the way you've crafted the show makes sense as a whole and that it's impacting an audience the way you intended, those little individual aforementioned moments aside. It allows us to gauge what the audience is noticing and responding to. It let's us punch up those elements that need punching up and get rid of the things that aren't working. So each afternoon this week we'll be gauging the response to the show from several audiences, taking notes and then rehearsing the bits that help us make the show as a whole more meaningful. By Saturday night this process should be finished and then it's official opening night and no more rehearsal during the day except for line brush ups with Scott and the other actors prior to the show.
In other news, I asked Amanda to take a little video tour of the set with Angie, who directed the production. The set was designed by Rob Bowen, whose head of the Department of Dramatic Art at UNCA and construction was headed up by Sylvia Pierce of Scenery Concepts. Enjoy!
True West rehearsals are going well: we've started blocking the show, and had one session of fight choreography with Bill Munoz (thanks, Bill!). I'm really excited about getting this show up on its feet.
While Angie and the actors are in rehearsal, our design team is busy building sets, finding props and costumes, and designing the lights and sound. This week, I'm excited to be able to introduce the designers to you and share some of their process. Our Managing Director Amanda did some quick interviews with our designers, asking them all the same question: What has been the most exciting and/or challenging aspect of working on this production of True West? (In theatre, the most exciting and most challenging thing are often one and the same!).
Check out the interview with the designers in the video below, and check back later this week for interviews with the other designers, plus audio clips from our composer Jason Waggoner!
Here's a photo of an actual "what the butler saw" machine, from Wikipedia (photo by Linda Spashett). If you'd like to see the photos inside, you can do your own Google search!
