Happy Thanksgiving!!!

It's Thanksgiving day and the staff of NC Stage are at their respective holiday things. Much like last year and the year before. What's different this year is that we are in rehearsal for a show that opens tomorrow night. The cast of Live From WVL Radio Theatre: It's A Wonderful Life has been rehearsing for the past few weeks and opens tomorrow, Friday November 27th and runs till December 20th. Today is their day off and then we're back for a dress rehearsal Friday afternoon with the opening performance that night.

So I was realizing that our folks in the cast don't get to travel anywhere this Thanksgiving. To some, that might be a blessing. To others, a hardship. But it made me start thinking about traditions. And certainly It's A Wonderful Life makes me think about traditions around the holidays too.

So I asked the cast and crew of our production of IAWL if they would share some holiday food traditions that have had a lasting impact on them. Here's what they sent.

Kathryn Temple, playing Mary Hatch and others:

Butter Mints! There are Butter Families and there are Margarine Families. Whole Milk and 2% Skim families. The kids from the latter try desperately to trade lunches with the kids from former, usually with little or no luck. I was from a Margarine/ Skim Milk / Whole-Wheat/ No-Sugar-Cereal Family whose mother had sworn off cooking early and passed the apron off to my father. So, it was nothing short of a Christmas miracle when my mom busted out a list of four ingredients that at no other time of the year could be found in our kitchen:

Butter
Powdered Sugar
Mint Extract
Green Food Coloring

She blended the exotic ingredients and I stood at her side, barely eye-level with the countertop. She rolled out the ice green confection and I methodically pressed a shot glass into the dough, cutting out quarter-sized mints. She carefully lifted the mints onto waxed paper, and then layered them into gift tins.

This was what Christmas was all about. There was butter in our kitchen. And powdered sugar. In the same place. These were no ordinary communion wafers. This was a holy time, no doubt, and I let those buttery discs melt in my mouth and stain my tongue bright green.


Tiffany Cade, playing Violet Bick, Ma Bailey and Zuzu Bailey and others

When I was a little girl I always dreamed of having a Thanksgiving Dinner just like they do in the movies. You know, everyone well dressed, table nicely set with festive cheer and warm candlelight. It is after all Thanksgiving Dinner. Well, I'm not sure how my family missed the boat on that one, but missed it they did. Ours was more like Thanksgiving Breakfast. Oh we had turkey, and green bean casserole alright; we just ate it at 10am. And I'm not even exaggerating! For generations all the women in my family would begin cooking at 5am, by 10am they were "starving." I tried to convince them that it was an easy fix; just eat a good breakfast and don't start cooking till noon. That idea never quite seemed to catch on. Being the late sleeper that I am, I often missed it all together; waking to find uncles and cousins with food coma setting in, snoring away. By 2pm everyone would be making their way back home. So depressing, I thought. My family does realize it's Thanksgiving Dinner, right?

I haven't spent a single Holiday with my family since I moved away from home in 1993. I love my family dearly, but I choose to go home during other times of the year. I decided I couldn't participate in one more Thanksgiving Breakfast. I'm thrilled to say that my parents are coming to Asheville for Thanksgiving and to see IAWL. For the first time in their lives, they will finally experience a real Thanksgiving Dinner!!!! I'm hoping they'll enjoy it so much that they'll go back home to Louisiana and spread the "tradition!" I love you Mom & Dad! Thanks for all the wonderful stories that you've given me.

PS My 2 favorite Holiday dishes that I can't live without:
Grandma's Mac & Cheese (from scratch and the kind you bake)
Green bean casserole (also from scratch, with real fried onions)


Willie Repoley, playing George Bailey, Harry Bailey and a few others.

Fried dough. Have you ever had this? I’m not kidding. You make a simple dough, let it rise, punch it down, and then pinch off a small amount, form a roughly hand-shaped lump, and drop it in a pan of hot oil. Flip it over when it starts to get all golden brown, and cook the other side.
Now, this is actually fairly common in a number of cultures, I think, but the Italian angle is what was handed down in my family: top the fried dough with red sauce (homemade, of course), dried oregano, and freshly grated parmesan cheese. It is related to a pizza, but the dough—golden, fluffy, slightly chewy—is quite different, and the particular combination of ingredients is not quite like anything else in the world. And earlier this year, I came into possession of my great grandmother Maria’s ladle, so we’ll be making the sauce with the same spoon she used to make sauce back when she and my great grandfather immigrated to this country in 1911.
(What I’m not sure I should admit to is that for the past, oh, twenty years, the family has gathered every year around the making and eating of fried dough, accompanied by the annual viewing of Ernest Saves Christmas. Really. This is a great movie. Maybe I’ll adapt it for a radio play next year if our It’s A Wonderful Life sells poorly.)

Michael MacCauley, playing Clarence the Angel, Bert, Mr. Potter, and others

Mashed potatoes. Sounds simple, I know, but they are part of the trio that is Thanksgiving. My mom made them for years, but now, many years later, I have added my own special touch. I am also from a family that is 100% Irish, so potatoes are mandatory, in whatever form they may appear.

The number of potatoes may vary, depending on how many people there are to serve.

Garlic Mashed Potatoes
Cut potatoes into quarters, and boil for 20 to 25 minutes. Leave skins on. After draining, add 1 stick of butter and milk to desired consistency.
Preheat oven to 450Take 1 clove of garlic covered in olive oil, heat in oven until lightly golden brown, (approximately 20 to 25 minutes). Remove from oven and garlic will easily squeeze out from the skin. Smash, crush, blend garlic into a paste and add to mashed potaoes. Vampires beware!

The following is a fundraising appeal letter from Angie that went out to our mailing list last week. Please take a look and consider a gift to NC Stage. Thanks!

Charlie and I are excited to welcome you to NC Stage's 8th season! There is, as always, a lot going on here--on the Mainstage, in the Catalyst Series, and even off our "campus"--out in the community and the schools.

A few highlights--NC Stage is thrilled to welcome Alexa Hardy, a VISTA (Volunteers in Service To America), who is heading Stages, our education program. Already, Alexa has doubled the program's reach since beginning in this position in August, and she is hard at work contacting schools, community centers, and after-school programs to forge more alliances. We are also proud to announce the launch of LiveWire , a marketing and branding campaign for the performing arts in Asheville that we’ve been working on for the past two years. NC Stage received a $50,000 grant from the Asheville Merchants Fund of the Community Foundation of WNC to fund this project. It involves over 70 performing arts organizations in Buncombe County, from the Asheville Symphony and the Orange Peel to aerial acrobats, hula hoopers, and street performers.

I am writing to ask for your support in two ways this season. First, please make a gift to NC Stage's annual fund. This year, we need to raise $75,500 in individual contributions. Some of our patrons have already made an annual fund gift to NC Stage this year--as Green Room Society members, with their subscriptions, or as part of our Bard-a-Thon fundraiser. Many thanks for these gifts. If you have not yet made your annual fund gift this year, we hope you will sustain your past level of giving, whether that level is $10 or $5,000. To make a donation online, click here.

Second, please come to the theatre, and bring friends. We all know people who keep meaning to come, but play after play comes and goes, and they never quite get here. Can you help us get them through the door? The best way you can support NC Stage is by helping us become a household name with your friends and neighbors, making each play a not-to-be-missed event.

Thank you so much for all of your past support. Your feedback and patronage are helping to make NC Stage a better and better place to share a profound theatrical experience. We are looking forward to sharing NC Stage with you this season!

Best regards,


Angie Flynn-McIver
Producing Director

P.S. For your convenience, we’d be happy to spread out your contribution over several months or a year. If you would like information on paying a pledge in monthly installments, or contributing stock, please call Reggie Ealy at (828) 239-0263, extension 11. Thank you!

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.

A letter to our Bard-a-thon participants

Hey there Bard-a-thon readers/fund raisers!

I wanted to check in with you and say thanks for helping us with this unique and grueling fund raiser for NC Stage. I also want to tell you that we still have some interesting roles available for reading (come on! 4am Titus everyone! It’s gonna raaawk!) so here’s a link to a google doc for info on still available roles. Feel free to send it to anyone you know who might be interested in participating.

Some cool things happening around the event:

I’m setting up a Livestream.com channel for NC Stage and, like last year, the Bard-a-lution will not be televised, but it will be streamed live over the interweb. But, unlike last year, more people will be able to watch at one time and you can also chat with other viewers in real time about what’s going on.

For those of you who do the tweets, I’ll be setting up a live feed from my TweetDeck and I’ve started a hashtag, #bardathon, to track any comments that come through. I’ll have the laptop hooked up to the projector and we can see any tweets that pop up regarding the Bardathon. So feel free to bring your phones, laptops, etc. and join in all the interconnected twittering fun. Come follow us on Twitter at @ncstage

Now to the core matter of this exercise: Raising money!!!

Since this is a fundraiser I thought I’d start a little check in process for all of us to share successes, challenges, tips, etc. as we go around asking our friends, families, stranger to sponsor us. So this letter will be posted on the NC Stage blog and we can all use the comments section to communicate with each other about advice or tips or updates.

First off I hope you are aware of the absolutely fantastic prizes that have been donated for the various categories of highest funds raised. If not, check them out here

Our goal is to raise over $7,000. So let’s do a little math. There are 26 participants so far in this year’s Bard-a-thon. Each participant would need to raise $270 for us to reach that goal. If each person got 14 sponsors at $20 each the goal would be met.

So, you get the idea, right? You can break it apart any way you like but the point is, how do you eat an elephant? One bite at a time!

So you can ask people who will sponsor because they know you. Or you can appeal to someone’s philanthropic nature in general or because they like theatre, the arts or NC Stage in particular. If you’re in need of some talking poins for NC Stage, consider this: NC Stage is a professional, not for profit, 501(c)3 theatre; Contributions are tax deductible; We’ve produced over 30 productions and hired more than 300 artists; Our education program, Stages, has reached over 15,000 students in WNC with residencies and student performances covering subjects from Shakespeare to geometry!; NC Stage has donated thousands of dollars worth of tickets for local charity fundraisers for groups like WNCAP, MANNA Food Bank, YWCA of Asheville, The Mediation Center and Rotary Club of Asheville, , and NC Stage supports other local theatres every year with $14,000 of its own money through the Catalyst Series.

So that’s just a little update and check in. Hope you’ll join me on the blog and thanks again for helping NC Stage with this. It’s a rough time out there but with your help we’ll be able to start things off really well this year.

Charlie

Oh! Hello there! Update and a little presentation.

Whoa, whoa, whoa!!! Where've I been!?! Well I did 2 shows down at Flat Rock Playhouse, we had 2 shows running at NC Stage, the kids have been in summer camp, including JCC summer camp and the Soggy Sneakers preschooler's camp at the NC Arboretum, and a week long trip to the beach with the family. You know what's hard to remember to do? Write blog entries. I don't know how the professional bloggers do it. Oh well. I'm here now and looking forward to writing some more about NC Stage and other stuff. If you're just starving for the day to day info about NC Stage, you can follow the NC Stage Twitter account that's listed to the right on this blog page. I'll get back to some more stuff about producing the season and hopefully get some guest bloggers in here soon. Until then, here is a Keynote (that's the Mac version of Power Point) presentation that I gave to a local economic development think tank. Thought it might be interesting. It's one of the other things that's had my attention recently. Hopefully, it won't be too dry. New season coming up! I'll tell you the plays later.