Season Review: Collage

Season End Review: Designers and Such

I know sometimes it seems like I make it seem like all these shows need is a script, actors and an audience. But obviously that is a lie. There are so many other folks who make these shows possible. Some times they are the true stars of the production, whether it be sets, costumes, lights, props, stage management, dramaturgy, electrics, production management or direction these are the folks who make it more than just some folks talking on stage.

I could break down the designers into new and old, but somehow I know I would mess that up, so lets just thank them on a show by show basis:

Monster
DIRECTED BY: Randy Baker
DESIGNED BY: Debra Kim Sivigny (Set), David C. Ghatan (Lights), Erin Nugent (Costumes), William Burns (Sound), Andrew F. Griffin (Asst. Lighting Design)
STAGE MANAGED BY: Megan Reichelt, Jillian Levine-Sisson (Asst. Stage Manager) ASSISTANT DIRECTOR: Jessie Gallogly
FIGHT CHOREOGRAPHY: Grady Weatherford

Rough Magic
DIRECTED BY: Jenny McConnell Frederick
DESIGNED BY: Eric Grims (Set), Andrew Cissna (Lights), Frank Labovitz (Costumes), Matthew Frederick (Sound), Debra Kim Sivigny (Props), Andrew F. Griffin (Asst. Lighting Design)
DRAMATURGY: Rachel Miller
ASST DIRECTOR: Ryan Taylor
FIGHT CHOREOGRAPHY: Casey Kaleba
STAGE MANAGED BY: Megan Reichelt, Cecilia Cackley (Assistant SM)

References to Salvador Dali Make Me Hot
DIRECTED BY: Shirley Serotsky
DESIGNED BY: Robbie Hayes (Set), Andrew F. Griffen (Lights), Pei Lee (Costumes), Matthew Nielson (Sound), Jean Ann Douglass (Props), Connor Dale (Asst. Lighting Design), Justin Titley (Asst. Set Design)
DRAMATURGY: Jacqueline E. Lawton
STAGE MANAGED BY: Cecilia Cackley and Ashley Hollingshead (Assistant SM)

birds
DIRECTED BY: Wendy McClellan
DESIGNED BY: Jacob S. Muehlhausen (Set), Deb Sullivan (Lights), Debra Kim Sivigny (Costumes), Matthew Nielson (Sound), Andrew F. Griffin (Asst. Lighting Design), Veronica Lancaster(Asst. Set Design)
STAGE MANAGED BY: Viv Woodland
ASST. STAGE MANAGERS: Alex Aaron and Jake Melville

Season End Review: New Faces Part II

Couple of things before I round out the New Faces of Rorschach Review.

The Rorschach Web site has been updated and now has information on all of Season 8. Including information on our rediculously cheap subscriptions. Follow this link and find out what $75 can get you. If you are a student or a senior you get a whole season for just $55. That is cheaper than some of the seats at Studio or Areana or Shakespeare for just one show. Check it out.

Rorschach now has a Myspace Page. Like every other 14 year old girl and hipster in the world we are adding friends left and right. So if you are into that kind of thing and I know many of you are because you are already friends on my own Myspace account, consider giving us an add. The place is still under development but check out the slide show and Tom Waits song I put up. I am so giddy it hurts some times.

Onward! References . . . was sort of our vet heavy show of the season, with only one new performer gracing our stage. But what a find she was! Gabriela Fernandez-Coffey. Look at that sexy woman above. She was a find and a half. Seriously it was good to have some fresh blood in a cast of war weary Rorschach vets.

Conversely, birds was one vet and a lot of new blood. Timmy Getman was surrounded by some fantastic performers in birds.

We were very lucky to get the dynamic duo of Brian Hemmingsen and Nanna Ingvarsson to join us for the summer. There are very few folks who bring as much talent and experience to a show as these two. I don't want to make them sound old, that is the tendancy when you are talking about people who you respect and admire, but they are pros and we are lucky to have had them in our sand box this year.

Joining them were Marissa Molnar and Jjana Valentiner. Not exactly rookies but they are just the kind of artists and performers we love to have up on our stage. Folks willing to take risks. Who are fierce in the way they perform and who know something about hard work and sacrafice.

I am going to be trying to do a show count for everyone who has performed in a Rorschach show very soon. But tomorrow a quick look at the designers and directors who made this year so special.

Season End Review: New Faces Part I

There are many times when people will say to me that Rorschach and many small theaters hire the same folks over and over again. It is hard to get your foot in the door because the company is like a closed shop.

I will be the first to admit that Rorschach does use a lot of great actors in their shows as often as they can. There is a joke in the company about the 5 Timers Club and getting a smoking jacket and a secret hand shake. (Just to remind you all this is a joke and there are no smoking jackets, so stop asking.)

Despite the fact that we use some of the same people over and over again we also are one of the only companies that makes it a point to bring in new talent on a regular basis. Today and tomorrow I will show you the number of new faces that have graced the Rorschach stage over the course of last season.

For instance the picture above from Monster none of those folks had ever been in a Rorschach show before. Out of a cast of 9 only 2 had ever been in a Rorschach show before. So Lily Balsen, Nicky Daval, Jeremy Goren, Tiernan Madorno, Ryan Nealy, Robert Rector, and Jon Reynolds all walked into Rorschach history last fall.

Then there was Rough Magic, where Jenny brought together a group of Rorschach regulars but she also found the right people for the right roles outside of the usual suspects.

New actors to Rorschach included Diana Cherkas, Danny Gavigan, Lee Liebeskind, Dustin Loomis, and Vasanth Santosham.

I think more than any other company in town Rorschach has found the right balance of Company vets and new talent to grace our stages. While other companies of our size (and I mean no disrespect when I say this) pad out their shows with Equity actors and force their regulars into roles that may not be the best fit for them, Rorschach is constantly bringing new faces to our audiences. We are lucky enough to have worked with folks who have found success on the larger DC stages after working with us and hopefully we can intice them back every now and then, but as with so many people I know Rorschach is one of, if not their first professional credit in DC. I hope that continues forever.

I will finish off the new actors tomorrow and then look at the new designers and directors who graced our lives on Friday.

Season End Review: The Trailers

I am going to be spending some time this week, running down some of the things that made this season so special for Rorschach. From our triumphs to our defeats, our sense of tradition and our blazing new trails 2006-2007 has been a Season with a great deal of progress.

Today I am going to post all four of the trailers we did this season. Grady Weatherford made this happen and I have to say I for one could not be more pleased or grateful for his time and talent. We started out not knowing exactly what these would be or whether it was something we could do on a consistent basis. I have heard some people say that the idea is not all that original, but so far no one else in town has been able to do one of these let alone 4 of them.

So please enjoy the walk down memory lane:

Four Shows

Here are those details I have been promising you about the season:

ANNOUNCING SEASON 7!

Rorschach Theatre announces its hotly anticipated SEASON 7, opening on Halloween with a terrifying contemporary adaptation of Frankenstein, an area premiere of Roberto Aguirre Sacasa’s genre-bending meld of Shakespeare’s TEMPEST, comic-book fantasy and contemporary New-York, an area premiere of a Jose Rivera magical realist masterpiece and a world premiere urban fantasy adaptation of a Grimm fairy tale developed by Rorschach Theatre’s Magic in Rough Spaces.


Building on their recent successes Rorschach Theatre has chosen four plays that are uniquely suited to the company’s style and vision, with epic plays whose themes connect past and present, explore the form and purpose of myth and storytelling and focus on dynamic ensemble performances.

Rorschach Theatre is a fierce young company known for their inventive use of space, performances of feverish intensity and a passion for epic stories told in new ways.

MONSTER
BY NEAL BELL
From Mary Shelley’s FRANKENSTEIN
Directed by Randy Baker
Opens Halloween 2006

MONSTER has been hailed as one of the most inventive and frightening adaptations of Frankenstein ever to be put on stage. Drawing parallels between our modern science and morals and those of Shelley's characters, playwright Neal Bell has created a unique and chilling telling of this Gothic Classic. Take away the Hollywood lens, and the story of Victor Frankenstein and his creation becomes a lean, terrifying tale of morality and immortality.

ROUGH MAGIC

BY ROBERTO AGUIRRE-SACASA
Directed by Jenny McConnell Frederick
February 2007
(Washington Premiere)

Caliban has escaped from Prospero's island after being imprisoned for 500 years. On the run from his sadistic and powerful master, he finds himself in modern-day New York where he joins forces with a dramaturg with magical powers and a love-struck lifeguard who might be the child warrior fated to save the world. Taking his cues from many of today’s most popular comic and graphic novel writers like Neil Gaiman (SANDMAN), Bill Willingham (FABLE) and Warren Ellis (PLANETARY), Aguirre-Sacasa, a writer for Marvel Comics and one of America's hottest young playwrights, melds a very real New York with Shakespeare’s THE TEMPEST, creating a modern tale of thrills, chills and drag queen furies.

REFERENCES TO SALVADOR DALI MAKE ME HOT
BY JOSE RIVERA
April/May 2007
(Washington Premiere)

Strange things happen in a moonlit backyard on the edge of the California Desert. The cat talks with a dangerously seductive coyote and the moon plays his violin for a lonely woman awaiting her husband's return from war. When he arrives, broken and distant, the reality of their relationship seems as strange as the apparitions in the desert night. Jose Rivera, a contemporary master of magical realism and the painful and gritty realities of human relationships, has created a suddenly relevant play that explores the scars of war both on those who fight it and those who get left behind.

birds.

BY JENNIFER MAISEL
Directed by Wendy McClellan
July 2007
(World Premiere)

A woman caught between the world of her past and the present she has made for herself falls into the city’s urban underbelly when she gives a homeless man her lover’s coat. A series of unbelievable events are set in motion that are at once are at once magical and at the same time grounded in the realities of modern-day New York. Jennifer Maisel’s adaptation of a Grimm fairytale is a dark circus of lost lives and magic charms where the lives of the homeless man, the prostitute and the stockbroker are inextricably intertwined.

BIRDS was developed by Rorschach Theatre’s MAGIC IN ROUGH SPACES new-play program.

Season 7

Now stop saying I never do anything for you!