Suicide Goes VIRAL at ISU Next Week

Before he leaves Illinois State University, third-year MFA director David Ian Lee is taking on one last show. It's not just any show, either. Instead, Lee is directing a provocative piece from Mac Rogers, a play called Viral that deals with the right to die mixed together with the Youtube generation and a search for sexual satisfaction that comes from unorthodox places. Or, as the show's Facebook page describes it:

"Mac Rogers' Viral is a frank, humane and surprisingly funny look at some very complex issues -- assisted suicide, fetish, dignity and privacy in the age of viral videos, where there’s nothing so twisted that it doesn’t have an audience."

Lee is directing a cast that includes his wife, Karen Sternberg, as Meredith, a woman interested in ending her life for reasons she doesn't care to share. Garrett Douglas, Alex Levy and Katharine Rohrscheib are a trio of misfits eager to witness the moment Meredith shuffles off this mortal coil. And Pete Guither, Assistant Dean in ISU's School of Theatre and Dance, will play Snow, a mysterious "big daddy in the specialized entertainment field."

Plotwise, it's a collision of someone who wants to die, a small group of someones who want to videotape the perfect moment of death, and someone else who has experience with the medium.

David Ian Lee has made video (appropriate, yes?) interviews with his cast available on the Facebook page and lots more info on the show's website, where Lee promises "daily videos, music, essays, interviews, and other content to extend the theatrical experience." One piece of news: Playwright Mac Rogers will participate in a talkback via Skype following the Monday, November 17th performance of Viral. Again, technology and this play are a natural match!

If this edgy little play sounds like your cup of snuff, performances are scheduled for November 17, 18 and 19 at 9 p.m. in Centennial West 202 on the Illinois State University campus. To make reservations, leave a comment on the Viral Facebook page or visit davidianlee.wix.com/viral

IN THE NEXT ROOM (OR THE VIBRATOR PLAY) Opens Thursday at ISU

Sarah Ruhl has become a major player in American theater over the past few years. Since The Clean House in 2004 -- a Susan Smith Blackburn Prize winner and a Pulitzer finalist -- Ruhl has hit the big time with Eurydice, Passion Play and Dead Man's Cell Phone and In the Next Room (or The Vibrator Play), her first play on Broadway. The Vibrator Play was nominated for three Tony Awards, including Best Play, and it, too, was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize.

In each of these plays, Ruhl wraps her poetic, distinctive voice around issues big and small, from love to death, from passion to religion, connection, power, humor and gender politics. Her work is fresh and different, with liberal helpings of fantasy, wit and intelligence and some seriously interesting female characters.

Locally, you could've seen The Clean House at Heartland, Eurydice at the Station Theatre in Urbana, Passion Play in the Center for the Performing Arts at Illinois State University and Dead Man's Cell Phone at Eureka College. Now director David Ian Lee brings In the Next Room (or The Vibrator Play) to the CPA at ISU, as well, completing the Ruhl picture.

In the Next Room is lighter, both in tone and situation, than some of Ruhl's other works, tackling the invention of the vibrator as a medical device to cure hysteria in women in the 19th century. Ruhl's story isn't fact-based in terms of the real inventor. Instead, it gives us the fictional Dr. Givings, who is a proponent of using this new technology to bring relief to his unhappy patients. This is all for the good of science, you understand, or for therapeutic reasons, not erotic or prurient in the least.

But his own wife is quite curious about what exactly is going on behind the door into his office, curious enough to talk to his patients and even to sneak into his exam room when he's not there to see what the brouhaha is about. In fact, the image of Catherine Givings with her ear pressed to the door graced the cover of the published script.

At its heart, The Vibrator Play is about more than just vibrators. It's about freedom and repression, about taking ownership of one's own body, about loosening both literal and figurative stays.

Grad students Natalie Blackman and Colin Lawrence will play the Givings for ISU, with Allison Sokolowski as Mrs. Daldry, one of Dr. Givings' patients, Graham Gusloff as Mr. Daldry, Dario Carrion as a male patient who also benefits from the good doctor's ministrations, Kelly Steik as the doctor's helpful office assistant, and Brandi Jones as a wet nurse who provides a different point of view when Catherine Givings needs it.

Performances of In the Next Room (or The Vibrator Play) begin Thursday, October 2 at the ISU Center for the Performing Arts. For more information on all of ISU's upcoming performances, click here. To find out about buying tickets, click here.

David Ian Lee: The Fun Ride in PERICLES

With The Exonerated just concluded and Mrs. Packard running right now in the Center for the Performing Arts at Illinois State University, ISU's Department of Theatre and Dance has been very busy. Next up: Pericles, the roving Shakespearean (or maybe Shakespearean -- more about that later) adventure play about a man named Pericles who finds himself up and down, lost and found, as he travels through a wild world of possibilities and drama. Second-year MFA directing candidate David Ian Lee is navigating the stormy seas of this Pericles, and I posed a few questions to Lee to see what I could expect from his version of this journey.

As a director, what attracts you to material like Pericles? At its heart, what do you think this play is about? 

Pericles tells the story of a charming, roguish prince who sails from kingdom to kingdom, pursuing adventure and wooing princesses. He’s a bit of a narcissistic twit, who along the way is humbled, falls in love, and becomes a father. And that’s when Fortune chooses to take from Pericles all that he holds dear. This is a story about growing up. It’s about dads and their kids, and that’s what makes it personal for me. Our play is about how children may redeem their parents, and about the responsibility each of us bears for one another. But, also: There are pirates and prostitutes and shipwrecks and swordfights! There’s birth, death, and a couple of rebirths. There’s magic. This is a story set "once upon a time," with all the fun and adventure of an Indiana Jones movie.

Pericles is not among the most familiar or most frequently performed of Shakespeare plays. There are also different theories about how much of the play, if any of it, Shakespeare wrote. Does any of that make a difference in how you approach directing it?

Scholarship suggests that Shakespeare collaborated with the English dramatist George Wilkins on Pericles; we joke in the room that Shakespeare wrote the middle acts, and that Wilkins worked on the (trickier, more erratic) first and final acts. The truth, of course, is that what we recognize as “Shakespeare’s plays” come to us by way of four-hundred years of editing and revision. But we’ve approached the piece the same way we would any other play: How do we best tell this story?

David Ian Lee, director of ISU's Pericles

As written, Pericles is set in ancient times in lands and seas around Greece and Phoenicia, but It's interesting that the modern versions of the places Pericles visits would be in Turkey, Libya and Lebanon. How does the setting inform your production? What are you doing with the period of the play?

There seem to be two prevailing aesthetic preferences when staging Shakespeare today: "In the period" -- which loosely translates as "about 1600ish" – or in a place or time that creates a metaphoric framework for the show, and that’s how we get post-apocalyptic King Lears or Romeo & Juliets set during the American Civil War. We went in a different direction. Our design team created the six different cultures of the play "from the ground up," imagining a fantastical realm of antiquity. Shakespeare traded in cultural appropriation, to be sure, so we didn't concern ourselves with "What would an Antiochian or a Pentapolean look like?" but rather "How would an Elizabethan audience member have received these various exotic cultures, and how do we create worlds that achieve the same effects?" It’s an exciting experiment, and the results are evocative and unique!

This will be your second show in a row (after last semester's Angels in America: Perestroika, performed in ISU's Centennial West 207) where you will be working with the journey and scope of a huge, epic play. This time you have a bit more space in Westhoff, but what do you do as a director to bring alive the scope of an epic play in a small space?

This play brings a whole heap of challenges: Swordfights, dances, songs, music, dumbshows, sailing sequences, mystical sequences… There’s a lot of stuff in Pericles! What’s wonderful about the play as a celebration of theatre is that all the spectacle is in the service of telling the story of a human being. I think that connects Angels and Pericles; both tell big stories that play across epic landscapes, but the plays focus on people in locked combat with forces seemingly greater than they. That’s something I’m drawn to: We are such fragile, imperfect things, but we are capable of grace and greatness.

Finally, what would you like audiences to know before they come to see your PERICLES? What should they expect? 

I love Shakespeare in performance because of the opportunities for audience utilization and interaction. I once took a master class with John Barton, who described the experience of playing Shakespeare as being alone with three hundred of your closest friends. We’ve no "fourth wall" in our production, so we’ll talk to you, but we may also touch or climb on you. Pericles makes for a fun ride!

Thanks, David!

Pericles will be in performance at Westhoff Theatre from April 17 to 26. For information, click here or here.

Angels in America: PERESTROIKA at ISU Starting Thursday

When the first half of Tony Kushner's Angels in America opus, the Millennium Approaches half, was unveiled to audiences in 1992 (in Los Angeles) and 1993 (on Broadway), audiences were stunned. The sweeping nature of the play, covering the past, the present, the future, the nature of change and staying the same, as well as all kinds of issues related to AIDS, homosexuality, Mormons, Jews, Marxism, Ronald Reagan Republicans, Roy Cohn and Joe McCarthy, Ethel Rosenberg, and of course, angels, kept people on the edge of their seats for the entire three hours it took to tell the first half of Kushner's story.

At the end of Millennium Approaches, by the time the character of Prior Walter utters the memorable line, "Very Stephen Spielberg" when an angel crashes through his ceiling, audiences were also desperate to find out what happened to WASPy Prior, who had been diagnosed with AIDS; Louis, the conflicted Jewish boyfriend who had deserted Prior when he became ill; Belize, a friend of Prior's who had been a drag queen but was now a nurse; a closeted Mormon Republican named Joe Pitt who was having trouble suppressing the fact that he was gay; Joe's unhappy wife, pill-popping Harper; Joe's hard-edged mother, Hannah, who came from Salt Lake City to find him; and Roy Cohn, the epitome of evil, a character based on the real-life lawyer and Washington power broker who'd sent the Rosenbergs to the chair and sat at the right hand of Senator Joe McCarthy.

Kushner's vision was huge, funny, fantastic, sad and true, all at once, what with that Angel crashing through the ceiling, a "threshold of revelation" where two strangers' reality overlapped in their dreams; a flaming Hebrew letter that appeared out of nowhere in a hospital room, and an imaginary travel agent named Mr. Lies who took one of the characters to Antarctica.

Angels in America Part II: Perestroika appeared on Broadway about six months after Millennium Approaches, and Kushner was still writing it, trimming it, polishing it till the last minute. This one was even bigger, coming in at four hours. Yes, that's right -- if you wanted the whole Angels story, back-to-back, it was going to take you seven hours. And the scope got even bigger, with Heaven and Hell and a whole phalanx of Angels now in the mix.

It's Perestroika that David Ian Lee is directing for Illinois State University in the intimate space at Centennial West 207, with performances scheduled for November 7, 8, 12, 13, 14, 15, and 16. Will it run four hours? Will we see Roy Cohn in Hell? Will Prior visit Heaven and see Louis's grandmother? Those are some of the variables involved in Tony Kushner's different revisions, along with whether Joe Pitt will go FFN when he strips off his Mormon temple garments, whether there will be projections to tell us the titles of the individual sections of the play, what kind of music or underscoring will be used, and how this production envisions the Perestroika landscape. Will it be a police-taped post-Apocalyptic mess? Look like the basement of the Smithsonian? Or like a giant shipwreck? I've seen all three, as well as one with a big ol' Bethesda Fountain front and center throughout the play and one that sent us to a giant disco inferno.

I have to think Lee's Perestroika will be simply staged, just given the venue. There's no room for rafters full of abandoned furniture or a giant ship's mast and sails crashed on the stage. But that is the beauty of Angels in America. It can be reshaped and reimagined and still come off just as stunning. It's an amazing piece of work.

For ISU, Nick Spindler will play Prior Walter, with Ross Kugman as Louis Ironson, Bryson Thomas as Belize, David Fisch as Joe Pitt, Cydney Moody as Harper Pitt, Kelsey Bunner as Hannah Pitt, Joe Faifer as Roy Cohn, and Emma Dreher as the Angel. Most of them will play other roles, as well, to fill in a character roster that includes the World's Oldest Living Bolshevik, mannequins in a tableau at the Mormon Visitors Center, and the ghost of Ethel Rosenberg. This is complex, difficult work for college-age actors, but also the kind of material they won't get a chance to work with very often.

If you're an actor and you get a chance to take a waltz with Angels in America, no matter when or where, I'm thinking you take it.

Say Hello to HELLO OUT THERE

If you know any of William Saroyan's work, it's probably The Time of Your Life, his 1939 play about the patrons of a low-rent San Francisco bar. Hello Out There, a one act Saroyan wrote in 1941, features the same kind of down-on-their-luck folks, with an unlucky gambler and the small-town girl who tries to help him at the center of the story.

Neither of them is given a name in Saroyan's play, but they're both outsiders, loners, in search of something or someone. The Young Man, the gambler, has been arrested for rape on a trumped-up charge in some Nowheresville town. He begins the play by calling out from his jail cell, hoping to reach someone who will listen. The Young Girl answers -- she's working as a cook at the jail -- and when they talk, she discovers she has something in common with the guy in the cell. But as they forge a connection, forces from outside the jail interrupt, shattering any hope the Young Man and Young Girl have of escaping this dead-end end.

David Ian Lee, who is directing Hello Out There in Centennial West 202 for Illinois State University's School of Theatre and Dance, describes the play as "a love story, but not of the romantic sort; it's a story about two lonely people who learn that we -- all of us -- belong to one another."

He continues, "This play exists in a world that can be cruel and unfair, and some inhabiting this world contribute -- by cowardice, by malice, by short-sightedness -- to the darkness. Others see the world as fixed and oppressive, and that it is their role to suffer. This play is about two people who together discover that the world is changeable, but kindness and hope demand active participation: That's how we shape our world."

And that sounds like pure Saroyan, that our hope of moving into a brighter future depends on kindness and positive action.

Lee directs a cast that includes Arif Yampolsky and Audra Ferguson as the two lonely people, the Young Man and Young Girl, along with Antonio Zhurinskias, Chris Bryant, Janice Kulka and David Zallis.

The production staff includes assistant director Claire Ford, stage manager Rachel Hettrick, fight choreographer Paul Dennhardt, lighting designer Joshua Christ, and sound designer Eli Van Sickel.

This one-act play last approximately 35 minutes and is presented at Centennial West 202 free of charge, with performances Thursday, Friday and Saturday at 7:30 pm and Sunday at 2 pm. It's a chance to see up-and-coming performers and artists and a little-known, powerful script from a Pulitzer Prize winner. Lee is a first-year MFA directing candidate at ISU and this will be the first chance for local audiences to see what he can do.

And I'll leave you with a link to some mood music, with the wonderful John Prine singing "Hello In There." Yes, it's in, not out, and its characters are old, not young, but it, too, is about loneliness and connections. Plus I love slide guitar, so, you know, any excuse...