Childhood trauma can have an enormous impact on the choices we make throughout our adult lives. Alcohol and physical abuse are among the chief causes in our society today. This fictional story incorporates many real experiences and suggests how love, empathy, and the support of others can offer a path to a better future.
The counting of the votes in the US election didn’t even begin until I was already in bed and asleep. The next morning was when I would find out who had gotten the most votes. This is my story of that morning.
In this podcast Inajá Wittkowski, and actor with more than 15 years of acting and improvisation experience, talks about tools to learn flexibility and responsiveness on the stage and in real life.
In this workshop Natalie Bury, a professional dancer, choreographer and actor, guided us in exploring the power of authenticity in movement. Physical authenticity is a powerful means to establish our character’s connection with the audience. As the day progressed, we became more connected to our our vulnerability and the importance of bringing movement out of our authentic self. We gained a better understanding our need to both be seen and not seen. At the end of the day, each of us was more aware of the space we are moving in and the many ways we can use that space.
Today we will chat with Susan Voight, one of the founding members of WUT. Susan is acknowledged as a gifted actor and took on the challenge as director to bring Nobel Prize winning Harold Pinter’s play, “The Dumb Waiter”, to the stage at Pepper Theatre last November.
This month we read a play written by the Norwegian playwright Henrik Ibsen, A Doll’s House, that deals with the fate of a married woman, who, at that time in Norway, lacked reasonable opportunities for self-fulfillment in a male-dominated world. Despite the fact that Ibsen denied it was his intent to write a feminist play, it was a great sensation at the time and caused a “storm of outraged controversy” that went beyond the theater to the world of newspapers and society.
Ibsen had completely rewritten the rules of drama with a realism which was to be adopted by Chekhov and others, and which we see in the theater to this day. He is the most frequently performed dramatist in the world after Shakespeare, and A Doll’s House was the world’s most performed play in 2006.
This workshop gave each of us an amazing opportunity to become a little more aware of the social face (or “mask”) that each of us have unconsciously chosen to present to the outside world. Bogdan Tabacaru, an experienced and talented director, used Sanford Meisner’s teaching on text and improvised scenes to help each of us begin to set aside our mask just a little bit so that we could authentically step into the shoes of vulnerable characters on stage. Each of us left the workshop with a sense of having gained a bit of insight into living more truthfully in our real lives.
This extraordinarily well written play involving family members dealing with deep loss in their individual ways – and in ways that we all can recognize in ourselves and in our own families. The play was adapted to make a successful movie starring Nicole Kidman in 2010.
In this podcast we chated with Jai Mallet, one of the founding members of Wake Up Theater and who provided the inspiration to bring Nobel Prize winning Harold Pinter’s play The Dumb Waiter to the stage.
When we read “Beyond Therapy” in our March play reading meeting, the emotional power of black comedy became very real for all of us. The exaggeration of rather serious issues and the crazy responses of the characters, we all found ourselves laughing constantly at their words and behavior. What was especially fun was to experience how each of us got more and more into our characters as we read the play together – even to the point of laughing, crying, yelling and other physical clues in response to our emotional involvement in the moment.
This is one of Pinter’s earliest plays (1958). Even then, Pinter was an expert at mixing the realistic with the absurd, the personal with the political. When the play opens, two men, Ben and Gus, are waiting in a windowless basement room. They are awaiting instructions for their next assignment. While they wait, their conversation is riddled with conflict and miscommunication. Differences between the two men’s attitudes emerge, yet questions remain. Pinter said of his dramas, “between my lack of biographical data about (the characters) and the ambiguity of what they say lies a territory which is not only worthy of exploration but which it is compulsory to explore.”
Held February 10, 2024
Led by Carolyn Morrow
In this workshop we tuned into and activated the vivid life, potential depth and expressivity of our emotions.
Click on Carolyn’s picture to read more.
