The fundraising campaign for FAMINE
PLAYS got off to a roaring start at West Hollywood's Normandie Room on
Wedesday night. Mandi Moss raffled off gifts from bar top and NOTE
members Laura Finnegan, Ezra Buzzington and Lisa Clifton did their best
to play pool. 6140productions was pleased with the amount raised and
promise another event soon at Safari Sam's in Hollywood.
LA Weekly Review - Pick of the Week:
PICK ~ FAMINE PLAYS ~ In playwright Richard Caliban’s chilling scenario, the United States is reduced to a desolate wasteland. Victims of an apocalypse of titanic proportion (its nature is never defined), nine isolated survivors traipse across the barren landscape, each gripped by their individual form of madness. The nomads include a former businessman named Fleet (Trevor H. Olsen), blinded by hooligans and now forced to depend on a simple-minded brute named Stub (Monroe Makowsky) for survival; Rosie (Julia Prud’homme), an ex-topless dancer who found Jesus and salvation with the birth of her daughter and who is pursued for her breast milk by a renegade tomboy (Mandi Moss); and Mrs. Klinger (Judith Ann Levitt), a plucky elderly woman caring for her hapless, demented husband (John MacKane). At first the multiple scenarios seem bewildering, but as the play progresses, its various threads coalesce, culminating in an explosive catharsis. Amanda McRaven directs with imagination and insight, capitalizing on multiple opportunities to heighten tension and humor. The production fuses the talents of set designer Jeanine Nicholas, lighting designer Karyn Lawrence and sound designer Corinne Carrillo, who overcome space limitations and project Caliban’s bleak, chaotic vision. Prud’homme, spotlighted in some of the production’s most compelling moments, stands out among a committed ensemble. And Olsen, the brainiest of the characters, creates a dynamic presence as a supercilious intellectual and would-be poet in a society on the brink of extinction. Theatre of NOTE, 1517 N. Cahuenga Blvd., Hlywd.; Thurs.-Sat., 8 p.m.; thru Aug. 4. (323) 856-8611. (Deborah Klugman)
LAist Review of FAMINE PLAYS:
LAist Recommends: The Famine Plays
The new weather systems have hit, possibly due to global warming, and our country is a desert. It's Mad Max in America. It's Firefly/Serenity minus spaceships and western clad. It is The Famine Plays by Richard Caliban.
Part of Theatre of NOTE's "apocalyptic season," this cyberpunk drama is not just about survival and finding water in the desert, but about violence, loneliness and denial. In what other world do people get beat to death as a man continually screams "Walt Whitman!"
"Such things don't happen to nice countries like ours," said Mrs. Klinger, an elderly but strong and mentally persistent character, as she helped her now insane husband walk across the desert. But such things do and can happen to our country, especially in our changing climate. "Bad time to be alive," another character said upon meeting a fellow desert traveler. Indeed, we would not want to live in the world created by Caliban and director Amanda McRaven.
Famine runs 100-minutes without intermission, but goes extremely fast as it is built upon plays within plays (hence the plurality of them title). Scenes of the various miniatures are interwoven into the whole and last anywhere from 5 seconds to 10-minutes. As each mini-play collides into each other, the story turns from laughter (sometimes uncomfortably) to depressing and violent to intriguing and insightful. We recommend it to you because the experience of the play, those linear kinetic events, lead to one of the most perfect endings in theatre we have seen in a long time. It was satisfyingly beautiful.
The Famine Plays are probably not for children as there is nudity and extreme violence. -LAist
BackStage West:
"Director Amanda McRaven brings the play to savage life on Jeanine Nicholas' bleak set; the uncredited costumes seem to decay before our eyes; and the actors gamely plumb the depths of the grueling play." - Neal Weaver, BackStage West
Los Angeles Times:
"Apocalypse can really limit storytelling options: Things are bad, people adapt or they don't. Richard Caliban's grimly comedic "Famine Plays," presented by 6140 Productions and Theatre of NOTE, offers a vivid but narrow vision of a bombed-out America without order, electricity or hope.
On Jeanine Nicholas' torn-up highway set — imagine one of the 110's seamier underpasses — director Amanda McRaven and her team create striking images: A senile old man pulls an empty baby stroller across the detritus-clogged stage; a father gives a golf lesson to his freaked-out son in the middle of a firestorm. Overhead, upside-down umbrella frames, stripped of their protective fabric, form spiky chandeliers for the bare bulbs glaring down on Caliban's refugees. They're all stressed out with nowhere to go.
So far, so bleak. But "Famine Plays' " flavor comes from strong performances that locate the play's no-man's land in a recognizable emotional reality. The engaging Trevor H. Olsen, as the yuppie Fleet who loses his eyes in a skirmish, is the play's Virgil, a blind tour guide whose lacerating irony struggles to keep anguish at bay. Shell-shocked Julia Prud'homme, a recently bereaved mother — her mammaries still tight with milk — finds an unlikely mouth to feed. Meanwhile, Judith Ann Levitt and John MacKane, as long-married senior citizens, offer a sweetly desolate portrait of a matter-of-fact love that can't survive the desolation around it.
Whether you find this impressive acting exercise sustaining for 90 minutes all depends on your taste for end times. Think of "Famine Plays" as a fractured episode of "Survivor," where the immunity idol turns out to be the ability to tolerate an all-too-human awareness of our desperate animal needs." - Charlotte Stoudt, LA Times
LA City Beat Theater Critics Choice: Famine Plays
Following an unspecified catastrophe in the Ohio River Valley, nine survivors scramble for sustenance in Richard Caliban's bleak, occasionally sardonic portrait of extreme duress. The stories gradually interweave, as tenuous alliances form and disappear. Director Amanda McRaven's actors create precise and physically demanding characterizations on Jeanine Nicholas's impressive shambles of a set, and other design components help create the image of a doomed landscape in its final days. A longer version was staged in 1990, but this streamlined production in 90 vivid minutes feels freshly topical in the post-9/11, post-Katrina age. -Don Shirley, LA City Beat
LA Flavorpill Review of Famine Plays:
Mad Max meets Our Town at theatre of NOTE, as its self-described "apocalyptic season" wears on. And, with Richard Caliban's Famine Plays, that whole end-of-the-world thing is no longer a mere metaphor. Thanks to extreme climate change, America, and presumably the whole world, is slowly becoming a harsh desert devoid of resources. The nine characters whose stories unfold on the stage aren't just having trouble coping — they're trying to survive. With humor, political insight, loads of violence and nudity, and a complex but ultimately elegant vignette format, Famine Plays takes unflinching, cautionary stock of a present disguised as the future. LA Flavorpill
THE APOCALYPSE CONTINUES
Theatre of NOTE presents FAMINE PLAYS June 29-August 4, 2007.
Richard Caliban's FAMINE PLAYS is the 3rd production in Theatre of NOTE's 5 play "Apocalyptic Season".
FAMINE PLAYS
by Richard Caliban
directed by Amanda McRaven
with
Michelle Hilyard
Phinneas Kiyomura
Judith Ann Levitt
John MacKane
Monroe Makowsky
Mandi Moss
Trevor H. Olsen
Julia Prud'homme
Camden Toy
After having examined a political apocalypse with Larry Kramer's JUST SAY NO and an emotional apocalypse with Adam Szymkowicz's FOOD FOR FISH, Theatre of NOTE continues its "Apocalyptic Season" by taking a closer look at the potential effects of a cataclysmic event on American lives with Richard Caliban's FAMINE PLAYS.
FAMINE PLAYS is not a one-act series.
In the tradition of Mother Courage and Endgame, Caliban tells the endgame of survival in America. Nine characters are adrift in the desert that has become America: a mother, an orphan, a daughter, a husband and wife, a bus company employee, a wayward son, a business man, and a loner. With social divisions erased and the definition of "being American" meaningless, each character struggles against starvation and loneliness with either violence, denial, continual movement, or stasis. As each journeys across the country, their stories collide and the connections are as arbitrary as the new weather systems -- finding another human can mean death as easily as it does partnership. Ultimately, there is perhaps hope, if the humans left can muster the strength and the desire...
"America has become dangerously complacent about our invulnerability," Says Director Amanda McRaven. "Even after 9-11. The answer is not in raising alert levels to orange, but in looking in ourselves for a vast, ancient reservoir of animal strength and survival instincts. This play asks, what would you REALLY be able to do tomorrow if the bomb dropped and you had literally nothing but yourself, or if you are lucky, the remnants of a family. How would you make it and how would you start over?"
Richard Caliban (Playwright): Richard Caliban has worked as a director and playwright across the country and internationally. He was Artistic Director of the critically acclaimed, award-winning Cucaracha Theatre where he wrote and directed many of his plays over fourteen seasons, including Homo Sapien Shuffle at the Public Theatre, Performance Piece #27 (also at the Vineyard Theatre and the Ilkhom Theatre in Tashkent, Uzbekistan), Budd, A Vast Wreck, Famine Plays (also at the Yale Cabaret), Rodents & Radios (Best Play List 1990--Mel Gussow, New York Times). Under Mr. Caliban's directorship Cucaracha received a 1989 Obie for its achievements as an emerging company. http://web.mac.com/richardcalilban
Amanda McRaven (Director) : Directing credits (partial): California: Macbeth (FUGITIVE Theatre Ensemble), Woof, Daddy (San Francisco Fringe Festival); Orpheus Descending, As You Like It, Polaroid Stories, Mud, And Baby Makes Seven, Playhouse Creatures (UC Irvine). Virginia: Much Ado About Nothing, Henry V, Antony and Cleopatra (American Shakespeare Center); Boston Marriage, Floyd Collins, Romeo and Juliet, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead (Live Arts), A Winter's Tale (Red Umbrella Theatre).
Assistant-Directing credits: Hamlet (South Coast Repertory) with director Daniel Sullivan; Room Service, directed by Mark Rucker, The Merry Wives of Windsor, directed by Kate Buckley (Utah Shakespearean Festival); The Two Gentlemen of Verona (Oregon Shakespeare Festival) and The Clean House (Lincoln Center Theatre), both with director Bill Rauch.
Founder and Artistic Director of FUGITIVE, an ensemble focused on re-igniting the relationship of contemporary theatre to its audience; former director of The Voice Project, a performance and writing ensemble for female inmates; Education Director for The American Shakespeare Center, 2001-2004.
Other: Suzuki, Viewpoints (SITI Company), Commedia Dell'Arte (Reggio Emilia, Italy)
Awards: Elftmann Scholarship for Artistic Excellence; 2008 Fulbright Award: Indigenous performance traditions and contemporary performance in New Zealand.
MFA Directing, UC Irvine, BA English and Drama, University of Virginia.
Thank you for adding Back Stage as a MySpace friend! Keep in touch!
-- Luke,
National Casting Editor,
Back Stage Magazine
BackStage.com: Entertainment industry news and interviews, online casting tools, a searchable talent database, and additional resources and advice for actors, singers, dancers, comedians, models, casting directors, film/theatre crews, and more.
