Getting people talking....
I can't tell you how pleased I am to finally have our production of GUANTANAMO officially opened. Firstly, because I am quite proud of the production and the exquisite work of director Nick Bowling and our talented cast and design team, but I'm also glad that the doors to our theatre are finally opened for audiences to experience the show...and hopefully respond (through post-show discussions, informal & impromptu debates in the lobby, and of course this blog). Already, GUANTANAMO has generated tremendous attention from the media, and we're proud to have people talking about the ideas of the play (both what they like and what they don't like). Here are some links to a lot of those articles and interviews. I hope you enjoy reading & listening to them....and I hope you'll post your own thoughts here to keep the conversation going.....
PJ Powers
Artistic Director
Chicago Tribune review
Chicago Tribune feature
Chicago Sun-Times feature
Time Out Chicago feature
WBEZ (Chicago Public Radio) feature on "Hello Beautiful"
"Vantage Point" radio feature on WTMX-Chicago
Chicago Sun-Times review
posted by PJ Powers @ 2:03 PM
1 comments
1 Comments:
Saw Guantanimo on Friday night. I hate this kind of theatre. By default it's not dramatic. It lacks action and no one is actually talking to anyone else onstage. . . Julia Childs would tell a young actor, these are not the ingredients of a good night at the theatre. And yet . . . this show totally worked for me. Two big reasons: 1) the subject matter. I found I couldn't turn away, that I couldn't NOT care about what was being said, especially knowing this prison is still open and the UN just last week said, OK you should close this camp. 2)The production rather brilliantly builds the action, as the evidence accumulates, multiplied by our knowledge that years of these guys' lives are bleeding away at the hands of less-than-precise investigation on the part of the arresting countries. And it solves the problem in the text of no one talking to each other, by having them talk _ to us _ big credit to the director and actors for pulling this off in a way that feels on the very natural side of theatrical, but not at all forced. That can be hard to carry off and can really melt down as a convention if the actors don't believe what they're saying 100%. They made me care. So hurrah!
I left the theatre thinking, "Kevin you haven't written your congressman and senators about this, and you need to", because at the end of the day you have to answer the question: once you KNEW, what did you DO? I think any time a play leaves one soaking in a big question, it's done a great job.
Solid work by all, and very functional and interesting design. Great performances by, um . . . don't have my program on me . . . dude on the park bench in Hyde Park, dude in the bar, father with the tea, and prisoner in the center especially. Dude who works out four hours a day, revel in knowing that every night you say that, the average woman in the audience will spend four hours that night talking about your physique. The married men simultaneously thank you for the awkward moments at the bar postshow ("yes dear, he, uh, had a, a uh, very nice body, yes, I suppose")and congratulate you. And the actors among us would be lying if we didn't say that was one of our goals every night we're onstage.
Nick Bowling is a great director (who is DYING to work with me) and it's impressive to see something so different from the Bowling millieu and still so dead on.
My catty comments are mainly about the text: these authors were lazy and unimaginative in the narrow range of people they spoke to for this. More Rumsfeld would have helped. Somewhere out there, there exists a salient and therefore very frightening articulation of why it's a really good thing those guys are in there and it doesn't matter that they aren't charged, etc. This could be updated, this should be updated with new and more balanced perspectives - really, the more we hear the logic articulated by the perpetrators, the easier it is for people to decide for themselves whether or not they want leaders who think that way.
Don Hall puts this quote in his blog:
"I never imagined I would live to see the day when the United States and its satellites would use precisely the same arguments that the apartheid government used for detention without trial. It is disgraceful ... One cannot find strong enough words to condemn what Britain and the United States and some of their allies have accepted." - bishop Desmond Tutu.
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