Two separate readers sent me two separate theater news items regarding Long Wharf Theatre Associate Artistic Director Eric Ting.

One is about Berkeley Rep’s elaborate new new-works development extravaganza, The Ground Floor, which will encompass 13 workshop projects in a single month. Eric Ting received one of dozens of Ground Floor residencies, and he’ll be residing near such other leading lights as Julia Cho, David Edgar, Amy Freen, Marcus Gardley, Richard Montoya, Lynn Nottage, Octavio Solvis and Rinne Groff (to name just a few, and specifically some of the artists’ whom New Haven theatergoers may recognize as having had works done at Yale Rep or Long Wharf.)

Ground Floor will take over a newly converted warehouse space in West Berkeley and let these accomplished artists run wild. Not all the projects will necessarily result in a public reading or performance.

Ting is attached to a new Meiyin Wang project, motherland/foreign relation (we all here, why you never call?) Ground Floor ground rules are here.

http://berkeleyrep.org/about/groundfloor.asp

The other Eric Ting item is more current, a review by Hilton Als in the April 16 issue of The New Yorker of a Jackie Sibblies Drury play Ting directed, We Are Proud to Present a Presentation About the Herero of Namibia, Formerly Known as South-West Africa, From the German Sudwestafrika, Between the Years 1884-1915.

It’s a sweet review for a director to get. Als writes:

The show provides a thrilling opportunity to see both a serious new talent developing her voice and what an inspiring director can do to encourage it. … Ting is a magician who doesn’t have to pull anything out a hat; it’s all there in the script. What he’s terrific at is making stage pcitures that not only frame Drury’s big thoughts and bigger bigger imagination but ground them so that the actors can take off.

The full review is here.

We Are Proud to Present… runs at the Victory Gardens Theater. Details here.

Ting is shown discussing the play in a series of videos on the website. I’ve embedded one above.

Netflix thinks I’ll like Macbeth because it knows I like Monty Python’s Flying Circus. But it doesn’t mention, say, Strindberg in the context of me liking Bergman.

What does Monty Python have to do with Shakespeare? Well, John cleese appeared in a TV production of The Taming of the Shrew, and the Python show was stylistically beholden to one of the most influential stage shows of the past 60 years, Beyond the Fringe. One of the founding members of Beyond the Fringe was Jonathan miller, who directed a bunch of the bard’s other plays for the bbc.

Every once in  a while I dip into the New Arrivals section of Netflix to see what’s of special appeal to the the theater-minded. Here are 30 such titles:

Alleged: A more family-friendly, and more historically accurate version of Inherit the Wind, with Brian Dennehy as Clarence Darrow.

American—The Bill Hicks Story. 2010 documentary about the iconoclastic stand-up heir to Lenny Bruce, who proved it’s still possible to provoke and shock a live audience with concepts, not just blue language.

The Arbor: Experimental biographical film based on the experimental work of playwright Andrea Dunbar, in which actors lip synch to interviews with Dunbar’s family.

Being Elmo: A Puppeteer’s Journey. Documentary about Kevin Clash, who also published a muppety memoir last year.

The Black Power Mixtape—1967-1975: Archived meditations on the Black Power movement as it happened, featured some of the great speakers of the century, plus Broadway heavyweight Harry Belafonte.

Blank City—New Cinema No Wave New York: Doc about the underground film movement of the 1980s, a lot of which came out of the Off Broadway and performance art scenes.

The Captains: The Star Trek captains, that is, in a documentary directed by the first of them, William Shatner. Most of these actors have impressive theater backgrounds, especially RSC member Patrick Stewart.

Certifiably Jonathan: Jonathan Winters plays his contemporary unhinged self, obsessed with becoming a famous painter.

Circo: A modern real-life save-the-family-circus saga.

Conan O’Brien Can’t Stop: The live stage side of the writer-turned-talk-show-host. Sidekick Andy Richter, of course, first hit it big Off Broadway as Alice in the Brady Bunch Live.

Doctor Who: The Christopher Eccleston and David Tennant versions (aka Doctors Nine and Ten). Both Eccleston and Tennant have long British stage resumes, and Tennant even interrupted his film career at its height in order to play Hamlet and other roles with the Royal Shakespeare Company.

Dumbstruck: documentary about ventriloquism.

Eating Out—Drama Camp: Queer frolics at Dick Dickey’s Drama Camp, with the comic emphasis on Camp, Drama, and dick.

Limelight: The decline of a legendary New York nightclub owner.

Magic Trip: Lest we forget that the impetus for Ken Kesey’s cross-country bus trip was a discussion which began when he came to New York to see the Broadway production of the stage version of One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest. It notes right off the bat that Kesey wanted to be an actor, magician or ventriloquist rather than a writer.

Memphis the Musical: Last year’s filmed performance of the Broadway show, which screened for a few days as a special cinema event.

A  Midsummer Night’s Dream: The 1996 Adrian Noble version, well-spoken but slow, and low-budget.

The Perfect Host: The creepy side of David Hyde Pierce.

Phil Ochs—There But for Fortune. Just last week, a friend opined that Ochs was overdue for one of those jukebox biomusicals. This 2010 documentary will have to suffice for now. Ochs’ best songs had a stand-up comedy pacing and a confrontational theatrical style. Who could ever play him?

Queen to Play: Kevin Kline as a chessmaster.

Rango: Johnny Depp as a cultured chameleon in the Wild West who, in a crisis, screams: “Burn everything! Except Shakespeare!” and converses with an ill-fated armadillo dressed like Don Quixote.

Reel Injun: Documentary about film stereotypes of Native Americans, caricatures inherited from decades of similar caricatures in literature and stage.

Rescue Me: Seven seasons. Denis Leary was a working actor in Boston before his MTV stand-up bits typed him as a comedian. With this show, he found the middle ground and pulled a lot of fine stand-up comics/actors in with him.

Saturday Night Live: The 2010s. The final “s” in the title is unnecessary. Only the 2011 season (Season 36) is included. Elton John, Helen Mirren and Paul Rudd are among the hosts.

Spork: Teen comedy about a high school dance showcase.

To Die Like a Man: A drag queen in despair finds an enchanted forest.

The Topp Twins—Untouchable Girls. The musical comedy sister act from New Zealand is profiled.

The Trip: Steve Coogan and Rob Brydon as actors on a gourmet food tour, like Sideways with drama and food instead of literature and  wine. Director Michael Winterbottom, as ever, brings a sense of looseness and improve to the endeavor. Worth it for the dueling Michael Caine impressions.

United States of Tara: Would Toni Collette’s quickchange personality transformations be more interesting as a live stage exercise? I find this show to be an actor’s vanity exercise and little else.

The Wavy Gravy Movie—Saint Misbehaving: The Woodstock mascot and performance artist/poet/clown gets a documentary.

Barry McGuire (a veteran of the original Broadway production of Hair) played Peter in this 1978 musical by Jimmy & Carol Owens, about the resurrection of Jesus. So does that make McGuire’s solo ’60s hit “The Eve of Destruction” a second-coming riff?

The whole freakin’ Witness soundtrack can be found on YouTube. The Jimmy & Carol Owens website is here.

From an excellent anthology of F.B. Opper’s century-old Happy Hooligan comic strips, published by NBM’s Forever Nuts Classic Screwball Strips series and edited by Jeffrey Lindenblatt.

The Irish Literary Landscape from International Festival of Arts & on Vimeo.

Arts & Ideas got into the podcast game a couple of years ago, releasing audio versions of various lectures and discussions held during recent festivals.
Having just announced its 2012 festival, A&I recently posted two new podcasts with content from last year’s event, some of it relevant to this year’s:

“How Pleasure Works” is a talk by Yale Psychology Professor Paul Bloom. The stated theme of the 2012 festival is “Serious Fun,” and one of the scheduled “Ideas” talks will feature Tamar Gendler discussing “Five Ancient Secrets to Happiness and the Good Life” (June 17 at Yale Art Gallery).

“The Irish Literary Landscape” (embedded above) is a discussion between Colm Toibin, the esteemed novelist and short story writer and Belinda McKeon, a novelist, playwright and curator of poetry festivals.

McKeon reads from her first novel, Solace, set in Ireland (with the author acknowledging how much has changed in that country in just the past few years).

Toibin opens his reading, of the short story “Two Women” (from his collection The Empty Family), with a long anecdote about the actor Jack Mac Gowran (known for his mastery of the works of Beckett and O’Casey) coming to the small Irish town he lived in when he was a teenager. Beckett is evoked, as is another famous Beckett interpreter Jack McGee. Toibin explains the strange dimensions of being an “Irish genius actor, slightly lost or at sea when they’re not playing the leading Irish parts.”

They might have added a Brooklyn subtheme to this conversation—McKeon now lives in that part of New York, and Toibin titled a novel Brooklyn.

There is no pronounced Irish element of Arts & Ideas this year. Closest perhaps would be a Scottish theater event, the National Theatre of Scotland’s site-specific drama The Strange Undoing of Prudencia Hart (June 20-30 at the Wicked Wolf Tavern on Temple Street).

There are now 27 Arts & Ideas podcasts streaming on vimeos or downloadable for free in the iTunes store.
The list is here.

The most applicable to this year’s festival is a conversation with Mark Morris, from when he revived and conducted his own 1970s production of Dido and Aeneas for the festival in 2009. Morris returns to Arts & Ideas this year to conduct several repertory pieces he created for his Mark Morris Dance Group (June 21 & 22 at the Shubert on College Street).

I’ve written about the Arts & Ideas 2012 announcement here. I’ll be gushing further about the festival offerings on this site and at the New Haven Advocate site in coming weeks.

We did a five-minute rendition of Menaechmi, with eight kids aged 6 to 12. It was our second Plautus; one of the first Play in a Day projects was The Haunted House. Above is a four-second outtake where co-narrator Rosie has forgotten that she’s supposed to be talking in gibberish.

The complete five-minute production is at http://scribblers.us/nhtj/?page_id=1500 with all the other Play in a Day videos, and more details on the program.

We still abide by the same principles and priorities:  A loose, fun, chaotic creative environment. Figuring out what can get done with minimal time and considerable effort, rather than allowing for rote memorization and rigid discipline.

These kids are great improvisers. Most of them never play a scene the same way twice, yet they know which key words to punch to get the plot across.

The next Play in a Day is 2 to 5:15 p.m. Tuesday, April 17, 2012, at Neverending Books, 810 State St., New Haven. The fee for the three-hour session is $5 per child.

Contact Christopher Arnott at chris@scribblers.us for more details.

What we need in the American theater is more impulse decisions like in panel two of this story from Veronica comics #145 (December 2003). The story is scripted by Kathleen Webb, pencilled by Dan Parent and inked by Jon D’Agostino.

Robert Eli and Kate MacCluggage in Bell, Book and Candle at the Long Wharf last month. The co-production shifted to Hartford Stage this week and runs through April 29. Photo by T. Charles Erickson.

Bell, Book and Candle began previews at Hartford Stage last night. The same production, with the same cast and designers, just left the Long Wharf Theatre, where it ran March 7-April 1. Before that, the same director, one of the actors, and the set and lighting designers did Bell, Book and Candle in 2007 at the Old Globe Theatre in San Francisco.

Director Darko Tresnjak gets credit for rediscovering John Van Druten’s sturdy 1950s comedy. He dusted it off, added a hi-fi lounge vibe and ginchy Soho surroundings. He also upped the impact of the show’s central outsider theme suggested by such lines as “Have you been engaging in UnAmerican Activities?” and “I was talking to the cat.”

As with another excavated mid-20^th century comedy hit, Boeing Boeing—which was brought back as an arch West End/Broadway nostalgia trip, and is now being warranted tamer and more respectful productions at regional and community theaters— it looks like others have caught on to the charms of Bell, Book and Candle. The Cleveland Play House has scheduled it as part of its 2012-13 season. That production, directed by CPH artistic director Michael Bloom, runs Jan. 11-Feb. 3. On the Play House’s website, Bloom calls the play “a lost classic.”

The Hartford Stage production of Bell, Book and Candle plays through April 29. My posting on the casting of the show is here.

My review of the Long Wharf presentation is here.

Nilaja Sun in No Child...

I know, I know. Education stories are so fascinating. But here’s another one.

I posted yesterday that Long Wharf Theatre’s a finalist for a $10,000 check earmarked for theater education programs, from the National Corporate Theatre Fund.

Today, the same theater’s announced that it’s getting $224,500 from the Werth Family Foundation to “fund the development of a substantially expanded in-school residency program.”

The money’s spread out over four years, and the programs will add three “teaching artists” to Long Wharf’s Education Department. The teaching artists help facilitate school trips to appropriate Long Wharf productions, present lectures and seminars and actually teach in the schools through residency programs.

Long Wharf presented a play on its Stage II about a teaching artist, Nilaja Sun’s autobiographical drama No Child…, in 2010.

Also, the Long Wharf’s Director of Education Annie DiMartino is a theater artist herself, running a youth summer theater program at the theater.

So these educational concepts should not be hard to grasp. Long Wharf preaches what it practices.

Nonie Newton Breen in Late Nite Catechism.

Can’t let the Yale Rep production of The Winter’s Tale close without praising its program notes, which match the upbeat silliness of the show’s best Bohemian scenes and also offer sober refelction on a famously difficult text.

The program includes several pages of a parody travel guide leading readers through the fantastical Shakespearean countries of the play.

There are even drink recipes for such concoctions as “The Boho Boo Hoo,” “Deus ex Machinatto” and “Pastoral Punch.”

That’s the fun stuff. There’s also a concise yet idea-packed essay on Shakespeare’s play by Catherine Sheehy (the Chief of Dramaturgy and Dramatic Criticism at Yale School of Drama, who’s credited as Production Dramaturg for The Winter’s Tale alongside second-year YSD student Ilinca Tamara Todorut). The piece is titled “The Triumph of Time,” and runs a time riff through not only the script but the scholarship surrounding it.

Good intermission reading.

The Winter’s Tale closes Saturday at the Yale University Theater, 222 York St., New Haven. Info at (203) 432-1234, www.yalerep.org.