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Producer’s Notes In designing their seasons, most of the community theatres use the approach oriented towards script and directors. The Balagula Theatre Company has been an actor oriented theatre from its very beginning, tending to favor plays and directors that offer new challenging roles to specific actors who expressed interest in working on its unusual stage in the environment of theatre outside theatre. When Ryan Case and Shayne Brakefield expressed a strong interest in sharing a stage at the Balagula Theatre director Ed Desiato immediately thought of the “Power Plays”. A long time fan of the script and the authors, he saw a possibility of looking at the play from a different angle –an opportunity for two talented actors to create completely different characters within the framework of one show. Originally “Power Plays” were presented as three plays, two involving just two characters and the third one -- all four actors. Our show presents only two of the plays: “The Way of All Fish”, written by Elaine May and originally starring her and her daughter, and “Virtual Reality”, written by Alan Arkin and originally starring him and his son. As any comedy, “Power Plays” present a challenge to even an experienced director and cast, and in this case, probably, more so. The witty dialogue and easily recognizable punch lines tend to stir actors to showbiz like theatricality of a standup comedy, where the comedian on stage feeds his jokes to the audience and in turn is fed back by its hearty laughter. Though quite entertaining, this kind of presentation would have left out the deeper meaning hidden behind the seeming lightness of dialogues. It would have lost the bitter social commentary of “The Way of All Fish” as well as sharp satire on pseudo psychological intellectualism of “Virtual Reality”. Also, it would have left the actors with nothing to act, with no characters to build, but caricatures not worthy of their talent. Instead, we have approached the plays the same way you approach drama: no matter how “character” the roles and how bizarre the circumstances are we attempted to bring on stage the real people with their insecurities, dreams, struggles and fears ; people whose lives, no matter how funny to us, are real and tragic to them. We hope our audience laughs, but not so much at the people on stage, but rather at themselves, at our society, at our times, habits and morals. We see the stage as an honest mirror framed by director’s imagination and enhanced by the sincerity of actors’ work. From a purely theatrical point of view, an opportunity for male actors to create realistic female characters in one play, and rough male characters in another within a framework of one evening, seemed like a novel idea. The novelty, of course, does not lie in crossing the gender boundaries, for originally theatre was a purely male realm; but in the fact that, put in a similar circumstances of “power plays”, actors had to investigate and question the differences in inner and outer ways men and women react to challenges, the way they approach and resolve conflicts. It’s not the make- up, wigs and skirts that convince us that we are watching two women at a “picnic” that Miss Asquith, a rich owner of a multimillion corporation, is having with her secretary in her pent house office in New York. Neither it is a set design, for it consists but of six wooden crates. It is the utter transformation of the actors. And it’s another transformation that brings us down to an empty warehouse to witness two men involved in a secret operation, who manage to turn their actual reality into a make-believe stage. Whether we have succeeded in our goals is for the audience to judge. |