Dramaturgy Program at Arizona Repertory Theatre

We wanted to share with you a general idea of Director Brent Gibb’s modern day prep school concept for Love’s Labour’s Lost.

As part of the Theatre Studies BFA program, Kevin Becerra and Morgan McAslan created this video about the conceptual world in which Love’s Labour’s Lost takes place. It played in the lobby of the Tornabene Theatre during the run of the production.

—Kevin Becerra

Kevin Becerra, Assistant Dramaturg for Love’s Labour’s Lost, is a sophomore in the BFA Dramaturgy and Theatre Studies at UA.

We thought you might be interested in the six minute video we created about our production of Cat on a Hot Tin Roof:




As part of the Theatre Studies BFA program, production dramaturg Morgan McAslan created this video about the year and location in which Cat on a Hot Tin Roof takes place. It played in the lobby of the Marroney Theatre during the run of the production.

—Morgan McAslan

Morgan McAslan, Production Dramaturg for Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, is a senior in the BFA Dramaturgy and Theatre Studies program at UA.

When Cat on a Hot Tin Roof closed after its summer run, everyone on the production went their separate ways for summer vacation; but recently the production staff and actors for Cat returned for an onstage “remount” rehearsal. Every year, the first show of the Arizona Repertory Theatre’s season rehearses in May and opens in June. ART then shuts down for a two month summer break and once all of the students have returned, the show reopens for another two-week run. On August 28, the designers and technical staff met for a production meeting to discuss things that needed to be fixed or checked before Cat re-opens. While the stage managers took props out of storage and set up the stage, the production staff discussed paint touch-ups, lighting fixtures, and furniture. An hour later, the actors arrived at the theatre to prepare to run through the show. They have rehearsal every night prior to opening night, with the exception of Labor Day, to make sure that the show is in the same impeccable condition it was over the summer. While the new run crew, who take care of everything backstage, becomes accustomed to the costumes and props associated with the show, the actors are reacquainting themselves with the characters and the complicated relationships Williams has created for them. As the second opening night approaches, the same excitement and nerves are swelling with the cast and crew that did during the show’s first two-week run.

Cat on a Hot Tin Roof re-opens today and runs through September 14 in the Marroney Theatre. There will be a post-show discussion immediately following the September 7 matinee.

—Morgan McAslan

Tennessee Williams has said that Cat on a Hot Tin Roof is his favorite of his finished works. Like Williams other works, the final product of Cat on a Hot Tin Roof came about after several revisions, which Williams was initially opposed to but which made the play an iconic American classic. There are three published versions of the play, the last of which evolved out of the pride Williams felt in the honesty of Big Daddy’s character.

The character of Big Daddy has elements of two people: Williams’s own father, and an acquaintance he met more than a decade before he wrote Cat. During 1942, Williams spent the summer in Macon, Georgia, where he met Jordan Massie, Sr. who went by the name Big Daddy, which was not an uncommon nickname in the south at this time. Williams derived the title of the play from Massie’s description of someone who was “as nervous as a cat on a hot tin roof”.

Big Daddy was also based loosely on Williams’ father, Cornelius, even though Williams had not spoken to his father for a long period of time before he wrote Cat. In his writing there are parallels to his father and his strained relationship with him. The elder Williams relished poker and liquor and the “companionship of man in hotel rooms far more than the family at home”. Williams Sr. was not only a basis for Big Daddy in Cat, but also for the father character in Glass Menagerie.

In Cat, Big Daddy has elements of Williams’s father, but as a character seems more understanding of Brick than Williams’s father was of him. Williams’ father died at the age of 77 on March 27, 1955, three days after Cat on a Hot Tin Roof opened on Broadway. Williams went to the funeral even though he had not spoken to his father in many years.

Williams felt a sense of pride in the character of Big Daddy; he felt he reached a level of “crude eloquence” with the character that brought a high level of honesty to the representation of the human condition within the play. Big Daddy fulfills an imperative role in the action of the play and the arc of the other characters in the play. Without the influences of Williams’s father and other people in his life, Big Daddy might not exist in the raw and influential form that he does in Cat.

—Morgan McAslan

Morgan McAslan is the dramaturg for Cat on a Hot Tin Roof and is a senior in the BFA dramaturgy program at the University of Arizona.

As one of Tennessee Williams’s masterpieces, Cat on a Hot Tin Roof is a play that documents the ugly side of human nature in an articulate and crude manner. It is also Arizona Repertory Theatre’s summer production and the first production of the 2008-2009 season. ART’s Artistic Director, and director of Cat, Brent Gibbs, has brought together a talented cast including two recent University graduates, two ART company members, several members of the Tucson theatre community, and four children. The play is perfectly cast with actors who bring something of themselves to the characters and the play.

In rehearsal, Gibbs encourages the actors to participate in a collaborative manner. The first two weeks were dedicated to blocking, the period in rehearsal when characters’ movements and physical actions are decided. While working on the second act of the play, Gibbs stopped rehearsal in the middle of blocking and said, “Everyone take a moment and read the stage direction on page 117.” There was complete silence in the rehearsal room as the actors read:

“The bird that I hope to catch in the net of this play is not the solution of one man’s psychological problem. I’m trying to catch the true quality of experience in a group of people, that cloudy, flickering, evanescent—fiercely charged!—interplay of live human beings in the thundercloud of a common crisis. Some mystery should be left in the revelation of character in a play, just as a great deal of mystery is always left in the revelation of character in life, even in one’s own character to himself. This does not absolve the playwright of his duty to observe and probe as clearly and deeply as he legitimately can: but it should steer him away from “pat” conclusions, facile definitions which make a play just a play, not a snare for the truth of human experience.”

After everyone in the room finished reading, Gibbs said, “Right there. Right there, Williams tells us exactly what he’s trying to do with this play. It is very rare to have that kind of resource directly from the text of a play.” This sort of stage direction is indeed very rare. Usually, a playwright will write an introduction or a note at the beginning of a play explaining their intentions, but this stage direction appears in the middle of the action.

During extreme emotional highs between characters, Williams felt the need to explain his purpose, in order to aid actors in truthfully depicting the characters in a naturalistic way. Williams mentions an illusive solution to a psychological problem in the play that he feels the actors should seek. The mystery of character mentioned in the stage direction is something the audience should experience based on the nuance of live performance. Williams uses the stage direction as a device to communicate to an actor that there should be no ambiguity in their portrayal of the characters because the play is written so that ambiguity and mystery is revealed to an audience through plot and story. In order for that to be communicated, the characters have to be fully developed and motivated human beings. Gibbs is sensitive to this, and in an effort to be true to Williams’s original vision, he gave this passage special attention in rehearsal, encouraging the actors to continue to make character decisions in order to discover the nuance and mystery Williams emphasized with such importance.

—Morgan McAslan

Morgan McAslan is the dramaturg for Cat on a Hot Tin Roof and is a senior in the BFA dramaturgy program at the University of Arizona.

This past March, I was cast in an unusual comedy entitled Summertime by Charles L. Mee. With Summertime I found a play that is exceptionally different from any of the forms that we are so used to seeing in the theatre. A play that is once wholly modern and realistic, and yet a piece that reads as a classic set inside of a dream. This heartbreakingly funny play is so direct in its topic and at the same time it is very complex in its delivery and meaning.

Charles L. Mee is known for being the driving force behind the (re)making project. The (re)making project is a collection of plays written, adapted, copied, or stolen by Mee himself. He offers these plays online as a resource to the theatre world for performance, adaptation, rewriting or whatever a director and a group of actors would like to do with the pieces. And all of his writings are available for no charge. According to Mr. Mee “there is no such thing as an original play.”

Summertime is about love, that is it. Love in all its forms: love between men and women, men and men, women and women, husbands and wives, husbands and lovers, wives and lovers, parents and children, between friends, acquaintances, and strangers. [Read more →]

(Hope Cladwell [Stefanie Brown] is held hostage by Bobby Strong [Kyle Harris] and Little Sally [Richelle Meiss]. Photo by Chris Richards.)

‘It begins with bodies’, I wrote at the top of my notes as I watched last-night’s run-through of Urinetown. One hardly expects a show riddled with musical-comedy to begin with the poor of Urinetown scattered about the stage. A man whose name is less-than-inconspicuously mentioned during the performance was similarly struck by the plight of the poor: Thomas Robert Malthus. [Read more →]

An interview with Richard T. Hanson

Associate Professor Richard T. Hanson has been a fixture at the University of Arizona for more than twenty-five years. He received his Master of Fine Arts from UA’s School of Theatre arts in 1981 and has been a member of its faculty since 1982. During his tenure at UA, he has directed and choreographed almost two dozen mainstage shows for the Arizona Repertory Theatre (ART) and is the founder and director of ENCORE, a musical revue touring group made up of the freshman musical theatre majors. Now the head of the Acting/Musical Theatre Division, he has the honor of having a UA Foundation Musical Theatre Endowment created in his name. This production of Urinetown marks the end of the Hanson era; Dick will be retiring from academia at the end of the Spring 2008 semester, and will continue to pursue his creative endeavors beyond the University setting with UA’s gratitude for his more than two decades of excellent service.

I recently had the opportunity to sit down with Dick to discuss this production of Urinetown and what it means to him, both as a show in itself and as his sendoff production with ART.

“It’s really my kind of show,” he said. “I like those kind of raw rock-and-roll shows. It’s really contemporary, really modern, but yet it’s old-fashioned at the same time.”

[Read more →]

We thought you might be interested in the seven minute video we created about our production of Titus Andronicus:

“In the end, it’s director Brent Gibbs who displays the greatest creativity, without coming between us and Shakespeare. He keeps the action on a human scale rather than resorting to monumental camp, makes good use of overhead projection of stage directions…and frames the play with a disturbing image.”—James Reel for the Tucson Weekly, 13 March 2008 (To read full review, click here.)

As part of the Theatre Studies BFA program, dramaturg Morgan McAslan sat down with director Brent Gibbs to discuss the themes and challenges of producing one of Shakespeare’s earliest plays.

—Morgan McAslan

Morgan McAslan, Assistant Dramaturg for Titus Andronicus, is a senior in the BFA Dramaturgy and Theatre Studies program at UA.

Americans are addicted to violent images. From video games that plaster death by car crash across the screen, to media coverage of brutal events, violence permeates our everyday lives. But what happens when bloody acts appear on
stage? For example, Shakespeare’s Titus Andronicus and Macbeth stage multiple murders while in the popular musical West Side Story, gang members dance through fights and eventually deaths. These moments of stage violence haunts us long after we leave the theatre.

Martin McDonagh’s The Pillowman pushes the audience’s comfort zone despite our previous encounters with theatre’s vindictive stories. Like filmmaker Quentin Tarantino’s Kill Bill or Pulp Fiction, McDonagh’s dark characters express psychological depth ultimately leaving audiences sympathizing with the most immoral people. Just as Uma Thurman’s character in Kill Bill seeks revenge against the slaying of her husband and supposed murder of her unborn child, the characters in The Pillowman seek retribution to the point where the audience is unsure of who to root for. However, instead of sitting in the cozy seats of a movie theatre, the blood and gore is staged a mere ten feet before us.

Director Jordan Parsons takes advantage of an intimate setting, by fully engaging our emotions through sight and sound. Parsons states:

“…the biggest problem was taking college actors and having them recreate a realistic portrayal of violence against children on stage…In an age where CSI and Tarantino manipulate our society, audiences feel the need to take it a step up on stage”.

Parsons does not feel as if the blood should detract audiences but remind them that it is the duty of the actors to tell a story.
McDonagh takes our emotions on a roller coaster ride of beautifully told soliloquies where the innocent and the guilty are felt for. In that respect McDonagh differs from Tarantino, by replacing fast action with heart-wrenching drama. In two and a half hours, the audience’s emotions go from sadness to laughter again and again. Parsons direction of McDonagh’s
play allows us to reflect on these sensations while creating a Tarantino-esque show to fit our contemporary thirst for entertainment and our endless attachment to the innocent.

—Alex Gendreau

Alex Gendreau is the assistant dramaturg for The Pillowman and is a sophomore in the BFA Dramaturgy & Theatre Studies program at the University of Arizona.