Results tagged “Henry Murray” from Inkblog!
Dedicated, diligent, delectable readers — I hope you like hearing from playwrights. We've enjoyed our conversations with 22 playwrights, whose work we chose to explore as part of the 2009 Inkubator Festival. We knew they were imaginative... they've taken nearly every subject under the sun... global warming, fat, the meaning of time, conflict between ideals and politics, the reformation, The Odyssey, immaculate conception, tetherball... and monkeys... and woven rich, surprising, funny, frightening plays out of them. In talking with them over the past several weeks, we've found them to funny, open, warm, thoughtful. (Wow... I'm all about the adjectives today). Just awesome people all around.
Over the next few weeks, we'll be sharing with you insights from a number of our playwrights. We're so glad to hear that they enjoyed their time working with us.
So here are some impressions from one of our wonderful playwrights: Henry Murray. He has written a crazy great play called Monkey Adored that imagines a world of animals on the edge. We presented a 20-minute excerpt of the play at The Kennedy Center. (You can learn a little more about it from a previous blog entry.)
Thanks, Henry, for your kind words. And we can't wait to read the next draft of Monkey Adored.
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My name is Henry Murray and I was invited to DC over Labor Day Weekend for a reading of an excerpt from my play Monkey Adored. I had never been to Washington (I grew up saying Warshington as a kid in Tennessee) so I flew from LA a day early to see the sights. What a beautiful city!
The Kennedy Center is amazing. In LA we have have the Ahmanson, The Mark Taper Forum and The Dorothy Chandler Pavilion all on one downtown city block, but The Kennedy Center has all that in one building plus a few more performance spaces thrown in. Impressive!
I had spoken to Anne McCaw by phone about what I wanted to work on with the play, and she encouraged me to change the 20-minute excerpt I had chosen to present. I wasn't completely sure about the switch, but I decided trust her and the adventure and ultimately I was glad I did. I had never worked with a dramaturge before, and I was intrigued and now believe it can be a powerful relationship. I had additional excellent dramaturgical help from Meghan Long in rehearsal.
Speaking of rehearsal, my director Chris Niebling turned out to be an energetic and well-prepared dynamo of ideas and support. The actors were talented and well cast, also well-prepared and energetic, and we had a great rehearsal. Which, of course, led to a terrific reading. The audience laughed way more than I expected and several people came up to me afterword and told me they were touched as well. Gee, have I oversold this experience? It was pretty ideal. I was highly energized by the experience and now have a complete new draft of Monkey Adored.
My only regret is that the Inkwell is a whole continent away from LA.
Over the next few weeks, we'll be sharing with you insights from a number of our playwrights. We're so glad to hear that they enjoyed their time working with us.
So here are some impressions from one of our wonderful playwrights: Henry Murray. He has written a crazy great play called Monkey Adored that imagines a world of animals on the edge. We presented a 20-minute excerpt of the play at The Kennedy Center. (You can learn a little more about it from a previous blog entry.)
Thanks, Henry, for your kind words. And we can't wait to read the next draft of Monkey Adored.
--------------------------------------
My name is Henry Murray and I was invited to DC over Labor Day Weekend for a reading of an excerpt from my play Monkey Adored. I had never been to Washington (I grew up saying Warshington as a kid in Tennessee) so I flew from LA a day early to see the sights. What a beautiful city!
The Kennedy Center is amazing. In LA we have have the Ahmanson, The Mark Taper Forum and The Dorothy Chandler Pavilion all on one downtown city block, but The Kennedy Center has all that in one building plus a few more performance spaces thrown in. Impressive!
I had spoken to Anne McCaw by phone about what I wanted to work on with the play, and she encouraged me to change the 20-minute excerpt I had chosen to present. I wasn't completely sure about the switch, but I decided trust her and the adventure and ultimately I was glad I did. I had never worked with a dramaturge before, and I was intrigued and now believe it can be a powerful relationship. I had additional excellent dramaturgical help from Meghan Long in rehearsal.
Speaking of rehearsal, my director Chris Niebling turned out to be an energetic and well-prepared dynamo of ideas and support. The actors were talented and well cast, also well-prepared and energetic, and we had a great rehearsal. Which, of course, led to a terrific reading. The audience laughed way more than I expected and several people came up to me afterword and told me they were touched as well. Gee, have I oversold this experience? It was pretty ideal. I was highly energized by the experience and now have a complete new draft of Monkey Adored.
My only regret is that the Inkwell is a whole continent away from LA.
We've launched, loyal readers! We're off! We're out of the starting gate... you pick your metaphor.
In plainer speak, we started our second Inkubator Festival at Page to Stage last week... and it was such a treat to hang out in The Kennedy Center's North Atrium with directors, actors, dramaturges, and playwrights to catch up, talk shop, and get a taste of five new plays!
There's so much to share about our Page to Stage activities, but here's a great summary from DC Theatre Scene... the inteprid Rosalind Lacy joined us for the entire day of events.
I thought I'd also share with you my notes from our showcase event, where we presented 20-minute excerpts from four new plays, each with a political bent. As the supervising dramaturge, I am serving as a sommelier of sorts, helping playgoers taste all the rich, surprising flavors of the plays we have chosen to explore. Let me know if that metaphor works for you.
Without further ado, let me introduce you to the plays we showcased last week:
Island of Outcasts by Fengar Gael
What you are about to see is the first 20 minutes of a wildly imaginative take on the next phase of human existence. The play is set on the imaginary island of Dolphina, amidst the raging storms brought on by climate change. On Dolphina, two idealist marine biologists hatch their own solution to perpetuate a species on the verge of extinction... that species is, of course, human beings.
Our readers were fascinated by the magical way that Fengar approaches pressing issues of the day... of climate change, of how we steward the planet and ourselves, and of the ethics of scientific experimentation.
"Nearly everything about the play is memorable. It suggests visual, musical, and dramatic possibilities that are stunning to consider -- from raging storms on a tropical island to shimmering swimmers and ethereal songs of fish people."
Empire of the Trees by Adam Kraar
We now go back in time to 1963, the moment before Kennedy is assassinated, as our picture of perfect America dies. An expatriot, a Jewish American, is living in New Delhi, coming to terms with the loss of her child, her loneliness, and a crisis of identity that often comes when a person is uprooted and taken from everything they know.
Again, we are seeing the very beginning of the play, as well as a journey of the imagination that the heroine, Deborah, finds herself in.
This is also a story explored through magic, through the mythology of India, and through a dangerous, compelling relationship between our heroine and a poor Indian bookseller.
Our readers loves the mixture of political events, of mythology and literature, and the journey of troubled people in a landscape that they don't really understand.
i put the fear of mexico in 'em by Matthew Paul Olmos
This is a tense thriller of a play, and it kept us all on the edge as we read it.
It's also a dissection of difference, of connection, of the borders and barriers we use to distance ourselves, and those dangerous moments when we cross over those borders and barriers.
This is the very beginning of the play when two hapless tourists, Adrey and Jonah, have wandered down an alley in Tijuana to find Efren and Juana. While it first appears that we are the edge of a nasty confrontation, we soon learn that they have more in common that it seems, more in common that either couple is comfortable with.
Matthew is getting a lot of attention with this play. He recently received a workshop at the Sundance Institute, and the play will receive a reading in October at Gala Hispanic here in DC. We're delighted to showcase it and these characters, all of whom are dangerous and terribly delicate, brutal and passionate and terrified of the future.
Monkey Adored by Henry Murray
We end this showcase in another strange and surprising place, in the world of animals. Literally.
This is a play from the perspective of animals, those that fight and love and lose as we do, yet always fighting the pernicious ways of man, who are in search of the next lab experiment.
This excerpt drops us into the middle of the play, when Sonny Bonobo, a monkey, is about to engage in an act of terrorism. His partner of the moment, Brown Spot the dog, is dead set against Sonny's activism, struggling to come to terms with his deep sense of loyalty in a world of people and animals who are not very loyal to him. We also catch a glimpse of Sonny's compatriot, James the Rat, and Sonny's former lover, Madeleine the Cat.
I was the one who first this play, and it made me laugh and laugh and laugh. But there's something else beyond a set-up of animals wrestling with a human condition. The language is stunning, moving, surprising. The philosophical discussion is engaging. The characters are complex, rich, hilarious. And you'll see here in this excerpt a theatricality that is truly surprising, funny, and thought provoking.
We'll be creating a library of these excerpts and of the suite of plays we are exploring through our Inkubator Festival, which picks up speed again on September 24th, where we host an open rehearsal for Strike Seek Find, a dark, brutal, and truly modern take on The Odyssey from the perspective of Telemachus, Odysseus's son.
Stay tuned!
In plainer speak, we started our second Inkubator Festival at Page to Stage last week... and it was such a treat to hang out in The Kennedy Center's North Atrium with directors, actors, dramaturges, and playwrights to catch up, talk shop, and get a taste of five new plays!
There's so much to share about our Page to Stage activities, but here's a great summary from DC Theatre Scene... the inteprid Rosalind Lacy joined us for the entire day of events.
I thought I'd also share with you my notes from our showcase event, where we presented 20-minute excerpts from four new plays, each with a political bent. As the supervising dramaturge, I am serving as a sommelier of sorts, helping playgoers taste all the rich, surprising flavors of the plays we have chosen to explore. Let me know if that metaphor works for you.
Without further ado, let me introduce you to the plays we showcased last week:
Island of Outcasts by Fengar Gael
What you are about to see is the first 20 minutes of a wildly imaginative take on the next phase of human existence. The play is set on the imaginary island of Dolphina, amidst the raging storms brought on by climate change. On Dolphina, two idealist marine biologists hatch their own solution to perpetuate a species on the verge of extinction... that species is, of course, human beings.
Our readers were fascinated by the magical way that Fengar approaches pressing issues of the day... of climate change, of how we steward the planet and ourselves, and of the ethics of scientific experimentation.
"Nearly everything about the play is memorable. It suggests visual, musical, and dramatic possibilities that are stunning to consider -- from raging storms on a tropical island to shimmering swimmers and ethereal songs of fish people."
Empire of the Trees by Adam Kraar
We now go back in time to 1963, the moment before Kennedy is assassinated, as our picture of perfect America dies. An expatriot, a Jewish American, is living in New Delhi, coming to terms with the loss of her child, her loneliness, and a crisis of identity that often comes when a person is uprooted and taken from everything they know.
Again, we are seeing the very beginning of the play, as well as a journey of the imagination that the heroine, Deborah, finds herself in.
This is also a story explored through magic, through the mythology of India, and through a dangerous, compelling relationship between our heroine and a poor Indian bookseller.
Our readers loves the mixture of political events, of mythology and literature, and the journey of troubled people in a landscape that they don't really understand.
i put the fear of mexico in 'em by Matthew Paul Olmos
This is a tense thriller of a play, and it kept us all on the edge as we read it.
It's also a dissection of difference, of connection, of the borders and barriers we use to distance ourselves, and those dangerous moments when we cross over those borders and barriers.
This is the very beginning of the play when two hapless tourists, Adrey and Jonah, have wandered down an alley in Tijuana to find Efren and Juana. While it first appears that we are the edge of a nasty confrontation, we soon learn that they have more in common that it seems, more in common that either couple is comfortable with.
Matthew is getting a lot of attention with this play. He recently received a workshop at the Sundance Institute, and the play will receive a reading in October at Gala Hispanic here in DC. We're delighted to showcase it and these characters, all of whom are dangerous and terribly delicate, brutal and passionate and terrified of the future.
Monkey Adored by Henry Murray
We end this showcase in another strange and surprising place, in the world of animals. Literally.
This is a play from the perspective of animals, those that fight and love and lose as we do, yet always fighting the pernicious ways of man, who are in search of the next lab experiment.
This excerpt drops us into the middle of the play, when Sonny Bonobo, a monkey, is about to engage in an act of terrorism. His partner of the moment, Brown Spot the dog, is dead set against Sonny's activism, struggling to come to terms with his deep sense of loyalty in a world of people and animals who are not very loyal to him. We also catch a glimpse of Sonny's compatriot, James the Rat, and Sonny's former lover, Madeleine the Cat.
I was the one who first this play, and it made me laugh and laugh and laugh. But there's something else beyond a set-up of animals wrestling with a human condition. The language is stunning, moving, surprising. The philosophical discussion is engaging. The characters are complex, rich, hilarious. And you'll see here in this excerpt a theatricality that is truly surprising, funny, and thought provoking.
We'll be creating a library of these excerpts and of the suite of plays we are exploring through our Inkubator Festival, which picks up speed again on September 24th, where we host an open rehearsal for Strike Seek Find, a dark, brutal, and truly modern take on The Odyssey from the perspective of Telemachus, Odysseus's son.
Stay tuned!
