Monday, August 6, 2012
Thursday, June 14, 2012
From Page to Stage
Meet Cockroach Theatre’s radical new resident playwright
Photo by Garfield & Adams
June 14th, 2012
In May, Griffin signed on for a two-year residency with Cockroach Theatre, where she will produce her character-driven dark comedies and spearhead a training series for playwrights. She joins the decade-old company as it moves into a new home, the Arts Square Theatre (1025 S. First St.) in the Arts District.
Griffin, 36, is a stay-at-home mom and no stranger to the Las Vegas theater scene. In addition to a prolific playwriting portfolio, she’s performed in various shows locally, including Tony n’ Tina’s Wedding at the Rio and Caligula with Cockroach Theatre. Her play Spearminted was the 2012 Las Vegas Little Theatre New Work Competition’s winner, and her new play, Roles for Women, just premiered at the Vegas Fringe Festival.
Between chasing around her toddler and awaiting her next creative tidal wave, Griffin took some time to speak about her new residency.
What exactly will you do as Cockroach’s resident playwright?
A residency, in general, guarantees a certain number of full productions over a certain number of years. In professional theaters, residents usually receive a cash award, stipends to attend theater and health-insurance benefits [Griffin won’t receive any of those benefits, but she will receive a full production of one play.] Playwrights don’t have a union like actors equity. What I’ll be doing with my residency is simple: developing my craft, helping other writers develop their craft, and making some sweet, sweet theater.
Why does a playwriting residency matter?
I think it’s a vital investment. If the play does well, and it gets picked up by a publisher, then it’s good for everyone. The play has the potential of going all over the country, with the permanent inscription: originally produced at Cockroach Theatre, at the Arts Square Theatre in Las Vegas, directed by so-in-so, with the following cast. So the entire company becomes part of history.
How did you first get involved with theater?
My mom was an actress and writer; she took me to plays around Seattle and taught me how to use her old blue typewriter. I wrote my first play on it at age 11. It was an adaptation of Rumpelstiltskin, and I staged it on my neighbor’s deck, using kids in the neighborhood. … I remember watching the show, totally blissed out, thinking, “I want to do this the rest of my life!” And so I did.
You’ve described your plays as radical acts. What does that mean to you?
It’s a radical act to challenge the status quo, to present a different point of view than the audience’s belief structures, [to] offend people—whether it’s the copious amounts of marijuana used by a grandma in Mulch or the questioning of the government and anti-privacy acts in Chipped. People have been walking out of my shows since 2001, but they never seem to ask for their money back. … Critics have called my work “screwball tragedy,” which I think has a nice ring to it.
When it comes to writing a play, what inspires you?
Ideas for plays come when an interesting character in my head intersects with an interesting theme I’ve been knocking around. … For instance I see a homeless person with a blanket on their head and I’m reading Daniel Quinn’s Ishmael, and suddenly I come up with the dramatic question of Casa de Nada: What if someone were using homeless people to make them money and then exterminating them, Holocaust-style?
What brought you to Las Vegas as opposed to L.A. or New York?
I’d rather be a pioneer than a settler. I moved here after college precisely because there wasn’t much going on, and yet a huge potential for something big to happen. I’ve always believed in theater in Las Vegas, like the little engine that could. I’ve been lucky enough to see minor shifts in the way theater off the Strip has been viewed. I feel like I’ve witnessed a small cultural awakening, and I’ve been proud to be part of the effort.
Cockroach Theatre boldly infests the Arts District
They wandered the desert for 10 years, staging shows wherever they could find space, like in magic shops and yoga studios. Now Cockroach Theatre is putting down roots in the 18b Arts District. Their first home, The Arts Square Theater, will open this summer in Art Square (1025 S. First St., attached to Artifice).Known for pushing the edge of convention and challenging the way audiences think, the nonprofit Cockroach Theater was formed in 2002 by a group of UNLV theater students. “Up until now, Cockroach Theater has done one-offs, now we are going to be able to present a whole package,” said the company’s new artistic director, Erik Amblad.
With a permanent home, Cockroach Theater will reach a broader audience as it presents a full season of neglected/forgotten works as well as new works by emerging playwrights. “Most exciting, is that fans of Cockroach will be rewarded with a season-long exploration of a theme—an exploration [that] will hopefully get more complicated show after show,” Amblad says.
The first season will be announced in early July and will start in September. The pre-season will begin in late July with the 2011 Sin City New Play Contest winner, Nurture by Johnna Adams. (The contest from Original Works Publishing was previously hosted by Onyx Theatre.)
Cockroach Theater also plans to offer training programs and provide an affordable space for variety acts, contemporary dancers and spoken-word performers from around the Valley. “The idea is that every step of the way, every day of the week,” Amblad says, “you’ll find something interesting at the Art Square Theatre.”
Wednesday, June 13, 2012
Fringe Fest: The good and the very bad
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The perfect part: The actresses of Roles for Women take casting into their own hands.
photo by Richard Brusky
photo by Richard Brusky
by Jacob Coakley
Roles for Women
I’d say Dick Johnson had the best ensemble of actors ... if it weren’t for the ladies of Roles for Women, playing five women suffering through their most extreme audition ever. Griffin does an excellent job capturing small moments, pushing the characters through them and letting their actions generate the laughs. The actresses embraced this with gusto. You could feel the glee at having fully-formed characters that had nothing to do with “girlfriend” or “romantic interest.” If sometimes that enthusiasm veered a little too closely to self-parody for the sake of a laugh, that was only a slight problem.
Thursday, June 7, 2012
Erica Griffin
Playwright takes up Residency at Cockroach Theater
Cockroach Theatre officially announces esteemed local author Erica Griffin as resident playwright. Griffin joins the creative and operations team as they prepare to move into their permanent home in the Art Square Theatre this summer.
"Erica Griffin's voice as a playwright has always been compelling, compassionate, and surprising. We are honored to have Erica join us for our inaugural season at the Art Square Theatre," said Erik Amblad, Cockroach Theatre's Artistic Director. "Personally, I've been working with Erica for years, and I'm excited to see where this new creative collaboration will take us."
According to Amblad, Cockroach Theatre established the Resident Playwright program as part of their core commitment to new and neglected works. A two-year term, Griffin's residency will see her work actively developed and then produced as part of Cockroach Theatre's season of plays. Additionally, Griffin will spearhead new programming at Cockroach Theatre, including a development series for local playwrights to workshop their own plays.
"As a playwright, I've been growing in tandem to Cockroach Theatre since it first began ten years ago," said Griffin. "Just as they've wandered all over town in the last decade, so have I hauled my original plays from space to space. Feeling it was time to commit to one company in order to allow my craft to grow, it was the easiest decision in my career to put my roots down with the Roaches."
About Erica Griffin:
The addition of Erica Griffin to the creative team at Cockroach theatre comes as they enter the final month of their grassroots fundraising campaign , aimed at supplementing the opening operational costs of The Art Square Theatre. Donors to the campaign have the opportunity to be a part of the historic opening of this theatre in the 18b Arts District in downtown Las Vegas.
Bonfire of the Vanities
Ego trips and satire dominate the 2012 Vegas Fringe Festival
As my Dad likes to say, sometimes the best surprise is no surprise. Unfortunately, "sometimes" does not include Las Vegas Little Theatre's Fringe Festival. This year's is not only smaller than 2011's, it's less revelatory. The shows one expects to be good don't disappoint, and those that do are colossal downers.
Without question, the finest Fringe offering is Neil LaBute's Iphigenia in Orem (Olde English Productions), flawlessly paced by director Gus Langley. LaBute's spellbinding monodrama is the confession of a traveling salesman (Shane Cullum) in a Vegas hotel room. Casually, conversationally, this Utah businessman unburdens himself to an unseen stranger about the "crib death" of his first daughter and the tenuousness of his job ... although that's ultimately not what's haunting him. His confessional leads us imperceptibly to a chilling revelation that also elucidates LaBute's arcane title. (Orem is a suburb of Provo; Iphigenia was the daughter Agamemnon sacrificed to the gods when his armada was becalmed en route to the Trojan War.)
Playing a misogynistic, petty and drab man with the face of an insect, Cullum fully humanizes this unsympathetic figure. Behind the buglike spectacles and caterpillar mustache, he finds the universality of a deeply disturbed person, in addition to his furtive monstrousness. It's pure brilliance and not to be missed.
PONDERING PONDEROUSLY
Lurching from the ineffable to the unspeakable, we encounter Fringe's other monodrama, Eugene Markoff's 75-minute Expanding the Relative: Pondering Einstein, presented by aptly named Endless Productions. This catastrophic vanity project stars Markoff himself, over whose "acting" a veil of charity should be drawn. Making matters worse, sloppy tech cues ground last Saturday's performance to a temporary halt.
Nominally, Pondering is a lecture by distant Einstein relative, Ezekiel Beam (Markoff). This disjointed, free-associative harangue is replete with pseudo-profundities like, "What if our yesterdays were today's tomorrows?" If that doesn't make you groan, there's plenty worse in this interminable, smug string of one-liners and faux insights. Markoff comes across as a Beat poet who dropped far too much acid, then hit the vaudeville circuit. Faced with an incompetent protagonist, director Timothy Burris is reduced to reprising sight gags from last year's Wind in the Willows. If he's lucky, the self-important awfulness of Pondering will be mistaken for High Art.
The title of Poor Richard's Productions' Dick Johnson, Private Eye -- three penis references in four words -- makes one expect the worst. Instead, Maxim Lardent and Mark Valentin's nostalgic comedy is very creatively penned and a Fringe smash. Set in the studios of WKZP in 1942, Johnson is couched as a radio serial involving the titular private dick's search for his missing desk. Interspersed are clever jingles touting the healthful virtues of asbestos, cigarettes and such, while Arles Estes nimbly alternates between providing dramatic musical punctuation and atmospheric, live sound effects. Valentin and Lardent wittily use the radio-drama format to comment on the conventions of the detective genre (the omniscient cabbie, the lady in red), as well as on the '40s themselves.
Lysander Abadia brilliantly orchestrates the dizzyingly intricate, quick-change staging, and Kirstin Maki's costuming is the fest's best. Regrettably, Lardent arrogates the title role for himself. His mumbling, arrhythmic delivery does his writing a serious disservice. Much of the cast is drawn from local improv troupes, with Valentin and Kimberly Scott Faubel distinguishing themselves as cabbie and adenoidal Gal Friday, respectively. Flawless period panache is displayed by Benjamin Loewy -- flinging himself with relish into a continent's worth of accents in four roles -- and by Breon Jenay (Femme Fatale). Her plummy, seductive delivery elevates obvious jokes into double entendres. This duo plays it to the hilt and not one scintilla beyond.
TOO MUCH 'DICK'
Watching Johnson back-to-back with A.R. Gurney's The Open Meeting (LVLT) requires superhuman tolerance for "Dick" jokes. Cutesy, Nixon-era agitprop, it's a wan allegory of democracy. The oft-referenced, unseen Dick is unreachable in Washington, spinning sinister plots. In his absence, Gurney's town meeting degenerates into a power struggle between rebellious youth (Dustin Sisney) and the Establishment (personified by Ralph Weprinsky), with vacillating Verna (Teresa Fullerton) representing the electorate. An ostensibly hilarious Oedipus Rex subplot thickens the metaphorical stew. It's even more didactic than was LVLT's Yankee Tavern, albeit funnier, too. Weprinsky's authoritative presence and clarion delivery ultimately prove more sympathetic than Sisney's oafish hollering.
Worse still was Michael O'Neal's flaccid Soul (Chaos Theatre), disparate episodes posing as Something Deep about mortality. Jason Niño's drowsy, disjointed production (more scene changes than action) only sows confusion, as does acting that's borderline-comatose. A totally random set and a cast of mostly too-old actors muddles locations and relationships alike. Except for Michael Drake -- brisk, nasty and dangerous as a drug dealer -- the best performances are given by Jamie Carvelli (in a pre-recorded voiceover) and Kiha Akui, as Death, who says almost nothing.
Theatrical vanities are skewered in Erica Griffin's Roles for Women (Table 8 Productions), staged with manifest affection by Troy Heard. Five actresses are auditioning -- or so they think -- for the meaty role of a cannibalistic murderess. Petty jealousies and one-upwomanship escalate into a full-blown brawl (unconvincingly choreographed, alas). The climactic catfight is provoked by a quintessentially Griffinesque, underlying deception. It's more fully realized than her 2011 "Best of Fringe" winner, Casa de Nada, and just as funny.
Sarah Spraker has the gravy part of the Amazonian, domineering community-theater diva, complemented by Stacia Zinkevich as a hilariously daft, eyelash-batting ingénue. Playing the attitude-throwing, tattooed, wannabe "rebel," Mary Foresta should provoke shudders of self-recognition among certain local actresses, while Carvelli's fascinatingly detailed portrayal of the group's earnest underachiever binds the story together. Natascha Negro riffs amusingly, neurotically on previous tragedy-queen roles but, as the draconian and manipulative stage manager, mild Cathy Ostertag lets the side down.
VEGAS FRINGE FESTIVAL Thursday-Sunday, through June 10; Las Vegas Little Theatre, 3920 Schiff Drive, 362-7996 (www.lvlt.org/FRINGE2012home.htm for showtimes), $12 (single ticket) or $90 (all-show pass).
Without question, the finest Fringe offering is Neil LaBute's Iphigenia in Orem (Olde English Productions), flawlessly paced by director Gus Langley. LaBute's spellbinding monodrama is the confession of a traveling salesman (Shane Cullum) in a Vegas hotel room. Casually, conversationally, this Utah businessman unburdens himself to an unseen stranger about the "crib death" of his first daughter and the tenuousness of his job ... although that's ultimately not what's haunting him. His confessional leads us imperceptibly to a chilling revelation that also elucidates LaBute's arcane title. (Orem is a suburb of Provo; Iphigenia was the daughter Agamemnon sacrificed to the gods when his armada was becalmed en route to the Trojan War.)
Playing a misogynistic, petty and drab man with the face of an insect, Cullum fully humanizes this unsympathetic figure. Behind the buglike spectacles and caterpillar mustache, he finds the universality of a deeply disturbed person, in addition to his furtive monstrousness. It's pure brilliance and not to be missed.
PONDERING PONDEROUSLY
Lurching from the ineffable to the unspeakable, we encounter Fringe's other monodrama, Eugene Markoff's 75-minute Expanding the Relative: Pondering Einstein, presented by aptly named Endless Productions. This catastrophic vanity project stars Markoff himself, over whose "acting" a veil of charity should be drawn. Making matters worse, sloppy tech cues ground last Saturday's performance to a temporary halt.
Nominally, Pondering is a lecture by distant Einstein relative, Ezekiel Beam (Markoff). This disjointed, free-associative harangue is replete with pseudo-profundities like, "What if our yesterdays were today's tomorrows?" If that doesn't make you groan, there's plenty worse in this interminable, smug string of one-liners and faux insights. Markoff comes across as a Beat poet who dropped far too much acid, then hit the vaudeville circuit. Faced with an incompetent protagonist, director Timothy Burris is reduced to reprising sight gags from last year's Wind in the Willows. If he's lucky, the self-important awfulness of Pondering will be mistaken for High Art.
The title of Poor Richard's Productions' Dick Johnson, Private Eye -- three penis references in four words -- makes one expect the worst. Instead, Maxim Lardent and Mark Valentin's nostalgic comedy is very creatively penned and a Fringe smash. Set in the studios of WKZP in 1942, Johnson is couched as a radio serial involving the titular private dick's search for his missing desk. Interspersed are clever jingles touting the healthful virtues of asbestos, cigarettes and such, while Arles Estes nimbly alternates between providing dramatic musical punctuation and atmospheric, live sound effects. Valentin and Lardent wittily use the radio-drama format to comment on the conventions of the detective genre (the omniscient cabbie, the lady in red), as well as on the '40s themselves.
Lysander Abadia brilliantly orchestrates the dizzyingly intricate, quick-change staging, and Kirstin Maki's costuming is the fest's best. Regrettably, Lardent arrogates the title role for himself. His mumbling, arrhythmic delivery does his writing a serious disservice. Much of the cast is drawn from local improv troupes, with Valentin and Kimberly Scott Faubel distinguishing themselves as cabbie and adenoidal Gal Friday, respectively. Flawless period panache is displayed by Benjamin Loewy -- flinging himself with relish into a continent's worth of accents in four roles -- and by Breon Jenay (Femme Fatale). Her plummy, seductive delivery elevates obvious jokes into double entendres. This duo plays it to the hilt and not one scintilla beyond.
TOO MUCH 'DICK'
Watching Johnson back-to-back with A.R. Gurney's The Open Meeting (LVLT) requires superhuman tolerance for "Dick" jokes. Cutesy, Nixon-era agitprop, it's a wan allegory of democracy. The oft-referenced, unseen Dick is unreachable in Washington, spinning sinister plots. In his absence, Gurney's town meeting degenerates into a power struggle between rebellious youth (Dustin Sisney) and the Establishment (personified by Ralph Weprinsky), with vacillating Verna (Teresa Fullerton) representing the electorate. An ostensibly hilarious Oedipus Rex subplot thickens the metaphorical stew. It's even more didactic than was LVLT's Yankee Tavern, albeit funnier, too. Weprinsky's authoritative presence and clarion delivery ultimately prove more sympathetic than Sisney's oafish hollering.
Worse still was Michael O'Neal's flaccid Soul (Chaos Theatre), disparate episodes posing as Something Deep about mortality. Jason Niño's drowsy, disjointed production (more scene changes than action) only sows confusion, as does acting that's borderline-comatose. A totally random set and a cast of mostly too-old actors muddles locations and relationships alike. Except for Michael Drake -- brisk, nasty and dangerous as a drug dealer -- the best performances are given by Jamie Carvelli (in a pre-recorded voiceover) and Kiha Akui, as Death, who says almost nothing.
Theatrical vanities are skewered in Erica Griffin's Roles for Women (Table 8 Productions), staged with manifest affection by Troy Heard. Five actresses are auditioning -- or so they think -- for the meaty role of a cannibalistic murderess. Petty jealousies and one-upwomanship escalate into a full-blown brawl (unconvincingly choreographed, alas). The climactic catfight is provoked by a quintessentially Griffinesque, underlying deception. It's more fully realized than her 2011 "Best of Fringe" winner, Casa de Nada, and just as funny.
Sarah Spraker has the gravy part of the Amazonian, domineering community-theater diva, complemented by Stacia Zinkevich as a hilariously daft, eyelash-batting ingénue. Playing the attitude-throwing, tattooed, wannabe "rebel," Mary Foresta should provoke shudders of self-recognition among certain local actresses, while Carvelli's fascinatingly detailed portrayal of the group's earnest underachiever binds the story together. Natascha Negro riffs amusingly, neurotically on previous tragedy-queen roles but, as the draconian and manipulative stage manager, mild Cathy Ostertag lets the side down.
VEGAS FRINGE FESTIVAL Thursday-Sunday, through June 10; Las Vegas Little Theatre, 3920 Schiff Drive, 362-7996 (www.lvlt.org/FRINGE2012home.htm for showtimes), $12 (single ticket) or $90 (all-show pass).
A new space has Cockroach Theatre making big plans
Wed, Jun 6, 2012 (5:07 p.m.)
The gentlemen of Cockroach Theatre—Levi Fackrell, Erik Amblad and Will Adamson.
Photo: Bill Hughes
“We’re taking a leap of faith on this, that’s for sure,” says Levi Fackrell, managing director of Cockroach. Fackrell, friends with Sperry, was the first to see the empty space and began discussions with Sperry to turn it into a theater. With Sperry’s encouragement, and a generous lease, Cockroach will have its first permanent home—and Fackrell feels the time is right. “The buzz about Downtown has always been, ‘It’s gonna happen; it’s gonna happen’—but now it’s really tangible. It is happening. You can really feel the energy.”
But you need more than energy to run a theater. To help raise that capital, the Cockroach team has turned to the Internet and an Indiegogo (it’s similar to Kickstarter) campaign to raise $20,000 by June 15. Just like the weather, that’s heating up, too. People from Summerlin to Abu Dhabi have donated.
“That’s what’s great about our Indiegogo campaign, you really get a gauge of who’s behind you,” says Fackrell. Also important: Visible support of the campaign has emboldened other backers who might not be able to contribute through Indiegogo, but are just as important to the theater’s success.
“The platform has really helped us get some larger corporate sponsors,” says Will Adamson, producer at Cockroach. “They can have confidence that we’re not just a small group of people.” Cockroach has some specific fund-raising events planned to reach out to those sponsors and to some high-profile donors.
Cockroach isn’t only adding a new space. In April it named Erik Amblad its new artistic director; it has a new resident playwright, Erica Griffin; and its inaugural production in Art Square Theatre will be the winner of the Sin City New Play contest: Nurture, by Johnna Adams. That will be followed by something else that’s new for Cockroach: a full season of plays, rather than one-off productions.
“We get to express a point of view through a series of plays,” Amblad says. “This infrastructure allows us that freedom, and I’m hoping that people will see we have a real dedication to new works and neglected works with a new point of view.”
It’s exciting, and possibilities fill up the room with the rising heat.
“In Vegas, we don’t have the luxury of taking amazing regional theater for granted yet,” Amblad says. “One of our goals is to get to the point that people take it for granted that we’re one of the great regional theaters in Las Vegas and America.
“Ultimately, we want to be seen as Las Vegas’ professional theater company,” Fackrell says.
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