Chance to win free passes

UWISHUNU is giving away the chance to win a pair of passes to three Live Arts and Fringe shows.

One lucky Grand Prize winner will receive:


• Two vouchers to any Live Arts and Fringe Festival event
• Two vouchers to a performance of Traces
• Two vouchers to the Thursday, September 8 performance of the Green Fairy Cabaret

Click here to enter.  Just plan on using your two voucher for any performance to come see Straw, Stick, Brick,.

Huzzah!

The postcards are in!!  Liz Semon, our marketing guru, did a fantastic job.  And a big thank you for Fireball Printing for their discounts and for shipping the postcards in a box with a couple of fireball candies.

Why Theater Rocks

I regard the theater as the greatest of all art forms, the most immediate way in which a human being can share with another the sense of what it is to be a human being.


This supremacy of the theater derives from the fact that it is always 'now' on the stage.

-Thornton Wilder

(from The Paris Review: Playwrights at Work)

Philly Fun Guide

So one of the many emails I have received from Craig (the man behind the Fringy curtain) mentioned listing our event on Philly Fun Guide.


The site lists all sorts of things to do in and around Philadelphia - including Straw, Stick, Brick,!  Check out our page here and feel free to add a comment about how excited you are to see the show.  (Shameless, I know.)

Then hunt around the Guide for other things to do like attending the Crabfest at City Tap House or watching a Revolutionary War Reenactment.

(By the way, Philly Fun Guide is kind of stalking me.  I had posted a link to our page on the Facebook event I created and suddenly my activity was on their home page.  It knows what I shared!!  Freaky technology.)

The Poster Is Ready!!

A HUGE THANK YOU to Liz Semon for creating the awesome poster for Straw, Stick, Brick,!

Liz also created our postcards which I'll be ordering this week.  It's official - the countdown to opening begins!  T-minus 30 days.

Conundrum

Do you know what the most difficult aspect of playwriting is? I'll tell you. It's dealing with the money people. The commercial end of it is the most appalling part. The demands for changes and rewrites don't bother me if they're made by the director, and I think they're intelligent demands. But when the money people get into the act, you're in trouble.

-Tennessee Williams

(from The Paris Review: Playwrights at Work)

So I am both a playwright and the producer for Straw, Stick, Brick,.  Does this mean I will find it extremely difficult to work with myself?

Tickets are on sale!!!!

The 2011 Philadelphia Live Arts & Fringe Festival website is up and running!

Here is a link to the main page.

But you can buy tickets to Straw, Stick, Brick, here.

Only $10 each - hopefully nice and accessible.  We will only accept cash at the door so if you want to buy tickets with your card, please visit the website.  See you there!

Building Blocks

The jumping off point for Straw, Stick, Brick, was a one-man show by Charles L. Mee called The House of Cards.

The House of Cards is part of the (re)making project.  The description of the project begins as such:

There is no such thing as an original play.

Mee then encourages playwrights viewing the plays on the project website to use the plays as resources for new work.  He advises to pillage his plays in order to create an entirely new piece that truly belongs to the playwright.

Craig was drawn to The House of Cards because hee enjoyed the tactile nature built into the structure of the play – throughout the running monologue the actor builds a house of cards.  The stage directions read:

A man builds a house of cards throughout the entire piece
 so that the house of cards becomes a vast, elaborate structure.

He was thrilled by the intrinsic metaphor and the action during the play.

I, to no one’s surprise, was terrified by the concept.

Building a house of cards for twenty minutes (Mee’s running time) was scary enough.  We wanted to lengthen our production to around 45 minutes.  That is a long time to stack cards and not have any fall down.  A cough from an audience member in the front row might be enough to bring down the house.  Literally.

I’m a bit of a worrywart and the idea made me itchy.

Luckily, Craig didn’t want to poach the tangible idea of the play if we were thinking of using some of Mee’s text.  So we tabled any discussion of what would be built until we had a better understanding of what our play would ultimately be about.

We know Eric will be building something during the show; we discussed building multiple somethings for a bit.  Eric at a table with different types of supplies – think versions of straw, sticks and bricks.  (I personally loved this idea because he only had to make something exist for about 15 minutes before it was dismantled and a new supply was used.)

Currently we are considering the show in the round with Eric building in the center.  No table so the structure might be tall.  Still some dismantling and rebuilding.  But the movements will be bigger.  No longer tethered to a table Eric can move around the space, fetch supplies from behind the audience, etc.

I have my personal ideas for what Eric will build.  Craig hasn’t seen them yet.  Fingers crossed my ideas and his ideas are similar enough to compromise on a single vision.