The Gina Chronicles #RaptureBlisterBurn

From Sam Lasman, Literary Professional Intern

When Gina Gionfriddo’s Rapture, Blister, Burn opens in May 2013, three years will have passed since her Becky Shaw appeared on the Huntington stage. After directing Becky Shaw’s premiere, New York, and Huntington productions, Peter DuBois mounted Becky Shaw in London where it was hailed as a comedic bridge between the United States and the United Kingdom. Invoking Neil LaBute and Jane Austen in praise of Gionfriddo’s “cultivated panache,” the Guardian called the play, “astute, acerbic and richly funny.”

Supported by a Playwrights Horizons Harold and Mimi Steinberg Charitable Trust commission, Gionfriddo began developing a new work in which a feminist scholar voiced misgivings about the corrosive effects of pornography. However, wary that drama might veer into lecture, she expanded Rapture, Blister, Burn to include a generational cross-section of women negotiating the pitfalls of academia and relationships in modern America.

Seth Fisher & Keira Naughton inBecky Shaw at the Huntington. Photo: T. Charles Erickson

In her January 2012 New York Times op-ed, Gionfriddo recounts that following a preview performance of Rapture, Wendy Wasserstein’s former assistant Jenny Lyn Bader told her that she wished Wendy had been able to see the new play, “taking up where The Heidi Chronicles left off.” The Heidi Chronicles, Wasserstein’s 1988 Pulitzer Prize winner, depicts a woman’s journey towards self-assertion as a feminist and single mother. Though Gionfriddo did not set out to respond to Wasserstein’s work, Rapture inevitably came to confront many of the same hopes and fears.

Yet the link between the plays also has a personal dimension. In October 2011, Gionfriddo gave birth to a daughter, Ava. “I did not write a homage to The Heidi Chronicles, and I do not endorse that play’s ending,” she wrote in the Times, challenging that play’s paradigm of empowerment through motherhood. “But I have a play and a baby that suggest otherwise.” The ongoing search for gender equality must go beyond the prescriptive or the reductive — as the intricacies of both Gionfriddo’s work and experience suggest.

Gina Gionfriddo's biting new comedy Rapture, Blister, Burn plays May 24 — June 22, 2013 at the South End / Calderwood Pavilion at the BCA. Learn more at huntingtontheatre.org/raptureblisterburn.

Gearing Up for the Boston Theatre Marathon

From Sam Lasman, Literary Professional Intern

This weekend (May 11 and 12), Boston Playwrights’ Theatre presents the 15^th annual Boston Theater Marathon and the associated Warm-Up Laps reading series.  The Warm-Up Laps, now in their fourth year, present free, public readings of new plays by area playwrights, and the Marathon showcases ten hours of ten-minute plays by local writers, each produced by a different New England theatre company. Actors and directors volunteer their time, and all ticket proceeds go to the Theatre Community Benevolent Fund, a non-profit organization that provides financial relief for theatre artists and organizations who face dire need and require financial assistance.

As you might expect, a huge number of Huntington staff members, 

associated artists, and other friends are involved in the fifty plays that comprise the Marathon and the three Warm-Up Labs, both of which will take place at the Calderwood Pavilion at the BCA (the Huntington donates the venue each year). The Warm-Up Laps are on Saturday at 12pm, 2pm, and 4pm in the Deane Rehearsal Hall. The following day, the Marathon itself runs from 12pm – 10pm in the Wimberly Theatre. 
Five ten-minute plays run each hour, followed by a ten-minute break.

Amongst the Huntington affiliates whose work will be presented this weekend is 2010-2012 Huntington Playwriting Fellow Miranda Craigwell, whose Shelter will be read on Saturday at 2pm. It is directed by the Huntington’s Associate Producer, M. Bevin O'Gara. Learn more.

The Huntington’s entry in the Marathon, Saturday Matinee by Allan Appel, will perform in the 5pm hour of plays on Sunday. It is directed by yours truly, Sam Lasman (Literary Professional Intern), produced by Ali Leskowitz (Artistic Producing Professional Intern), and features Our Town actors Nicholas Carterand Jay Ben Markson.

Other plays with Huntington staff involvement include:

• Drive by James Wilkinson, produced by the Boston Children’s Theatre in the 2pm group and featuring Robert Orzalli (Calderwood Pavilion Professional Intern)
• Cleavage by Barbara Blumenthal-Ehrlich, produced by The Lyric Stage Company in the 6pm group, directed by Anna Trachtman (General Management Professional Intern) and featuring Paul Melendy from the cast of Ryan Landry’s “M”
• Rocky Road by Elisabeth Burdick, produced by Nora Theatre Company in the 8pm group, directed by Vicki Schairer (Assistant to the Artistic Director).

The work of many Huntington Playwriting Fellows will also appear in the Marathon, including:

• Joyce Van Dyke’s White Hole, produced by the Boston Center for American Performance, in the 12pm group
• John Kuntz’s The Nice Hotel, produced by Happy Medium Theatre Company, in the 1pm group
• Patrick Gabridge’s Curse the Darkness, produced by New Repertory Theatre, in the 3pm group
• Sinan Ünel’s Last Flight Out, produced by Provincetown Counter Productions, in the 4pm group
• Ronan Noone’s Boyfriend, produced by the Salem Theatre Company, in the 6pm group
• Lila Rose Kaplan’s The Chapel Play, produced by the American Repertory Theatre, in the 9pm group

Bad Habit Productions, helmed by Daniel Morris (BU Theatre House Manager) and Meg O’Brien (Manager of Education Operations)  is producing Red Drink by Obehi Janice, directed by Jeff Mosser, in the 12pm group.

And, of course, the entire Marathon is organized by HPF Kate Snodgrass, who is now  Artistic Director at the Boston Playwrights’ Theatre.

Learn more about the Marathon and get your tickets on BostonTheatreScene.com. We look forward to seeing you there!

Happy 284th Birthday, Mr. Lessing!

From Sam Lasman, Literary Professional Intern
My desk is currently host to a plethora of baked goods, individually bagged and awaiting sale. While we dramaturgs generally strive to bring good will and sugary cheer to all, there is a more specific reason behind these efforts today.

On this day in 1729, Gotthold Ephraim Lessing was born in Kamenz, Saxony. A prominent philosophe of the Enlightenment and friend of luminaries such as Moses Mendelssohn, Lessing was also a playwright and critic whose work in creating a national theater for Germany led him to the invention of dramaturgy. By advocating a close working relationship between art critics and artists, stressing the importance of classic models from Aristotle to Shakespeare, and emphasizing reasoned negotiation rather than absolute principle as the best route to the truth, Lessing laid the foundations of modern dramaturgy.

In honor of his contributions, the Huntington resident dramaturgs and their associates are holding a bake sale to benefit the Early Career Dramaturg Fund. This organization offers grants to budding dramaturgs, often to help them attend the national LMDA (Literary Managers and Dramaturgs of the Americas) conference each summer.

Among the treats on offer are classic chocolate chip cookies; decadent chocolate cupcakes with peanut butter frosting; splendid snickerdoodles; and dangerously good chocolate peanut butter bars.

Happy Birthday, Mr. Lessing!

Special Upcoming INVISIBLE MAN Post-Show Conversations

From Sam Lasman, Literary Professional Intern

Given the depth and complexity of the themes explored in Invisible Man (both the novel and our currently running stage adaptation), we've invited local scholars who study Ellison, his work, and/or broader themes of African-American literature and identity to lend their voices to a few of our regular post-show conversations. On Saturday, January 12, Robin Bernstein, an Associate Professor of African and African American Studies and Studies of Women, Gender, and Sexuality at Harvard University, joined us following the 2pm performance. She brought keen perspectives on the representation of invisibility and the performance of black narratives to the conversation. Her most recent book, Racial Innocence: Performing American Childhood from Slavery to Civil Rights, won the 2012 Outstanding Book Award from the Association for Theatre in Higher Education.

Upcoming guests include:

• Saturday, January 19, following the 2pm performance: Cynthia Young, Associate Professor of English and African and African Diaspora Studies at Boston College, teaches courses on race, film, and African American literature. She is the author of Soul Power: Culture, Radicalism and the Making of a U.S. Third World Left and has written widely on popular culture.
• Sunday, January 20, following the 2pm performance: Theo Theoharis, an Associate in the Department of Comparative Literature at Harvard University, teaches a course on the cultural politics of Invisible Man. Professor Theoharis has published books on authors as disparate as Ibsen, Joyce, and Cavafy.
• Saturday, January 26, following the 2pm performance: Sandy Alexandre, an associate professor of American literature at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, is the author of The Properties of Violence  (2012), which explores the connections between various representational forms of lynching and the issue of black dispossession. She is conducting research for her second book, trying to determine if slavery's discourse of black “thinghood” — as chattel, cargo, etc. — informs representations of black people’s relationship to material objects. She also has published several scholarly articles.
• Saturday, February 2, following the 2pm performance: Glenda Carpio is a professor of African and African American Studies and English at Harvard University. Her book, Laughing Fit to Kill: Black Humor in the Fictions of Slavery, was published by Oxford University Press in 2008. She is currently working on a book on immigration, expatriation, and exile in American literature. Professor Carpio also recently co-edited African American Literary Studies: New Texts, New Approaches, New Challenges (2011) with Professor Werner Sollors.

We hope you'll join us for one of these special conversations. If you've already seen Invisible Man, let us know what themes you left the theatre thinking about.