New version of Ana (with Dorothy Dix) goes over great!

A really good audience and, it seems, a really good way for Ana Fortier to talk about Elisee Reclue, Oak Alley, Antoine the slave, the righteous demands of the streetcar workers' strike in New Orleans, 1929 ... and, yes, a little about anarchy as she understands it.

Such a fine experience for me, the playwright, but I really think it was a good experience for all who came.  A good audience, a good beginning to the Seguin artsFest, ... the first time there was a theatre component, but surely not the last.

I am grateful to all who attended, to Keith Giles who gave us the use of the wheelchair accessible Aumont Hotel lobby, to the organizers of the Seguin artsFest for accepting Ana's Key to Anarchy (even if its title might off-put), to Carol Hirschi and Griffin, ...

and it was lovely, lovely.

New Version of Ana in Seguin artsFest

As part of the 2nd annual Seguin artsFest, there will be a staged reading of Ana's Key to Anarchy.  7 pm, Friday, March 30, The Aumont Hotel.  Free and open to the public.

This new version is a two-woman show.  Dorothy Dix just happened to be in New Orleans when we need her.  Carol Hirschi will read the role of Dorothy Dix.

Ana's Key to Anarchy for a UU forum in Comal Co.

Kathy Center could not read Ana's role, as I explained with the last entry. I did it myself. I welcomed the assembled Comal County UU's as if they were the delegation sent from Mayor Walmsley's Office (New Orleans) to see what kind of old lady would object to the Mayor's comments with "He doesn't even know what anarchy is!" (She'd seen in the Times-Picayune his statement, referring to the streetcar workers, on strike for better conditions, that "Anarchy must cease". )  Jan Estes, who organizes the Forum events on Wednesday night for the UUs, said she wished we'd taped it, for the play but also for the great discussion that followed.

But once again, I failed to get any pictures! Sorry.

I want to thank the Comal County UU's, of course, including Jan Estes; also my friends Bev and Rob who drove me over, Paul Martin who rode his bicycle from Seguin, Monta Zengerle and John Bushnell for attending, and Carol Hersch (the Mosheim Mansion, Seguin) for loaning me an antique telephone appropriate to 1929. Thanks.

Kathy Center in a new play

When I learned that Ana's Key... may get another staged reading in January, I wrote Kathy Center who did such a fine job with the role for the staged reading at the Blue Theatre in Austin in August, hoping she might be interested in reading the part again. But Kathy will be in rehearsal for another play. Below is what she could tell me about that play and and its performances:

Here's the play info so far:


CAFÉ AT THE END OF TIME
A stage play by Sue Carroll Moore
the story of a gay bar in the Florida Keys and the characters that call it home.

Directed and Produced by former LA Director - Marian Jones.
Performance Dates Feb 3 - Feb 19 at the Daugherty Arts Center, Austin, TX


I'm playing "Tony" the bar owner and manager, a dyke from New Jersey who's juggle two girlfriends: the former, emotionally-dependent gal who just won't let go, and the younger, current gal, who's losing patience. All the characters are gay or lesbian and equally colorful.


Thanks,
Kathy

BLUE THEATRE ANNOUNCES!

Good news for new play!

Ana's Key to Anarchy will get a staged reading at the Blue Theatre in Austin! Also to have a staged reading, the same evening, PÈRE BOISSON, based on a story by Guy de Maupassant. Hurray for Blue! August 8, 7:30 pm, "Free and Open to the Public." Link to Blue Theatre at the right.

beaucoup de français, mais pas trop (in new one-woman show)

Elisée Reclus


I've just finished a new play. It's Ana's Key to Anarchy. Catchy title, right? The one woman of show is Ana Fortier, whose family had the sugar plantation in Louisiana where Elisée Reclus, who would become an important geographer and anarchist, was the resident French teacher from 1853 to 1855. She's 87 as she addresses us in 1929.(He left, of course, because he could not tolerate an economy based on slavery). Dans cet piéce il y a beaucoup de français, mais pas trop.

One more play set in 1929 and I'll have another trilogy. A December Eve's Visit with Frederic Demuth (NYC International Fringe Festival show 2008, a one-man show) was also set in 1929. Any ideas?

This new play takes place as the streetcar strike is in progress in New Orleans. Ana is wanting one of those new PoBoy sandwiches that the Martin Brothers created to give out to hungry strikers.

I've re-subscribed to Celtx, though it has no Celtx Central anymore, which I dearly miss. With this new Celtx you can generate PDF files of the plays, so that helps. If anyone would like a copy, let me know!

It's 106F here in Texas where I post this. (I like that snow on the mountains behind Monsieur Reclus.) Stay cool.

Little Lucila still helping her belovèd Chile

Hi,

Just wanted to note here that Lucila: a play for Gabriela Mistral was shown once in my home and will be shown again to a Unitarian forum. We passed the hat for donations for Chile and came up with $250 the first time, all of which we are sending to a real person in Santiago who has worked with a theatre group in poor neighborhoods and through them will give it directly to someone(s) in dire need at this time.

His name is Mauricio and he is a friend of my poet friend, Monique Laforce. He rented a room from her when he was working on his PhD at the University of Laval. Later, when he was working, back in Santiago, he paid for Monique to travel to Chile.

Lucila was even lovelier, to me, this last time. Thanks again to all who gave the play their time and talent, their heart and soul.

Thank Heavens for old friends, but about Celtx Project Central....

Just returned from a visit to the Rio Grande Valley, Texas, with of course a cross over to Mexico for just a taste of it. Cold but sunny that day, Friday, in Nuevo Progreso, Tamaulipas with my friend Rosemary Miranda and her friend-once-husband, Manual Miranda, a painter.

Manual asked about my plays. I told him about the two produced in NYC in 2008, then told him I'd give him the URL for Celtx Project Central, where all my play scripts are available. But guess what? They're not there! Or maybe they're there, but there's no there there (as Gertrude Stein said of Los Angeles -- or was it Oakland?). Celtx Project Central is all gone! If you click the link at the right to my portfolio, you'll see the sad news of its retirement. And if Manuel hadn't asked about my plays, I'd not even have known, as I use Celtx only to input a new play, and I haven't written one lately.

I've long wanted to publish plays. Real plays. Real paper. Maybe now's the time. If anyone wants to help publish plays, tell me.

with his old camera i took pictures, like these in Quebec City, last day of October

Anthony Joseph (Tony) Weisman

Tony Weisman
May 31, 1944-September 29, 2009



Tony Weisman fixing a neighbor's roof last November, right, and Tony dressed in his nicest jacket, above.


We lost an angel of a friend when Anthony Joseph Weisman died on September 29, 2009. You can see many photos of him at www.MeM.com, where you search with Weisman, Anthony, or just use the link at the right.

He was a gift to everyone who knew him, but he was especially a gift to me, Sylvia; to Leecia (her daughter, Stella, calls him Opa Tony); and to my brother, Thomas Sherwood Manning, 1955-2005, mentally and physically handicapped, for whom Tony made a home the last nine years of his life.



Tony and Sylvia in 2008 in New York for the NY International Fringe Festival, with Stella.

Encore une fois, Bread & Puppet

We, Sylvia and poet friend Monique LaForce, of Québec, attended the B&P Circus this last Sunday. It was in the New Theatre instead of in the field, because of weather. They performed to two packed houses, one after the other, but with no Pageant in the woods. It was even better than before. It was great. Monique, who had never seen a Bread and Puppet performance before, said it was like entering another world.

And Peter Schumann was Uncle Sam again on his sky-high stilts. Go to this URL to see him on them: http://breadandpuppet.org/ (or click at the Bread & Puppet link on the right)




Monique LaForce, poet, after picking wild raspberries at Mullein Hill, Glover, Vermont.

more Bread and Puppet pictures from July 4, 2009

Some in rags, some in jags ...

I love these new puppets with (I think) plastic buckets for mouths. I love their bright colors and how, moving down Glover Road in Barton, Vermont, their ribbons of rags lift in the cool July breeze.

and some in velvet gowns.




And who wouldn`t love Dirt Cheap Money, title and theme of this year's circus?

From the north country

One of the joys of being in northern Vermont -- in the Northeast Kingdom, as it's called -- is the opportunity to see the great Bread and Puppet Circus.The sunshine came out just for them, when the band started playing in the Barton parade, and it stayed all afternoon so that people could enjoy the first circus of the season. (Otherwise, not a lot of sunshine that week in the Kingdom.)

Elizabetta, from John Reed's Insurgent Mexico

Back in the Texas heat for a month as of today, and in a small town where local theatre is not very local and not, in the opinions of some, theatre, after giving two book talks on Right Relationship: Building a Moral Economy, I found myself putting into Celtx a (new and improved, that is to say, revised) version of a play I wrote some time back. Well, I wrote it on the last typewriter we purchased, a manual Smith Corona which now lives, with its extra keys for Spanish, at the cabin in upstate Vermont. Think of it? I wrote this play before we ever owned a computer.

But it's computerized now!

So the play is Elizabetta. "Elizabetta" is also the title of Chapter 13 of John Reed's book, Insurgent Mexico. But the play gives more than just that chapter. I worked to present some of the depth of Reed's experience there, from the whole book; and beyond that, it begins and ends in a prison cell in Russia.

As the movie Reds has it, he didn't actually die in prison, but shortly after being released; but drama is fiction, or so I learned as a cataloger. One can take liberty.

If you'd like to see the play, follow the link to my plays on Celtx, on the right. For a little while, Elizabetta will be on the opening Projects page. Afterwards, you will need to put either SilviCol or Elizabetta in the Search Box.

Celtx is no longer free to those of us who use it for writing or production purposes, but it's still free to the browsing public.

I thought this play might be good for radio and looked up that format. The new Celtx, though, makes an instantaneous adaptation to Audio Format or Screenplay. That's good enough for me for now.

Joe's Mrs. Warren's Profession!

"The acting is great," reads one review. Another has this:

"Joseph Franchini’s performance as Praed is also a gem, from the time he nervously approaches to meet Vivie and becomes inexorably drawn into the family’s drama...
That each character wholeheartedly believes in his own standpoint and worldview, whether with a sense of naïveté or entitlement, makes their interactions captivating and provocative to watch throughout the performance...." (Off Off Online)

Below Joe's picture, on the right, is a link to a review; or just search Google with Mrs. Warren's Profession, Joe Franchini.

Congratulations, Joe.

Anouihl's Antigone

Last night I saw a wonderful production of Jean Anouilh's Antigone at Théâtre de Poche (Pocket Theatre) here in Quebec City, at the University Laval. Antigone had lip piercings and unkempt hair, dressed in grunge black. The jacket she left behind on her last entry into her tomb the young Hémon will hold it as if it were the bundled child they might have had. The audience walked through the cast, assembled beforehand on-stage as Anouihl requested for curtain rise -- and here there was no curtain. The tone was set from the moment your ticket was taken by one of the guards.

It's a splendid script, of course, and these young French Canadians actors were in their element with the French.

Sylvia SilviCol news

Sylvia Ann Manning (SilviCol) is happy to note that her play about Walt Whitman's housekeeper was one of two plays chosen for a Herstory event by Co-op Theatre East. The full name of the event is COTE Tales: "In Her Own Words: Retelling Herstory".

The title of the SilviCol play is Elizabeth's Book about Mary.

The staged reading will be Sunday, March 29, 2009, at 6 pm at Kaffe 1668, 275 Greenwich St. in Tribeca, NYC.

A link for Co-op Theatre East is at the right. If you go to the link, go on to the blog.

Joe's in Mrs. Warren's Profession!

Joe Franchini has taken a role in George Bernard Shaw's play, Mrs. Warren's Profession.

(That's Joe's picture at the left from back in 2005 when he directed Pierrot le Quin at the Connelly Theatre. A more recent picture is on the right, above the link to the Boo Arts website -- with more information about the production he's in.)

"I am so happy to be working on a Shaw play," he says. "I love his work. The language is a joy to work on (and difficult to learn!).

Thanks again to Annalisa Derr, our Lucila

Annalisa in group is second from left; Annalisa below is second to none.

Here's what Annalisa tells us about playing the role of Lucila:

As a non-native Spanish speaker, this is the second time I've played a Spanish speaking character. However, playing Lucila brought a handful of challenges aside from language. One of which was bringing to life the non-fictional character of a young Gabriel Mistral. I had to discover the truth, complexity, and freedom of this young woman without playing at being a 'little girl.'

One of the many fun things about being an actor is the process of discovery and growth that happens with each new play and character we inhabit. I had the fortune to learn about a talented and mysterious poet while recreating her through my own eyes.
There are universal human truths that we can all draw on to, "step into the shoes" of the character, or empathize with them. These truths I drew from while molding the character of Lucila. And sometimes, as actors, we ask for guidance and permission from that of the deceased soul of the character we are portraying in order to create a well-rounded portrayal."

[That's Gabriela Mistral on the left —Lucila grown up. She's smiling because someone worked hard to tell the story of what happened to her in Vicuña, Chile, when she was a child. Lucila's story.]

We're glad to know that Annalisa has been up to a lot of things since the 2008 New York International Fringe Theatre Festival.

I just wrapped a web series entitled "Empire," in which I played Katherine. Nearly completed filming the feature-length film, "Mara."
I am always creating; whether I am acting, writing, singing, dancing, painting, taking photographs with my Polaroid, I am "doing." I just returned from a three-week trip to Poland in which, among many things, I was able to perform my rendition of "My Funny Valentine."

Thanks!

Annalisa Derr

But we're back to the top where we who thank her for doing such a great job. Wish we could see her Funny Valentine.