Offscript - Incubation period

Secret ingredients go into ambitious debuts



Stage plays don’t just happen overnight. Well, improvised shows and stunts like The 24-Hour Plays do, but those are the exceptions. The two or so hours of an average play can represent months of preparation. The Alliance Theatre typically devotes four weeks just to rehearsals, and that doesn’t count costume, lighting and scenic design work and a zillion other details, which small playhouses often have to piece together on nights and weekends.

Theatrical gestation periods become even longer and more complex when producing original works or unusual adaptations. A variety of special ingredients go into the DNA of the most intriguing — and potentially eccentric — new plays coming up in the 2003-04 season.

You expect strangeness from the very title of Sensurround StagingsGeek Love (Jan. 9-25 at Horizon Theatre), an adaptation of Katherine Dunn’s cult novel about a family of sideshow freaks. Artistic director Aileen Loy has been writing the script since Sensurround secured the rights last November.

Even more crucial than the writing will be the prosthetics constructed by Atlanta puppeteer/goremeister Chris Brown, which will turn actors into Arturo the Flipper Boy and a pair of Siamese twins. This fall Brown will spend months building such items as a harness to convert Anessa Ramsey into the narrator, an albino hunchback dwarf. Loy also wants to make “Arturo dolls” to sell in the lobby.

VisionQuest has an even more specialized demand for The Fury: Medea (March 18-April 14, location TBD). Once the play is cast in December, the actors will spend about 50 hours learning martial arts. The show’s “Kung Fu Medea” concept sounds less gimmicky when artistic director Montica Pes explains it. The production will feature not just the tragic, child-killing climax of the Medea myth, but also the exciting “Jason and the Argonauts” legend that provides Medea’s backstory.

Pes explains that Jason of Greece and Medea of Colchis have an East-meets-West kind of dynamic, and that company member Jim Davies chose kung fu, the most dance-like of the martial arts, as a way to represent that cultural collision. VisionQuest hopes the play will attract fans of the martial arts in Jackie Chan and Matrix movies. The fact that live show lacks the safety net of movie editing and re-shoots should add to its appeal.

The Fury: Medea is being scripted by Pes, Davies and Lauren Gunderson, who debuts her new play Leap Feb. 12-21 at Theater Emory. In 2001, Gunderson began penning the fanciful dramatization about the most productive years in the life of Isaac Newton.

Leap will be directed by Alliance Theatre literary manager Megan Monaghan who, in the season’s weirdest coincidence, is contributing to a second play also titled Leap for the Alliance. The Alliance Leap (March 5-April 11 at the Hertz Stage) explores different facets of faith and has been developed by a team of artists who met monthly beginning last October.

Leap’s “congregation” includes author and playwright Jim Grimsley, artistic director Susan Booth, composer Michael Fauss, musician Adam McKnight and such performers as Tom Key, Carol Mitchell-Leon, Rosemary Newcott and Bill Nigut. Leap will follow the spiritual journey of a single character and will feature the actors addressing the audience as themselves, as well as playing characters.

The longest, strangest road to the stage has probably been driven by Mr. Four-Wheel Drive (June 11-July 10 at Dad’s Garage). Playwrights Scott Warren and Ryan Dunn created the title character, a gasoline-powered superhero, while goofing off as students at North Carolina’s Appalachian State College in 1997. Warren, who will direct the show, says the play will recount the title character’s oddball origins. He plans to use a variety of complex stage effects — from live video feeds to shadow puppetry — to emulate both the visual style of comic books and the documentary structure of an E! “True Hollywood Story.”

Next to those ambitions for Mr. Four-Wheel Drive, building a villainous brain in a jar should be a business as usual for the prop department.

Announcements

Edith Love, who spent 12 years as Alliance Theatre’s managing director, has been named managing director of Portland Center Stage, where she’ll work with artistic director Chris Coleman, founder of Actor’s Express. ... An anonymous donor contributed $100,000 to 7 Stages, the largest individual gift in the theater’s 24-year history. The money will erase the shortfall following 7 Stages’ previous season and also go to facility improvements and upcoming programming. Managing director Raye Varney quips, “Half of it is gone already.”

curt.holman@creativeloafing.com