Sunday, November 17, 2019

Zoetic Stage's Arsht Production of Sarah DeLappe's "The Wolves" gave me hope for the future.


 Had the pleasure of seeing Zoetic Stage’s wonderful production of Sarah DeLappe’s The Wolves last night. It’s such a brilliant play, and this was a truly breathtaking production. (The play was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize for drama in 2017, and the script and original production won numerous other awards including an Obie for best ensemble.)

The Wolves has been deemed by critics a “call to arms” in the #MeToo era. I agree: the play was hilarious, moving, and thought-provoking without being remotely “preachy”: seeing a team of teenage women’s soccer players represented theatrically yet realistically — the dialogue during their warm-ups hurtled between contentious impromptu debates about genocide in the Khmer Rouge to the current conditions of immigrant kids in cages on the border to the most effective menstrual products to use while on the sports field — gave me hope for the future of America and the world.

I went to the show with a student group on a UM “theater up close” field trip. To prepare for my brief informal intro presentation to share after our group dinner, to contextualize the play a bit, I researched the relatively short history of women’s soccer in the United States, which goes back as far as the 1950s. However, it was only 20 years after Title IX passed in 1972 that girls’ soccer leagues really took off, in the mid-late 1990s. In the 21st Century, teenage girls playing sports on college campuses feels ubiquitous and we almost take it for granted. But the play made me wonder if we have yet to experience the full effect of the relatively recent (25-50 years?) cultural historical shift. At one point in the play, to shake off the depression brought on by an offstage tragedy that occurs between scenes, the young women playfully sing the Schoolhouse Rock version of the preamble to the US Constitution. At the finale, as the lights fade, the girls huddle together to do their pre-game chant: “We are the wolves! We are the wolves! We are the wolves!” In this way, 29-year-old DeLappe’s play suggests that young women’s access to competitive team sports will bring about social changes we have only yet begun to see.

Artistically, the overlapping dialogue in the script made me think about numerous possible theater historical influences, from the choruses in Euripides’ The Trojan Women and Aristophanes’ Lysistrata to Aphra Behn’s ball scenes in The Rover to Lanford Wilson’s early “naturalistic collage” playwriting (as in Balm in Gilead and The Rhimers of Eldridge) to the USMC military drills represented in Kenneth Brown’s 1963 avant-garde play The Brigg. The choreographed synchronized movement in the piece (through which distinct personalities emerge despite uniform sports uniforms and repetitive calisthenic running) and use of the stage space recalled for me the rich history of women’s performance in the United States: from the kick-lines and mass ornaments of the 1930s, to synchronized swimming, to Golden Age of Hollywood big budget production numbers, to the feminist history of American modern dance, to cinematic representations of women in sports such as the groundbreaking 1982 lesbian cult classic Personal Best to Penny Marshall’s 1992 hit movie A League of Their Own.

If you haven’t seen Stuart Meltzer’s wonderfully-directed production and live in South Florida, it plays at the Adrienne Arsht Center through today only. If you live elsewhere, look out for any future productions of Sarah DeLappe’s inspiring play and go support it! You’ll be glad you did.

Here is Christine Dolen’s compelling preview feature article about Zoetic Stage’s Arsht production in the Miami Herald, which includes quotations from many of the local actors in the cast, many of whom were trained at Miami’s New World School of the Arts:

Friday, September 13, 2019

Production photos from "LUCID," the Theater Arts BA Capstone project at University of Miami, Spring 2018

LUCID
An original devised theater work 
by the University of Miami's
BA Theatre Arts Senior Capstone class
Spring 2018

Company Members:
Joel Castillo
Isabella Cueto
Jessica Diaz
Chazz Guerra-Ogiste
Emilie Anne Greaves
Alexander Haq
Hui Huang
Jordan Kiser
Bennett Leeds
Alex Michell
Kyla Samuels-Stewart
Andrea Vasquez
Lingyue Zheng

Artistic Director's Program Notes
     
Spring 2018 marks the first run of the the BA Theatre Arts Senior Capstone course. I must say, it’s been so exciting to see the concept become a reality with this talented group of students who have worked together to create LUCID. Presented with several options at the start of the semester, the company chose to develop an original script using dream images as its main inspiration. LUCID is composed of four interweaving dreamscape storylines, each with three interludes inspired by the themes of fear, love and redemption. 

     The BA Faculty Committee’s original goal for the Capstone course was to provide upper-level BA majors a rigorous student-driven experience in which they could fully utilize the skills they have acquired during their education as Theatre Arts students at the University of Miami, and perhaps gain new ones as well. We wanted the course to provide a venue through which the students could work together as a theater company to envision and produce a show. My role in this project has been minor compared to the students’ work: they have conceived, written, directed, designed, and now are starring in this devised piece. I hope you will enjoy the surreal fruits of their labor. 

— Darren Blaney, PhD, Faculty Supervisor

More production photos on next page

Thursday, September 12, 2019

Lanford Wilson's "Burn This" directed by Darren Blaney at The University of Miami, Hecht Studio Theater, Spring 2015

Some production photos of Lanford Wilson's Burn This
University of Miami, Spring 2015

Direction, Set & Lighting Design:
Darren Patrick Blaney
Artistic Director: Henry Fonte
Fight choreography: Lee Soroko
Vocal coaching: Josh Jacobson
Costume coordination: Tim Bell
Stage manager: Andrew Gryniewicz
ASM/Sound Coordination: Sam Chan
ASM/Props Coordination: Victoria Sadowski
Studio Coordinator: Margo Camden
Faculty Liaison & Publicity: Brian Valencia

Cast: 
Anna: Rebecca Muller
Pale: Timothy Bell
Burton: Matthew Jacobs
Larry: Joey Casseb
Robbie's ghost: Taylor Stutz


More photos and program notes on next page

An abbreviated version of my CV

Darren Patrick Blaney, PhD

CURRICULUM VITAE SUMMARY

EDUCATION
  • Ph.D., Dramatic Art/Performance Studies with a graduate minor in Critical Theory, University of California, Davis
  • Graduate Certificate, Acting & Theater Studies, University of California, Santa Cruz
  • STC Certificate, Acting, American Conservatory Theater, San Francisco, California
  • B.A., Art, Reed College, Portland, Oregon
  • Université de Rennes, France, exchange student
TEACHING EXPERIENCE
  • Full-time Lecturer of Acting & Theatre Arts, University of Miami, Florida, 2013 to present
  • Adjunct Lecturer of Theatre History, University of Miami, Florida, 2012
  • Adjunct Lecturer of Theatre, Pomona College, Claremont, CA, 2008 to 2010
  • Visiting Assistant Professor of Acting & Dramatic Literature, Pomona College, Claremont, CA, 2007 to 2008 
  • Critical Inquiry Faculty, Pomona Academy for Youth Success, Pomona College, Claremont, CA, Summer 2008, 2009, 2010
  • Teaching Assistant, University of California, UC Davis & UC Santa Cruz, 2002 to 2007
  • Assistant Art Teacher, Board of Education, P.S. 154: The Bronx, NY, 1993 to 1995
PUBLICATIONS
  • “Queering ethnicity and shattering the disco: Is there an enduring gay ethnic dance?” The Oxford Handbook of Dance and Ethnicity, edited by Shay, Anthony, and Sellers-Young, Barbara. Oxford University Press, 2016, pp. 91-112. Print. Oxford Handbooks.
  • “1964: The Birth of Gay Theater.” The Gay & Lesbian Review Worldwide, vol. 21, no. 1, 2014, pp. 17–21.
  • “How to Do Agitprop. Staging Social Justice: Collaborating to Create Activist Theatre (Review).” The Gay & Lesbian Review Worldwide, vol. 20, no. 6, 2013, p. 43-44.
  • “Queer Theatre and the Legacy of Cal Yeomans by Robert A. Schanke (Review).” Modern Drama, vol. 56, no. 4, 2013, pp. 569–571.
  • “Lay of the Land (Review).” Theatre Journal, vol. 64, no. 4, 2012, pp. 598–601.
  • “Queering the Domestic and Domesticating the Queer: Utopian Genealogies in Lanford Wilson’s Fifth of July.” New England Theatre Journal, vol. 22., 2011, pp. 125-146.
  • “The AIDS Show Broke the Silence.” The Gay & Lesbian Review Worldwide, vol. 18, no. 2, 2011, pp. 13–16.
DIRECTORIAL EXPERIENCE
  • Catastrophe Collective, Spring 2019, Theatre Arts Capstone Project, Artistic Director/Faculty Supervisor, Hecht Studio Theater, University of Miami
  • The Mask of Blackness, Spring 2019, written and performed by Estella McNair, Hecht Studio Theater, University of Miami
  • The Dining Room, Fall 2018, Hecht Studio Theater, University of Miami
  • Talley’s Folly, Spring 2018, Hecht Studio Theater, University of Miami
  • Lucid, Spring 2018, Theatre Arts Capstone Project: Artistic Director/Faculty Supervisor, Hecht Studio Theater, University of Miami
  • 24-Hour Play Festival, Spring 2016, 2017, & 2019, Jerry Herman Ring Theater, University of Miami, Director, Co-Producer, & Artistic Director of the Festival
  • As Is, Fall 2015, Stonewall National Museum and Archives, Wilton Manors, Florida
  • Burn This, Spring 2015, Hecht Studio Theater, University of Miami
  • Minatory Mansion, Summer 2009, Virginia Princehouse Allen Theater, Pomona College
  • Fifth of July, Fall 2007, Virginia Princehouse Allen Theater, Pomona College
  • Hey Baby How’ve You Been?, Fall 2007, Highways Performance Space, Santa Monica, CA
  • 10-Minute Play Festival, Artistic Director/Producer, Fall 2007, Spring 2009, Spring 2010, Pomona College


(Read more detail on next page)

Lanford Wilson's "Talley's Folly" at University of Miami, directed by Darren Blaney, Hecht Studio Theater, Spring 2018

Lanford Wilson's Pulitzer winning Talley's Folly
Staged at University of Miami’s Hecht Studio Theater, February-March, 2018
Cast: Bennett Leeds as Matt Friedman & Lily Steven as Sally Talley
Direction & Set Design by Darren Blaney
Costume Design by Lily Steven
Lighting Design by Bennett Leeds
Intimacy Choreography by Laura Rikard

Production photos & review of Main Street Playhouse's production of Sara Ruhl's "Stage Kiss" in Miami Lakes, May 2016, playing the role of "The Director"

"Darren Blaney demolishes the unenviable task of cold turkey introducing the play’s off-kilter characters and context in a winning over-the-top performance that’s just so right you want to hug him. As the audience made vociferously apparent." 
-- Jesse Leaf, Around Town Magazine, May 6-19, 2016 

Thursday, March 15, 2018

Lanford Wilson's "Rimers of Eldritch" should be staged often in post-2016 America.

Some impressions after reading Rimers of Eldritch: Lanford Wilson’s 1966 play for voices is his answer to Our Town: it’s almost an inverse of Thorton Wilder’s earlier iconic American work, in terms of how it offers a dark vision of the corruption and deceit in small town American life. (This seems intentional, as there’s a character named Cora Groves, which sounds like the inverse of “Grover’s Corners.”) The characters could be described as the ancestors of today’s “Trumpers.” 

Rimers is set in a former coal mining town in the Midwest that has been abandoned by progress: it has decayed into an almost ghost town, replete with boarded-up movie theaters, rusting factory towers, broken-down-buses, and tumbleweeds. Industry has left now that the land has been raped, and the people who remain are lost and without hope. 

photo still from a 2011 production of The Rimers of Eldritch by Stoneham Theatre, aka Greater Boston Stage Co.
Composed of seemingly unrelated vignettes, the purposefully jumbled narrative jumps back and forth in time, but over the course of reading the play, characters, themes, and a concrete plot emerge that reflect the back-biting, condemnation, and betrayal that occurs in a town where everyone spies on everyone else. In Eldritch, the characters all think they know everybody else’s business, but of course they're all actually wrong about each other. Sexual desire is condemned in public, yet acted out savagely and with lustful abandon in private. People scoff at the poor while covering up the sins of the more well-off. The court of small-minded public opinion influences the actual judicial court, and the preacher who supposedly leads people to salvation does so by condemning the innocent and exploited while ignoring the truth. Religion enables hypocrisy: people point fingers at their neighbors who have found some relief from misery, some happiness, even though in reality the finger-pointers seethe with jealousy. Leaving an innocent man dead, tragically accidental gun violence is rationalized as necessary for the protection of the community, while a rape is covered up and the criminal is allowed to walk free. Willful ignorance, nostalgia for the past, refusal to adapt, and a sort of honest naivety blend in the minds of the townspeople to give them a sense of self-righteousness, even as they instinctively know they need to be saved from themselves. 

Sound familiar? This play should be done by every single theater in America in 2018.

Friday, October 20, 2017

Dramaturgical program notes for "Romeo and Juliet"

My dramaturgical program notes for University of Miami's 2017 production of Romeo and Juliet
Jerry Herman Ring Theatre, current season

In 1873, Walter Pater famously described the Renaissance in terms of way its cultural products (in other words, its art) attempted to reconcile the predominating world view of Christianity with that of the ancient Greek and Roman mythologies, philosophies, and scientific hypotheses that had been “rediscovered” and disseminated in the 15th and 16th centuries. What made the Renaissance so revolutionary, according to Pater, was the way the era represented these clashing ideologies as if they were “subsisting side by side… substantially in agreement with each other.” With the interplay of natural and divine imagery that proliferates one of Shakespeare’s earliest tragedies, we find copious evidence to support Pater’s thesis.

Shakespeare composed the tragedy Romeo and Juliet in tandem with his comedy A Midsummer Night’s Dream, another play that appropriates the story of Pyramus and Thisbe, the “star-crossed lovers” of Ovid’s Metamorphosis. Shakespeare’s literary borrowing of these characters’ fates, as well as the numerous references to both celestial bodies and the inconstant, ever-changing qualities of atomized nature in the play, manifest his attempt to synthesize Epicurean/Lucretian materialism with Christian cosmology. In the opening scenes of Romeo and Juliet, Shakespeare introduces his audience to a world in which violence is a priori: the origin of the familial feud between the Montagues and Capulets is never fully explained, and it is into this conflict that the sweetness of the titular characters’ tender love blossoms. Although they feel their love to be as “boundless as the sea” beneath the “all-seeing sun” (to which Juliet is compared by the bard only fifty odd years after Copernicus proposed his heliocentric theory – a radical comparison indeed, that a 14 year old girl could embody the same qualities of magnetism, boundless warmth, and life-sustaining power as the center of the universe), the conflict that surrounds Romeo and Juliet destroys the tenderness of their love. Although in an Epicurean trope, Friar Laurence advises them to love moderately so that their passion will not engulf them, his failure to relay his ill-conceived plan of Juliet’s “resurrection” to Romeo spurs the lovers’ tragic fate. Ultimately, however, in death, the lovers escape the a priori restraints that imprison them: their family names, their religion, and even their bodies. Paralleling the Christian story of resurrection, with their “love sprung from hate,” and the ultimate sacrifice of their deaths, Romeo and Juliet are not only “cut out in little stars” where it is implied they will twinkle eternally in the heavenly spheres, they also appear to redeem their families and the future generations, as their fathers pledge a pact of peace in the final scene. In Romeo and Juliet, the final image is one in which both the older and forthcoming generations are redeemed by the sacrifice of the children’s love.

In UM’s current production, director Laura Rikard focuses our attention to these contrasts, as well as asks us to imagine how the story might look if the socially-constructed categories of race and gender had been no more limiting to Shakespeare’s vision than the characters’ family names themselves. By deploying the actors’ bodies to the stage in a way that reformulates space, using anachronistic musical passages to explode our contemporary assumption that Shakespeare’s works are primarily “period pieces,” and perhaps most startlingly, updating the play through the casting of female actors to play male roles, Rikard not only inverts and exploits Elizabethan theater practice, but also demonstrates the extent to which Shakespeare’s 400-year old play is still both timely and timeless.

Saturday, February 15, 2014

University of Miami's ambitious "Floyd Collins" probes endlessly challenging conundrums

... just saw Adam Guettel and Tina Landau’s Floyd Collins musical at the University of Miami’s Ring Theater with Larry, Gary, and Roger, and I wanted to jot down my impressions of it…
Resurrecting a critically-acclaimed Off-Broadway production that ran for only 25 performances in New York in 1996 (it had been eclipsed to some extent by the tragic circumstances of Jonathan Larsen’s RENT), the ambitious collaboration by my colleagues and students at UM’s Theatre Arts department thoroughly impressed me. Crisply directed by JV Mercanti, with masterful musical direction of the hybrid bluegrass/Bartok-esque score by NDavid Williams, and stunningly energetic and percussive choreography by Christine Kellogg, the unconventional experimental musical was without doubt one of the more challenging pieces I’ve witnessed in a college setting. The ensemble cast of student actors and orchestra fully embraced performing the difficult score with precision and abandon. With costume design by K. April Soroko, lighting by Bryan Kaschube, and a striking set by student designer Lauren Coghlan, the creative team vividly transported the audience into the world of rural 1920s Kentucky. Although the opening night of the production was hindered by a few technical problems that are inevitable in an endeavor of this scope and likely to be fixed in subsequent performances, the talented ensemble cast and orchestra succeeded in not only telling a moving and entertaining story, but more importantly, in challenging the audience to ponder our current situation vis-à-vis Nature, Technology, and the American system.
On the surface a true story about an entrapped Kentucky cave explorer who dies of hunger and exposure after 16 days underground, for me, Floyd Collins resonated as an extended metaphor about human life on the planet earth in the postmodern era. As in the present, in which we are grappling with the effects of climate change after two centuries of industrial exploitation of the earth’s resources, in the play (based on actual events from 1925), a man’s desire to harness nature for his own material gain backfires. In the wake of Floyd’s broken dreams, a callous and selfish society watches as the earth swallows him whole.

Thursday, January 9, 2014

Could Denton Welch's "In Youth Is Pleasure" inspire queer youth of today?

In Youth is Pleasure by Denton Welch

Set mainly in the environs of an upscale hotel in the British countryside at which Orvil is staying with his mildly effete wealthy father and two condescending older brothers, Denton Welch’s mid-20th-Century novel  In Youth Is Pleasure chronicles the vibrant inner life of Orvil Pym, a sensitive and imaginative teenage boy who is just coming of age. The narrative offers a seemingly unrelated sequence of events, built around the various illicit pleasures Orvil experiences over the course of his summer vacation after a debilitating first year at boarding school. Left to the endlessly entertaining devices of his own amusement by his distant father and annoying elder siblings (whose reaction to Orvil’s presence ranges from teasing to embarrassment to total disregard to fraternal protection – the one closer in age is relatively kind if a bit gruff, while the eldest is the most overbearing, fear-inducing, and cold), Orvil explores the hotel, its grounds, and surrounding countryside without supervision.

Over the course of the novel’s 152 pages, Orvil engages in various activities that could be described as transgressions against the ‘normative’ expectations of male teenage behavior. For example, he steals a tube of lipstick from a department store, then hides it in the back of a drawer in his hotel room, only to coat his young lips with the cheap sticky waxy-tasting paint several chapters later while admiring his mirror, before applying it freely over his bare body as if it were tribal war paint, encircling his nipples with the bright red pigment, creating gash marks alongside his ribs and forehead, etc., then dancing about wildly in his hotel room before scurrying frantically to wipe it off, jolted into action by his elder brother’s door knocks.
Other examples of Orvil’s ‘queer’ behavior include his breaking into a Catholic Church and becoming drunk on stolen altar wine while exploring the various nooks and crannies of the church including the inside pockets of the neatly-hung choir robes, and his fascination with a book in the hotel lobby dedicated to physical exercise that features photographs of semi-naked male athletes demonstrating the movements. Most beguiling for this reader was Orvil’s rainy day interlude with a ruggedly sunburnt parson in a cottage in the woods that begins with an invitation to warm himself by the wood stove, climaxes in his exploration of the feeling of the inside of the parson’s leather shoes that he’d been instructed to polish, and ends in Orvil’s binding the priest’s hands and feet with white rope before a rapid no-turning-back exit in spite of the cleric’s pleas for him to return on the following day. More innocuous passages narrate Orvil’s delight in finding the perfect broken China saucer to buy at an antique store, or in taking afternoon tea in the hotel lobby after an afternoon spent canoeing alone, in which a dive into the river precipitated the joy of weightlessness amidst the flowing water, followed by thrilling heat of the sun as he lay on the riverbank to dry.

What makes the novel most engaging is the way that Welch’s seductive, evocative prose captures the delights of youth objectively yet with palpable balminess: the writing – in third person omniscient voice – allows the reader to indulge in the unjaded feeling of interacting with an endlessly alluring world that is seemingly full of possibility, but is nevertheless clouded by the constricting feeling of social expectation that becomes ever more omnipresent with the encroachment of adulthood.

Wednesday, January 1, 2014

2014 marks the 50th Anniversary of the birth of gay theater.

In 1964, Lanford Wilson's "The Madness of Lady Bright" and Robert Patrick's "The Haunted Host" opened at the Caffe Cino in Greenwich Village. These two groundbreaking plays paved the way for subsequent GLBTQ theater. Published by the Gay and Lesbian Review, Worldwide, my essay explains how these plays did more than just open the door for gays on stage: by making visible and public a new liberated consciousness, they helped open the closet door in general, as well.
Robert Patrick and William Hoffman in
“The Haunted Host,” December 1964 production.

Tom Bigornia, Neil Flanagan, and Lucy Silvay in
“The Madness of Lady Bright.”
Photo by Conrad Ward from the 1964 revival.


Click Here
to read the article.