Mary-Louise Parker and Denis Arndt on the spare staging of "Heisenberg" at the Mark Taper Forum; inside a rehearsal with Nancy Keystone – a theater artist from L.A. whose new production will open the REDCAT's New Original Works Festival; Hollywood Reporter film writer Tatiana Siegel discusses the rocky relationship between Hollywood studios and outside financiers.
Mary-Louise Parker & Denis Arndt on their 'intimate experience' in 'Heisenberg'
Mary-Louise Parker and Denis (Denny) Arndt have performed opposite each other in the play “Heisenberg” more times than they can probably count.
The play, about an unusual romance between an older butcher and a younger eccentric woman, was written by Simon Stephens. He also did the Tony-winning adaptation of Mark Haddon’s novel “The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time.” Ardnt and Parker have performed “Heisenberg” Off-Broadway in 2015, on Broadway in 2016 and now in Downtown Los Angeles at the Mark Taper Forum.
The L.A. production is sparse. With minimal props and improvised staging, this production directed by Drama Desk Award winner Mark Brokaw (The Lyons, How I Learned to Drive) lets the innate chemistry between Mary-Louise Parker and Denis Arndt dictate the show.
The unconventional staging begins before the audience is even ready. As the lights dim and the theater makes its silence your cell phones announcement, Parker and Arndt enter and position themselves; strategically avoiding entrance applause, according to Parker. For the next eighty minutes they tell the story of Alex (Arndt) and Georgie (Parker) and how their relationship transpires after the intrepid Georgie plants a kiss on Alex's neck in a crowded London train station. From then on, the two are magnetically connected despite differences in demeanor, origins, and age.
Mary-Louise Parker and Denis Arndt sat down with John Horn to discuss the play's variable nature and how the two couldn't imagine performing 'Heisenberg' without the other.
You can hear their conversation by clicking the play button on this page.
Interview Highlights:
On acting in the theater versus TV or film:
Arndt: The difference for me is the human act of theater. The idea that we all get together, close the doors, turn on the light, let's pretend. Something happens between the group of people that agree to participate. When that thing happens in the room- it's electrifying for everybody. I don't find it gratifying. I don't do theater for any type of gratification. I do it for the sheer exercise of it. When it's good, you know it right away. When you are in a room where theater is happening and you're participating: something happens on a different level.
On falling in love with the script for "Heisenberg":
Parker: With me, it's been pretty immediate. With 'Proof' it was in the first ten pages, with this play it was in the first ten pages. Usually, I know by the third or fourth page and then I'm just praying that I won't turn back. But generally, it's really quick.
Arndt: I had to read it three times. I got it quite by accident... It was very obvious to me that it was subversive, in the sense of what is happening to most of theater – which is over-produced, heavy on the spectacle side. People come expecting to have something given to them, or fed to them. This was so different: two actors, the spoken word, no set, no frills.
On director Mark Brokaw's minimalist approach:
Parker: It takes a lot of bravery on behalf of a director not to show off with production values, to not bring a stream of unicorns down a hill... He really spent his time on the intent of the words and the characters, where they begin and where they end... I think that is lost on some people. I think some people will say 'This seems like an acting exercise' but in a way, how often do you see that? I mean, I'm wearing my own clothes... Our entrance is during the cellphone announcement because I don't like entrance applause. It just takes everything off of the idea of 'performance'; [Brokaw] took that really far in a way that a lot of directors wouldn't have the courage to do.
On eventually revisiting the play:
Arndt: I'll never do it again, there's no question about that in my own mind... it's such an intimate experience. It just belongs to us... It wasn't for anything other than the exercise of that piece inside of a room. That's what it's about. I can't imagine doing it again.
'Heisenberg' is showing at the Mark Taper Forum until August 6th, 2017. For ticketing information, please visit the Forum's website.
An LA-based theater troupe remedies Trump fatigue with make-believe
If you are a fan of live performance that skews a bit towards the avant-garde, then you already know REDCAT – the theater and gallery space in downtown Los Angeles.
This weekend, REDCAT kicks off its annual New Original Works Festival— or rather, the ‘NOW’ Festival, for short. For the next three weekends, nine different artists take over the main-stage to present a cross section of brand new musical, dance, and theatre work. Theatre director Nancy Keystone will open the festival Thursday night with a piece she created here in Southern California with her Critical Mass performance group.
Keystone is a decorated veteran of the LA arts scene whose edgy theater pieces have played all over the country.
In the days leading up to the NOW Festival, she has been trying things out in the rehearsal room with her cast.
“Go ahead and start tearing it!” shouts Keystone with the delight of a kid opening presents on Christmas morn. “Explore how it tears. Crumples. And how you can throw it using the impulses we have been working with.” She’s throwing out suggestions to her acting group during a recent rehearsal as they explore the characteristics of giant butcher paper.
I just think you have to be in a room and just make stuff and some of it is going to be horrible. Most of it is going to be just terrible. You can’t get to the other side without trying stuff and it’s like any scientific process. Most of what happens is failure.
But there is a bigger “why” fueling Keystone's latest work and that tracks right back to November 2016, election night in America.
“It’s like this is how I’m feeling: It’s sort of like I’m flummoxed and battered by the moment we are living in post election. And I don’t know what to do about it,” says Keystone. “And I would like to make something that is responding to that. That’s a very serious impulse. A very serious feeling.”
Keystone calls this new piece “Untitled Communion.” She wants her group to join her cheerful search for some elusive place where we can laugh at our country’s current political climate.
Without missing a beat or taking a rehearsal break, Keystone leads the group from the extreme of the angry paper destruction exploration to the opposite end of the mood spectrum.
“Val’s gonna come around with these little sparkly pom-poms,” giggles Keystone while she explains the next exercise to the cast. “Take one and let that be like a balm to your soul. Let it lead you somehow. Explore what that little thing does.”
Only a few minutes prior, the performers were sliding and pounding across the space creating bursts of hostile movements. But, all of a sudden everything has changed. Now, they are each holding what looks like a small, glittery cotton ball. All that explosive anger from before is gone in a poof!
Dancer Yanina Orellana says she’s allowing the little pom-pom to guide her through this movement exercise.
We are connected energetically I guess. I think because it’s trying to stay close. It’s a flow situation where we kind of know what each other is going to do next. So we can move together and not crash.
Across the dance floor, Playwright and actor Boni Alvarez takes great care to cradle his tiny pom-pom object in his big arms. He explains:
His name is Glow. He’s always there… you just don’t see him all the time. Glow is always there.
Alvarez is mainly a playwright by trade, but he’s excited to be joining the Critical Mass performance group for this new piece as a guest artist.
“Like a month leading up to the election, something told me something was askew,” recalls Alvarez. Like Nancy Keystone, he still has a lots of lingering feelings about the 2016 Election—and working on this piece is helping him work it all out.
“I found that a lot of my anxiety is actually rooted in anger. How did we get here? And I think everybody-I think Trump’s wondering how he got there. Seriously! He must wake and be like, how did I get here? Right?!”
Ultimately, Keystone believes we need to use our minds more creatively these days— to think our way out of the tension of 2017.
Theatre makes use of metaphor in a really powerful way. It is one of the forms that can exploit that mode of thinking. I think it’s really important to be able to think of things non-literally. It expands your openness and expands your imagination and connects ideas in a different way.
Sparkly imaginary fairy balls and political anger may not go hand in hand — but Keystone’s thinking is catching on with members of the Critical Mass Performance Group— like costume designer Lena Sands who was busy sketching ideas during rehearsal to offer the actors and audience members a little hope and inspiration.
“I’m drawing some necklace options for our two sparkly, fairy people at the end,” says Sands. “We were thinking about what would make people gain some sort of inner strength. Like, what is the sparkly angel person inside themselves? And how could we externalize that in a way that it would bring that out in people?”
A land of make-believe coupled with anger release and sparkly pom-poms. Sounds pretty good.
“I think I’m just going to play with sparkle pom-poms!” Keystone decides abruptly at the end of rehearsal.
Redcat’s annual NOW Festival starts July 27th and runs through August 12th. For more information go to REDCAT.ORG.