As we’re gearing up for our production of 44 Plays for 44 Presidents, I’ve been re-reading a lot of Vaclav Havel, both a playwright and politician. Check out this fantastic piece written by Havel while he was serving as president of the Czech Republic.

 http://www.project-syndicate.org/commentary/politics-and-theatre-

-Lorraine

Several nights ago in rehearsal we began talking about emergency preparedness kits – What kind of emergency would we be preparing for? What would we find useful? What would we need? want? crave?

Lots of people carry little kits with them, small bags containing a toothbrush and toothpaste, pain meds, band-aids, - that kind of thing. And I know a guy that always has a “go” bag with him in case something went down while he was away from home. It contains a flashlight, batteries, bottle of water, granola bar, clean undies, and a notebook containing important info and numbers. He’s even given a couple of “go” bags to friends when he found out they didn’t have one.

I’ve never – NEVER – carried anything like this. I do my best to leave the house with nothing but my wallet, keys, phone, and lip gloss. It wasn’t until I had a baby that I consistently began carrying a bag, and even now I try to keep as little as possible in it. I don’t know if it’s the fear of losing something, or the annoyance of having to keep up with things, but I just don’t want to be encumbered by “stuff”.

And this even extends into my home. I only recently (again because of baby) started keeping a well stocked first aid kit. I am embarrassed to admit I don’t have a fire extinguisher. The last one expired and I never replaced it. I only have enough groceries for the upcoming week, and I don’t have any bottled water in the house. I used to have a fairly well stocked freezer, but after the last power outage it is sadly empty. During times of emergency – Snowpocalypse, Hurricanes – I’ve never felt the need to run out to the grocery store to stock up. I’ve always been confident that I could get out and get what I needed.  I’m fascinated by shows like Hoarders and Doomsday Preppers and the sheer amount of stuff these people have just-in-case. (Granted the show are successful because they highlight the extreme.)

 But now, after doing some research and checking out the District’s site 72hours.dc.gov I’m a little freaked out. Do I need to take this more seriously? Am I putting my family in danger? How would I fair in an emergency situation? 72hours tells you to make sure that you are prepared for anything, and they mean ANYTHING. Here’s what they suggest you put in your go kit:

• At least a three-day supply of water (one gallon per person per day). Store in sealed, unbreakable containers.
• A three-to five-day supply of non-perishable canned food, and a non-electric can opener
• Flashlight
• Battery-powered or hand crank radio
• Extra batteries
• Wrench and/or pliers to turn off utilities
• Whistle to signal for help
• First Aid kit
• Prescription medications for at least one week
• List of family physicians, important medical information, and the style and serial number of medical devices, such as pacemakers
• Cell phone charger
• Extra set of eyeglasses, or contact lenses and solution
• Rain gear, sturdy shoes, and a change of clothing
• Blankets, bedding, and/or sleeping bags
• Identification, credit cards, cash
• Photocopies of important family documents including bank and home insurance information
• Extra set of car and house keys
• Local maps
• N95 dust masks to help filter contaminated air
• Plastic sheeting, duct tape, and scissors to shelter in place
• Tools: screwdrivers, waterproof matches, a fire extinguisher, flares, plastic storage containers, needle and thread, pen and paper, a compass, garbage bags, moist towelettes, and regular household bleach
• Special items for seniors, family members with disabilities, infants, and young children
• Change batteries in all your equipment at least once a year. An easy way to remember is to do it when you turn your clocks back in the fall.

Speal Items for Infants

• Formula, bottled water, bottles, nipples
• Jars of baby food and baby spoons
• Diapers and diaper rash ointment
• Medications
• Moist towelettes and hand sanitizer
• Blankets, pacifiers, and layers of clothing
• Sunhat in warm months, warm hat in cool months
• Several small, lightweight toys 

I am completely overwhelmed…

-Lorraine

A few years ago I was asked what my dream project was.  To be perfectly honest, I had no idea about this answer, so I made something up.  In a bold egotistic move, I answered this question, thusly – and I’ll quote myself here – in an interview with dctheaterscene.com in 2010:

“I’ve never done an Ionesco play (except in college), and I think this is a good time to put some old school absurdism back on our stages, with full use of contemporary theatre practices, maybe utilizing video, which I find to be one of the most wonderfully absurd design elements in a form which purports to be different because it’s “live”. I’d love to work on that: Ionesco, on video, with a whole bunch of flashing light bulbs. The Killing Game maybe would work well that way.”

To be clear, this was a flippant comment made to answer a question for which I didn’t really have an answer.  I am not the kind of person who has “dream projects”.  BUT, I have been struggling for several years now with how we communicate as citizens in this world.  I am today only very begrudgingly accepting Twitter as an acceptable form of certain kinds of communication.  I have still yet to see the actual societal benefits of Facebook that couldn’t be achieved by other slightly less efficient means.  This from the guy who still can’t understand why anybody wouldn’t make popcorn on the stovetop because it’s healthier and tastes better, just because microwave popcorn takes three minutes fewer to make.

We all have our values, and mine lie within a very specific plane in which very few others reside.  I would rather have better tasting healthier popcorn that takes five minutes to make with constant attention over a stovetop while others would rather sit on the couch for ninety seconds while the microwave does it all for him.

This is the absurd world in which I think we live.  And this is why absurd theater is right for us today.  Ionesco’s play Killing Game examines a town that is beset with a mysterious plague.  It’s not clear what causes the deaths that terrorize this town.  It’s not clear who might be a victim.  But it is clear that the plague is here, and it is indiscriminate in its bidding.  In Ionesco’s play, nobody is safe.  Not the rich, not the well-educated, not the well-prepared.  When the plague hits, you better just sit back and hope it doesn’t hit you.

Earlier this year, dog & pony conspirators and supporters met to read Killing Game.  After we read Ionesco’s play, out loud, I was surprised and delighted at the number of interpretations that came out of this work.  There was talk of SARS in Singapore, wearing medical masks on the subway.  There was a nod to the police states of Eastern Europe during the time of the Iron Curtain, where fear was stock in trade.  We talked at length about the effects of 9/11 on our society.  And the embarrassing things that people did in the confusion of the beginnings of the AIDS crisis in the 1980’s.  The consistent realization is that when a crisis hits, we often don’t know what to do.  And so we resort to our instincts, however base or noble, or more often base, those might be.

We’ve embarked on this production of A Killing Game to examine the hype that surrounds a crisis.  In the moments when an emergency first emerges, confusion and misinformation often leads otherwise clear-headed citizens to make irrational choices (such as giving up their Constitutional rights) which in the short term ensure their safety.  The Arab Spring has shown us the power of technology in propelling a movement through social media.  Yet at the same time, it has made us pause to consider how others outside the center of an uprising might influence those events using those same methods: a tweet from Brooklyn might just as easily have come from Cairo with the right verbage.  How are we to know?

This is the absurdity of the information that we attempt to digest as news.  We don’t necessarily know what is true and what isn’t.  As in Ionesco’s Killing Game, we are forced to consider how any crisis – be it an uprising in Libya or AIDS or the sinking of the USS Maine – is influenced by our media choices and those effects on us.  In the end, we are prone to our worst prejudices whether we like to admit it or not.  In a rational, intelligent society such as our own, I can’t imagine a more absurd notion.  And so we embark on dog & pony’s A Killing Game.

-Colin K. Bills

Nah!  But tickets for A Killing Game are now available for sale: dogandponydc.eventbrite.com.

And if a bomb goes off, we wil still be able to drink our PBR….?

My love affair… obsession… transfixtion(?) with the work of Eugene Ionesco started at the ripe age of 16. In high school one of my teachers, whom I still admire very much, decided that he wanted to do Waiting for Godot for our fall drama, bypassing the typical choices of Shakespeare and Greek tragedies. Sam Beckett thrashed in his grave as I was cast as Lucky and another girl was cast as Pozzo. Needless to say, this teacher had a desire to shake things up.

Fortunately (unfortunately), fate got in the way; fate in the form of the Broadway production starring Nathan Lane and Bill Irwin. The Beckett Estate forced our puny suburban high school cross-cast production to forfeit its rights to The Roundabout Theatre. Thank goodness for them… we were some serious competition for the Tony.

This led us to a life-changing decision.

My teacher then decided we were going to do a double header: The Leader followed by The Bald Soprano, by Eugene Ionesco.

AND IT WAS TOTALLY INSANE. AND AWESOME.

For the first time in my acting career, I was given the opportunity to figure something out while doing it. I wasn’t pressured by “making it look authentic” or “real” or “truthful”…because frankly it was all totally ridiculous. As long as I was there and I gave and I spat out that the Bald Soprano “always wears her hair in the exact same style,” I was gold. I was Mrs. Smith, it was my first experience in a collaborative theatrical work environment, and I had wet chewed pieces of bread spewed in my face. I loved that there was no reason for the play to articulate, to a T, what it was trying to do. I was living the absurdity of social graces that Ionesco was trying to comment on, and the audience lived it with me. That interaction was palpable and recognizable, even for a 16 year old.

In a lot of ways, Eugene Ionesco is a lot of the reason I do theater today. I’m still waiting for the aqueduct to come meet me at my windmill.

                                                                          -Melanie Harker, conspirator

RG and I attended the NET Detroit MicroFest in Detroit a few weekends ago. It was the first of four NET MicroFests planned across America this year, and its theme was, ‘Revitalization’.

We spent 48h touring the city’s downtown neighborhoods, holding workshops and meeting with the other festival participants to talk about what we’d seen and heard and done. 

Most of the artists we met with were engaged in work which overtly referenced a life-long acquaintance with Detroit. They had lived and breathed its struggles with economic hardship, with entrenched classism, racism & sexism, with the many challenges faced by proud communities endangered by a broken system. They exemplified in every way the axiom voiced by MicroFest participant Hasan Davis, ‘Environment absolutely informs culture.’

Then, late in the course of the weekend, we saw work by a few of the many artists now flocking into the city, who aren’t home-grown. These artists had opted to come to Detroit, specifically to live in a place where housing was plentiful and cheap.They moved into the  spaces left where the city had broken down, which gave them room to live and create with much greater freedom than elsewhere. Their art didn’t necessarily spring from or reflect the Detroit communities that came before them, within which they lived, in any way perceivable to MicroFest participants.  

And, newly bathed in the passion of so many powerful and talented sons and daughters of the city, I heard and sensed from others- and myself questioned- whether these come-lately creators lacked some authentic voice, lacked some thing that made them and their art worthy of regard. 

Questions that arise here for me are;

• What are the criteria for defining, ‘culture that is informed by environment’?
• Must art reflect a sense of environment to be authentic? 
• Who owns the sense of an environment? 
• Are there mitigating circumstances which change the answers to these questions? If so- what are they?
• Does our understanding of social inequities in our culture play a part in framing judgements about the authentic voice of artists and their work? Should it? Why?

Little Baby’s Ice Cream - something about it made me think of A Killing Game…

-Lorraine

This afternoon in the midst of remounting Beertown, we carved out a few hours to conduct what we were calling a “test of the test”… aka a rehearsal of the workshop event for A Killing Game that we’re hosting on July 15 to test the use of Twitter as a reactionary tool to a live performance.

Our good friend Hannah Hessel was kind enough to be our rehearsal tweeter… and half way through the test the interwebs connect went out.  So she continued “tweeting” in a word document on my computer.  

This is the string she left me.  You can catch the beginning at #dpdcevent.  

You can see the “real thing” at Woolly Mammoth on July 15 at 2:30p OR just following along on Twitter at #dpdcevent.

-rg

Let’s pretend this is twitter:

Ummm. I don’t know what I’m listening to?! #dpdcevent

They say there’s a difficulty but it sounds like people are being attacked?! There were screams. #dpdcevent

This is no good. There are people dying in NJ! I’ve never been a fan of the state but I don’t want them to die! #dpdcevent

This is all happening really fast. I don’t know what we’re supposed to think. #dpdcevent

Non-connectivitiy heat! O THE HORROR! (it’s like the weather today) #dpdcevent

God bless strong US boys surrounding the alien (?!) craft. Keep them safe. #dpdcevent

woah. did he say invading army from mars? did over 6,000 men just die in seconds? #dpdcevent

Washington! That’s where I am. He sounds scared. I’m starting to get scared too! #dpdcevent

I feel the heat! It’s hot in DC! Is it the Martian heat ray? #dpdcevent

We still have lights they must not be near here. #dpdcevent

That is so loud!! I don’t want to die! #dpdcevent

I don’t know if I can listen to this any longer. But I can’t turn it off! #dpdcevent

Wait. Did he just say. Army. Wiped. Out. What are we supposed to do?! #dpdcevent

This reporter sure talks pretty for someone watching a city become destroyed. #dpdcevent

Is it dead? Are they outside? What are we supposed to do! #dpdcevent