Friday, May 7, and Saturday, May 8th (7:30 PM, both days) are the final performances of the Wrecking Crew’s production of ‘Pterodactyls’ at Stone Soup in Seattle. This is a fine revival of Nicky Silver’s breakthrough play about the destruction of a Philadelphia family – the dinosaur in the living room.

Stone Soup Theatre Downstage
4029 Stone Way North
Seattle, WA 98103
(206) 633-1883

Directions to Downstage Theatre
Buy tickets here (Brown Paper Tickets)

“Nicky Silver’s absurdist 1993 tragicomedy deftly sketches the disintegration of Philadelphia’s Duncan family, an elite clan hobbled by extremely bad judgment, narcissism, and emotional deafness the way the dinosaurs were hobbled by a dust-filled atmosphere….Andrew Tribolini seems so effortlessly creepy you wonder whether he’s even going for creepy.” — Seattle Weekly, April 28, 2010 review

Ben Brantley, The New York Times, 10/21/1993, review of NY premiere of Pterodactyls.

Communique from Stephanie Shine, Artistic Director, Seattle Shakespeare Company:

“Ain’t War Grand?” We ask you ironically in our marketing for this production of Henry V.

The play itself puts forth the question and brilliantly offers the many facets of a particular war from a variety of its participants. Among my favorite lines regarding War: “I am afear’d, there are few die well, that die in battle: for how can they charitably dispose of anything, when blood is their argument”Williams, IV,i

I have a first cousin I am crazy about.  Timothy McCarthy is 2 years and 2 days older than I am; we grew up celebrating our birthdays together on the day in-between. Timothy is an identical twin, an honest-to-god cowboy from Durango, Colorado: frighteningly handsome, alarmingly witty, and the father of five.  I have idolized him from birth. His phone calls bring me great joy, and we share incredible amounts of laughter.

We have always been close. Our families even lived together for a few years (our moms were sisters) because my Uncle Mac, a career Marine, was fighting in Vietnam.

In March of 2003, I began rehearsal of an all-male The Taming of the Shrew. It was going to be the most exploratory, risky, production of my life to date. I had been looking forward to it for months. Yet the only thing I remember about the first week of rehearsal was that the United States invaded Iraq.

My only son Conor Mac was 12. Timothy’s only son Brandon was 14.  They were too young for war; they were safe.  We were all sure this war would not last long, and Iraq was so very far away.

Seven years have passed; I have continually read in the paper of the sons and daughters from our region who have died in this war. I have wept many mornings over their pictures. I wept for the lost promise of their young lives and the unending pain of other mothers and of fathers.

With each successive year, the gap between Conor’s and Brandon’s ages and the age of the dead soldiers has closed. Now I read of boys dying that are my son’s age, 19.  Then, last year, Timothy’s son, Brandon, enlisted in the Army. The war marches closer and closer to home.

Over New Year’s, Timothy phoned to let me know that Brandon will be deployed to Afghanistan this spring. He will have just turned 21.

One of our boys is now in danger. The war has come home.

I wonder in the next several months, how I will react when I see Timothy’s name on my phone. Will I still welcome his call by breaking into a huge grin and leaping to answer? Or will there be trepidation and even cold fear for what he might have to say? How will any of us sleep soundly knowing Brandon is out there?How will I support this boy I love and his father whom I adore?

What I mourned from a distance is now suffocatingly close. “Ain’t War Grand?”

Perhaps after sharing this play with us you will be answering that question for your self. For me, my thoughts will be with Timothy and Brandon. There is nothing grand about this fear, and I’ll be praying each day as Henry V prays “Not today O Lord, O not today.” – Henry, IV, i

“Bloody Bloody Andrew Jackson” is the most entertaining and most perceptive political theater of the season. Old Hickory, Rock Star President, Ben Brantley, NY Times, April 7, 2010. Extended through May 9 at the Public Theater, Lafayette Street.

Today I completed the first draft of a new full-length prnyc. How do you know when you complete the first draft? You reach a state of complete exhaustion and you cannot gone on. There is nowhere, in this milieu, beyond the last line. Life goes on beyond the play, as it inevitably will, as it must, just as life existed before the wisenheimer protagonist opened his mouth to piss off the bestial antagonist.

Of course, this is not the end of this process; in many ways only the beginning. Today it is a punctuation! Good enough to send off for feedback and the beginning of the process leading to the reading. How did this play begin?

A year ago I wrote a 10 min. play called WHITE NOISE; it played for eight performances at H-B Playwrights Theatre, Bank St, NYC, as part of “The Waiting Room” series.  In the play an over-zealous New York PR guys puts the moves on a crazed marketing exec in the waiting room of a therapists office. They test each other for 10 minutes and resolve to meet, after the PR guy rants about his horrible boss nicknamed The Beast.

What if that guy actually went to work the next morning? I asked myself, on my way to work one morning, as the bitterly cold wind whipped around Riverside Park. I used the 10 min. play as the the first Scene and built on that for a full length play. The Play was called PUBLIC RELATIONS and we went through two readings in Donna De Matteo’s playwriting class. At the end of that process I realized that:

• I had no idea what this play was about
• There were too many characters
• The action was too diffuse
• There was no climax
• I failed to establish the language and rhythm necessary to carry this play

I realized that as long as I was tethered to the 10 min play the full-length play would not be able to find its own life. So I:

• Deleted Scene 1; started at Scene 2
• Deleted 6 characters; pared down to 5
• Compressed action time frame to 48 hours
• Wrote the ending first, then the climax

In other words, I took Lee Blessing’s advice. Thanks Lee.

The oldest form of theater is the dinner table. It’s got five or six
people, new show every night, same players. Good ensemble; the people
have worked together a lot.  Michael J. Fox

The theater is so endlessly fascinating because it’s so accidental.
It’s so much like life.  Arthur Miller

thanks to Nancy at nycplaywrights

See more on The Maharini - background, map, ticket info

What more can you say? thanks to ‘tediousoldfools’

Polonius: What do you read, my lord?
Hamlet: Words, words, words.

The Hard Lull, Richmond Shepard Theatre, NYC Apr 7-12, 2009

Joe, the hyper stressed NY PR maven, and Melanie, the strictly A-type emotive marketing exec, are back for eight (8) encore performances of WHITE NOISE at the Richmond Shepard Theatre, 309 East 26th Street @ 2nd avenue, NYC, April 7 – 12, 2009.

A chance meeting in the waiting room of a therapists office leads to impromptu venting, a connection, and maybe more, illustrating that in New York your life can change radically in 10 minutes. Who is giving whom the business?

WHITE NOISE, a 10 minute play by Mark Rose, premiered at NYC Playwrights winter 2008 fundraiser, then ran for eight performances at H-B Playwrights Theatre, December, 2008. This is the first production of Discovery Hill Productions, a new venture of Ella Jane New, who starred as Melanie in the H-B Playwrights Theatre production of WHITE NOISE.

The Hard Lull is eight plays, 10 (or so) minutes each, 16 intriguing and impressionable characters all in different states of waiting.  What are you waiting for?

The Hook – C.S Drury | Open House – C.S Drury | Central B.S – Peter Alexandrou | Flight into Health – Stan Taub | Questioning – Elizabeth Primamore | The Executive – Henry Holden | White Noise – Mark Rose | The Exchange – David Rey and Leif Steinert

Director: David Rey
Assistant Director: Eduardo Costas
Light and Set: Brandon Hughes 

Tues April 7th - Sat April 11th @ 8PM
Sat April 11th Matinee @ 2PM
Sun April 12th @ 3 PM
Richmond Shepard Theatre
309 East 26th Street @ 2nd Ave.
Admission – $10
212-684-2690
917-796-3091