If you’re a follower of CAN TV, you may stumble across some familiar faces from SRTP on the CAN show Silk Road Sojourns.
This week, Silk Road Sojourns debuts its print component: Silk Road Sojourns magazine. Check out the magazine online on the Yohen page.
The inaugural issue includes the Artistic Director’s column, historical timelines, pottery, and an interview with our playwright.
I was nosing around in the theatre last week when my phone rang. It was Lee. He was calling to gently inform me that he had spent way more money than planned on fake foliage. Pause. And there was a very expensive bamboo tree that he wanted. Pause. And if we didn’t want to pay lots of money for the fake one, there was a real one. Pause. But someone would have to water it, and take it out in the sunshine. Fearing the worst for his budget, but also being a bit of a green thumb myself, I agreed to the live plant. Here are the pictures from its arrival at the theater:
Turning the corner at Clark & Washington Note the strategic placement out the sun roof...
A great stage manager once said to me, “I’ve never met a director who liked tech.” In some ways, I agree. I can’t speak for Steve, but I have a love/hate relationship with tech. I love that I get to see all of the elements come together — we begin to introduce scenery, lighting, sound and costumes that help flesh out the world of the play. Actors receive props and costume pieces that help add specificity to the business they do on stage; designers get to see what their work looks like in the space and begin to tweak and adjust their designs as they see fit. But, as a director, I’m inherently a bit of a control freak, and tech is the time that we start to hand the show over to a stage manager, so I kind of hate that (no offense, Michelle!). More time is spent working on transitions and run-throughs, and it becomes harder to spend time working acting notes. I also have many more voices to listen to than I did in the rehearsal room, and some times problems that were easily solved in rehearsal take hours to solve in tech (for reasons that are still a bit unclear to me — maybe just because there are more moving parts?). Read the rest of this entry »
It’s Sunday of tech here in Pierce Main (aka the Silk Road performance space). Jason came in this morning and told us that Chicago got 6.5 inches of rain yesterday and broke a record for the most rain recorded in the city in all of record-keeping. This was about half an hour after Sara and I finished taping garbage bags up over the set to catch the drips coming from the ceiling. There has been a lot of wet socks draped over railings, pants being thrown in the dryer, shoes propped up with the air mover blowing on them during this long weekend. At least it seems that the rain is due to taper off tonight. And then I try to remember how we ever manage to put a show up in February with the snow and ice! Read the rest of this entry »
Last night marked the first official day of tech - my favorite time in the production-creation process! The tech tables have been up since the seating risers were installed, about 2 weeks ago and at 5pm the design team and staff gathered around them to tackle the production as a group. Which is not to say that everyone has not been working on the production for a long time already. Design sketches, models, plots and paperwork have been going around by e-mail and on the production Google group for months already. But much of that pre-tech work is created by one person at a time - the costume designer sketches alone, the sound designer listens to music alone, the prop master shops alone, etc. Tech is the first time that we begin to create with several people working as one team, integrating their ideas on the fly to shape single images that combine music, light, color and shape. It is truly a beautiful thing! Read the rest of this entry »
Yohen takes place in the year 1986. In 1986, some states still had constitutional bans on interracial marriages, even though the Supreme Court ruled against these bans in 1967. Some judges were still upholding these anti-miscegenation laws as late as 1999. (”Miscegenation,” by the way, dates back to the 1864 presidential campaign, when anti-Lincoln critics feared “mongrelization”–a term that sounds even more racist today.) The second half of the twentieth century saw, in this country, police bursting into the bedroom of a married couple to arrest them because they were of different races.
(Mildred Jeter Loving and Richard Loving, subjects of Loving v. Virginia)
1986 turned out to be a significant year for conversations on race. On January 14 of that year, the Supreme Court barred racial bias in trial jury selection. And, on September 8, 22 years ago this week, national broadcasts began of a new daytime talk show by an African-American woman named Oprah Winfrey.
Now, it seems the world is full of Oprah. And a quick glance around the media shows us that the world is also full of couples of more than one race.
Michael Caine says it was “love at first sight” when he first saw his now-wife Shakira in Maxwell House commercial. David Bowie and Iman prove that rock stars and supermodels 
can stay together for the duration–and Seal and Heidi Klum are chasing their record. Even a movie critic and a judge can make it work (Roger Ebert and Chaz Hammelsmith). The list, of course, goes on and on. Can we learn from celebrities?
Oprah says yes.
(You can read more about the history referenced above at:
http://www.slate.com/id/2193747/pagenum/all/
and
http://www.lovingday.org/loving_story.htm
The full text of the Loving v. Virginia decision, regarding the marriage of the above-mentioned pulled-from-bed Mildred and Richard Loving, is available at
http://www.law.umkc.edu/faculty/projects/ftrials/conlaw/loving.html)