Silk Road Theatre Project

Meanwhile, at the theater, everyone was busy preparing for the afternoon performance of Yohen. Amanda, our intern-turned-house-manager, put up the welcome signs and tidied up the lobby. In the box office, Amber and Ashley stuffed envelopes of tickets and coupons for guests who would be joining us at the performance. Michelle, the stage manager, flipped through the light cues and turned on all the technical equipment, while Sara, her faithful assistant, set props in Sumi’s kitchen.

It takes about 80 minutes of prep to get a performance of Yohen off the ground. Some shows, such as this spring’s Our Enemies, have taken as long as 2 or 2.5 hours to get set up. The stage manager is the hub of it all, answering questions and helping everyone get organized – including taking calls from anyone who is running late and from the understudies checking in to see if they are needed to go on.

In this picture, Page, the wardrobe supervisor, applies a “bruise” make up effect to actor Ernest Perry. Page is also responsible for Sumi’s “roots showing” hairdo, and all the laundry and ironing that keep the cast looking great!

Even the stage managers need fresh air some times! From left to right – Allie, production manager, Michelle, stage manager, and Sara, assistant stage manager, hanging out in Millennium park between the matinée and evening shows last Saturday.

One lovely answer to our call for blending of cultures photos:

From Carolyn Briones:

“…myself, husband, and our son as a baby. I really love this picture, and ultimately for this project, I feel this photo reflects the beautiful result of two cultures coming together.”

Thanks, Carolyn!

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)

Pundits spend a great deal of time discussing the friction between live performance and mass media.  Yet framing this relationship as adversarial ignores the fact that all culture exists in relation to other culture.

This is my fancy way of saying that many people who work in theatre, just like many people elsewhere, spend their rehearsal breaks talking about the Olympics, and go home to watch political convention coverage at the end of the night.

The character of James in Yohen loves boxing, as does the Ernest Perry, Jr., the actor who plays him in our production.  Ernest talking about boxing sounds like talk about the Olympics–respect and awe of the excellence of athletes at their best, of witnessing moments in history where large groups of people watch a great move, of the pride of feeling connected to that greatness.  Both James and his wife Sumi (played by Cheryl Hamada) negotiate their relationship with each other in balance with their relationship to their culture(s).

Meanwhile, national attention has been focused on race through the candidacy of Barack Obama.  The terminology of “multiracial” or “mixed race” has been expanded and critiqued.  In Obama’s words,  “it is a story that has seared into my genetic makeup the idea that this nation is more than the sum of its parts – that out of many, we are truly one.”  As the Democratic and Republican conventions continue, we’ll hear a number of stories redefining how we define ourselves as a nation.  Yohen is one part of this larger conversation.

We’d still love to hear your stories of multiracial or cross-cultural (or whatever word you choose) relationships.  To contribute photos or stories to our exhibit, email litmanage@srtp.org or post here.

Last night at the first rehearsal for Yohen, our tenth show, playwright Philip Kan Gotanda described the play as “a love story that acknowledges that love and living in the real world are really really hard.”

First rehearsal is like a potluck of ideas.

Set designer Lee Keenan talked about the play’s setting in Southern California, in one of the neighborhoods where the military mass-settled Japanese/African-American postwar couples. Lee said he grew up around so many children of these unions that he didn’t think about the difficulties they must have had. (In the play, James recalls his father warning “baby’s gonna have both your troubles and then some…”) One of Lee’s research images shows a row of houses all alike, except that one yard is lushly green, while the neighbor’s yard is wilted brown. He talked about the details of Sumi and James’ house and its history-that a spot on the carpet would show where the TV USED to be.

Gardenia Street

Lighting designer Becca Barrett described lighting inspirations in terms of the moods of Sumi and James’ longterm relationship: the fire of intimacy v. the cooler deeper waters of the unspoken.

Carol Blanchard envisioned the clothes of two people working to express who they are, 40 years after the postwar American 1940s, when they had to wipe clean their stories to fit in. In the case of this couple, they’re moving in opposite directions, and Carol’s costume sketches express this in colors.

Meanwhile, Galen Pejeau has a particularly exciting props task on this production, since he gets to develop Sumi’s artistic vision through the pots she “makes” throughout the play. He’s working with Japanese-inspired potters in the Bloomington area to get original pieces.

And dramaturg Lavina Jadhwani posted some fascinating images of “war brides” and Black GIs in Japan. She also recommends the following, for those looking for some educational end-of-summer reading:

Tsuchino: My Japanese War Bride by Michael J. Forrester

Michi’s Memories:The Story of a Japanese War Bride by Keiko Tamura

An Absent Presence: Japanese Americans in Postwar American Culture by Caroline Chung Simpson
Sayonara by James A. Michener

“I don’t think any play changes the world,” Philip said, “but I do believe a good play can make you feel and think deeply… and enlarge the world we live in.”