Fletcherbetcher

Verbatim theatre represents a vital movement in theatre as far as I'm concerned. Through it we enable writers, artists and audiences to experience an event or topic through the eyes of those that initially lived it. We live in a complex, brutal, beautiful and constantly changing world. This is obvious. What is interesting is what stories or events strike a universal chord and whose ripples persevere in the wider swath of humanities collective memory. It is my opinion that when verbatim theatre is done well it serves to present not only a relatively factual retelling of events from a variety of perspectives but through these perspectives we arrive at a wider and more articulated understanding of what the event was and represents. It also inevitably leads to run on sentences. But I digress.   In the play Exonerated, Jessica Blank and Erik Jensen interviewed over 60 people who had spent anywhere between two to twenty five years on death row. Capital punishment is undoubtedly a cont...

TWITTER PLAY Are you the guy? I'm a guy. Where's the stuff? Where I left it. Is it lost? Are you? Are you the guy? I'm the guy Where's the stuff? Must of lost it. Silence is What Happens When You're Busy Making Other Plans I resonated with the idea of silence and how poignant it can be when used effectively. One of my favorite movies is the classic Paul Thomas Anderson film 'There Will Be Blood'. Before Daniel Day Lewis drinks your milkshake and redefines the sport of bowling the movie has to begin first. And what a beginning it is. Instead of kicking us off with dialogue to illustrate who and what we are about to see Anderson instead takes us on a nearly 15 minute atmospheric dive into location and character through a wordless 5 minute romp through the (hopefully) oil laden desert.  Check it out (could only find 5 minutes) on the right. Ah, if only all montages could be this poetic. Anderson and cinematographer Robert Elswitt express b...

Promenade Hamlet For this production we are going to need a bigger boat. But seriously, the play is going to be on a boat that actually sets sail and the audience is going to move around this boat to experience Hamlet. Why a boat? Well I like the symbolism behind this idea of being moorless for in many ways the characters either begin or descend into a moorless sense of self. The show would start with passengers boarding the boat for an at the sea wake (get it?) in which the ashes of Hamlet's father are to be scattered at sea; for like Peter the Great Hamlet's dad also had a connection to the sea. So the audience boards the boat and they are led into a main room where they are seated at the tail end of the wake. Grieving spouse, Claudius, framed picture of dad, coffin, you get the idea. It's somber- it's heavy. Hamlet is the last to give his eulogy but can't bring himself to do it so his family and the court leaves, and once they are out he delivers the spe...