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      In ‘Once Upon a (korean) Time,’ Bedtime Stories to Keep You Up at Night

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      Daniel K. Isaac’s stylistically daring play at La MaMa doesn’t quite fulfill its promise, but it suggests the playwright has more stories to tell.Korean fairy tales can trend macabre; a few skew more grisly than even the Brothers Grimm. In the Korean version of “Cinderella,” for instance, Cinderella dies. (For a while, anyway.) Murder, starvation, and sacrifice form the dark heart of this folk tradition, at least in the tales that Daniel K. Isaac tells in “Once Upon a (korean) Time,” a production from Ma-Yi Theater Company that opened on Wednesday at La MaMa.Isaac is better known as a stage and screen actor (“The Chinese Lady,” “Billions”); this is his first produced play. And if the ambition of this drama, which spans nearly 100 years and two continents, often exceeds his grasp — and that of its practiced director, Ralph B. Peña — it does suggest a lively theatrical intelligence and a willingness to grapple with some outsize themes.The play begins in 1930, mid-battle, with gunfire and screaming. Out of water, out of rations and — apparently — out of time, two wounded soldiers (David Lee Huynh and Jon Norman Schneider) cower in a foxhole. They soothe themselves by telling a story about a cruel older brother, a kind younger brother and some magical gourds. In a scene set a decade or so later, during World War II, three adolescents (Sasha Diamond, Teresa Avia Lim and Jillian Sun), kidnapped and forced into sexual slavery by the Japanese military, dissociate from their circumstances by recounting the story of Shim-Cheong, a woman who sacrifices herself to protect her blind father.David Lee Huynh, left, and Jon Norman Schneider as two wounded soldiers, with Jillian Sun, in “Once Upon a (korean) Time.”Richard TermineThese first scenes are the play’s most difficult. The circumstances are unimaginable in their horror, so it makes sense that Isaac and Peña struggle to envision them‌. In the scene with the soldiers, much of the initial dialogue comes down to screaming and moaning, with expletives flying around like‌ shrapnel‌. In the scene with the young women, Isaac keeps most of the sexual violence offstage, but there is a lot of screaming here, too, and one act of tremendous brutality. The actors do what they can, but they strain to convey the dread and the panic of the characters, and in neither scene does the staging feel sufficient. An extended drag sequence — with Schneider playing the Sea King in a ball gown and sparkles — offers variety and brief respite, but it is a strange and dissonant choice.After a confusing Korean War sequence, “Once Upon a (korean) Time” settles into a more confident mode, in a scene in which a daughter finds her birth mother — unfortunately, at a Korean-owned liquor store in the midst of the Los Angeles riots — and then another, set in present-day Koreatown, in which that same daughter, now a mother herself, meets up with her friends, all of them Korean American adoptees. At this point, it becomes clear — though, if you’re a savvy spectator, it was probably clear already — that these scenes and stories have been braided together to tell the story of one woman’s family.Under Peña’s direction, the shifts between time periods, and between realism and fairy tale, are not always fluid. Se Hyun Oh’s set, which is mostly two monoliths, labors to suggest everything from a cave to a convenience store. Despite evocative lighting from Oliver Wason, flexible projections from Yee Eun Nam, and Phuong Nguyen’s judicious costumes, these spaces rarely feel fully invoked. The final two scenes, in which stories are narrated but not fully enacted, are the most successful. And that could be either because these scenes are the least formally ambitious, or because they feel the most personal.Isaac is not an adoptee, but, as he explains in the program notes, he grew up without much knowledge of his ancestry or Korean folklore. He has had to seek that out on his own, as an adult. And so the play, for all its temporal and geographical sweep, is also Isaac’s own story, one of longing for connection with history and place. He could have rendered this tale a lot more simply, but who wants to fault a playwright for big swings and stylistic daring? “Once Upon a (korean) Time” doesn’t quite fulfill its promise, but it suggests that Isaac has more stories to tell.Once Upon a (korean) TimeThrough Sept. 18 at La MaMa, Manhattan; ma-yitheatre.org. Running time: 1 hour 35 minutes. More

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      ‘Los Otros’ Review: A Slow-Burning Tale of Melancholy

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      Michael John LaChiusa’s delicate new musical starts in Depression-era California and follows two people across six decades.There are musicals that hit you over the head with the instant familiarity of pop songs, or with the thrill of anthems belted to the back of the rear mezzanine. Michael John LaChiusa does not go for any of that, though he came close in 2000 with the jaggedly jazzy, underestimated “The Wild Party,” his most recent Broadway outing as a composer and lyricist.But even for someone who habitually shies away from demonstrative show tunes — or, as his detractors might acidly argue, anything labeled “fun” — the intimate “Los Otros,” opening at A.R.T./New York Theaters, is more an art-song cycle than a musical. It simmers so gently it never reaches a satisfying boil.This sense of a letdown has largely to do with the structure devised by Ellen Fitzhugh (“Grind”), who wrote the book and lyrics: We are led to expect a bigger payoff than the one we end up getting, which is compounded by Noah Himmelstein’s sober direction.The two characters, Carlos (Caesar Samayoa, who was in the original Broadway cast of “Come From Away”) and Lillian (Luba Mason, last seen in “Girl From the North Country”), take turns telling their respective stories, so most of the production consists of short, self-contained solo scenes. When one actor takes center stage, the other waits on the side. Then they switch places in a process repeated a few times over the course of the show, as though they are in a relay race — or rather a relay amble, considering the deliberate pacing.Carlos and Lillian, portrayed with sensitive restraint by Samayoa and Mason, don’t directly interact most of the time, but their tales share some elements: They are set in Southern California and involve the coexistence of the white and Mexican communities. Naturally, we assume these two people are connected in some way — the narrative device would be pointless otherwise — so it’s hard not to ponder, as the show goes on, how Fitzhugh is going to bring them together.Carlos’s story begins in 1933, when he and his mother travel from Mexico to California. We watch as he crosses the decades and discover his sexuality on the way. “One time something happens with Paco and me,” Carlos says. “Then we make it happen many times.” He also becomes an accountant, which, luckily for the audience, does not involve any kind of awakening worth singing about.Most of the life stages Carlos guides us through sync up with big events: a hurricane that hit Mexico during the journey to the United States; the summer of Paco coinciding with the end of World War II; domesticity unfurling with the O.J. Simpson trial in the background in 1995.Lillian’s side of the show, on the other hand, remains tethered to small-cap history, like her making it as a waitress with two daughters. She is often adrift, with failed marriages, an increasing reliance on alcohol and a desperate search for connection — one of them with a teenage boy in a scene that briefly teeters on discomfort before a bittersweet twist. If Lillian’s sections feel more poignant than Carlos’s, it might be because they are loosely drawn from Fitzhugh’s own experience.Mason and Samayoa’s characters take turns telling their respective stories, so most of the production consists of short, self-contained solos.Russ RowlandThe musical has been retooled extensively since it first came to life, as the solo “Tres Niñas,” in the 2008 edition of the Inner Voices series at Premieres, a company that helps develop new musical theater. In the current version, it’s LaChiusa’s score that makes the biggest impression — I would love to hear it with a bigger band than the three-piece here. The composer, as usual, delicately evokes the past without going into full-blown pastiches. Lillian’s first song starts by perfectly evoking the harmonies of its 1952 setting, and Carlos’s reminiscence about picking plums in the 1940s reflects that decade’s swing.In the nearly 30 years since the opening of his first major productions, “First Lady Suite” and “Hello Again,” LaChiusa (who usually writes his own lyrics) has become a musical-theater artist whose modernist style, which has been improperly criticized as not being melodic, has earned more admiration than box-office love.It is an unfair state of affairs — his finest work of the past couple of decades, “Queen of the Mist,” from 2011, was deeply affecting and deserves a greater reputation. At the same time, LaChiusa’s forte is melancholy, which is much harder to monetize than big drama or big comedy. In that regard, “Los Otros” is yet another illustration of his singular talent.Los OtrosThrough Oct. 8 at A.R.T./New York Theaters, Manhattan; premieresnyc.org. Running time: 1 hour 25 minutes. More

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      Ars Nova Introduces a Name Your Price Ticketing Model

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      For its upcoming season, audiences can pay what they wish. Tickets will start at $5 and increase in $5 increments up to $100 per ticket.The Off Broadway incubator Ars Nova will allow audience members to pay what they wish for theater tickets in a new initiative called “What’s Ars Is Yours: Name Your Price,” the company announced on Wednesday.“It’s not income based, it’s not age based, there’s no demographic basis,” said Renee Blinkwolt, the producing executive director of Ars Nova. “It’s just radically accessible — the doors are wide open to any and everyone to pay what they will.”Beginning on Oct. 6, theatergoers can choose their ticket price for any Ars Nova show at its base on West 54th Street in Hell’s Kitchen — as well as the company’s two productions at Greenwich House — for its 2022-23 season. Tickets will start at $5 and increase in $5 increments up to $100 per ticket.Ars Nova’s Off Broadway season includes the world premiere of “Hound Dog” (Oct. 6-Nov. 5), in which a young musician returns to her hometown, Ankara, Turkey, to look after her widowed father, and the world premiere of “(pray)” (March 9-April 15), a choreopoem that follows the form of a Sunday Baptist Church service while transporting audiences to an ancestral forest.Tickets to Ars Nova’s most recent production, “Oratorio for Living Things,” started at $35 and went up to $95 for premium seats. In a time of persistent drops in attendance, removing the financial barrier could be the extra incentive that gets people to the theater.Talks around a name-your-own price model started around this time last year, Blinkwolt said, knowing that audiences might feel nervous returning to in-person performances. After a year of planning and debating, the company is introducing the initiative for its 20th-anniversary season — and second in-person season since the start of the pandemic — during “a time of great change and transition,” Blinkwolt said.The pay-what-you-wish tickets idea is, of course, nothing new. For instance, in 2013, the Forum Theater in Silver Spring, Md., instituted “Forum for All,” under which patrons could attend performances for as little as 25 cents. And in 2017, the Off Broadway play “Afterglow” offered 10 pay-what-you-wish tickets to some performances at the Loft at the Davenport Theater.Still, having that ticketing for an entire season could signal a new standard in arts accessibility in New York City. Ars Nova says it will treat the effort as a learning experiment, with plans to assess the financial impact at the end of the year along with evaluating if the model succeeded in motivating attendance and diversifying the demographics of the audience.“My hope is that people are curious about it, they’re excited about it, and they build back that habit of getting together with friends, enjoying each other’s company in real time and space and taking in a show,” Blinkwolt said. More

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      Review: Finding Community in ‘As You Like It’

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      This shimmering Shakespeare adaptation at the Delacorte Theater retains the outline of the original, while making space for songs. You don’t have to sing along, though you may want to.The Forest of Arden is where you head when the city won’t hold you. When laws are unjust, when custom constricts, when institutions squeeze and shrink you, here, at last, is space to breathe and to be. Manhattan razed its woodlands long ago, of course. (A lone stand of trees, in Inwood Hill Park, remains.) But on a summer night, in Central Park, squint a little and you can imagine a forest here — the refuge, the bounty, the hush.You won’t have to squint hard at “As You Like It,” the shimmering Shakespeare adaptation at the Delacorte Theater, courtesy of Public Works. Adapted by Laurie Woolery, who directs, and the singer-songwriter Shaina Taub, who provides the music and lyrics, this easeful, intentional show bestows the pleasures typical of a Shakespeare comedy — adventure, disguise, multiple marriages, pentameter for days. And, in just 90 minutes, it unites its dozens of actors and its hundreds of audience members as citizens of the same joyful community.Taub and Woolery’s adaptation retains the outline of the original, while shortening and tightening the talkier bits, making space for songs. Rosalind (Rebecca Naomi Jones), the daughter of the exiled Duke Senior (Darius De Haas), falls instantly for Orlando (Ato Blankson-Wood), the younger son of a dead nobleman. Threatened by the current Duke (Eric Pierre), they flee, with friends and servants, to the Forest of Arden, where Duke Senior has formed an alternate, more egalitarian court.Taub has cast herself as Jaques, the emo philosopher, who opens the show with the limpid ballad, “All the World’s a Stage,” singing: “All the world’s a stage/And everybody’s in the show/Nobody’s a pro.”These lyrics do a lot of work, work that transcends paraphrase. “As You Like It” is a production of Public Works, a division of the Public Theater that partners with community groups. So the song serves as a kind of pre-emptive apology, an acknowledgment of amateurism. Yet the lines function as an invitation, too, an inducement to imagine yourself as part of the show, to join in its creation. A big ask? Maybe. On a breeze-soothed evening, with the city quieted and the lights aglow, it won’t feel that way. And for those who blench and tremble at the thought of audience participation, take a breath. You don’t even have to sing along, though you may want to.I first saw “As You Like It” during a short run at the Delacorte Theater in the summer of 2017, after the travel bans had been instituted, but before the widespread adoption of the Trump administration’s family separation policy. All scrolling felt like doom scrolling then; to open the morning paper was to start the day with some fresh horror. Things could — and did — get worse. I remember experiencing the show, profoundly and with some tears, as a temporary respite.From left, Idania Quezada, Christopher M. Ramirez and Rebecca Naomi Jones in the Public Works adaptation of “As You Like It” at the Delacorte Theater.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesTo revisit it now, when disaster seems less immediate, is to relax into the brisk pleasure of the work. Jones, an actress with a voice of steel and sweetness, like a knife baked into a birthday cake, is a dynamic Rosalind. And if you admired Blankson-Wood in “Slave Play,” you will enjoy his playful turn here, as in the exuberant R&B number, “Will U Be My Bride.” But the show’s success owes less to any individual performer than to the generous and sociable whole. Taub’s lyrics are simple, but it takes effort to write lines that feel effortless. The same goes for Sonya Tayeh’s fluid choreography, restaged by Billy Griffin and achievable for all kinds of bodies, and Woolery’s insouciant use of stage space.The stage itself has an oddly flimsy set, by Myung Hee Cho, a turntable dotted with trees that don’t look a lot like trees. But Emilio Sosa’s costumes and Isabella Byrd’s lights provide happy splashes of color. James Ortiz designed the deer puppets; if they lack the emotional heft of the cow he designed for the current revival of “Into the Woods,” well, you can’t have everything. That “Into the Woods” revival is directed by Lear deBessonet, who inaugurated Public Works, which Woolery now leads. Small wonder then, but wonder all the same, that the two most joyous shows in New York right now, the two most engaged with questions of community and duty and care, have this shared maternity.If “As You Like It” succeeds as entertainment — and it does, fluently, enough to make you wonder if Shakespeare in the Park should stick to comedies and musicals and maybe the occasional romance — it articulates and answers graver concerns. There is a persistent fear in American politics that to grant freedom is to invite anarchy. “As You Like It” offers another possibility. There is no rule of law in the Forest of Arden. But rather than descend into riot, its inhabitants practice mutual aid. They live in harmony, figuratively and — when De Haas swoops over and around the melody — literally.This confirms Woolery and Taub’s adaptation as a kind of thought experiment: What might happen if a community were free to determine its own best principles and practices? Because “As You Like It” swells its cast with the members of partner organizations — Domestic Workers United, Military Resilience Foundation and Children’s Aid, among them — the show is also proof of concept. There is hierarchy here, of course. The direction is by Woolery alone and the folks with Equity cards occupy the prime roles. (To put the lie to Taub’s lyrics, somebody’s a pro.)But if the theater were really made welcoming and accessible to all, this is what it might manifest — a stage bursting with performers diverse in age, race, size, habit and circumstance, an audience distributed across a similar spectrum. “As You Like It” offers that rare thing — a New York theater that looks like the city itself and feels like a promise of what the city, at its best, could be.What a feat that is. And what a gift. So go ahead. Wait in line and then walk to the theater through the canopy of trees. Shelter here awhile.As You Like ItThrough Sept. 11 at the Delacorte Theater, Manhattan; publictheater.org. Running time: 1 hour 30 minutes. More

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      Laura Linney to Return to Broadway in New David Auburn Play

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      “Summer, 1976,” about a friendship between two women in Ohio, will open next spring at the Samuel J. Friedman Theater.Laura Linney will return to Broadway next spring, in a new play by David Auburn about a friendship that arises between two women during America’s bicentennial.The play, called “Summer, 1976,” will be presented at the Samuel J. Friedman Theater by the Manhattan Theater Club, or M.T.C., which is one of four nonprofit organizations with Broadway houses. M.T.C. had previously announced plans to stage the play this fall, Off Broadway, but on Tuesday announced that Linney had agreed to lead the cast and that the production would now be delayed to spring and moved to Broadway.Linney, 58, is well known for her work on film (“The Savages”) and television (“Ozark”); she has won four Emmy Awards and has been nominated for three Academy Awards.She has returned often to the stage, performing in 12 previous Broadway productions, and has been nominated five times for Tony Awards. Her most recent Broadway role was in early 2020, just before the pandemic closed theaters, when she starred in the solo play “My Name Is Lucy Barton,” which was also produced by M.T.C.Auburn, the playwright, is best known as the author of “Proof,” which won the 2001 Pulitzer Prize in drama, as well as the Tony Award for best play. That play was also produced on Broadway by M.T.C.“Summer, 1976” will be directed by Daniel Sullivan, who won a Tony for directing “Proof,” and who also directed Auburn’s 2012 Broadway play, “The Columnist.” Sullivan has directed Broadway productions featuring Linney three times previously, including most recently a 2017 revival of “The Little Foxes.”M.T.C. said that previews for “Summer, 1976” would begin April 4; it did not announce an opening date or other members of the cast. The organization described the new play as about an unexpected friendship between two Ohio women, “a fiercely iconoclastic artist and single mom” played by Linney, and “a free-spirited yet naïve young housewife.” The characters “navigate motherhood, ambition and intimacy, and help each other discover their own independence.” More

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      Gabriel Byrne’s ‘Walking With Ghosts’ Is Heading to Broadway

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      The play, adapted from his memoir of the same name, will run for 75 performances starting in October.To Gabriel Byrne, his play “Walking With Ghosts,” adapted from his memoir of the same name, doesn’t refer to haunting phantoms but the lost people and places that we carry within us.“Who we are now is the result of what we were,” Byrne said in a video interview.In this autobiographical solo show, he tackles identity as an immigrant separated from his Irish homeland, along with memories of love and failure as people age. The play, directed by Lonny Price, will begin performances in October on Broadway at the Music Box Theater.The show premiered in January at the Gaiety Theater in Dublin and will continue from Sept. 7 to Sept. 16 in London’s Apollo Theater before it begins 75 performances in New York.Byrne described the feeling of returning to the New York City stage as a soup of nerves and excitement. As both a writer of and performer in the show, he said he wants the message surrounding the human experience to be and feel universal.He makes reference to what it means to be an immigrant and to be home.“As soon as you leave your place of belonging, in a strange way, you don’t belong anywhere else,” Byrne said.Although Byrne lives in Rockport, Maine, he grew up outside Dublin, in Walkinstown, the oldest of six. He left Ireland at age 11 to enroll in a Catholic seminary in England, but renounced his faith after he said he was sexually abused by a priest.He later joined an acting troupe in college. Byrne was most recently on the New York City stage as James Tyrone in “Long Day’s Journey Into Night,” in 2016. He played a survivor in a BBC adaptation of H.G. Wells’s “War of the Worlds” in 2019.Lonny Price first directed Byrne in the New York Philharmonic’s “Camelot” in 2008. Impressed with Byrne’s performance, Price, who directed “Lady Day at Emerson’s Bar and Grill” and “Sunset Boulevard,” said he was thrilled to work alongside Byrne again, as the actor embodies the friends, teachers, religious figures and family members that influenced his life.“I think the play has a kind of healing quality to it where people look at their own lives and find peace,” Price said.Byrne said that in the play, he aims to provoke the audience into thinking about their lives, their parents and their decisions.“My own belief is that every single person has an extraordinary story to tell and what I’ve done is I’ve put mine down, not because I want people to think or look at my life,” he said. “I want people to look at their own.” More

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      Interview: What Should We Wear for The King of Nothing?

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      Ben Glasstone on Monstro Theatre’s The King of Nothing

      This autumn, Monstro Theatre present The King of Nothing at the Little Angel Theatre. Promising musical madness and puppets aplenty, this is a reimagined version of Hans Christian Andersen’s The Emperor’s New Clothes; a popular story, often staged – but perhaps not like this. We donned our finest outfit to chat with Artistic Director Ben Glasstone to find out why this production is somewhat different from all the rest.

      Ben, there have been a billion trillion versions of The Emperor’s New Clothes over the years, but I suspect that Monstro’s will be somewhat distinctive. It’s a puppet musical version of the classic story to start with, so not a stuffy morality tale as we might sometimes see it?

      It’s a long way from stuffy! Yes, it’s full of rollicking songs, clowning and lovably daft puppets, so that helps. But also, any ‘morality tale’ that’s survived as long as this one is bound to have a lot more to it than a simple lesson-to-be-preached. As I discovered years ago when adapting various Aesop’s fables to make Monstro’s first co-production The Mouse Queen, what might seem to be a story with a moral often turns out to be a lot more complex and ambiguous than that…

      Our version of Hans Christian Andersen’s tale explores the way the story seems to have two, quite opposed, protagonists: there is the King, who is vain and neglectful of his subjects and has a journey to go on, as he is literally exposed and must somehow brazen it out and (we hope) take his responsibilities more seriously; then there are the Swindlers, who, on the face of it are total scoundrels – but then don’t we all love a scoundrel…? We have made the whole show into a kind of game with the audience where the two Swindlers are constantly making us question what is true and who is in charge of telling the story.  There’s also an upstart puppet mouse who, to the surprise of the main characters, takes it upon herself to be the narrator of the story.  

      What kind of puppets do you use in the show?

      As the story moves rapidly between characters and is told by two performers, the puppets need to be simple enough to be operated by a single puppeteer. To keep a variety and playfulness within that constraint, we have given different puppets different qualities in terms of their movement and construction, depending on their different characters and roles. So, for example, there is a Courtier with the title of Keeper of the Royal Trousers, whose main feature is her legs – it’s a type of glove puppet where the fingers are placed in the legs, which can then cross and uncross and flick around expressively. Another character has a muppet-like lip-synching style with a hand in the mouth, and makes use of a performer’s real hand as its hand – creating a very pleasing illusion.

      The great thing about puppetry is that it is so far from the literal, that you can mix scales and styles at will, and no-one is going to say “you’re breaking the rules”. Or if they are: bring it on, I say.

      How about the music and songs? Have you devised them yourselves?

      Song-writing is my bread-and-butter. As well as the Puppet Musicals I’ve written with Monstro, Little Angel, Polka etc I write actual human-sized musicals and I also do a lot of song-writing teaching. So I wrote the songs, because no-one else was going to.

      Tell us a bit about the performers. What skills do they bring to the stage?

      Gilbert Taylor and Karina Garnett are highly skilled puppeteers but are both also wonderful improvisers and clowns, which is exactly what this particular show needed. And, of course, they can sing. And play the ukulele. It does take a very particular sort of multi-skilled performer to be able to deliver a show like this.

      We reviewed director Steve Tiplady (who’s practically puppetry royalty!) at Little Angel earlier this year in his hilarious version of Pinocchio: can we expect to enjoy some of his bonkers audience engagement?

      Absolutely! I’ve been working with Steve on shows for nearly 20 years now and have been very much influenced by his sense of humour, inventive approaches and total lack of shame!

      Steve was very much in mind when I first had the idea for this show: I remember telling him: “imagine a puppet version of The Emperor’s New Clothes, with NO puppets! Instead, the swindler-performers keep telling the audience there are puppets and the audience believes them!”  I knew he would share my enthusiasm for this preposterous idea and it’s been a delight to go on this journey with him.  (Spoiler alert: there ARE actual puppets in the show, but we have gone to town on playing with this idea of the Performers-as-Swindlers-Fooling-the Audience….as you will see when you come to the show!)

      The King of Nothing is targeted at ages 5-11, but you’re known for productions with very universal appeal, enjoyable both for children and their adults as well: is this going to be a fun day out for the whole family?

      Is the Pope a Catholic? Is there dog poo on the streets of London? Of course it’s going to be a fun day out for the whole family! Monstro Theatre’s whole philosophy is about making shows that appeal regardless of age. Making shows that work for children requires a discipline in story-telling that a lot of grown-up shows could do well to learn. And once you know how to tell a story with humour and energy and keep the kids engaged, the world is your oyster: you can pack in all the wit and sophistication and thoughtfulness you want.

      Some of it will go over the kids’ heads, but the great thing to me is: we can’t really know what they will understand or not understand or question or think about in the future. We have all forgotten what it is to be a child and what thrills me is to put a piece of work in front of a young audience and let their wild imaginations transform it in ways we can never fathom. Sure there’s a 5-11 tag on the show, but to me theatre is social and to be enjoyed in the most inter-generational and multi-layered spirit.

      Thanks so much to Ben Glasstone for taking the time to chat with us. You can enjoy The King of Nothing at the Little Angel Theatre from 24 September until 20 November 2022.

      Further information and tickets can be found here. More

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      Interview: Where Next For Wolf?

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      Cameron Corcoran on taking Wolf to Camden Fringe 2022

      Normally here at ET Towers we tend to do interviews before a show starts its run. We like to have a chat with some of the people involved and we hope you like the results. But this time we have something a little different. We reviewed Wolf at Camden Fringe and by chance exchanged a couple of emails with author Cameron Corcoran afterwards. Out of this we thought it might be interesting to talk with him after Wolf had finished its short run for a slightly different perspective than usual.

      First, let’s talk Wolf, how would you describe it and what can audiences expect?

      Wolf is a play about domestic and sexual abuse; it considers the more realistic likelihood of these crimes: that they’re committed in the home and it is often the father and not some imagined stranger. I think audiences can expect to feel uncomfortable and also reflect on our ideas of abuse and how complicit people can be/feel for their actions, whether it be ignoring it or acting against it.

      Wolf has finished its short Camden Fringe run, how do you think it went? Did anything surprise you about the audience reception?

      Given that we only performed it twice, I think it’s fair to say we were all gutted we couldn’t do it at least one more time – you discover things in the room that weren’t present in rehearsals and things also come across differently to a live audience, so it would have been nice to have a few more performances. I think we forgot just how uncomfortable and awful the situation in the story is: we’ve sat with this information for a while and as soon as we finished the first performance we noticed a quiet in the audience, which informed us just how dark the story is.

      As well as writing Wolf, you play the character of Sam. Did you write Sam with the intent to also take on the role or did that come later in the process?

      For me, I’m starting an MA in acting at Rose Bruford College in October and I wanted to do a play before I start so I could get back into the swing of things. I did always envision playing Sam because I knew it was really outside of my comfort zone as a performer, so felt it was the best experience before October. I felt I could do the role competently enough not to sabotage the other actors too, so it was very early into writing I knew I’d be playing Sam.

      Wolf is at times quite heavy, with a lot of tension early on. Our review mentions it’s the only show where it was so tense the reviewer didn’t end up taking a single note. When you are on stage with the lights on and the audience around, were you aware of this?

      That’s very kind of you to say and very humbling too. Our director (Naomi Wirthner) and assistant director (Polly Waldron) worked very hard to trim the fat on the script, to keep the tension high and sustained. The original script was an hour long but after cuts it was just 32 minutes. They’re both experts in creating tension so I can’t really take the credit for that. Certainly, I felt I had written a few lines, small little bits of humour that received a muted response from the audience. Maybe they weren’t funny, but it felt like the stakes in the scenes were far too serious for laughter. I felt that too, it all seemed very real and we could sense how engaged the audience were with what was happening in the scene.

      When you kindly invited us to see Wolf, you said you had invited some theatres along in the hope of finding a run for it. How is that process going, have you had any nibbles?

      I think with theatre nowadays it’s extremely difficult to get theatres to come and watch a play. I often get replies asking to provide them with a recorded version of the play, which doesn’t seem to add any further dialogue… It can be quite frustrating getting little feedback from theatres. I know there are lots of plays on and resources are limited, so it is a godsend to have Camden Fringe because otherwise it’s very difficult to get plays on, even for extremely limited runs. Nevertheless, we are toying with the idea of performing Wolf locally. I’ll have to let you know.

      Camden Fringe is over and we reviewed 38 productions: did you have a chance to see any other shows?

      Regrettably not this time! I think the cost of living is affecting everyone. We had liaised with a number of companies on social media; however, both sides were unable to attend each other’s plays. I think in these times the theatre industry does have to fight very hard to get an audience in. I’m not cynical, I’m sure things will get better – it just felt like a bit of a perfect storm to hinder access to watching theatre this summer.

      Finally, while I imagine your main focus is on Wolf at the moment, are you working on anything else? Might we see another piece of writing or acting from you or Off Main Stage in the near future?

      Notwithstanding a potential performance of Wolf locally, I’ve been under strict instructions to focus on the MA for the next 12 months. However, after a run of our play Mosquito at the Seven Dials Playhouse (a truly amazing venue), I have been writing a new play called Nook, which focuses on family relations, and I’d like to approach Seven Dials with the hope of putting the play on there. It does feel like my best work to date.

      Thanks to Cameron for taking the time to chat to us. We wish you the best of luck with the MA and with Wolf. We are also big fans of Seven Dials Playhouse and would love to see Nook make an appearance there down the line.

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