Week 7:
1st Stage Theatre

January 29, 2014

This week I got to work on quite a few projects. There is the ongoing project of taking calls and making reservations. We’re getting quite a few for Souvenir. It’s going to be a great production!

Also, since we’ll be opening soon and will then be running for several weeks, we sent postcards to our patrons and donors. Mailings are somewhat monotonous, but they are hugely important. I’m really grateful that I have learned the steps to make labels from excel documents and how to generate the excel documents from our database. They are absolutely essential to marketing, fundraising, publicity, and other miscellaneous things like sending tax-deduction receipts to our donors. We’ve done three mailings since I’ve been here. It’s been the end of one year and the beginning of the next, so that’s part of the reason, but non-profits always have some sort of letter that needs mailing out, and I’m glad I’ve developed those skills.

Then, I got to see Tribes at Studio Theatre. Watching this production reminded me why I want to go into theatre. Let me give a short synopsis before I describe how much I loved it: One family has a deaf son that they teach to speak and lip-read and none of the family members learn sign language. This son meets a hearing girl who’s going deaf who was born to two deaf parents.

The play doesn’t really take a stand. Instead, it shows the intricacies of the issue at hand. The script interlaced many ideas that play a role in the lives of deaf and hearing people. Many of them were things I had never thought about. One powerful detail is that the father is learning Chinese, but he won’t learn ASL. There’s also a theme of music. The whole family constantly yells at each other, except for the deaf brother.  The family feels like he has it best because he can’t hear all the bickering, but he feels left out. In the play, the deaf man learns sign language after he’s grown up. There are sections where he’s signing with the girl who has grown up with deaf parents, and the audience gets subtitles projected on the wall, but the family feels as left out as the deaf man had when they were all bickering. The father is also a writer. The brother has a stuttering problem and also has hallucinations where he hears voices.What I like most is that every detail that was there had something to do with the theme, but I still never felt bashed over the head with anything. The transitions between scenes used music and also a visual representation of the music projected onto the walls. I loved it. I loved everything about it. I can’t do it justice by simply writing about it, but it was phenomenal.

Also phenomenal: August:Osage County. The screenplay was written by Tracy Letts, the same man who wrote the stageplay. Even though I haven’t seen the play, I could see how it would flow really well onstage, but there was a lot that definitely made it into a successful movie. As I watched the movie, I realized that this is how I watch things now. I loved the story and I didn’t miss any of it. In fact, I like to notice how certain elements–specific word choice, action, interaction–are important to telling the story.