Well, dammit.

Our illustrious artistic director, and would-be director of this play, Tony Barilla, is moving to Kosovo to join his wife. So no Killing Game this year. And no more blog updates.

Maybe we can talk him into returning to H-town next year just long enough to direct this...

Compositions!

Some of the cast members presented their compositions last night. Walt turned his in on dvd, which I proudly present to you here:

Rehearsal cancelled tonight

Tony is terribly sick, so we're cancelling rehearsal for tonight. Be ready with your compositions tomorrow night at 7 PM though.

getting antsy...

Rehearsals start in just one week.

Attack of the Fleas

Wayne's been using this break between plays to do some much-needed cleaning and organizing downstairs at the Axiom. He must have disturbed a nest of fleas or something, because all of a sudden, they're everywhere. And I mean EVERYWHERE. So Friday he bought two gallons of industrial strength flea killer, soaked the Axiom with it until the stench of floral scented chemicals was overwhelming, and we all left early. The fleas should all be quite dead after we return from the holiday break on January 2.

This development is particularly disturbing after reading up on the role of the flea in speading the plague. Disturbing enough to keep one up at night. Especially when you go on to research how fleas can be intentionally used as a means of biological warfare. In the middle ages, cadavers infected with plague fleas were catapulted into nemy cities. In the 1940's, the Japanese airdropped paper packets of plague fleas on Chinese territories, and their bites killed hundreds. Japan also developed a specialized bomb, the Type 50 Uji, which could hold up to about 30,000 plague fleas. Intended to burst at an altitude of 660 to 980 feet above ground level, field trials at Anta, Manchuria, concluded that 80 percent of the fleas survived dissemination and that coverage was best under conditions with high wind. Also during WWII, Canada (yes, Canada) worked to create a colony of fleas for use in combination with both plague and murine typhus. In the United States, the plague flea concept was competing against the use of mosquitoes, flies, ticks, and lice. Of these concepts, the United States put most of its energies behind weaponizing yellow fever in combination with the Aedes aegypti mosquito. Who knows what our governments would be capable of now.

FUN FLEA FACTS

• The Ctenocephalides felis flea, (the kind of flea you find on your dog or cat), can jump the equivalent of the Eiffel Tower and has an acceleration 50 times higher than a space shuttle.
  
• 15th century ladies wore fur to trap fleas.
  
• People in the 17th century wore cylinder flea traps around their necks. Scented substances or rags soaked in blood were inserted in the traps to attract fleas.
  
• Americans spend one billion dollars a year to find a new molecule which will eliminate fleas.
  
• The National History Museum has over 270,000 specimens of fleas in its Lord Rothschild collection
  
• It was once believed that there was a hormonal relation between women and fleas.

The splendid flea image above, btw, was drawn by Robert Hooke in his famous Micrographia. Robert Hooke was very colorfully depicted in Neal Stephenson's Quicksilver (The Baroque Cycle, Vol. 1) - if you haven't read it, I highly recommend it.

First Assignments

The winter holidays always make a mess out of everybody's schedule, and it's damn near impossible to schedule anything with a group of people until they're over. Therefore, Killing Game rehearsals won't begin in earnest until the second week of January.

In the meantime, each actor has been asked to take a scene or part of a scene (as long or as short as they want) from the original script and prepare it to be performed during one of the first rehearsals after the break. The cast has been given just four guidelines for these pieces:
1) the scene must be performed to music.
2) it must be interesting.
3) they must work with a partner. Each cast member has been urged to consider non-human and/or inanimate partners.
4) gender lines should be ignored and/or willfully crossed.

The results of these compositions will be used to generate even more ideas for the play.

Movie Night

Last Monday Tony had the cast over to his apartment to watch some movies, to give everyone an idea of some the ideas rolling around in his head before we start rehearsals. We've used this technique before, and it works well. It's an easy way for a director to share his inspirations with a group of people in a direct, visual way. Charlie Scott did this when he directed Medea - we watched Dead Man and Grey Gardens, and little snippets from several other films I can't remember right now. It's also a great excuse to get together and drink in the name of art.

Tony showed three very different films. The first was the Charlie Chaplin classic Modern Times. Modern Times is full of broad physical humor and slapstick comedy, and also showcases Charlie Chaplin's trademark facial expressions.

Then he showed one of my personal favorites, the Peter Lorre classic M, the first serial killer movie. M is a great film in that tension is overwhelmingly present in the film from the very first scene. It's also wonderful in that every single character in the film is fully fleshed out, and interesting to watch - there are no "extras."

Finally, he showed Songs from the Second Floor, a Swedish film which was the winner of the Special Jury Prize at Cannes in 2000. Like Killing Game, it is a series of fascinating vignettes. Also like Killing Game, the characters devise certain rituals to try and combat a spreading terror.

To Begin

"A city is gripped by terror when a plague threatens to destroy the entire population. Hilarity ensues. Come watch your favorite IBP company members drop dead multiple times."

This is the description that Tony gave me of the play he has chosen to direct next for IBP: Killing Game, by Eugene Ionesco. While Ionesco is a very popular playwright, this play just isn't performed all that often. Maybe it's because of all the death. Because that's what this play is about - corpse after corpse after corpse after corpse, and how the townspeople deal with their fear and the corpses, until they become corpses themselves. Not "fun for all ages", some might say. And opening it in February, when many theaters choose to throw up love stories? Well, that is an interesting choice. And a hysterical one. And a challenging one.

Ionesco makes it plain in his stage directions for Killing Game that he wants producers to make the play their own. The play could have a cast of five or a cast of twenty. It could be performed with a mix of humans, puppets, and painted figures, or could be all live actors. Tony intends to take a very liberal approach in style to the script, one that involves a great deal of sound, physical comedy, choreography and technical elements. He also plans to rely heavily upon creative inspiration from the cast, and this will truly be an ensemble-driven piece.

As a company, we at IBP have been interested in communicating more about our process to the audience, and that's what we're going to try to do with this blog. We'll post dramaturgical information as we dig it up, similar to the zine that Cathy Power created for Hide Town. Hopefully, as we get further into the rehearsal and performance process, a few of the actors will feel comfortable posting about their experiences, much like Cary Winscott did during Speeding Motorcycle.

Creating a production blog while we're creating a play is new for us, so we welcome any comments you have. Onwards and upwards.