opening night pictures

Some of our PYBY volunteers setting up the opening night reception.


Co-director Serge Velez.


Ensemble member Emily Munguia in the green room.


Emily with ensemble member Amanda Williams.


Ensemble member Francisco Espinoza.


Ensemble member Gilbert Arias with co-director Dan Friedman.


Ensemble member Eugene Clowney with co-director Brian Mullin.


Francisco with co-director Sita Sarkar.

another openin'

It's hard to believe that we only started rehearsing this show on January 6th!! For those who like to keep track, that makes it exactly 46 days since our first meeting. And now we're opening. Pretty impressive that we've been able to pull a group together, get to know one another, create a play and stage it in that short a time!

We sat down before our run-through last night and talked about where we're at. This has been a challenging process for all of us because it's required taking a big leap into the unkown. Most of the cast had never created a play from scratch and certainly not one that didn't have a plot or characters. We've all had to take on roles that we didn't exactly know how to do; and instead of waiting to figure it out, we just started doing it.

This play is challenging not only to the actors, but also to the audience. We spent a long time last night talking about whether anyone would "understand" what the play was about. Well, there will probably be many people who say they don't "get" it, but that's not necessarily the point, right? Here at Youth Onstage! and Castillo, we create "developmental" theater that asks something of its audience. Instead of telling them what to think, we're asking them to see things in new ways. We think that that helps people figure out new ways of seeing and new ways of re-organizing the world. The play is really just the opening remark in what we all hope will be an ongoing conversation with everyone who sees it (and even those of you out there on the web who don't see it). And we hope that people respond in all kinds of ways, including by responding with brand new performances.

As for the future of this blog, it has only just begun! We are planning to post updates from our post-show talk-backs. And I'm also going to ask our cast members and creative team to reflect on the experience. Hopefully, we'll have new pictures to put up at some point. Most of all, though, we want audience members to post their comments.

Tell us what you liked, what you didn't get, what you thought it was all about. Conduct some performance exercises in your own communities and tell us about the results. In other words... keep talking!

pretty pictures

Here are the first of our production photos. Doesn't everyone look great in their hoodies??

performance exercise #3

PERFORMANCE EXERCISE #3

-After you've played around with the poems and some other texts, make a list of lines from all of the texts that the group finds interesting. (Be sure to mix them up!)
- Improvise two-person scenes in which one person can only respond with lines off of the sheet. You can choose the situation: maybe they're at a restaurant, maybe one of them is a hitchiker. It doesn't matter!
- When we did this exercise, the person reading off the sheet played the role of "America." You can see some snippets of our scenes here, or come to the show and see them all!

performance exercise #2

Sorry that posts have been so sparse lately. We've been very busy staging the play before our opening on Friday! Here's another performance exercise for you to try...

PERFORMANCE EXERCISE #2

- Having discussed the poems by Hughes and Ginsberg (or any other texts you've decided to start with), have each participant bring in something that the text reminded them of.* It might be another text (like a poem or a song) or it might be an object or an image.**
- Use these new materials as inspirations for new performances. Come up with improvised scenes that use them.


*In our rehearsal process, some of the things people brought in were a woman's scarf with the American flag on it, the text of "The Internationale," a Rubick's cube, and the slogan from a Subway sandwich commercial. Some of these things made it into the show eventually.

**Try to keep things concrete. In our rehearsal process, we spoke about how eating applesauce makes people think about America. So, in the play, there's a part where people eat applecauce onstage.

performance exercise #1

We now have a final script for the show and we are working dilligently to rehearse it. I'm also happy to report that our intrepid Sales Director Gail Peck and her team have done a great job spreading the word about the show, especially to schools.

With school groups (and others) in mind, I thought it might be interesting to post some "Performance Exercises" based on the kinds of things we did in rehearsal. That way, other groups of people can have their own conversations about/with America. Enjoy!

PERFORMANCE EXERCISE #1
- Read our two poems*: "Let America Be America Again" by Langston Hughes and "America" by Allen Ginsberg and discuss them with your group.
- Have every member of the group pick one line that they really like, even if they don't understand it.
- Divide everyone into groups of three or four and have each group come up with a performance that somehow incoporates all of the members' favorite lines (try to make sure the groups have some Hughes lines and some Ginsberg lines).
- The lines might be used as dialogue or they might be used in a different way (for example, one of the kids in our cast liked the line "I am the young man, tangled in that ancient endless chain," so he performed a scene where he was dragging a big chain along with him).
- You'll be surprised at some of the weird, funny, interesting scenes that people come up with.

*You don't have to use the Hughes and Ginsberg poems. Pick anything that you think is interesting! (I do think those poems are good ones for a "conversation," though, because they are written as addresses to America. They give some strong, forceful dialogue.)

doesn't this look like fun?

Military recruiting ads came up in our rehearsal discussion the other week. I thought I'd post this one. What do you guys think? Is this false advertising??