A Stroke of Johnny-us

From my Dad, on opening night:

I was in the car on St. Peter waiting for Dad when a mule and buggy
drove by slowly, full of tourists. As they passed Royal St. the
driver leaned back and yelled "STELLA!" It reminded us of you and
tonight.

Break a leg(end)! Hope it's a STELLAR performance!


Also, a nice new article on him just came out:

Johnny Donnels Article in Country Roads Magazine

Therapist Helps Make Streetcar Run

During the first two weeks of rehearsal, I had my good friend Tracy Trevorrow, a psychology prof at Chaminade, come to do mini-therapy sessions with each of the 4 main characters. The actors loved it, and Tracy seemed to find it fascinating. Star-Bulletin Feature by John Berger

Only a Paper Moon

I’m fascinated by the way a vision can evolve due to happy accident. On Monday, I suddenly had a revelation about the paper lantern Blanche buys. She calls it a Chinese lantern, and I’ve always pictured it as red, cylindrical, and accordian-folded. But I suddenly realized that if it were light-colored instead of red, and a globe shape, that it would be the Paper Moon she sings about (hanging over the Cardboard Sea that is Stella and Stanley’s bed). And the very day Alexia, our props designer, was set to buy 12 from a mainland company, I caught her just in time. We got 12 lavendar globe-shaped ones. They were sent express mail and arrived on Thursday. At the same time, I have been searching for what the music at the very top and very end of the show should be. So now it is an instrumental version of “Paper Moon.”

And how does one make a prop tamale?

The design team here at UHM is wonderful about making sure the director has input into a lot of decisions on design. So in addition to have lots of meetings this week about major design issues (2.5 hours on sound one day, about 6 hours total on lights over the week, lots of stops in the costume shop), I’ve been making snap decisions about a range of smaller details. This week alone I’ve been asked to decide between two very similar brick colors, pick from amongst 3 types of drawer handles, decide which hankies belong to Stella, Eunice, and Blanche, and pick which Jax beer labels I like. The patio bench proved to be a very hard item to find, but we got one at last at a military store. An older-type electric fan that works is also really hard to find these days, had to be bought online. And I’m thrilled to report that I was the one who found the perfect bedspread at Ross. (Do you love it? I love it).

Realism is deceptively simple when you read it, but I’m finding it to be exhaustingly demanding in practice.

Yelling "Shut Up!" in a Bookstore

We did a staged reading at Barnes and Noble yesterday, and it was quite a success, I think. The thing that thrilled me was that two groups of students, from Hawaii Baptist Academy and Pearl City High School, came. They are both studying the play in class as part of Page to Stage. The Pearl City group will be coming to the Open Rehearsal too (10/29 2pm). I was beaming like a proud mama while the actors gamely worked their way through 4 scenes, miming props and battling coffee shop noise. Two funniest moments: Reb having to provide his own sounds cues for (1) a screeching cat and (2) a ringing phone. The B&N coordinator said that we had about 50 people watching!

Entr'acte

Waiting for my Airborne to fizz (c’mon, save me Airborne, you can do it!).

I had to make a hard decision this week about where intermission will come. For the Broadway premiere in 1947, Kazan and Williams used two intermissions, after scenes 4 and 6. But audiences aren’t used to 2 intermissions anymore (although I did use 2 in Shepard’s A Lie of the Mind but there was a live country band for entertainment and energy). So I’ve been working with it coming after scene 6, the scene with Blanche and Mitch after their date, when Blanche reveals what happened to her young husband. But that makes for a very long first act (about 80 pages to 40 pages). And scene 6 is a lengthy and somewhat introspective scene. So I just made the decision today to change intermission to being after scene 5 (just after Blanche’s encounter with the young newspaper collector.) It doesn’t have quite the climactic kick that scene 6 does, but I think the audience will be less antsy and that counts for a lot these days.

Carnivalesque

My dramaturg Jess Holman came on Wednesday to present a talk on Williams and how his life story is reflected in the play. She brought up many interesting things that were resonant with many of the characters: the tempestuous relationship between TW's parents, TW's guilt over the institutionalization of his sister Rose, TW's childhood illness and subsequent hypochondria, TW's tendency to embroider the truth. At one point the cast asked about New Orleans in this time period, and Jess asked me to answer. I wasn't around then, but I've heard enough stories from my Dad to know that after the war the atmosphere in the Quarter was La Vie Boheme. My Dad tells a great story about being intoxicated and almost rolling off the roof of the Skyscraper (4 stories). And to some extent that's the same sensibility that prevailed in the the '60s and '70s when I was growing up there. In a way, every day was Mardi Gras. A spirit of relaxed, crazy partying, an escape from conventionality and the "normal." So it's no wonder TW fell in love with it, and was able to explore his homosexuality more freely.
The funny detail I realized is that because the Quarter has second and third floor balconies to all the apartments, people do yell up from the street a lot there. "Hey, Johnny!"
Dad used to stand on his second floor studio balcony with a big sign that said "Get rid of him and come back later." He would wait for just the right moment when a couple was walking by and reveal the sign around right when only the woman was looking up. Sometimes she did come back!

Images

On Wednesday I showed them all the photographs of the French Quarter in my Dad's most recent photography book, and I also showed them the images I'd created in my Arts Morgue (a notebook with pictures of paintings, sculptures, photographs, etc. I feel relate in some way to the play). I asked them to choose one image they feel their character would particularly
relate to.

Nina (Stella) liked 3 things: a woman's face covered in a black lace veil, a photo of a wrought iron balcony, and this nude called "Dawning" by my father Johnny Donnels (I love the fact that the pole in the photo across the window was rigged by my Dad to keep me from falling out of that window at Mardi Gras. The model's name is Missy):


Reb (Stanley) chose this piece by George Bellows (1924):
Dempsey and Firpo

Jeremy (Mitch) chose another photo by my father, called "Eye of the Storm."


Guen (Blanche) was attracted to this controversial 1934 piece by Paul Cadmus:
Fleet's In

Improv Inspirations

This week we had a little time to do selected improvs with the four main characters. I thought they were quite useful, and the actors seemed to have fun with them.

1. Stanley telling the news to Mitch about Blanche's past. (This was interesting, because Mitch was very resistant to believing it and felt Stanley would have to go to greater lengths to really convince him.) They also remained friends at the end, sharing a laugh together, which I liked.
2. Stella, Stanley and Blanche at home on what I told them was their "one fun night that summer." They tried charades, and also played a game of poker. The funny part was that although I had given them the instruction to enjoy themselves, there was still a lot of tension in the room. Blanche even gave "Polack" as her charades clue. In the middle, I whispered to Stella that she wanted to try to get Stanley off to bed, and it took her a while to achieve this goal. We talked after about how tense it would be to share an apartment together in those pre-TV times. We know for a fact that none of the characters likes to go to sleep early. So how did they pass the time?
3. Stella trying to get Mitch to propose to Blanche. This led me to the most interesting revelation of the night: we jointly decided that Mitch was planning to propose to her, on the night of her birthday, the very night that Stanley told him the news.

I have a few more in mind, about events that precede the opening of the play, so I hope to find time to do them soon.

First Week

I feel terrific about the first week of work with Stella, Stanley, Blanche and Mitch. I allowed big chunks at the beginning of each night for character work. On Tuesday, we did about an hour of physical exercises that emphasized contact, so that the actors would start getting comfortable with each other physically. Both Weds and Thurs we did prop exercises. One was to search for an object (prop) that is very special to the character, and then to write about it in their actor journals. The second night, I asked them to write about a ghost that is haunting them, and then to find an object that belonged to that person. Our Friday night session focused on sensual sense memory, with the goal of awakening their sensitivities to their characters' desires. The second half of each night was scene work, always starting with very detailed questions about what had just come before, time of day, mood prior to scene, etc. We made it all the way through Act I, and will finish Act II by Friday this week.

Starting Work

I am going to work with Mitch, Blanche, Stella and Stanley for two weeks before adding the other actors. My hope is to focus on the details of their circumstances, environment, objectives and also to get the senses and the imagination involved. I'm using a mixture of various physical exercises, improv, table work, and working through the scenes. Last night:

1. 7pm Spent an hour doing Lee Breuer's "Walk Through Your Life" exercise (courtesy of a workshop I took with JoAnne Akalaitis). The actors walk through the space focusing on an image from each year of their lives. It takes one minute per year. The aim is to connect with your past, seeing images from it and feeling changes in the body. It took 34 minutes, since the oldest actor is 34. Then I had them write in journals about how something they remembered from their own lives might connect to their characters.
2. 8pm An hour writing and discussing basic character info: from script, inferred, or invented. Things like name, age, family history, occupation, etc. We also made a stab at identifying a superobjective for each character.
3. From 9-10:30pm, we went through scene one, skipping the Eunice/Blanche scene. We tried to think carefully about things like time of day, characters' mood before the scene, reaction to environment and each other. Closed by writing down objective for that scene.

Tonight I will do some exercises to start establishing physical contact and trust among the characters, then tackle another scene.

A Challenge

My husband Sean, who is my own "model spectator" and always appreciates all my directing work and the choices behind it, said the oddest thing a few weeks ago. He said he was surprised I chose Streetcar to direct because he sees me more as a Glass Menagerie type of person.

I interpret this to mean he thinks I'm too soft for this script.

So I consider this a challenge. To open myself and my actors to the raw and primal. To tap into testosterone.

Happy Birthday, Blanche!

The script says that Blanche’s birthday is Sept. 15! I’ve got another Virgo on my mind, my dear friend Armour, born Sept. 19. As I mentioned in a previous entry, her mother Cynthia believed herself to be the real Blanche DuBois. Armour came to visit me this summer, and I was tickled to realize that she’s got a little bit of Blanche in her too. She’s always loved sophisticated people, travel, music, good wine and food. Part of it was Armour’s effervescent conversation, her charming chatter. Part of it was her quite evident love of fashion (Blanche: “Clothes are my passion”); we had a blast together trying on gorgeous vintage-style evening gowns at Silver Moon Emporium on the North Shore. I was delighted to find, on the night she cooked dinner for us, that Armour dressed up in heels and a dress. I was, of course, in shorts and bare feet. I felt very Stella to her Blanche. So Happy Birthday, Armour! I’ve been thinking of you!

First Rehearsal

Ain't nothing like it. You read and plan and envision and imagine for a long time (in my case, a year). You consider the options (I had about 40 people audition). And suddenly you're there at the first rehearsal, where it's all possible but the final product seems so far away. So much ahead.
I usually do a read-through on the first night, and an "act-through" on the second night, to have the actors feel what it's like to get the whole thing on its feet. Since this is a long play, I tried something different: focusing just on Act I the first night, with a read-through followed by an act-through. Tonight we will do Act II that way. It was a bit exhausting but I liked it. More fun than just reading through all at once.
It was hard to really integrate the street people last night, I will work with them more on Oct. 2. But for the Act-through, I asked the 3 ghosts to simply stand up when they thought they might be in Blanche's head. Very interesting! Some connections I hadn't thought of. I'm pleased to have them as an element.
Chemistry seemed to be good already in all the right pairs: Blanche/Mitch, Stella/Stanley, Blanche/Stanley. They were all already finding some good humor in the lines, which I appreciate.
The poker players took so long setting up their cards and chips that they completely cracked me up, I was literally crying. I think that first Poker Night scene has great comic potential. Then we see the same bunch in scene 11, sobered up a bit.
I liked ending with scene 6 because if you just ended the play there it would be a happy ending. Blanche and Mitch have found each other!!!
What else? Oh, I could feel the realization on everyone's part about what a big, long, complicated show it is. Much work to be done.

Concepts for Streetcar

I wrote this note as part of the Educational Materials for teachers in the Page to Stage program (site coming online soon!) but thought I would share here.

PRODUCTION NOTES:

Kennedy Theatre Production Team
Director Lurana Donnels O’Malley
Scenic Design Joseph D. Dodd
Costume Design Sandra Finney
Lighting Design Daphne Velasquez
Sound Design Daniel Sakimura
Props Design Alexia Chen
Co-Dramaturgs Katrina L. Nipko, Jessica Holman
Stage Manager Ulu Mills
Assistant Stage Manager Tanyah Tavorn
Makeup Design Katie Daniels

I’m writing this note as director, but Streetcar is being created by an artistic team, a remarkable group of creative designers, technical staff, and actors. The things I will talk about here are some of the guiding ideas I’ve given the group to inspire our process.

1. Concept #1: The Play is Memory

Williams’ first big hit on Broadway was his delicate and autobiographical The Glass Menagerie. In that play, he broke with realistic stage conventions to employ a narrator figure. Tom, clearly a version of the young Tennessee (Thomas Lanier) Williams, presents the play as a recurring remembrance of things past, with selective presentation of a subjective perspective.
I am guided by this idea in staging Streetcar. In the script, there is no official narrator, but many elements of the play, particularly Williams’ reference to the sounds and music and their effect on Blanche, recall the more subjective elements of Glass Menagerie. As Blanche deteriorates over the course of the play, these sounds and also lights reflect her fragmented mind in the manner of an expressionist play.
My production will represent Blanche’s memory. Looking back at the events from her asylum, she recalls and eternally replays the events that led her there. I’m not sure yet how obvious this concept will ultimately be in production. There may be a framing device at the beginning to make this connection clearer to audience.
To me, this is Blanche’s play, in which Stanley serves as antagonist. I’ve read that Brando was so startlingly sexy and powerful in the Broadway premiere that it skewed the play in Stanley’s direction. I will work carefully to show the story of all the characters, but to emphasize Blanche and the arc of her story.

2. Concept #1: I See Dead People

Blanche is a haunted character, and my production will literalize that onstage with the help of three ghost characters. Silent and seen only by Blanche, they represent the people whose lives continue to haunt her: her dead mother, her dead husband Allan Grey, and a Sailor who represents all the men who ever used her sexually. The scenic designer Joe Dodd will use the Kabuki scenic element of a double hanamichi, a walkway out into the audience. The hanamichi will serve as both the real-life New Orleans street for characters like the Tamale Vendor and the Mexican flower seller, and also it will serve as the initial home of the ghosts in Blanche’s mind. As the play progresses and Blanche begins to crack, the ghosts will get closer to her and enter the main apartment playing space.

3. Concept #3: Johnny Donnels

I’ve asked both scene designer Joe Dodd and lighting designer Daphne Velasquez to draw inspiration from the New Orleans paintings and photography of my father Johnny Donnels. Although they will not try to recreate a specific image of his, they are both looking at his lines and shapes, his colors and textures.
We will be displaying a selection of artwork by Johnny Donnels in the lobby during the Kennedy Theatre production. And on Thurs. Oct. 26 at 6:30 pm there will be a screening of a documentary about his life. The film, The Pink Satin Suit by Anastasia and Will Lyman, features his life, work, and philosophy.

Auditions

Auditions are particularly insomnia-inducing, because it’s all about envisioning all kinds of possible variations, like multiple alternate universes. I’m pretty good at keeping an open mind and really letting the audition itself guide me. But at the same time, I know a lot of the names on the sign-up sheet and can’t help picturing some of the possibilities. It feels great to have the variable of Blanche fixed for this equation (I cast Guen Montgomery in the role way back in November 2005). But the chemistry has to be right between her and the other three: Stanley, Stella, Mitch. So I'm sleepless and excited.
Auditions are Weds. and Thurs.
Audition Info
Since it's still summer, if I don't get back to sleep soon, I'm going to start hearing birds and seeing dawn soon, so I will try to calm my brain.

632.5 St. Peter St. (by Johnny Donnels)

I asked my father Johnny Donnels if he would share this photo and story:

The new owners that bought the building where Tennessee Williams had his split-level, third-floor studio in 1946-47, wasted no time in hiring a contractor to completely renovate the inside AND the outside of their historic* acquisition.

I just happened to walk outside of my next-door art gallery when I saw four painters setting up their scaffolding, in order to spray-paint a bilious, chartreuse-looking,
prime coat all over the front side.

This would have completely obliterated Tennessee’s 632 ½ apartment entrance numbers,
with their years and years of layers upon layers of textural and antique build-up!
They had CHARACTER..and I did not want to see them lost forever!

I yelled to the paint foreman with a frantic ‘WHOA!’..then asked him to hold off just a while until I could run upstairs to my studio and retrieve my trusty Konica FT.
This I did..and not minutes too soon! I was only able to snap a few quick images
before they turned on their radios and began painting.

They sorta looked at me, like..
‘Who would want a picture of THAT!’

Johnny Donnels


* It was historically significant, ‘way before Tennessee moved in.

On the Brink

I wrote this early Director's Note for the Educational Guide we are developing for teachers in conjunction with the production. Thought I'd share it here.

In October of 2005, just coming off of a thrilling experience directing Caryl Churchill’s Vinegar Tom, I wanted more. I hadn’t directed since Fall 2000. Trying to conceive, carry, give birth to, and then start raising my twin girls had pushed theatrical art to the background for too long. So I started to think about productions I might choose for Kennedy Mainstage. I first thought of Calderon’s Life is a Dream, an old favorite of mine. But the program needed something modern in the Fall slot. And Katrina had me thinking a lot about my hometown. So I thought of Streetcar Named Desire.
Growing up in New Orleans, Streetcar and Williams pervaded my life in numerous ways. I hung out every day in my Dad’s art gallery, in the building next door to where Williams wrote Streetcar in 1946. I have been up many times to Williams’ old studio. A few years ago, my Dad had the opportunity to acquire Tennessee Williams’ old coffee table, and he sent it to me here in Hawai‘i. What else? Oh, my parents live on Desire Street. (Their house and my Dad’s gallery were untouched by Katrina). I took the Bus Named Desire to high school every day. My best friend’s mother Cynthia Ratcliffe was an expert on Williams and his life in the French Quarter. I wrote my undergrad thesis on Williams, with a chapter on Streetcar. I’ve been to the Tennessee Williams Literary Festival and witnessed their infamous “Stella-Shouting Contest.” I can’t remember a time when I hadn’t seen the movie.
My first thought was that I wanted to somehow involve the artwork of my father, Johnny Donnels. Either his photographs or paintings. Check them out at
www.johnnydonnels.com
My scenic and lighting designers have been enthusiastic about doing this, and although they will not replicate his work, they are inspired by it. We will include a display of his work as part of the lobby display during the run of the show. And a documentary about Johnny Donnels will be screened, for free, on Oct. 26, 2006 at 6:30 pm in the Krauss Hall Yukiyoshi Room on UHM campus.
My second thought was that this is a classic work and would likely be something taught in Theatre and English classes around the island. That thought led to the Page to Stage program, in its pilot year, “linking your classrooms to our productions.” So many teachers have expressed an interest in sharing the script and production with their students. We have high hopes for a continued partnership with these schools.
I’m writing this note on the brink of auditions, so there is a long journey ahead. I have many ideas, but the adventure is in the exploration, and in enjoying the creativity of the others traveling with me. I’ll see you on the other side.

Kowalski: Polish nobility

I'm researching materials this summer on women in Russian theatre in the 18th century (yes, a far cry from Tennessee Williams). I'm been learning about the fascinating career of Praskovia Zhemchugova, a serf actress whose master freed her and then secretly married her. Listen to this: "In Moscow in November 1801, Count Sheremetev married Praskovia in secret. He freed all her relatives from serfdom and hired an attorney to trace Praskovia's genealogy to the Kowalskis, a Polish noble family."

And I think Stanley knew it, too.

(source: Pushkareva, N. L., and Eve Levin. Women in Russian History: From the Tenth to the Twentieth Century. The New Russian History. Armonk, N.Y.: M.E. Sharpe, 1997. p. 151)

copyright 1977 Christopher R. Harris

Chris Harris, professor of Electronic Media Communication at Middle Tennessee State University, kindly agreed to let me show this image of Williams here on the site. Thanks, Chris! (See previous posting, Ghostly Child)
copyright 1977 Christopher R. Harris All Rights Reserved

Ghostly Child

My dad Johnny Donnels has a photographer friend named Chris Harris, who took a quite wonderful photo of Tennesee Williams over thirty years ago. It's a shot of Williams standing in Jackson Square, right in the middle of the French Quarter. Williams is in front of the famous statue of Andrew Jackson on a horse, at the center of the square. Williams is raising his arms joyfully, as dozens of pigeons scatter into the sky around him.

Just to the right of Williams, there is a little girl in a winter coat, who is looking directly at the camera with a serious and almost ghostly stare. Well, that little girl is quite clearly my oldest and dearest friend Armour. We used to play in that square all the time when we were that age (around 7?). And Armour's mother Cynthia was later to become an expert on Tennessee Williams and his relationship to the quarter. Cynthia considered herself to BE Blanche DuBois (she was an English teacher from a conservative North Carolina background who came to New Orleans to experience its freedoms). Cynthia has sinced passed on, but she would have loved to have known that her daughter shared that moment in Jackson Square with Tennessee.

My father sent me a copy of the photo, signed from Chris, a few years ago and that's when I recognized that Armour was in it. Little Armour and Tennessee both hang over my desk now, and I will display the photo in the lobby display for Streetcar.

Desire and the Black Masseur

Today I re-lived a sequence of events from twenty years ago. In late December 1985, I turned 21 and got a present from my parents: "Tennessee Williams: Collected Stories". At the time, I was in college at U.Va. and was writing a B.A. Honors Thesis in English on Williams, and themes of metatheatricality in some of his plays. One of the chapters was on Streetcar (I should re-read that chapter sometime). Anyway, when I first got this story collection, I thumbed through the contents and found a story that Williams wrote in April 1946, called “Desire and the Black Masseur.” The story is about a timid man who seeks brutal treatment from a black masseur, who ends up eating him completely by the end of the story. Today, I sat on a beach in Hawai'i and looked at the table of contents and picked the same story first. I only remembered later that I had read it first twenty years ago.

There’s a great definition of desire in it: “Desire is something which is made to occupy a larger space than that which is afforded by the individual being.”

Today another line made me think of Blanche: “the principle of atonement, the surrender of self to violent treatment by others with the idea of thereby clearing one’s self of his guilt.”

I'm cheating a bit, typing in my welcome message at 9:41 p.m. I'm envisioning this blog mostly as the rantings of a director during bouts of insomnia, associated with my latest project: directing Tennessee Williams's A Streetcar Named Desire. During my last show, Vinegar Tom by Caryl Churchil, I was up many nights at about 4:09 a.m. and would type an e-mail to my dramaturg Frank Episale. I haven't yet had too many sleepless nights associated with Streetcar (the play opens Nov. 10) but so far I've been waking earlier, about 2:30 a.m.
So check back over the next few months to see what's on my late night mind as I grapple with this haunting play . . .

Lurana