Season 1 Episode 9
Ben Binversie:
You are who you are. You are where you are. You are doing what you're doing. The time is now. Those are the rules for today's show, A Journey Into Neo-Futurism.
[00:00:30] This is All Things Â鶹´«Ã½. I'm your host, Ben Binversie. On this week's show we'll talk with Rob Neill from the class of 1991, who came back to Â鶹´«Ã½ this spring with his merry band of Neo-Futurists. Rob met me late at night, after rehearsals, to talk about what the heck a Neo-Futurist is anyway.
Then we'll talk with Ellen Mease, who just wrapped up directing her 40th-anniversary product of Shakespeare's Twelfth Night, her last as a professor here at Â鶹´«Ã½. This week's show is coming [00:01:00] up next, after a word from Â鶹´«Ã½ College.
Ben Binversie:
The information and opinions expressed in this podcast are solely those of the individuals involved and do not represent the views of Â鶹´«Ã½ College.
Ben Binversie:
You might be asking yourself right about now, what is Neo-Futurism? If you're not a philosopher or art critic though, it might be helpful to iron out what a futurist is, before we get to Neo-Futurism.
Historically, futurists were mostly Italian and Russian [00:01:30] philosophers and artists, mostly active around the turn of the 20th century, who sought to create a new relationship with the audience. The Neo-Futurists embrace some of their principles, but also deviate in important ways. What they do maintain is putting on a unique and chaotic spectacle of a show.
Rob Neill:
Neo-Futurism embraces that and a lot of other things. It becomes a little bit of an amalgam of theater movements that came before it. Not just the futurists, but [00:02:00] surrealists and dadaists. Then the kind of happening theater of the '60s, and we take sport, and dance, and music, and poetry, and what we call living newspaper, where you embrace what's happening in the world and try to put some of that onstage. Then when we distill down the essence of what Neo-Futurism is, we consider what we do and how we perform and create to [00:02:30] follow four basic tenets. Which is, one, you are who you are. Two, you are where you are. Three, you are doing what you're doing. Four, the time is now.
Sometimes when we talk about the show, we talk about a fifth rule which is, if there's a fire on the stage, we didn't create it, so the fire exits are wherever the fire exits are. Because we have to actually do that legally in a New York Theater, and also we're not allowed to use open flames, so if you see a fire, [00:03:00] it's not on purpose.
Ben Binversie:
That's a good warning. I'll be prepared for that tomorrow if I see a fire.
Rob Neill:
Yeah.
Ben Binversie:
How do those principles translate into your shows? Like how do you mechanize those?
Rob Neill:
Yeah. We perform and create art that's from a place pretty much of honesty and taking the artist or creator's experience, and having that dictate what we create. Then we present that in a space [00:03:30] with a unique audience, and have what is happening there be a one-time event. We're going to do tomorrow night a show called The Infinite Wrench, which is a show that we do every Friday and Saturday at 10:30 in New York, 50 weeks out of the year. They do it in Chicago Friday, Saturday, and Sunday. They do it in San Francisco Friday and Saturday. They do it in London, kind of, it's called something different.
The idea is that we do this show that [00:04:00] is an ever-changing attempt of 30 original plays in 60 minutes, in random order, as determined by the audience. It will never be the same, just mathematically probably, because of that. Plus we add the fact that in our show we look at things that are actually happening sometimes in the space, and we activate the audience members as well. That's never going to be the same.
Ben Binversie:
Right.
Rob Neill:
There's a structure that's used throughout, and we mess with that a little bit [00:04:30] as well now, but for every show, it is done in a different order, and different plays happen. We change plays so frequently that since 2004 we have created over 5000 short plays.
Ben Binversie:
Wow.
Rob Neill:
We're constantly creating new plays because we don't often go back and do plays that have been in the show. Plays are in the show anywhere from one night to, I don't know, 30 nights. Often we just don't [00:05:00] return to plays, until we do gigs like this one in Â鶹´«Ã½, where we will take plays that we have just recently written, or maybe they're a few years older but we really like doing them and they're a lot of fun and it's great to kind of resurrect them in a new space and see how the space influences the work. Then see how the audience influences the show. Then there you go, unique theater that is ephemeral, and special for just [00:05:30] that one night. One night only.
Ben Binversie:
Yeah, that's cool. One of the linchpins of your shows is the idea of non-illusory theater. You kind of allude to that with the value of honesty in terms of your shows. Basically, it's the idea that you don't play characters. For many people, I think the idea of playing characters is so, like, ingrained into their idea of theater. Where did that idea come from, and why have you incorporated it into the Neo-Futurists?
Rob Neill:
[00:06:00] Taking non-illusory performance I think allows us to have a very different relationship with each other on stage and with the audience. We're really doing what we're doing, and if you know that, then there's a certain buy-in that's different than if we're playing a character. The journey that we take you on is more of a, [00:06:30] it's a different kind of community building in that moment. In that one night we're saying, "All right, we have this buy-in, and what you see is really us. Therefore, what we're doing really affects us, and it probably will have some real effect on you."
That comes out of when the Neo-Futurists started way back in the late '80s, it first started in Oberlin, and Greg Allen started it when he was a student at Oberlin. [00:07:00] Then brought it to Chicago. The idea was that it was a response to how people were not only faking it, or acting in traditional forms of performance. Also, he came from a suburb in Evanston and noticed that people in the world are being really fake to each other, and he wanted a theater that countered that.
A way to be real with each other in the space, really talking to each other, really looking each [00:07:30] other in the eyes. Whether it's two people that are considered performers and onstage, whether it's looking at the people in the audience, whether it's bringing the people in the audience onto the stage, or taking the performers into the audience space. It starts to change the space and how we traditionally look at space in performance. There's more and more theater now that does it, but that there's no fourth wall. We try to pretty much never hint that there will be [00:08:00] one, and from the moment you walk in the theater it's different than when you walk into a normal show, so you know that you don't have to behave like you would normally behave in a traditional theater setting.
Now, that doesn't mean-
Ben Binversie:
It's not a free-for-all.
Rob Neill:
It's not a free-for-all, and it doesn't mean that everybody needs to be an asshole. Ultimately we're trying to make it so that everybody's better with each other, and more generous, and building this unique experience that everybody wants to be a part of. Now, everybody responds differently, and sometimes things that happen, you know, it's [00:08:30] like, oh, here, this is something that's made me uncomfortable. Now, what we would say is, "Great. Let's hear what that is. Let's open up the dialogue about why that is."
We're bringing people in our company that have been working on this for, you know, I've been doing this since ’95, and some people have only been doing it for a year. We're bringing a lot of different perspectives and different life experiences to tell these stories, to do these dances, to sing these songs. In the end, it is [00:09:00] a variety, and I would say that we're aiming with what that is to be real and not fake.
Ben Binversie:
Do you think that it ever limits your group as performers, the fact that you have to base your performances on your real experiences, or do you think it opens up new possibilities?
Rob Neill:
I think that it seems initially limiting to play within those rules, but what I would argue is, once you're [00:09:30] in that set of four, and that idea of not traditionally acting, that there's still infinite space. There are still infinite possibilities, and that allows you to focus it. Then it also allows you to play with what the gray areas are, you know. When am I Rob? When am I Rob facilitating somebody else's story, so I don't have to exactly do what I would do?
Ben Binversie:
Right.
Rob Neill:
I can do what their story needs, [00:10:00] but at no time, we would argue, should you as an audience member think that it's not me up there. You could think that it's me representing somebody's boss, or somebody's friend, or someone's dad, or whatever it is, but it's still Rob.
Ben Binversie:
Always Rob.
Rob Neill:
Yeah, and we use each other's name on stage, unless we're saying, "Oh, we're going to do this play where it's about the time that I [00:10:30] crashed the car, where Rob plays my best friend, and Robin plays my dad, and T plays the dog." Whatever it is.
Ben Binversie:
Yeah. You're not fooling anybody with the dog there.
Rob Neill:
Yeah. Right.
Ben Binversie:
If you had to pin down the Neo-Futurists, or, like, categorize them, or kind of triangulate them in the realm of theater, what would you call it? Somewhere between like sketch comedy, improv, traditional theater, where does it land?
Rob Neill:
Yeah. [00:11:00] Depends on who I'm talking to, and how they can relate to what we're doing initially.
Ben Binversie:
Okay.
Rob Neill:
We like to say, when you've seen the show once, you've only seen the show once. It's constantly changing. Usually, once you've seen it, you can describe it, but you're not going to fully understand it unless you see it probably. I most likely, if I had to, would say it's avant-garde sketch comedy. Where not [00:11:30] everything's funny, and sometimes it's not funny on purpose.
We try to have a good mix, and we try to have things that make you think, and things that are funny, and things that are funny that make you think. Also, we try to have things that are affecting us that are serious, and we deal with the political and the social-political, and personal tragedy, and communal tragedy. Just like looking at what's happening in the world.
[00:12:00] Yeah, I mean, there's always some part of the show where you're like, "Wow, that person is really talking about something that really happened to them, and it's intense." Particularly in the current climate, there are things that we're talking about at times where it's just like, whew, it's hard to be happy at some times, and it's hard to just say, "Oh yeah, it's just a show and we're going to make you laugh." It's like, no, there's some serious [00:12:30] shit and we want to talk about it. We want to hear what other people have to say about it too. Part of it is starting a dialogue.
Ben Binversie:
Yeah. Now that we kind of have a handle on what the Neo-Futurists are, I want to talk-
Rob Neill:
Do we? Yeah. Tell me what we've got. Oh my god.
Ben Binversie:
I want to talk about your mission and kind of digging into what you were just talking about. I know that part of the goal is to embrace those that are maybe unmoved by conventional theater.
Rob Neill:
Yeah.
Ben Binversie:
For whatever reason. It's uninspiring [00:13:00] to them. Why is it important to you to reach new audiences with this show? Do you feel uninspired by conventional theater?
Rob Neill:
I do sometimes. I like a lot of stuff, and I think, to tangent on that real quickly, that particularly as a Neo-Futurist, but as artists in general, it's good to experience the stuff that's not your thing, or to experience the stuff that isn't like what you do, so then you know what you're playing [00:13:30] against, or you're responding to.
I actually, I live within walking distance of Broadway, and I will go to Broadway shows. I love going to some of them, and I cry during some of them, and some of them I don't like. I like to sing some of the songs. Then I'll go to off-Broadway and to independent theater, and there are things that I love and I love that those spaces exist and create vibrant art, like we do, but there are times I go and I'm like, "What did I just watch?" Sometimes it's only 15 minutes long, and you're like, "How did I just do that in [00:14:00] 15 minutes?" Survive.
What was the real part of the question? Oh, audience members that are-
Ben Binversie:
Yeah.
Rob Neill:
Yeah. I think, well one, because we're not attempting to cast traditional actors, we're casting people who are for our ensemble, like to be part of a company. Not to just do a show. We're trying to get a diverse array of voices in that, and we want [00:14:30] that kind of diversity represented in our audience. Not everybody that is in this company is an actor, per se, but they all have things to say and they want to put that out there. I guess that has to be part of it, which involves a kind of acting.
Ben Binversie:
Yeah.
Rob Neill:
I think as far as when you look at the audiences, I mean I know the shows we do aren't for everyone all the time. One, I think we can tailor our shows depending on the audience sometimes. We have shows now that are family [00:15:00] shows, or going into schools of young kids. I think that our show can be really accessible to people who don't normally go for theater. Our show also can be really accessible for people who are into a variety of theater types, and especially an amalgam of some of the esoteric things, as well as the common pop-culture kind of things.
I think that we also have a way that, oh, this is going to be different, and you're [00:15:30] going to go on this journey that if you kind of just let yourself get into it, that you'll find something that you can relate to and something that is accessible. More so than sometimes you go to a play and you're just like, it shuts down, and there are people up there doing things and they're not really talking to you. They're doing things in front of you. There's some people that that's not their thing.
Then beyond that we try to do the shows every once in a while in unique, non-theatrical spaces, so it's not [00:16:00] like you're even in a theater. I think there's a way to get to people who, "Oh, I don't really like theater, but I like to go to that kind of stuff." Or they don't even know they like to go to that kind of stuff until you-
Ben Binversie:
You get them there.
Rob Neill:
You get them there. Also, with that we try to keep our ticket prices subsidized so that for under 20 bucks you can come and see our show in New York. I think it's similar in both San Francisco and Chicago. There was a time, back when it started, that it was under 10 bucks. [00:16:30] The idea is that you're not throwing out a lot of money, like you can for the-
Ben Binversie:
Broadway shows.
Rob Neill:
$175 a ticket, that's a different price point, and that prices a lot of people out.
Ben Binversie:
Yup. Different people are going to those for sure.
Rob Neill:
Yeah.
Ben Binversie:
The original mission for the Neo-Futurists was to create interactive kind of highly personal, challenging art for the general public. That sounds great, but how do you actually do that?
Rob Neill:
You always are writing and [00:17:00] absorbing what you're doing, and figuring out how you can turn that into some kind of theatrical, or performance-based piece. We try to challenge each other before we get into the rehearsal room, but every Tuesday a certain number of us, usually somewhere between five and ten of us gather, and we know from the previous weekend what plays had been taken out. Then [00:17:30] we pitch new work, and usually we're pitching two to three times the number of plays that we need for that week.
Then within the room, there will be kind of a little bit of workshopping, collaboration on the pieces that are going in. Then there's even more of that, that happens. Some plays are pitched, rehearsed, and then performed, and it's exactly the way it was on the page, and boom. Not as much collaboration necessarily. A lot of times then when we get them into the space [00:18:00] on Friday, first time in front of an audience, even more collaboration. You're getting to see how the audience does, and then the pieces have a chance to breathe, and you can make even more adjustments.
I feel that a lot of the plays that I get in the show, at least in the recent years, have been plays where I like to keep tinkering. I like to keep playing with what it is, and seeing, oh, the audience didn't really want to get up and participate here, why not? What are we going to do with that? Too many people wanted to get up and participate, [00:18:30] how are we going to deal with that? That line doesn't even sound good coming out of my mouth, or someone else's mouth, or we just skipped those four lines, is there a reason for it? What are we going to do? Maybe the wind-up monkey didn't make its journey like it was supposed to, do we like it that way?
You're constantly looking at it and going, oh, I could do that, or maybe I want, you know, now that I realize it, this play should totally be put in a different part of the space and it'll be 100% better. Let's try it that way the next time.
Ben Binversie:
[00:19:00] Yeah. That's cool. It kind of strikes me as maybe how theater should be. You know, you take what the audience gives you, and there's a little bit of give and take. I think everybody's for the better in the end.
Rob Neill:
I hope so. Yeah, I mean we really talk about it a lot. It's like, okay, you know we may love it, but how is it playing for the audience? The audience may love it, but how is it working for us? You know, and so there is explicit dialogue right there, that explicit collaboration, [00:19:30] and that relationship that is constantly shifting. Because some nights we'll have 30 people see the show, and some nights we'll have 130 people see the show. Even that affects how a play plays at times.
Ben Binversie:
Yeah. One of the members described it like being in a band, everyone's kind of part of writing and everybody's an artist. You've been with the Neo-Futurists now for a long time. Is it kind of like a family for you? Are these your people?
Rob Neill:
[00:20:00] Yeah. I mean, the Neo-Futurists are my artistic family. Whether someone's in the company now, or been in the company only for six months, or six years, I feel that I have a kinship with them. All of those people I consider family. Collaborating with them like that, yeah, there's a band quality to it, and the band's lineup that's going out on the road changes all the time, [00:20:30] but there's a lot of ways that we switch out who's on what, and how we all play together.
When it comes down to it, we're an artistic family who gets along this way, and respects each other, and ultimately hopefully is artistically generous, and considerate, and about really helping nurture the voices and the art, and bring it all up and elevate [00:21:00] it to a point where everybody is having fun, and creating stuff, and challenging each other as well.
That's not to say that it's always happy, because it's hard. We were joking the other night, like making art is hard. It's like, yeah, it is. Sometimes you're not making tons of money doing this, you know. You're doing it for the ability to create, and activate, and inspire, and have this incubator of [00:21:30] voices and personalities. Part of it is just to give people a chance to mess around and figure out where they are as a writer, or where they are as a director, or where they are as a performer, or a lot of those things. Maybe they go on and do more stuff with music, or more stuff in television, or more theater, or raise a family, or all those things, and they're a magician, or a wizard.
Ben Binversie:
For those who haven't seen [00:22:00] your shows, myself included, the Neo-Futurists' first show, Too Much Light Makes the Baby Go Blind.
Rob Neill:
Yup.
Ben Binversie:
Kind of like The Infinite wrench, it's organized into basically 30 two-minute plays.
Rob Neill:
Yup, very similar.
Ben Binversie:
Kind of like the Â鶹´«Ã½ basketball system of theater.
Rob Neill:
Right.
Ben Binversie:
How do you transition between them? How does the audience choose them? How does that work?
Rob Neill:
Sure. When you come in, you're not only given a name tag that's not your name, but you're given a menu that is a [00:22:30] list of the plays. We, at the top of the show, give you the four rules. We explain how the menu works, and basically the audience orders by number. We have a clothesline where all the numbers are strung up. The audience calls out a number, and we pull that down, set up the play, call go. The play happens, we call curtain, and then people shout out more numbers. For the most part, the show goes along like that. Then [00:23:00] hopefully we finish, but sometimes, we have a clock and sometimes time runs out, and we have to stop the show before the plays are all done because it is a race against time.
The audience really drives it, and can kind of make or break whether we finish on time or not. Because they have to be on top of that, and also that allows it so you have no idea, when you're in the show, or in the audience, what the order of things are going to be. the [00:23:30] audience member, you may worry about that. You may be like, "Oh, I want to call out this play, or I want to call out this one. And I think this one should be first and this one should be fourth." Whatever, and who knows if that'll work out. As a performer in it, you can't worry about it. You just have to, maybe like the Â鶹´«Ã½ basketball team, you just have to go in and do it. Then you'll have a moment where you can take a breather, and then-
Ben Binversie:
Then you're back in there.
Rob Neill:
Then you're back in. You know, just go out there and score. You know.
Ben Binversie:
Yeah, make it happen.
Rob Neill:
Just go out there and get it done.
Ben Binversie:
[00:24:00] Put a couple shots up. Maybe they go in, maybe they don't.
Rob Neill:
Yeah. I mean, failure is inherent in what we do, and ideally we don't just fail, fail, but we don't always beat the clock. We're not always going to remember our lines. I mean, it's just things happen, and sometimes there are plays where failure is important to the play. Like a play deals with that, or incorporates that. There's a point in one play where I drink shots of real whiskey, and after that play my game's a different [00:24:30] game.
Ben Binversie:
Yeah. It's a different ballgame.
Rob Neill:
I'm just playing it different, I don't know. You know, hopefully.
Ben Binversie:
Okay, so coming back to Â鶹´«Ã½, can you reflect on your time here as a student and how that kind of fits into your journey to becoming a Neo-Futurist?
Rob Neill:
Sure. Yeah, I came here from a small town in Wisconsin, Ripon, where there is also a college. Coming to a small college town in the Midwest was not a shock to me. [00:25:00] I came to Â鶹´«Ã½ to study anything that I hadn't studied before.
Ben Binversie:
That's a good attitude.
Rob Neill:
Right. I got into a tutorial with Dan Kaiser, that was called Moscow's Bestsellers, which was all contemporary Russian literature, and for some reason thought, oh, I should major in Russian too, or take Russian at least. For a long time I thought I was going to be a Russian major, but [00:25:30] I took sociology, and economics, and anthropology, and philosophy, and-
Ben Binversie:
Really dug into the liberal arts.
Rob Neill:
I spread my liberal art wings.
Ben Binversie:
So wide.
Rob Neill:
So, so wide. Then I landed in a philosophy major with a Russian Eastern European studies concentration.
Ben Binversie:
There we go.
Rob Neill:
But I did a lot of theater as well. Even as a senior had a project where I got funding and did a mashup of a show that was somewhat Neo-Futurist, where kind of [00:26:00] took some Pinter and some Ted Hughes poems, and Richard II's monologue in prison, and kind of put it all together in something that I thought was performance art or something.
Ben Binversie:
Coherent enough.
Rob Neill:
I don't know. The semester before that, my first semester senior year I was in Â鶹´«Ã½ in London, and I saw 60 plays in six months. It was ridiculous. I think all of that led me to, and now I'm a philosophy major going out in the world, and I can kind of speak [00:26:30] Russian, but I knew that I loved acting.
I had done plays with Ellen Mease and Sandy Moffett, who are still around. I did improv, I did a lot of improv. Eventually from Â鶹´«Ã½ I went to the National Theater Institute, and then to the London Academy of Cinematic Art, and studied, like conservatory style, going, okay, this is really love.
I now have learned a lot of different things at Â鶹´«Ã½, [00:27:00] but can I live the artist's life day in, day out? I didn't know. Because I think one of the reasons why I wasn't a theater major was because I thought the actor's life is no life for me. Ha. What did I know? Then I found out. I went and I did those schools, and loved it even more. I got to go to Poland and study there, and then I came back to the Midwest, and thought, okay, now what do I do?
I started doing poetry slams and improv slams [00:27:30] in Chicago, and saw the Neo-Futurists, so I'm like, oh, I'll audition. Why not? Let's try this. I'll do something. They called me back, and then I found a Bambi lamp that someone had thrown away on the Belmont EL train platform, and I found it and I wrote a play about it, and that was my callback piece that got me in.
Ben Binversie:
There you go.
Rob Neill:
Because of that, I'm in the Neo-Futurists. They said, "Hey, we want to cast you, and the only things is we want to cast you in the New York Company." I'm like, "What New York Company?" They're like, " [00:28:00] Exactly. You're going to be part of it." I said, "Great, I'll do that for six months." It's 1995, I move to New York City for 50 bucks a week, to be a Neo-Futurist for six months, and I still live there, and I'm a still Neo-Futurist. Success story.
Ben Binversie:
Hopefully making a little more than 50 bucks a week now.
Rob Neill:
Right. A little bit more, but the Neo-Futurists don't pay a whole lot more, just other jobs that I do, and I've done tons of other different acting things, and day jobs and things like that, that I've juggled through these 20 some years. I mean, [00:28:30] coming from Ripon to Â鶹´«Ã½, I never thought I'd live in New York City, or at least survive living in New York City, and I love it. I love it.
Ben Binversie:
Nice. Most education systems, be it high school or college, are geared towards simulating and developing the intellectual side of your brain.
Rob Neill:
Yes.
Ben Binversie:
Without much regard for creativity. We start out as kids, I think, with loads of creativity, and school and society kind of conspire to crush that creativity [00:29:00] in most of us.
Rob Neill:
Agreed.
Ben Binversie:
I was watching some of the videos on your website, little previews and video sketches that you guys did, and I stumbled on one called Like a Child. It's a bunch of Neo-Futurists lip-syncing over audio of some kids doling out what I think is some pretty great advice.
Rob Neill:
Yeah.
Ben Binversie:
Simple, yet to the point, the gist of the message is, we're all still children and it's important to remember who we were when we were a kid, and it's important to respect that kid that you used to be, and it's okay to act like [00:29:30] the kid that you are. That's kind of the message that I take away from the Neo-Futurists, and it's powerful, even though I haven't even seen you live yet.
Rob Neill:
Exactly. It's about play, and it's about ... You know, one of the top five traits they are looking for people in business is creativity, and people have gotten away from that. There are jobs I've had, going into corporations, where I'm going to take these corporate leaders [00:30:00] on this creative journey, where they have no idea what they're going to be doing. They just know that what I teach them is of value, and then they see how it is so different from where they are now, and they just need to let that creativity in. They just need to go back. They are artists. They are poets. They've just not been tapping into that. Then that helps them relate better to what they do, and their job, and the people they work with. [00:30:30] There's that awesomeness.
Then as far as like what Neo-Futurism brings to that, I think is this embracing of the random. This realizing that there is power in not trying to overpower with thought or mind, than just letting the synchronicity happen. Then also to say, "Okay, the rigid ways of doing things [00:31:00] in just a kind of traditional structured job, or traditional structured play, or traditionally structured school, is not geared to individual, or even group success." How we deal with each other face to face, one on one, creatively, like what are the real things? What is my story and what's your story, and how is that going to make what we do better? How can [00:31:30] we encourage each other?
Like that kind of stuff is what, when we were kids, we would engage with. Like who are you? What are you doing here? I don't know. Hey, let's pretend that this table is a boat. Okay, well it's not a boat. Well it's not a boat, but let's stand on this table as if it were a boat. Okay, then it's a boat. You know, let's redefine things in a way that elevates us all.
Some of that came from when I was here in the '90s. Like going, okay, I'm going to try all these new things, and I'm going to have these [00:32:00] adventures. I think that that's one of the things that Â鶹´«Ã½ really instilled in me, was a sense of adventure, and that I could do anything. That a lot of it was more about relationships and the kind of bonds and ways that we talk to each other, and the stories we tell, and the narratives we create, than it is about like knowing this one thing, or knowing how to do that, or [00:32:30] making lots of money, or not making any money. I don't know. I don't know where I am now, but you get it.
Ben Binversie:
One of the performers described what you all do as responding honestly to the world around you with all of your creative might. I think maybe we should all be doing a little more of that, and maybe we should all be Neo-Futurists.
Rob Neill:
Yeah.
Ben Binversie:
For the time being I'll settle for the group of Neo-Futurists that brave the cold, polar vortex to come and perform here in Â鶹´«Ã½. Thank you for coming Rob, and thanks for your time.
Rob Neill:
You bet. It's [00:33:00] been great hanging out, and thanks for listening.
Ben Binversie:
Rob Neill is a Â鶹´«Ã½ grad from the class of 1991, and a founding member of the New York Neo-Futurists. The Neos performed here in Â鶹´«Ã½ earlier this semester, and also led a workshop the next day, in which I participated. If you couldn't tell from the conversation with Rob, I was pretty intrigued by the Neo-Futurists, and the students involved in the workshop thoroughly enjoyed the opportunity to practice a different way of thinking [00:33:30] and being.
The Neo-Futurists encourage vulnerability and facilitate the sharing of intimate experiences in a powerful way. To get a better idea of what they're all about, check out some of their videos and sketches online. If you're lucky enough to be in one of those cities he mentioned, New York, Chicago or San Francisco, go check out a performance.
We're taking a turn from Rob's brand of theater to something a little more traditional, the most traditional perhaps, Shakespeare. We're [00:34:00] going all the way to 1979 for this one. Ellen Mease, Professor of Theater and Dance here at Â鶹´«Ã½, directed this semester's production of Twelfth Night, which ran last weekend. 40 years after her original production of the play. She showed me her scrapbook from the original production.
Ellen Mease:
This is the 1979 record of rehearsals, and look how wholesome and young everybody is. That's me.
Ben Binversie:
Where? [00:34:30] Oh my.
Ellen Mease:
Oh my.
Ben Binversie:
It doesn't register. Maybe it's the long hair, I don't know.
Ellen Mease:
This is how I remember alums, because the performances, over a long rehearsal period, just get imprinted. They are material impressions in my brain, so when they come back for a reunion, I can [00:35:00] see, this is Ted Gaines. I can see Carolyn is an old, old friend. Michael Glassman, just look at all that hair.
Ben Binversie:
That's a mustache and a half.
Ellen Mease:
You don't get many undergraduates that can grow this much hair, and thus look sort of mature. Not clean-shaven youthful.
Ben Binversie:
Yeah.
Ellen Mease:
You recognize my nose, surely.
Ben Binversie:
The profile is more recognizable, but the first one I swear, [00:35:30] I thought you were joking when you told me it was you.
Ellen Mease:
This is Sue Wood. We didn't have a staff costume designer, a faculty costume designer, so Sue, as a student, was designing all the costumes. My mother was the sole costume crew person.
Ben Binversie:
Wow. Keep it in the family.
Ellen Mease:
Yeah.
Ben Binversie:
Back to 2019. By the way, if you hear panting dogs, that's not your imagination, [00:36:00] that's the ghost of Hamlet. Just kidding. Those are the sounds of Ellen's two golden retrievers, Hamlet and Beckett, named after the famous Shakespeare play, and playwright Samuel Beckett. I snuck into the theater before rehearsals last week, as actors were getting ready for a run-through of the show.
Speaker 5:
The tongue, the lips, the mouth, the teeth. The tip of the tongue, the lips, the mouth the teeth. The tip of the tongue, the lips, the mouth, the teeth.
Ellen Mease:
She makes a proper cup of coffee in a copper coffee pot.
Speaker 5:
She makes a proper cup of coffee in a copper coffee pot.
A box of biscuits, a box of mixed biscuits in a biscuit mixer. [00:36:30] Lemon liniment, lemon liniment, lemon liniment. Sinful Caesar sipped his snifter, seized his knees, and sneezed. Achoo. Sinful Caesar sipped his snifter, seized his knees, and sneezed. Achoo.
Oh mistress! Hi.
Oh mistress, my dear, where are you going? Oh stand here your true love's coming. That's the same both high and low.
Ben Binversie:
[00:37:00] Now that we're all warmed up, I wanted to see what Ellen had to say about returning to Twelfth Night 40 years after her first production of the show.
Ellen Mease:
Well, returning to it 40 years later, it's a time to commemorate the joy that is always built into being a young faculty member here, when the age difference between you and the students is not so great. You don't have to be doctor [00:37:30] anybody, you're just who you are, the coach, and a fellow risk-taker along with everybody else on stage.
The blessing of that particular production is that I had three really strong women in Carolyn, Nancy and Miriam. We had a really strong group of newbies who were willing to take the risks that a comic role [00:38:00] is necessarily going to require. You're going to fall flat on your face. The timing's not going to be right until you work it and work it.
We had just superb clowns. We had the three strong women and all of that youthful sense of adventure and risk taking. Ed Moore was on board, encouraging and advising. In large part, the choice [00:38:30] of the comedy now, for me, is not just the 40th anniversary, but it is to celebrate the long engagement that Ed had with the theater department. He advised on Sandy Moffett's productions of Romeo and Juliet, The Tempest, A Midsummer Night's Dream, Much Ado, my Hamlet, my Macbeth.
The way I love [00:39:00] to remember Ed is the same way that Patrick Neil and various, a large number of alums, once the word went out about Ed's death, students created just a wonderful chain of email responses to his death, and they all remember his voice. That great, deep, gravel, barrel of his hearty, "Well how are you?" We shared an office in ARH, [00:39:30] office suite, so I can hear him now.
Ed used to tell this great story that I use whenever I have to talk about romance onstage. I have to do it with this play in particular. This is before my time, but he was sitting in on a late rehearsal of a production of Henry IV, Part I, that Sandy Moffett was directing. It was really late in the rehearsal period. It was a late dress rehearsal, and Sandy finally [00:40:00] said to his hotspur, "Look, you're going to have to kiss your lady Percy goodbye, because you're going into battle and you're going to die, and you're never going to see her again."
Here's Ed telling this story in that sort of Georgian drawl, "Oh, oh." The actor wails, "But Mr. Moffett, I'm only 20 years old." You've just got to get over it. You've got to stretch into the whole gamut of human emotional engagement.
[00:40:30] There's so much this college owes him, especially for the energy and the passionate intensity of those intro to Shakespeare courses, which all of his former students talk about.
Then the third big reason, this is my last production as a full-time faculty member. It will be I hope my last winter production. I want merriment. I want mirth. [00:41:00] I want, heaven knows we need something to chase away what ended up being really, really long winter blues, and serious cabin fever. Because the dogs look at me every night before we are ready to go to rehearsal and say, "Okay, are we going to Illyria now? Are we getting out of the house?"
Of the many challenges that we've had for this production so far this winter, [00:41:30] the terrible serious cold set us back for auditions, and then the campus closure in single digits, and down into the negative 20, whatever it was for those two days. We were behind a full week of rehearsals. This is already a short period of time in this winter block because you have to go up the weekend before spring break, and if you lose time to ice, snow, [00:42:00] cold, colds, flu, food poisoning, whatever.
Ben Binversie:
Things that you can't necessarily plan for.
Ellen Mease:
You can't play catch up. You can't postpone the production.
Ben Binversie:
What distinguishes this play from any other yahoo's Twelfth Night? What's the Ellen Mease flavor that we're going to find?
Ellen Mease:
I'm not one for gimmicks.
Ben Binversie:
Fair enough. Staying true to the original text.
Ellen Mease:
[00:42:30] Yeah. It's the same main romantic plot. It's the same secondary, but very, very funny subplot with Sir Toby Belch, and Andrew Aguecheek, and Maria the Mischief Maker's gulling Malvolio, the uppity pompous puritan steward into thinking that his mistress loves him, and making him dress in yellow stockings and cross-gartered, [00:43:00] and come smiling to his mistress, and he makes a complete ass of himself.
Ben Binversie:
How embarrassing.
Ellen Mease:
We necessarily have to do productions of Shakespeare in modern dress because we don't have the costume storage, and we don't have the human resources to create any design scheme from scratch in the way that The Globe does. Erin, our costume designer, [00:43:30] is just terrific at using the resources available to us, not just here but in professional and university costume storage areas, to pull together a look. It is sort of '70s, because we have a lot of '70s stock. It's a really, really funny silhouette. The patterns and colors can be awful, but we're sort of keeping the wild stuff in the comic subplot, and the nobles are [00:44:00] suitably dressed, and sort of Calvin Klein lookalike gowns and things like that.
Ben Binversie:
Very nice.
Ellen Mease:
I was interested myself in, for this most musical of Shakespeare's plays, in using Jazz, Latin, blues, some folk. I have a friend who was a housemate out at Stanford who's a Silicon Valley engineer, but also a jazz musician. [00:44:30] He adapted the original Elizabethan Renaissance settings of the songs in contemporary jazz, rhythm and blues idiom. Kevin Zoernig, who graduated in 1980, and while he was here created music for a lot of theater and dance performances. He now teaches in New Mexico, and he's coming back [00:45:00] to work with a jazz band on stage.
Ben Binversie:
Oh wow.
Ellen Mease:
Orsino's courtiers are jazz musicians. There is the gazebo and the bandstand, looking out on the Adriatic Sea coast. We have two sax players, a drummer, and Kevin on the keyboards. They're providing not just accompaniment for Feste's songs, but also transition music, and maybe the occasional [00:45:30] improvisatory underscoring for some scenes. Really, really subtle on the piano, but they're going to be on stage the whole time.
Ben Binversie:
That's cool.
Ellen Mease:
That's a level of performance that the actors really can't even anticipate. We've had recorded music to sort of give them a sense of what the transition rhythms are going to be, that bring them onstage, but to have the actual musicians onstage happens during tech weekend. That's really exciting [00:46:00] for them.
Ben Binversie:
Okay. That'll be fun to pick that up.
Ellen Mease:
Yeah.
Ben Binversie:
The audience will have to do a little bit of imagination once they are coming in from the winter outside to pretend that they're on the Adriatic Coast, but the scene helps.
Ellen Mease:
Well, you see we have a green world, and when we'll have the projection of the sea.
Ben Binversie:
Yes, it's very verdant. Yeah.
Ellen Mease:
The other scenic element that we have is a bridge, and that's a really important thematic element. Because we have the Duke's palace here, and Olivia's [00:46:30] grand household here. At the beginning of the play, the Duke is lovelorn with unrequited love, sunk in the sort of petrarchan melancholy of loving Olivia, whose brother is dead, and she's unnaturally sworn to abjure the sight of men for seven years. You have two houses that are sort of frozen in time.
It takes Viola, [00:47:00] in her shipwreck and her emergence from the sea, and then later in the play Sebastian, her twin brother, also emerging from the sea, to bridge the gap between these two houses and to unfreeze time, and to let life's vital natural energies toward marriage and procreation lead us to the resolution of comedy's usual resolution of happy marriages. [00:47:30] Three happy marriages in fact.
Ben Binversie:
That's nice. Have you had any time to reflect on your time here? I know you've got this photo book, your scrapbook of the original one.
Ellen Mease:
Directing and coaching acting in an undergraduate liberal arts college is the best theater job that you could possibly have in American theater. You can do the great plays because they're great plays. You don't [00:48:00] have to put butts in seats, because the college very generously covers the cost of almost every activity on campus. Nobody's worried about where the next job is coming from, so you can afford to take risks.
These Â鶹´«Ã½ians are fearless, they are intellectually engaged. They're willing to take the emotional risks that go with complex characterization. [00:48:30] They open themselves to other ways of being and behaving, and they have the great capacity of wonder. They are not world-weary souls just yet. You might be disappointed about the political climate right now, and you might be really dismayed, desperate, be very afraid of the existential threat of climate change, but while you're here, [00:49:00] you can develop a whole array of skills that allow you to address the really serious problems that in a well educated, civically responsible citizen, ought to develop. You can also develop the literary and the dramatic imagination.
Ben Binversie:
Right. Yeah, and another side of yourself as a human being.
Ellen Mease:
Yup. Here's the last reflection.
Ben Binversie:
Okay.
Ellen Mease:
John Pfitsch, so he used [00:49:30] to liken directors to coaches. He used to call me coach. Directors, like coaches, mostly watch. We watch a performance develop. Casting is 95% of the job. You see that there's some talent there, and then you just watch to make sure that the skill level increases and increases night after night, and it just is emblazoned on your brain as you watch.
The other [00:50:00] analogy is the relationship between a good jockey and a great racehorse, like American Pharaoh. You just get on their back, as I do when I'm sort of kinesthetically out here, imagining myself in every character that's onstage. Then you give the horse the rein-
Ben Binversie:
Let them do what horses do.
Ellen Mease:
Him, her, do what they do.
Ben Binversie:
That's a good way of looking at it. Well, you don't need to put butts in seats, but I think [00:50:30] the butts will be in the seats, and one of those butts will be mine.
Ellen Mease:
Thank you Ben.
Ben Binversie:
Ellen Mease is a Professor of Theater and Dance here at Â鶹´«Ã½, and she just finished up her 40th-anniversary production of Twelfth Night. It was a musical performance, with drunken shenanigans, mismatched lovers, and a beautiful set. It certainly lifted me out of my winter blues.
You can find some pictures from the show, as well as the S&B article from the [00:51:00] 1979 show, on our website. The music you're hearing right now was composed and performed by Kevin Zoernig, class of 1980, who wrote the music for this past weekend's production. Zoernig, who played piano in the 1979 production, returned to Â鶹´«Ã½ all the way from New Mexico, to perform as an onstage band member. His daughter Amelia, from the class of 2021, was also in the play. More information about the show is available online at grinnell.edu/ [00:51:30] podcast.
With that, we'll wrap up this week's episode. Next time we're going to dive into the powerful exhibitions currently on display at the Faulconer Gallery here on campus, Reckoning With the Incident, John Wilson's studies for a lynching mural, and Dread and Delight, Fairy Tales in an Anxious World. [00:52:30] We'll talk with the curators of the exhibit, and some of the students, faculty, and staff involved in the programming of the exhibits. Both shows will remain on display into April, so if you're in Iowa, it's well worth a stop.
Music for today's show comes from Brett Newski, Podington Bear, and Kevin Zoernig. If you'd like to contact the show, email us at podcast@grinnell.edu, or check out our website, grinnell.edu/podcast, for more information about the guests from today's show. Don't forget to subscribe to the podcast wherever [00:53:00] you listen. I'm your host, Ben Binversie. Stay weird Â鶹´«Ã½ians.