http://www.nightskytheplay.com/

PERFORMANCES BEGIN MAY 20TH!


NIGHT SKY explores what the noted author and physicist Steven Hawking has called the two remaining mysteries -- the brain and the cosmos. When she is a struck by a car, the brilliant and articulate astronomer Anna loses her ability to speak. In place of conventional speech, she expresses herself in a hodge-podge of unconnected words that are alternately poetic, funny, confusing and profound, and sometimes all four --a little-known medical condition called 'aphasia' -- resulting in a rich new language which, indeed, can communicate, but only if one listens in a manner equally new.
At the same time that it considers the varied ways through which we communicate with one another, NIGHT SKY movingly dramatizes the resilience of the human spirit in crisis, as a woman, her family, her career and life's work are put to a powerful test.


eTuesday - Fri 8pm
Saturday 3pm & 8pm
Sunday 3pm

May 20 - June 20, 2009
At Baruch College Performing Arts Center
All preview tickets Regular tickets
May 20 - May 30, Only $45! $45 & $65
Same day Rush $25 Same day Rush $25


For information about Night Sky or about tickets,
please contact us at:
646-290-7897
Or
Info@nightskytheplay.com

For more information about aphasia and
the National Aphasia Association,
please visit www.aphasia.org


NightSkyThePlay.com Designed & Maintained by Ronn(i.e.) designs

Baker, Stanek, Milligan Will Explore Night Sky, a Play About Aphasia, Off-Broadway

By Kenneth Jones
20 Apr 2009

Jordan Baker, of Off-Broadway's Three Tall Women, will play an astronomer who loses the ability to speak in Susan Yankowitz's Night Sky, to play Off-Broadway starting May 22.

Opening is June 2 in the Rose Nagelberg Theatre at the Baruch Performing Arts Center, 55 Lexington Ave., in Manhattan.

Daniella Topol (Palace of the End in NYC) directs the production, presented Off-Broadway by Stan Raiff/Power Productions (Irena's Vow) in association with the National Aphasia Association.

Baker returns to the New York stage after a 15-year absence. She was last seen there in the 1993 original cast of Edward Albee's Three Tall Women opposite Marian Seldes and Myra Carter.

According to production notes, "Night Sky explores what the noted author and physicist Steven Hawking has called the two remaining mysteries — the brain and the cosmos — as the play looks at what happens to a bright, articulate astronomer, her family and her career when she is struck by a car and loses her ability to speak conventionally, a condition known as 'aphasia.' As she is left to expresses herself in an alternately funny, poetic, confusing and profound hodge-podge of words, astronomer Anna, her daughter, fiancé and colleagues face uncommon challenges of the mind and spirit as they discover new ways to communicate, and what it really means to listen."

Also featured in the cast of Night Sky are Jim Stanek, Tuck Milligan, Lauren Ashley Carter, Dan Domingues and Darlesia Cearcy.

The play is "inspired by and dedicated to the memory of the late, revered actor, director, playwright and founder of the Open Theatre, Joseph Chaikin, himself affected with aphasia following a stroke in 1984," according to the producers. "Having recovered sufficiently to continue writing, directing and performing until his death in 2003, Mr. Chaikin commissioned Ms. Yankowitz to write a play that dealt with aphasia."

Since leaving New York, Baker has appeared on several television series including as a regular on "The New Adventures of the Old Christine" opposite Julia Louis-Dreyfus, along with roles on "Brothers and Sisters," "Medium," "Cold Case," "Without a Trace," "The O.C.," "Buffy the Vampire Slayer," "Passions," "Gilmore Girls" and "Still Standing."

Yankowitz is a playwright, novelist, lyricist and librettist. Her plays include Phaedra in Delirium (Classic Stage Company/The Women's Project), winner of the QRL poetic play competition; Terminal and 1969 Terminal 1996 (collaborations with Joseph Chaikin's Open Theatre); Slain in Spirit, a gospel-and-blues opera with music by Taj Mahal; Cheri, an opera/music theatre work with Michael Dellaira (finalist for the 2006 Richard Rogers Award and a featured opera at the 2006 Opera America New Works Sampler, to be produced at Long Leaf Opera in 2012); and bookwriter/lyricist of True Romances, a musical fantasia with Elmer Bernstein.

Night Sky will run Tuesdays through Fridays at 8 PM; Saturdays at 3 PM and 8 PM, and Sundays at 3 PM (with an added performance on June 1 at 8 PM and no performance on June 3).

All tickets during previews are $45, and will range $25-$65 after opening. There will be a limited number of $25 Student Rush tickets available for each performance. Tickets go on sale May 1. For reservations, call (212) 352-3101 or visit www.NightSkyThePlay.com.

*

The month of June is National Aphasia Awareness Month. It is estimated that over one million Americans have aphasia — the sudden inability to communicate, speak, read, write or understand language. Noted figures who have experienced "aphasia" include cinematographer Sven Nykvist, poet Ralph Waldo Emerson, composer Maurice Ravel, ABC-TV reporter Bob Woodruff and Sen. Tim Johnson of South Dakota.



2nd Story Theatre tackles domestic abuse with offbeat Fuddy Meers

01:00 AM EDT on Thursday, May 8, 2008

By Channing Gray

Journal Arts Writer

Paula Faber digs deep during rehearsal for the comedy Fuddy Meers, which opens May 9 at Warren’s 2nd Story Theatre.

>

The Providence Journal / Ruben W. Perez

Paula Faber might as well be speaking a foreign language. In 2nd Story Theatre’s soon-to-open production of Fuddy Meers, Pulitzer Prize winner David Lindsay-Abaire’s offbeat take on domestic abuse, Faber plays a stroke victim suffering from aphasia, a condition that has left her speech garbled.

Her words come out twisted and broken. In a typical moment, Faber’s Gertie says, “Dusha riddle dimsum da my hempoo.”

Faber’s fellow cast members know what that means, because a translation has been provided at the back of the script for the actors. What Gertie was trying to say was, “Just a little something that might help you.”

But the audience won’t have the benefit of a translation. So it’s up to Faber to get the meaning of her distorted phrases across through things like inflection, intonation and the occasional discreet gesture, like pointing to a door. Trying to act out situations like a game of charades would be far too heavy handed.

“It’s been a huge challenge,” said Faber, who met with a speech pathologist and a couple of psychiatrists to prepare for the role.

The first challenge for Faber was just memorizing Gertie’s scrambled utterances. That took extra hours, as she said the lines over and over to her dogs. But just learning the phonetic sound of the words has not been enough, Faber has found. She has had to learn to show the frustration and anger someone like Gertie must feel.

“I spent a lot of time learning my lines as they are written out,” said Faber, who has been acting with 2nd Story since the theater opened in Warren in 2001, “and that has almost been a problem. Now it’s a matter of not making them so accurate and precise. I have to make them sound more realistic.

“Now the challenge is to make it more difficult, so these words are not just flowing out. For Gertie, everything is a struggle.”

That process was addressed last week in rehearsal, as Gertie called the police and tried to alert them that an escaped convict was holed up in her house.

“Isis Geht Maso,” she whispers into the phone, as she tries to say, “This is Gertie Mason.” “Fee cape” (“Philip escaped”). “Eesh ina hiss” (“He’s in the house”).

But her delivery was too straightforward, too much like someone rattling off phrases in another language. Director Ed Shea wanted her to convey more of the struggle and frustration she must feel, as she tried to communicate with people who can’t understand her. He wanted her to chew on the words more, to make the whole process seem more arduous.

Faber said that by the end of rehearsal she was ready to throw the phone down on the floor.

“I can feel my center being given over to that struggle,” said Shea.

“You get right in there with her, and your stomach tightens, your breath quickens and you work with her.”

The trick with portraying Gertie is that she can’t appear “ditzy,” said Shea. This is a woman with her mental faculties intact, but whose speech has been affected.

“She’s not unaware at all,” said Shea. “Halfway through the play, she says I wish I could have said some things when I could, which is a very sweet moment.”

Fuddy Meers (it means “funny mirrors,” as in the body-distorting kind found in funhouses) is Lindsay-Abaire’s first play, written while a protégé of Christopher Durang at Juilliard. His assignment was to bring in 10 pages a week, so he wrote the play like a serialized Dickens novel, leaving cliff-hangers along the way.

It debuted in 1999 at the Manhattan Theatre Club to sold-out audiences and mostly positive critical responses. And it helped establish the playwright as someone with a keen eye for people with extreme afflictions who have had their lives upended.

In Kimberly Akimbo, a teenager suffering from premature aging looks like a 70-year-old woman. Her dad is an alcoholic who works in a gas station, her mother is a pregnant hypochondriac with a foul mouth. In the play, an elderly actress engages in a budding romance with a 16-year-old boy.

Lindsay-Abaire won the Pulitzer last year for Rabbit Hole, which is about a couple grieving the death of their four-year-old son, who was struck by a car.

While it may seem odd, maybe even a little cruel to write a comedy about someone suffering from the effects of a stroke, Lindsay-Abaire sort of specializes in plays in which we find ourselves embarrassed to laugh at the misfortunes of others, but can’t quite help ourselves.

“You’ll laugh your head off,” said Shea, “and then say, ‘I really shouldn’t be laughing at this.’ ”

Gertie is not the only person in this wacky comedy suffering from a medical condition, either. There is Gertie’s daughter Claire, who has a rare form of amnesia. Each morning she wakes as a blank slate, and has to read a book her husband has prepared outlining the high points of her life.

Before long, Claire is kidnapped by a half-blind, half-deaf limping man with a pronounced lisp, who has just escaped from prison and tells Claire that her husband is trying to kill her. He takes her to Gertie’s house along with fellow prisoner Millet, a weirdo with a puppet.

Claire’s husband, Richard, and her drug-addict son, Kenny, eventually show up, along with Heidi, a prison cook who is masquerading as a cop. What follows are moments of mayhem and a raft of revelations.

The play is something of a mystery. It’s only in dribs and drabs that we learn what has happened to these battered and impaired characters. There is a point at which Gertie explains all the sordid details of their lives to Claire, but her speech is so muddled that Claire, who understands most of what her mother says, can’t make it out — nor can the audience. And that’s because at that point in the play, we’re not supposed to know all that’s going on, said Shea. We have to wait to learn Claire’s secret.

Nevertheless, Shea feels the audience will understand most of what Gertie says.

“Very slowly, your ear becomes attuned to that language,” he said, “and you start to understand it. By the end of the play you start to get it.”

Fuddy Meers opens in previews tomorrow and runs through June 8 at 2nd Story Theatre, 28 Market St., Warren. Tickets are $10 for previews (May 9-10), and $25 for all other performances. Call (401) 247-4200.

MORE REVIEWS of what’s playing at area stages: Projo.com/theater

Review: 'Fuddy Meers" at 2nd Story Theater

sunday, May 18, 2008; Posted: 6:51 PM - by Randy Rice

Related Links 2nd Story Theatre

There is a lot to like about this production of Fuddy Meers, directed by 2nd Story’s Artistic Director Ed Shea.

There is David Lindsay-Abaire’s outrageous story, with as many twists and turns as there are lines to speak. I am tempted to say that it has everything but the kitchen sink…but…it has a kitchen sink. With a running time of an hour and fifteen minutes, the playwright tempers the over-the-top storytelling with brevity. It is a combination that seems rare. It works very well here.

Claire (Barbara McElroy) is a psychogenic amnesiac. Each evening as she goes to sleep her mind becomes a blank slate. Claire is married to Richard (Wayne Kneeland), a micromanaging martyr who revels in the co-dependent relationship. She has a teenage son named Kenny (Christopher O'Brien); complete with angst.

On this morning, like every other morning for the past two years, Claire is gently awakened by her husband, who patiently helps her sift through her confusion. That is where the similarities to ordinary days (if there are ordinary days) end. A Limping Man (F. William Oakes), wearing a mask, enters her bedroom and tells her that he is her brother and that she is in grave danger. He convinces her to leave with him and he spirits her away to her mother Gertie’s (Paula Faber) house.

The Limping Man has a dim-witted sidekick, Millet (Jonathon Jacobs) who constantly argues with his sock-puppet dog. As they arrive at her mother Gertie’s home, Claire is welcomed with open arms. Claire is naturally surprised to learn that her mother recently suffered a stroke, which has left her with terrible aphasia.

There is a cop (Amy Thompson) chase involving Claire’s husband and son, as they go looking for her. There are mistaken identities and mayhem. It is all completely improbable and beyond absurd but very entertaining.

Paula Faber turns in a tremendous and notable performance as Gertie. Faber grasps and conveys Gertie’s indomitable spirit and her not-so-quiet dignity. It is the finest performance I have seen Faber give.

Actually, there are strong performances from the entire cast. Director Ed Shea has successfully kept the performers on the same level. No performance is broader or more absurd than the other. You might say that each character is equally absurd and each performance entertaining.

Fuddy Meers runs through June 8th at 2nd Story Theatre in Warren, RI .

Tickets are $25.00 each and can be purchased at the 2nd Story Theatre Box Office at 28 Market St., Warren, RI or by calling 401-247-4200.

For more information visit www.2ndStoryTheatre.com.

Photo: Gertie (Paula Faber, left) teaches the puppet a lesson as Millet (Jonathan Jacobs, right) breaks down.

Photo Credit: 2ndStoryTheatre/Richard W. Dionne, Jr.

The Musical Mystery

Music is so ubiquitous and ancient in the human species—so integral to our nature—that we must be born to respond to it: there must be a music instinct. Just as we naturally take to language, as a matter of our innate endowment, so must music have a specific genetic basis, and be part of the very structure of the human brain.

An unmusical alien would be highly perplexed by our love of music—and other terrestrial species are left cold by what so transports us. Music is absolutely normal for members of our species, but utterly quirky.[1] Moreover, it is known that music activates almost all the human brain: the sensory centers, the prefrontal cortex that underlies rational functions, the emotional areas (cerebellum, amygdala, and nucleus accumbens), the hippocampus for memory, and the motor cortex for movement. When you listen to a piece of music your brain is abuzz with intense neural activity.

Losing, Finding Language: Audience will be inside injured woman's head as she struggles

Emily Stilson once walked on airplane wings - while the airplane was flying. But long after the barnstorming days of her youth, she suffered a stroke. Now, she grapples with what has happened to her.

Wings, Wake Forest University Theatre’s season-opener, is an exploration of Stilson’s journey - from inside her own thinking and her attempts to understand.

Arthur Kopit, a three-time Tony Award nominee, has described his play as “an adventure, a quest, a mystery.”

Cindy Gendrich, an associate professor of theater at WFU and the play’s director, said, “It’s not a tragedy.” She likes Kopit’s own definition - an adventure.

doonesbury