THE CUTTING BALL THEATER NEWSLETTER
October 26, 2005 Volume 2, Issue 3
Contents:
1. Risk Is This… Successful third festival continues this weekend!
2. Upcoming: Ghost Sonata by August Strindberg: an interview with translator Paul Walsh
3. Cutting Ball Recommends
4. Donate to The Cutting Ball
Risk is This…
The third Risk is This… The Cutting Ball’s new experimental plays festival kicked off on Oct. 14 with Janet Allard’s fantastical and hilarious The Girl Triptych. Robert Alexander’s Alien Motel 29 brought an exciting new, local voice to the Cutting Ball stage last weekend.
Please join us this weekend for our final production!
the evolutionist’s club by Kevin Oakes
In a remote field house on the edge of a wilderness, a research scientist lives with his emotionally fragile wife. Into their tainted Eden a mysterious stranger appears. But is he there to help or hurt? So begins a battle as they seek to control not only each other but reality itself.
8pm Friday and Saturday, Oct. 28 and 29
Please visit www.cuttingball.com/tickets.php for reservations and information.
The tickets are free with a suggested donation.
Tuesday, November 8 @ 7pm
The Hidden Classics Reading Series is a chance for The Cutting Ball to share lesser-known classics with the Bay Area community. After each reading, there is an opportunity to discuss the plays and consider how a future production might impact its audience.
The Ghost Sonata by August Strindberg
In the night, a building has collapsed. A young man has been working all night long pulling survivors from the wreckage and tending to their wounds. As he drinks from the water fountain, he meets an old gentleman who has read about the young rescuer in the paper. It seems that the old gentleman knows everything about the younger man and even has the young man's future all planned out for him. As the young man steps into the web of fate, he goes on a mysterious journey that takes him to the opera, a ghost supper, and finally to an encounter with the girl of his dreams in "the hyacinth room." This is Stringberg's masterpiece on the forces of the past. In Sweden, it is performed all of the time (Ingmar Bergman directed it three times) but it is rarely seen in the U.S.Modern Times Bookstore
888 Valencia Street, San Francisco
No Reservations Needed, Free
An Interview with Paul Walsh, translator of The Ghost Sonata
Rob: Paul, you have a long and rich relationship with Strindberg's works. Your dissertation was on Strindberg's early plays, you translated Creditors for productions Carey Perloff directed at ACT and the Classic Stage Company, you wrote about your translation and production of The Pelican in the book “Strindberg's Dramaturgy”, and you have translated The Ghost Sonata. What initially drew you to Strindberg and what do you still find interesting about him today?
Paul: Rob, I think I should hire you as my press agent. No kidding, you know more about me than my family does. But Strindberg. Yes, the mad and sad Swede has been an important part of my life for years. I was introduced to his plays and his foibles and his mad vision of life when I was a graduate student at the University of Minnesota and took classes with the great Strindberg scholar Göran Stockenström. It was he who suggested that I apply for a Swedish Institute guest fellowship, which allowed me to study in Sweden for a year. (I stayed three years.) Living in Sweden taught me how sane Strindberg really was. It's the world that's crazy. Strindberg understood the pain of daily life better than most, and the exuberance. He was obsessed with life, terrified of it, tormented by it, and always desperately in love with it. And he wrote plays that went right to heart of the modern experience. Disregarding the rules of good craftsmanship and good sense, he discovered a new vocabulary for the modern theater. What's not to like about someone who is willing to take that kind of risk?
Rob: The Ghost Sonata occupies a special place in Strindberg's canon. In Sweden, it has a rich production history (including three productions by Ingmar Bergman). What is it about this intimate dream-play that has drawn so many interesting Swedish and European artists to it, and why do you think it is not done more often in the United States?
Paul: The Ghost Sonata is a baffling play. A ghost play, or a ghost of a play that turns expectations over and examines their moldy, bug-infested undersides. It is a play that violates all the rules of consistency and logic to present a vision of a world haunted by metaphors of ghosts and vampires and a deliciously grotesque mummy. And it has a deep and abiding spirituality that is not familiar from any conventional western religion, including the religion of science. Strindberg was not interested in adhering to the convention of scientific realism nor in reiterating the world around him in all its boring little realistic detail. He believed there was a deeper, more terrifying, and more powerful truth beneath this facade of reality. It is this that he strove to put on stage. For many people Strindberg's mad world is too fragmented, too hallucinatory, too crazy to be considered. Here in America, our theater has been dominated by a demand for good order and good sense. It has been ruled by realism and the limitations of realism: consistency, causality, coherence. Sometimes I am amazed by people who want their theater to be as boring as their lives. Such people can't make heads or tails of the visionary plays of Strindberg. But the head is there, and so is the tail. That's why Strindberg's day is yet to come.
Rob: In addition to Strindberg's works, you have translated plays by Ibsen and collaborated on translations of plays by Brecht and Marivaux. Translators have argued for centuries about whether their role is to be faithful to the letter in order to give audiences a clear idea of the original or to be faithful in spirit in order to create a play that works and flows in the target language. As you translate, how do you negotiate between the two perspectives?
Paul: All translation is a negotiation and to some extent a betrayal. Every translator is both collaborator and traitor. The original text and its original impulses and cadences are in danger of being lost to audiences even as they text is made available to them. This unavoidable fact can also be the source of great pleasure. It is what fascinates me about the art and the act of translation. Translation is always a conversation between the text and the translator's experience of the text. Of course the goal is to be fair to the text, to treat it with respect. But at the same time, the translator is anxious to force the text to speak another language and behave in ways foreign to it. To do this the translator tries to coax the spirit, the heart, the passions and the hidden desires of the text to reveal themselves, and then to expose these in other words. Sometimes an accurate translation is not a literal translation, but always an accurate translation is a living one.
Voices Underwater by Abi Basch
Join The Playwrights Foundation and Traveling Jewish Theatre in the development of a profound (if not prophetic), emotionally charged new play, Voices Underwater by Abi Basch (two-time winner of a Jerome Fellowship at The Playwrights Center in Minneapolis and Fulbright Scholar).
Traveling Jewish Theatre, 470 Florida St. San Francisco, Oct. 27-29 at 8pm; Oct. 30 at 2 pm / Ashby Stage, 1901 Ashby Ave. Berkeley: Halloween Night, Oct 31, 8 pm
Tickets: $12 - $15 sliding scale www.atjt.com; or call 415.255.0786.
Voices Underwater, first discovered during the 2004 Bay Area Playwrights Festival, is an experimental theatre piece by an award-winning emerging playwright, Abi Basch and directed by PF Artistic Director, Amy Mueller.
Emma and Franklin have inherited a deserted house in Alabama, but don’t know why. Heading South to explore its origins, the couple’s quick, romantic weekend is shattered by a violent storm. As floodwaters rise, and the house’s past inhabitants swell from its walls, each must face a long buried history. Using heightened poetic language and rigorous physicality, the play uncovers a family mystery which unleashes events of an unspoken legacy shared by both Black and Jewish Americans in the post Civil-War South.
The Cutting Ball Theater relies on donations from individuals to continue producing the high-quality, energetic work on which we pride ourselves. Like most performing arts organizations, the majority of donated funds come from individual theater-lovers, not government agencies or corporate foundations. Please consider making a tax-deductible donation, please visit: http://cuttingball.com/donate.php
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