Composing sounds that were as human as the actors on the stage…

When I was first asked to design John Gabriel Borkman, I started with my usual process: give the script a read-through and sketch ideas as I go. What I found in the text was as close to a perfectly described soundscape as any playwright could provide. Ibsen’s prose is, in itself, musical and flows with passion and depth parallel to his compositional contemporaries. Beyond that, he alludes to very specific aural imagery: the sound of iron ore desiring to be set free from the earth, a haunting danse macabre, a wolf padding in its cage. In that respect, the show seemed to almost design itself, but the challenge we faced in creating a soundscape was how to capture those beautifully turned phrases in actual sound. More so than any show I’ve done prior, I spent countless hours collecting samples of metal/wind/fire/rocks/bells to have an immensely large pallet from which to draw in order to compose sounds that were as human as the actors on the stage. As a true lover of music, director Marty Giles was a great collaborator in the design process, able to offer just enough of a suggestion to spark the perfect cue or the perfect suggestion for the danse macabre.

While Ibsen mentions the piano as Frida’s instrument, we soon came to love the violin for her and found it ideally suited for this production. The cadenza, initially (per Ibsen’s text) used as a dramatic element in the end of Act I, took on its own character in both my design and the structure of the play itself. As a transition between Acts I and II, we were able to really explore the macabre nature of the play outside the text with Frida’s solo struggle against the instrument to which she’s been attached. As we lived with the design for a while, it became clear that the cadenza was beginning to function as a Wagner-influenced leitmotif for Borkman, underscoring his tumultuous escape out into the storm and inevitably serving as his epitaph.

As with every Quantum show, the space provides so much inspiration in addition to its own set of challenges. When we first toured the room, it was nothing but a glass-and-brick echo chamber, but thanks to Tony Ferrieri’s beautiful set and the structure provided by RJ Romeo and his crew, it became a wonderfully treated and acoustically superb environment, full of nuances that can only result from the collaborative takeover of such a room (sit up high and listen for the perfect natural reverb of the space any time Borkman or Ella shouts: a first-rate ‘Quantum Moment’).

From the integration of the violin cadenza, to the use of anvils, electricity, and wind, the sound design for John Gabriel Borkman became a pseudo-Wagnerian gesamtkunstwerk and an experience I will certainly treasure for the rest of my career. Many thanks to the talented Kathleen Andrews for recording the danse macabre and for the cast, crew, design team, and Marty for making this such a memorable production.

-Ryan McMasters, Sound Designer: John Gabriel Borkman

Director’s Notes

Well…so…we’re opening, and we’ve come a long way. The thing about Ibsen is, you work and work, like making your careful, arduous way along a strange and dangerously cluttered corridor looking for a door, you find the door, and burst into a room–Discovery! Insight! Arrival!–, and then you discover the room you’ve burst into at last leads to another room, in fact, to a number of other rooms, and you immediately know you have to search those rooms, and you have to decide in which room to begin to search…you get the idea. I won’t even get into going back out into the difficult corridor after you’ve searched the numerous rooms and looking for another door. You get the idea.

We’ve worked and searched for weeks, and we’ve discovered a lot, seen many things, arrived at much. The thing about Ibsen (to my mind, more than any other playwright) is that the working and searching are bound to continue, in pain and joy, nausea and pleasure, grating nerves and momentary bliss, as long as the play is performed, as long as it lives in our memories. Because Ibsen is writing, with unparalleled skill and power, about the depths and complexities of human nature, we will never get to the bottom of this play. Just as we none of us likely will, in our single lifetimes, ever get to the bottoms of ourselves. Ibsen’s program as a playwright is to, with little mercy, demonstrate the aforementioned work and search, and that they are inevitable, that they are essential, that denial of them has its consequences in the morbid, paralytic and destructive.

So…what does an audience member thus get out of all of this? Why, something fresh, immediate and boiling-over every night–funny, terrifying, maddening and beautifully sad. Discovery! Insight! Arrival! Not to mention, probably, at some points, Loss, Blindness, Departure, as well… I confess I’ve felt consistently anxious during the rehearsal process, and not just anxious about how the thing was going…just anxious. Say the anxiety was a desert, then there were days, or hours, when I came upon lush and expansive oases which were a feeling that I was a worthwhile and productive human being, surrounded and abetted by similar such beings, and that our lives had a great deal of meaning. Then, of course, back to the desert, but such are the nature and produce of a quest (the work and search), which I suppose life is whether we like it or know it or not, which I’m certain is the experience of this masterwork of Ibsen.

So…at this point we ask others–You!–to join us. You get to take away, from an evening in the theater, necessary provisions (some of them hard to chew and even harder to swallow, true) and excellent good company (cranky sometimes, but reliable, strong-backed, often humorous) for your quest.

My personal thanks to Karla Boos for the gift of this great work. To the intrepid actors: Bridget Connors, Malcolm Tulip, Robin Walsh, Ken Bolden, Luka Glinsky, Daina Michelle Griffith, Carly Otte. To the amazing designers: C. Todd Brown, Christine Casaus, Tony Ferrieri, Ryan McMasters. And to those stalwarts of getting stuff done: Scott D. Nelson and R.J. Romeo.

—-Martin Giles

A hint of how we go about making a dream…

Well, as you no doubt know, Dear Blog Reader, a great deal of time is spent preparing a production even before any actor puts a first foot forward in rehearsal.  I’ve known I’d be directing JOHN GABRIEL BORKMAN for nearly a year.  Early on, I was, for the most part, dreaming about the play, letting it sink down and in, to take up a place of firm occupation in my psyche.  This is a particularly effective process with Ibsen, as he is one of those rare stage-poets (with, to me, Shakespeare and Beckett) who you feel, when working with him, is somehow altering your brain-chemistry, but from the inside out.  As though his words, images, etc. have sunk below the level of the bio-chemical and, when called, come sizzling back up  through to fill you with vivid ideas, sharp realizations and powerful emotions.

 

Anyway, these pseudo-poetic musings aside, the time comes when you begin THINKING about the fast-approaching production of the play intensively and specifically.  You share ideas and impulses with the designers.  And–the special challenge and excitement of the Quantum experience–you encounter the raw space, a space that, in all likelihood, no one ever before thought of as a theater.  You cast your thoughts and dreams about the play into it, and it, implacable, irresistible, begins to work upon them.

 

For example, one day last week I met Christine Casaus, our Costume Designer, at the Broad Street space.  This was Christine’s first visit to the space.  She and I had had a couple of fairly long and detailed live discussions and exchanged a flurry of e-mails about the play and her designs, but she had reached a place in her process where she wanted to see the space in its raw state, so it might perhaps give her a push.

 

The space is basically a big, deep storefront.  The sidewalls and a pillar in the area we’ve decided to play in are battered red brick.  The floors are either bare concrete or covered in greys-spackled retail tile and the relatively low ceiling is uneven white plaster on heavy steel beams.  So there’s a contrast of the warmth and fine detail of the brick walls and the massive and expansive cold of the floors and ceiling, about which I had mixed feelings, as

BORKMAN is such a wintry play.

 

Christine and I had been talking about the costumes–and I am thinking about the production at large–in (and I use the word a bit loosely) “expressionistic” terms.  For the costumes, that means incorporating elements to reveal character in a bold way, character in this particularly vibrant time and place–a single very active winter evening.  (I steered Christine to Ingmar Bergman’s great film CRIES AND WHISPERS to observe his use of color in this regard.)  BORKMAN  contains a pair of strong parallel elements that lead me to the “expressionist:”  one being a mythic or archetypal underlay that anticipates, it seems to me, the works of writers like James Joyce and Thomas Mann (Joyce, in fact, was a great admirer of Ibsen); and the other, therefore, being a long reach into the very modern, that is manifest in a deep dark comedy that reaches almost to Beckett.

 

With our discussions in mind, and experiencing the space, Christine immediately began to see ways to use the problematic (to my nervous mind) warmth of the brick in subtle, significant ways in the costumes.  She also more graphically realized that the human figures must be truly vivid against the drab cold weight of the floors and ceiling.  She saw how there could be both significant contrasts and connections between the lives and images of the characters and the elemental space.  I showed her where there would be a tall mirror in Borkman’s lonely refuge, a touch of greenery in Mrs. Borkman’s over-heated sitting room, which would in the next few days clarify some things for her and spur her to fresh ideas.

 

So…there, Reader, you have a moment or two in the process–which takes place with the designers of the set, lights, music and sound, as well, separately, in various combinations, and all of us together–, a hint of how we go about making a dream into the concrete and specific into a dream for you to have.

 

-Martin Giles
Director of JOHN GABRIEL BORKMAN

“the collective creative energy of everyone became focused like an acetylene torch…” Talking with Video Designer, Joe Seamans.

Joe Seamans, Video Designer

Art is a form of expression. Every day we strive to find ways to express ourselves and yearn for others to feel the same passion about what we do and what we believe. After interviewing Joseph Seamans, the video designer for Ainadamar, it’s clear that this is a man who has passion for art and for what he does. Here’s an insight into the world Joe creates for us within Ainadamar.

Why did you choose this career path?

When I saw my first photo image emerge on the paper under the safelight in the darkroom, I was seriously amazed. It happens to a lot of people, Or it used to anyway. I studied photography through college, but I wanted work in a more collaborative way… hence filmmaking.

How long have you worked in theatre/film?

I made my first film in senior year at high school. That was in 1966. I got my first film job from Fred Rogers making a ‘funny fast film’ of Mr. McFeeley mowing the lawn.To that one right I had to reshoot about 5 times.  Then I got a job as a news cameraman at WQED. Learned just about everything about filmmaking doing that job. I worked at WQED for 25 years making documentaries: National Geographic Specials, and lots of science docs.   In the late 90′s I began to work independently, making shows for NOVA and doing independent projects. My first theater experience was with Quantum two years ago. This is my second.

What’s the main difference you’ve noticed with film making and live theatre?

One thing is that in filmmaking the image is everything. In live theatre the image is part of the bigger theatrical image. To goal is to make it one experience for the audience and not just a movie that happens to be running on the screen while the actors are running around doing their thing in front of it. Another big difference is timing, especially with live music.  In filmmaking I can be accurate with film and sound within 1/30th of a second.  Not so with a live orchestra which means I have to think about timing in a totally different way.

Why Quantum? How did you start working for this theatre company?

I was interested in trying to make video in a new environment and Karla was very open to it.  It’s been a great manifestation of my desire to work collaboratively which I felt decades ago.

Tell us about working on Ainadamar. Since this show is so different and innovative, give us some insight on the production and what it’s like to work on it with Karla and the rest of the cast and crew.

When I first learned about it it sounded very exciting, but it wasn’t clear to me what it was all about particularly visually. At some point it caught fire for me, and the collective creative energy of everyone became focused like an acetylene torch and what I needed to do became clear.

Preparing the screens on the set of Ainadamar

What makes Quantum different than others?

As a theatre goer, the theatrical experience often kills the real experience the production is trying to convey.  The emotional power becomes ‘theatricalized’.  I don’t have this experience with Quantum.

Besides Ainadamar, what’s been your favorite project you’ve been a part of?

That would be my only other theatrical project: Maria de Buenos Aires.

Give us one random fact about you that most people wouldn’t know.

I’m a Pisces but I can never catch a fish, in fact, I hate fishing.

Is there anything else we should know about you or Ainadamar?

Ainadamar is about real people. Lorca and Xirgu.   The opera is fantastical and depicts the interior imaginings of a woman who suffers greatly, but it’s based on a true story.

–Interview conducted by Chelsea Gallo, Social Media Intern at Quantum Theatre.

I’m dreaming the score of Ainadamar…

… asked the singers if that happens to them, does the score play in their heads every hour that they sleep?  They said, ‘yeah.’  So I’m not alone.  Actually all plays go on in my sleeping head while I’m rehearsing, and I’d better not complain because a lot of good work gets done that way.  And then it abruptly stops, the minute we open.

Ainadamar is special.  It’s exquisite, musically and dramatically, it’s bold, it speaks in unexpected ways.  So says me, the one obsessed enough to have it playing in my head at all hours, but an awful lot of the world worships at the feet of this living composer Osvaldo Golijov, and this work in particular brought him legions of fans.  So we hope that Pittsburgh will care that we took it on, and we hope that we’re doing justice to it.

I think it’s special for me because it speaks to theatre people, particularly, because it’s about one of the 20^th century’s greatest theatre artists, Federico Garcia Lorca, and is about his relationship with an actress; about their deepest desire to make meaningful theatre together and how that intersects with life’s events… very dramatic, sad, and true events.  The word means ‘fountain of tears’ in Arabic, and that’s what I often am as I work on it, though the piece is not all sad or ultimately sad, it’s cathartic, transcendent.

It’s also a special project because I’m in artistic love with Andres Cladera (declaring myself here in this blog, though maybe he knows) and for a brief time my love is requited as I get to work with him (he moved to Denver, the shit.)  To watch him hold all the lines of the music in his head and his hands – this music that entwines melody and harmony and dissonance and constantly changes time, key, pulls motifs from the depths of ancient forms like flamenco and yet is all its own – to watch him in control of all that is quite a fantastic and pretty much sexual experience for me!  Ha.

We’re all shooting on all guns, and what a group it is, many of us friends who cherished the experience of making Maria de Buenos Aires together: Carolina Loyola-Garcia, Raquel Winnica Young, Joe Seamans, Tony Ferrieri, Richard Parsakian.  In this, Carolina, as multidimensional as an artist can get, dances her beloved flamenco for us, and does so much more.  Raquel, native of Argentina, plays the role of a lifetime in Lorca (after the role of a lifetime in Maria) and well-deserved that she does, she’s a beautiful actress as well as singer.  Ainadamar calls for images of an even grander, more all-encompassing scale, and video artist Joe is like a mad scientist, churning out magic from some bank of fifty computers, as I imagine it.  There are wonderful people new to me in the mix, Katy Williams, playing the actress Margarita Xirgu, with the voice of an angel, Leah Dyer as her student Nuria, and many, many more.

I’m very content.  Terrified, but content in my terror – I get to listen to the opera all day every day.

Maybe I can say more interesting things about its challenges; its very wonderful location, etc. down the road… seems appropriate to share the feelings at this point.
–Karla Boos

REVIEW: The Golden Dragon by Kenneth Hendrata

The Golden Dragon is a play that weaves several initially disparate story lines into an amalgamation of metaphors by the end of the play. The main setting is a small and perhaps dinky Chinese Thai Vietnamese restaurant where the workers labor just to get by in this world. While the others are busy preparing dishes, one cook is crying because of a grinding toothache while he continues to cook. The other cooks call him the “kid” a 30 year old Chinese male…. Meanwhile, in the same building, above the kitchen, an uncomfortable conversation between a grandfather and his granddaughter starts. In another room, a separate conflict between a working man and a cheating wife begins. Before these go anywhere, the play turns outside the kitchen, where two stewardesses recount their day’s experiences. Another story line develops where a grasshopper grows hungry as winter comes and begs the ants for food.

Let me offer a view of this play as an Asian American who was born in India, grew up in the Middle East and Indonesia, and spend his last 17 years in the USA.

First off, I can tell that this play was not written by an Asian because the main story line (kid cook with toothache) makes a big deal out of the tribulations of Asian workers who are scrapping a living in foreign soil, whereas an Asian writer would make that the background of the main focus. In the play, the other workers initially ignored the crying kid and later told him to deal with the problem. Finally, when they can’t stand it, they took out big red pliers to yank the tooth out of him. The tooth finally comes out and lands on a soup that’s just about to be delivered. The waiter delivers it anyway… to the two stewardesses who are waiting in the dining room.

Personally, I’ve worked in a Chinese kitchen along with illegal immigrants, and yes, there were a lot of incidents that happen in the kitchen, unbeknownst to the audience outside. And yes, the workers often did have “obligations” to fill such as sending money back to the home country. Yes, it is the Chinese (or Far Eastern) way to not draw attention to yourself – even if it means to suppress pain – and to work without complaints. It’s an accepted behavior that doesn’t become a focus in Asian mind, while an Asian writer would want to use these norms to depict the Asian way, in the background.

That rant aside, the play does evoke thoughts. The characters are played by the opposite – male characters are played by females and old characters by young ones and vice versa – giving a suggestion that people are not as they seem. There were other occasions where the characters wonder what it’d be like to be the opposite side (male or old). Other story lines depict primal behaviors.

To me, The Golden Dragon symbolizes China, which bears a nickname of the “Sleeping Dragon”. The story lines (bleeding cook, grandfather-granddaughter, working man-cheating wife, stewardesses, sex slave) symbolize the internal issues and struggles within that great nation. Meanwhile, outside, a growing country plays in a stage where the show “must go on” and it’s business as usual (as in the restaurant patrons in the play).

In the case of Quantum Theatre (Pittsburgh, PA), I enjoyed the use of stage to provide realism. The Golden Dragon, here, plays at the side of a road in a local park. It starts at twilight and the sound of people shouting and motorbikes zooming by provide a real ambience toward the hustle and bustle of a dinky street corner restaurant.

Overall, for an 80-minute play, The Golden Dragon is a deeply layered play that engages you throughout the duration. Go enjoy some Thai soup.

-Kenneth Hendrata, National Association of Asian American Professionals (NAAAP)

Quantum wants to hear from you!

Hello Quantum family.

The Golden Dragon is starting its final week of performances and it has been a truly wonderful experience to work on this beautiful piece of theatre. We have had some great responses from reviewers and bloggers around the city and we couldn’t be more pleased with them. Here’ are a few snippets:

“The Quantum team has risen to the challenge and staged this spectacle in a truly comprehensible and cohesive way that in the spirit of site-specific work uses more than words to communicate the underlying ideas of the play in a visually concentrated way.”

Constant Witness Blog

“Director Karla Boos has achieved the neat trick of making the production simultaneously sharp and lyrical, and her staging, which often suddenly shifts perspective and scale, mirrors in three dimensions the fracturing effect of Schimmelpfennig’s writing.”

Pittsburgh Tatler Blog

“…the unusual setting is fitting because of the breathtaking moments it makes possible, as ripples in the water take the stage light or when characters move away from us on a pier that extends across the lake toward a silent building front. Looming in the distance, gradually lit as the day darkens around us, it shines with enigma.”

Review from Pittsburgh Post Gazette

We’re so thankful for the amazing reviewers of this city looking at us so favorably. However, one thing we would love to know is “how does our audience feel?” We’ve had three great weeks of performances and plenty of you seen the show, and had some time to mull it over. We would love for you to comment below to tell us what you thought of the work.

We’re certainly not fishing for compliments here. The Golden Dragon is a dark and complex show, with a very unique style. Did the themes of the play move you? Do you have any comments about the style of show? Do you have any questions about elements of the show you want to know more about?

This new age of social media allows us to communicate easier than ever before. So let’s start a conversation. Quantum Theatre is listening, and we look forward to reading and responding to your comments below.