Other Desert Cities: "impeccably-cast production"

This week on drama on the waterfront, we meet the cast of Other Desert Cities.

“I so much enjoyed Baitz’s play … the twists and turns are carefully exploited as each character creates their own history with such insight. I’d like to tell you what unfolded because it was that exciting. Don’t miss this one… it’s gripping!” said reviewer Kate Spencer about Other Desert Cities.

“Astutely crafted to explode secrets”, said John Smythe of Theatreview about “this impeccably - cast Circa production directed by Ross Jolly.”

So, lets meet this “amazing cast”:

Catherine Downes - Polly Wyeth

“I play the matriarch, Polly, who feels to me like somewhat of a 'Mother Courage' type of person, hauling the wagon and protecting the baggage that is her family. And she does this with wit, panache and staunch - What a great trip! 'Desert Cities' is provocative, heart- rending, challenging - and fun!”

Catherine is one of NZ’s finest theatrical talents, working in theatre, film and television on both sides of the Tasman as an actress, director and playwright. Recent Wellington performances: Four Flat Whites In Italy, A Shortcut to Happiness, The Year of Magical Thinking and Talking of Katherine Mansfield.

Michelle Langstone - Brooke Wyeth

“I just love this play. I love the rhythm and dynamism of the relationships. There is so much history present in every word the characters say to one another. Other Desert Cities is funny and sad, and that's my favourite kind of play. I'm very happy to be making my Circa debut with this production.”

With a starry, award-winning CV from both sides of the Tasman, Michelle is best known for her roles in the TV programmes The Almighty Johnsons, (Love Goddess Michele), and Go Girls (Sarah Bennett). Her recent stage roles include The Lover, and Under Milk Wood (Silo). Other Desert Cities marks Michelle's professional theatrical debut in Wellington.

Jeffrey Thomas - Lyman Wyeth

“Rehearsing this play has proven to be exceptionally enjoyable. Other Desert Cities, like so many great American plays, tells a fascinating and intriguing story. My favourite kind of theatre.”

Jeffrey is well-loved by Circa audiences, having appeared in many plays including The Cherry Orchard, Uncle Vanya, August: Osage County, All My Sons and Tribes - to name but a few. And he's enjoyed every minute of it. He also recently featured in The Hobbit – playing the Dwarf king Thror.

Paul Waggott - Trip Wyeth

"It's been such a blast working on such a great script and with such great people. There's something special going on!"

Working regularly at both BATS and Circa theatres, Paul was winner of the Most Promising Male Newcomer at the Chapman Tripp Theatre Awards 2010. Paul‘s recent work includes Tribes, Red, Eight, West End Girls, Clybourne Park, A Play about Space, and most recently A Play about Fear.

Emma Kinane - Aunt Silda

“A great role, an awesome bunch of people, and working with an awesome script – what more can I say!”

Emma’s versatility means she can be found acting, singing, and writing for film, radio and stage. And she has won awards in all fields! Her recent performances include All My Sons, Tribes (nominated Best Supporting Actress Chapman Tripp awards), No Naughty Bits, Pasefika, and the cult musical, Dead Tragic, (Emma’s favourite singing role - channelling various pop stars), which has a return season later this year at Circa.

 Other Desert Cities is on in Circa One until 17 May. To book, call the Circa Box Office on 801-7992 or visit www.circa.co.nz.

 Other Desert Cities production photos by Stephen A'Court.

Other Desert Cities: A Family History Lush in Secrets

Jon Robin Baitz’s funny, fierce, and immensely entertaining Other Desert Cities was one of the hottest tickets in New York. Baitz, creator of hit TV series, Brothers & Sisters, took America by storm with his Broadway debut. Nominated for five Tony Awards, this award-winning play, which has just opened to rave reviews in London, now makes its New Zealand premiere at Circa, opening on Saturday 19^th April, with a stellar cast of CATHERINE DOWNES (The Year of Magical Thinking), MICHELLE LANGSTONE (The Almighty Johnsons), JEFFREY THOMAS (The Hobbit), EMMA KINANE (Tribes), and PAUL WAGGOTT (Red).

Baitz talks about himself and Other Desert Cities in this PBS Art Beat interview from last year:

http://www.pbs.org/newshour/art/other-desert-cities/

Some background on JON ROBIN BAITZ:

Jon Robin Baitz is a celebrated American playwright and is perhaps best known in this country for his internationally successful TV series, Brothers and Sisters, about a wealthy Californian family who grapple with love, loss and living in the modern age, which ran for five seasons.  Other TV work includes PBS’s version of Three Hotels, for which he won the Humanitas Award, and episodes of West Wing and Alias. He is also the author of two screenplays; the film script for The Substance of Fire(1996), and People I Know (2002).

Baitz’s  is a founding member of Naked Angels Theatre Company, and on the faculties of the Master of Fine Arts program at The New School for Drama, New York, where he is Artistic Director of the BFA division, and is also visiting professor at University of Southern California's Master of Professional Writing program. His version of the Australian TV mini-series, The Slap begins filming for NBC this Summer.

His plays include Other Desert Cities (Pulitzer Prize Finalist 2012, Tony Nominee, Drama League Award, Outer Critics Circle Award), The Film Society, The End Of The Day, Three Hotels, A Fair Country (Pulitzer Prize finalist 1996),  Mizlansky/Zilinsky, Ten Unknowns, and The Paris Letter, as well as a version of Hedda Gabler (Broadway, 2001). He is the recipient of a Rockefeller Foundation Award, a Drama Desk Award, is a Guggenheim Fellow, and a Pulitzer Prize finalist for both A Fair Country and Other Desert Cities. 

Other Desert Cities opens in Circa One on 19 April and runs until 17 May. There will be a $25 Preview on Friday, 18 April, and $25 Special on Sunday, 20 April. To book, visit www.circa.co.nz or call 801-7992.

Talking of Katherine Mansfield: 'I want to be all that I am capable of becoming.'

Catherine Downes shares her favourite Katherine Mansfield quotes, which collectively form the reason she created Talking of Katherine Mansfield.

'To acknowledge the presence of fear is to give birth to failure.'

'Here then, is a little summary of what I need. Power, wealth and freedom.'

'Katherine. How badly, how stupidly you manage your life!'

'When I look back over my life all my mistakes have been because I was afraid.'

'Love and Mushrooms. It takes a dreadful lot of toadstools to make you realise that life is not one long mushroom'

'Our own particular self...The moment of direct feeling when we are most ourselves and least personal'

'Risk! Risk anything! care no more for the opinions of others, for those voices. Do the hardest thing on earth for you. Act for yourself. Face the truth.'

'I want to be all that I am capable of becoming.'

'Let me take the case of Katherine Mansfield. She has led, ever since she can remember, a very typically false life. Yet, through it all, there have been moments, instants, gleams, when she has felt the possibility of something quite other.'

Talking of Katherine Mansfield is on in Circa Two until Saturday, 16 March. To book, call the Circa Box Office on 801-7992 or visit www.circa.co.nz.

Catherine and Katherine

Performer Catherine Downes tells drama on the waterfront about her interest in Katherine Mansfield and why she has devoted a second solo show to one of New Zealand's most prolific short story writers.

"The interest goes back to playing Katherine in Brian McNeil’s The Two Tigers; a play about the often tempestuous relationship between Katherine Mansfield and her publisher husband John Middleton Murry at Four Seasons Theatre in Whanganui when I was 26. While I was researching the role, I became interested in her journals and diaries; her intimate writing about her own feelings and where she wanted to go. They were very personal, candid, and private. She probably didn’t expect they would ever be published.

It was the quality and perception of this personal writing that inspired me to develop a solo show based on Mansfield’s journals called The Case of Katherine Mansfield. I think I’ve  performed that play more than 1000 times over 20 years in six countries - Australia, Holland, England, Scotland and America; and in New Zealand of course. I did a lot of school performances around the country. And actually it was in the schools that I realised how little I needed around me in the way of props to make it work.

I remember a particular performance at a boys’ school in South Auckland in a brightly lit gym - the audience were a big bunch of beefy footballer types. But while the play was on you could have heard a pin drop and afterwards the comments were so perceptive and intelligent.

There are so many layers beneath the surface in Mansfield’s work; like a spider’s web where everything is interconnected and every word counts. And on a deceptively small canvas she explored huge universal themes.

KM was a prolific journalist, she kept a journal from the age of 18 to her death at 34. All the material in both my KM plays is from journals and letters, interwoven with several of the short stories. With The Case of Katherine Mansfield I initially started off with about nine hours of material. But once I’d discarded the more public material and gossip I realised what I had left was a story about personal growth.

I guess that theme is the essential provocation for Talking of Katherine Mansfield.

Talking of Katherine Mansfield hangs on three themes: love, personal development and death, all in her own words. As Mansfield became more and more ill, she focused on what really mattered. Those themes are universal and her articulation of them is so acute and precise.

When I was in my 20s I related to and was inspired by Mansfield’s outrageous determination to carve her own path and ultimate fight to ‘be all I am capable of becoming’. Now in my 60s, these themes are no less compelling - perhaps as my mortality  becomes more of a reality I relate more keenly to Mansfield’s quest to achieve one’s potential."

Talking of Katherine Mansfield opens in Circa Two on 27 February and runs until 16 March. $25 ticket specials on Tuesday, 26 February and Thursday, 28 February. To book, call the Circa Box Office on 801-7992 or visit www.circa.co.nz.

The Year of Magical Thinking: “AN ELECTRIFYING PIECE OF THEATRE”

Stunning reviews of a stunning performance! Catherine Downes and The Year of Magical Thinking has received glowing appreciation from the critics …

Catherine Downes in The Year of Magical Thinking. Photo by  Stephen A'Court.

Didion’s “writing is heartfelt, it is also incredibly expressive and lyrical, a mark of the great writer that she is. However, as good as this is, it still needs to be brought to life on the stage and this where Susan Wilson’s production makes this into a superb piece of theatre.

The simple but effective set of Penny Angrick, Marcus McShane’s subtle but very evocative lighting design and Gareth Hobbs haunting music all add much to the quality of this production, but it is the stand-out performance of Catherine Downes that transcends this production into something special.

Solo performances often incorporate multiple characters.  Not so this play.  Catherine Downes is nobody but Joan Didion relating her year of magical thinking and how Downes does it is masterful.

From the moment she appears on stage with her opening lines, reticent, holding back, but powerfully seductive, the audience is drawn into her world where they stay for the duration of the production savouring Downes’ exquisite performance.

There are moments of emotion, beautifully handled by Downes, but for the most part this is a rational, sometimes even calculating, way of dealing with loss which Downes portrays with such confidence and ease. Consummate performer that she is, the strength, stamina and ability of someone to perform what is essentially a 90 minute monologue is quite extraordinary.

A must-see production for not only the writing but for Downes’ amazing performance.”

- Ewen Coleman, the Dominion Post

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Catherine Downes in The Year of Magical Thinking. Photo by  Stephen A'Court. 

“From the moment Downes appears, a spectre behind a semi-transparent screen bathed in ethereal blue light, she is the character left behind, the one still living. Downes’ face when she steps in front of the screen is one of a woman struggling to hold something back and wanting to release at the same time. “It will happen to you. That’s what I’m here to tell you,” she says.

Written by American novelist and journalist Joan Didion after her husband, the writer John Gregory Dunne, and her daughter, die within two years of each other, the script is more fleet-footed, dynamic, and revealing of her personality than the two books on which it is based. Self-pity or sadness aren’t allowed to dominate one moment as she oscillates between clinical details of death and memories that make up so much of life. Humour also gets fair play. “It’s still early in Los Angeles. Is John even dead there yet?”

Downes isn’t Didion, but she fully inhabits her memories and all the ranges of emotions, so when she flashes back to a happy night in Honolulu and says, “I had such a sense of well-being I did not want to go to sleep,” it strikes a chord of joy as powerful as the knell of death.”

- Amanda Witherall, Capital Times

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“As the audience rises to applaud Catherine Downes' solo effort, the wonder of it is she has made her 90 minute marathon seem effortless: such is the centred fluency of her beautifully paced and modulated performance, directed by Susan Wilson.

All is perfectly pitched for the intimacy of Circa Two. We don't so much witness a performance as spend time with a very particular person who has a profound experience to share.  It is 90 minutes very well spent.”

- John Smythe, Theatreview

The Year of Magical Thinking is on until 8 September. To book, call the Circa Box Office at 801-7992 or go online at www.circa.co.nz.

JOAN DIDION and THE YEAR OF MAGICAL THINKING.

Didion is one of America’s iconic writers and The Year of Magical Thinking is a stunning memoir of electric honesty and passion in which she explores an intensely personal yet universal experience: a portrait of a marriage--and a life, in good times and bad--that will speak to anyone who has ever loved a husband or wife or child.

It is a remarkably moving examination of the year following her husband’s sudden death just before their fortieth anniversary that is filled with often surprising insights and more than a dash of humour. It is one of the most critically acclaimed books of the decade.

“Thrilling . . . a living, sharp, memorable book. . . . Sometimes quite funny because it dares to tell the truth.” - Robert Pinsky, The New York Times Book Review

The book was published in 2005 – winning the US National Book Award. In 2006 Didion was persuaded to adapt the work for the stage and the resulting play opened on Broadway, New York in 2007 (directed by David Hare, starring Vanessa Redgrave).

Didion was born December 5, 1934, Sacramento, California. She graduated from the University of California at Berkeley, and currently lives in
New York. For over forty years, Joan Didion has been widely renowned as one of the strongest, wittiest and most-acerbic voices in journalism, literature and film. With her sharp, idiosyncratic essays collected as Slouching Towards Bethlehem and The White Album, she helped define both the New Journalism and Sixties America. Later, she and her husband, John Gregory Dunne, became some of the highest-paid screenwriters in Los Angeles (The Panic in Needle Park, Play It As It Lays, A Star is Born) – glamorous, well-connected and Hollywood’s mascots of the East Coast intelligentsia. Combined with the political reporting and fiction drawn from her experiences in Central America in the Eighties, Joan Didion emerged as the grande dame of American journalism. 

So, no one could have been more unnerved by her unraveling in the wake of a pair of tragedies than Didion herself — a fact she conveys brilliantly in The Year of Magical Thinking, which chronicles an exceptionally unforgiving period in her life. Her recently married daughter Quintana had been stricken with pneumonia and fell into a coma. Only a week later, her husband and partner of 40-years died of a heart attack. Battered by these events, Didion felt her grip on reality suddenly slipping. “Grief turns out to be a place none of us know until we reach it. We know that someone close to us could die. We might expect to feel shock. We do not expect this shock to be obliterative, dislocating to both body and mind. We might expect to be prostrate, inconsolable, crazy with loss. We do not expect to be literally crazy – cool customers who believe that their husband is about to return and need his shoes.” Quintana died in 2005, and Didion’s most recent book Blue Nights tells her story.

The Year of Magical Thinking  - an award-winning, best-selling memoir and a play of extraordinary perception and depth. It has touched the hearts of readers, audiences and critics:

“What has stayed with me the most these past few weeks is Didion's heartfelt portrait of her and Dunne's extraordinary love for each other, and their constant companionship, and respect, and friendship, which shine through all of her reminiscences of their four decades of marriage. Deepest love; deepest pain … quite possibly my favorite of the year.”  - Scott, New York

“magnificent … as moving as anything we are likely to encounter in a theatre this year.” - Daily Telegraph

The Year of Magical Thinking opens in Circa Two on 11 August and runs until 8 September. There will be a $25 preview on Friday, 10 August and a $25 Special on Sunday, 12 August. To book, please call the Circa Box Office on 801-7992 or go online www.circa.co.nz.