Category: {theatre}

Theatre

The night that panicked America

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The Mercury Theatre on the air.

Being a long-time fan of both HG Wells and Orson Welles, the latter’s radio production of War of the Worlds with the Mercury Theatre group has always held a special fascination. This was staged sixty-nine years ago today, October 30th, 1938, and famously caused panic among listeners who missed the opening and believed they were hearing genuine news reports of an alien invasion. I’ve often listened to the rather crude recording of the play around this time of year, having owned that recording on vinyl, cassette tape and CD. These days you don’t have to buy it, you can head over to the Internet Archive or this Mercury Theatre page and grab an mp3 to discover what all the fuss was about. The recording may be crude but the presentation still strikes me as decades ahead of its time, with a very astute sense of how ordinary people behave when faced with the news media. I’ve always loved the attention to detail, such as the moment when the man who’s been interviewed at the crash site wants to carry on talking and the interviewer has to shut him up. That same verisimilitude was carried over to the newsreel footage in Citizen Kane (which was pretty much a Mercury production for cinema) and it was those moments in the radio play which helped encourage people to think that what they were hearing was real, not drama.

Screenwriter Howard Koch, who later polished the rudimentary draft script that became Casablanca, is credited as writer of the play but the adaptation was a group effort according to Koch in his book The Panic Broadcast (1970). The idea of presenting Wells’s story as a series of news bulletins came from Orson Welles and producer John Houseman, with Koch scripting the scenes and dialogue. Most of the other Mercury adaptations took a more traditional approach and if you want some spooky listening for Halloween I’d suggest you try their version of Dracula, also from 1938. The story is severely truncated, of course, but Agnes Moorehead is very impressive as Mina, there’s some remarkable music from Bernard Herrmann and Welles plays both Arthur Seward and the sinister Count.

Previously on { feuilleton }
• Alexandre Alexeieff and Claire Parker
• The Door in the Wall
• Voodoo Macbeth
• War of the Worlds book covers

Paradise Now: The Living Theatre in Amerika DVD

julian_beck.jpgMost people today know Julian Beck, if at all, for a small but unforgettable film role at the end of his career. In Poltergeist 2 (1986) Beck plays the nightmarishly sinister Reverend Henry Kane and his one full scene in that film is far more unnerving than the rest of its rubber monsters and special effects. Beck, a bisexual radical who makes most contemporary theatre directors seem as challenging as civil servants, started out as a painter but moved into theatre in the late Forties, founding the legendary Artaud-inspired Living Theatre in 1947. The Living Theatre was to the stage what the Beats were to literature, intent on shaking up the medium, the audience’s complacency and—by implication—society itself, to the fullest extent possible.

It’s the tragedy of theatre that its nature as a medium dependent on performance leaves so little record of its works behind. But there is one major film of the Living Theatre at its most provocative and it’s fitting that this should appear on a new DVD from Arthur Magazine in the year of the company’s sixtieth anniversary.

NEW FROM ARTHUR: PARADISE NOW: THE LIVING THEATRE IN AMERIKA DVD. LIMITED EDITION OF 1,000 – PRE-ORDER NOW – SHIPS OCT 1ST, 2007!

the screams
the unchained soarings of a sincerity which is on its way
to this revolution of the whole body without which nothing can
be changed. – Antonin Artaud
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Arthur Magazine proudly presents our newest release PARADISE NOW: The Living Theatre in Amerika DVD featuring rare, never-before-distributed films and a bacchanal of revolutionary multimedia documents from The Living Theatre’s historic and influential ’68–’69 American tour. A fulminating art-meets-life installation brought to you in collaboration with The Living Theatre, The Ira Cohen Akashic Project and Saturnalia Media Rites of the Dreamweapon.

DVD INCLUDES – PARADISE NOW: The Living Theatre in Amerika (1969) a film by Marty Topp, produced by Ira Cohen for Universal Mutant

• EMERGENCY (1968) a film by Gwen Brown, featuring precious footage of Living Theatre productions Mysteries and smaller pieces, Paradise Now, and Frankenstein

• RARE PHOTOGRAPHS of Paradise Now at Brooklyn Academy of Music by Don Snyder

• THE MAP OF PARADISE NOW, a 14″ x 19″ double-sided, commemorative poster + ‘zine including texts by Antonin Artaud, Julian Beck, Judith Malina, Ira Cohen and Don Snyder

ADDITIONAL SPECIAL FEATURES

• Slideshow / Installation, The full theatrical script

• Paradise Now: A Collective Creation of The Living Theatre as written down by Julian Beck and Judith Malina

• Video Interviews with director Judith Malina, Hanon Reznikov, Steve Ben Israel, and producer Ira Cohen

• The Spinning Wheel by Steve Ben Israel, soundtrack to EMERGENCY sourced from agit-prop radio broadcasts

• Akashic Video Gallery of excerpts from current and forthcoming Arthur DVD releases

WHAT IS PARADISE NOW?

In 1968 The Living Theatre, led by Julian Beck and Judith Malina, triumphantly returned to America from years of self-imposed exile in Europe with their theatrical breakthrough Paradise Now. The play introduces the practice of collective creation, dissolving the boundaries of human interactions and forging a harmony between the actors and audience. Of this process, Julian Beck writes, “Collective creation is the secret weapon of the people… This play is a voyage from the many to the one and from the one to the many. It’s a spiritual voyage and a political voyage, a voyage for the actors and the spectators. The play is a vertical ascent toward permanent revolution, leading to revolutionary action here and now. The revolution of which the play speaks is the beautiful, non-violent, anarchist revolution.The purpose of the play is to lead to a state of being in which non-violent revolutionary action is possible.”

The result of this shared voyage is the spontaneous creation of a temporary anarchist collective – free from the enslavements of war, violence, the State, money and the self.

CRITICAL PRAISE FOR PARADISE NOW

“Marty Topp’s beautiful film of Paradise Now reveals how the theories of revolutionary change and the experience of sexual liberation are not separate paths to the beautiful nonviolent anarchist revolution. Practiced together they are a single thrust, encompassing both political action and sensual joy, leading to the dreamed-of terrestrial paradise.” Judith Malina

“Paradise Now is possibly The Living Theatre’s greatest achievement – unsurpassable!” Ira Cohen

“This past spring, in a group art show at New York?s Swiss Institute, an old black-and-white television played a grainy print of bodies writhing to the tune of distant drumming. “As long as you have people working for money and not love, there will be violence,” intoned a tall, angular man on the screen. The bodies – women in scant bikinis and men in what looked like loincloths-piled together in an orgiastic tribal dance, some simulating (or perhaps actually having) sex as the voice continued: “Psycho-sexual repression is impeding the revolution.” What looked like an underworld-of the 1960’s counter-cultural variety, in this case- is the Living Theatre?s Paradise Now, as documented in the 1969 Ira Cohen-produced film Paradise Now: The Living Theatre in Amerika ? soon to be released on DVD from Arthur Magazine.” CAN THEATER STAGE A REVOLUTION – Traci Parks, Fall ’07 Preview, V MAGAZINE

“Joyous, brutal, exploding with the kinetic energies of psychic catharsis… Marty Topp’s PARADISE NOW: The Living Theatre in Amerika has captured the essence of this extraordinary theatrical experiment. It is unquestionably one of the finest artistic documentaries to come out of the United States cinema. Its heartfelt sincerity should be sheer inspiration to the many young people throughout the country who are struggling to make meaningful and influential work. It is the reverberation of a crucially important message that must not be neglected, for the consequences are too terrible to endure.

“Marty Topp’s achievement is not just in the making of a great film, but in making us remember again, Paradise as a reality.” PARADISE ON FILM – Don Snyder, July 1970, East Village Other

“Like an astonishing portion of the country’s popular music, the spectacles of The Living Theater proved to be in content and form outside the social system – not structured by it nor, except as outlet, implementing it: liberated territory.” Revolution at the Brooklyn Academy – Stefan Brecht, The Drama Review number 43: Spring 1969, The Living Theater Issue

Previously on { feuilleton }
• William Burroughs by Ira Cohen, 1967
• The Invasion of Thunderbolt Pagoda

The art of John Austen, 1886–1948

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A few drawings by British illustrator John Austen (1886–1948), like Patten Wilson another artist whose work is hard to come by today. Austen was one of the many young illustrators over whom Aubrey Beardsley’s etiolated shadow fell from 1900 onwards and it’s the first ten years of Austen’s work I find most interesting, mainly because of the Beardsley stylings. He’s not as original or as elegant as Harry Clarke but he’s a lot better than the frequently overrated (yet interesting for other reasons) Hans Henning Voigt, or Alastair as he preferred to be known.

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