2009 Prebut: Heretics, Henchmen and the Holy

Based on the theme Heretics, Henchmen & the Holy, Mother Road has chosen The Love Song of J. Robert Oppenheimer, by Carson Kreitzer to be produced in the spring and Life During Wartime, by Keith Reddin to be produced in the fall.

Scenes from both will be showcased at the PREBUT. Scenes from the following list will also be presented and the audience will vote on their favorite. The play receiving the most votes will round out Mother Road’s 2009 season!!

The Unseen, by Craig Wright
Incorruptible, by Michael Hollinger
Third Selection TBD

Prepare yourself for an evening of feuding monks and misplaced bones, prisoners and their keeper, Oppenheimer’s dance with the Bomb and ancient Lilith, the corruption of money and love!

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The Love Song of J. Robert Oppenheimer

Carson Kreitzer”Do I dare disturb the universe?” J. Robert Oppenheimer’s rise and fall erupt in this kaleidoscopic play exploring questions of faith, conscience, and the consequences of the never-ending pursuit of knowledge. Act One: Math. The fevered wartime drive to build the first nuclear weapon, by a collection of previously academic theoretical physicists, many of them Jews fleeing Hitler’s Germany. Success turns to horror when “the Gadget” is dropped, first on Hiroshima, then Nagasaki.

Act Two: Aftermath. Oppenheimer confronts his conscience; Russia turns from ally to enemy. The Red scare is in full swing as we shift to the courtroom. Oppenheimer’s wife, Kitty, drinks; J. Edger Hoover does the dance of the seven veils; and the Father of the Atomic Bomb has his security clearance revoked, cast out of the world he helped create. In a flash that is the end of his life, J. Robert Oppenheimer paces the desert of the Trinity Test Site, wrestling with his memories and one scary, sexy, unpredictable demon: Lilith, Hebrew mythology’s first woman, cast out of Eden for refusing to behave. Hissing in his ear, she goads him to admit what he refuses to acknowledge: an anger that mirrors her own.

“Oppie” is haunted by actions, decisions, and a trinity of women—mother, wife Kitty, and lover, Jean Tatlock. Her suicide is never far from his mind; her Communist ties are never far from the government’s.

The Playwright:

Carson Kreitzer’s The Love Song of J. Robert Oppenheimer won the Rosenthal New Play Prize, the American Theatre Critics’ Steinberg Citation, the Stavis Award and is published in New Playwrights: Best Plays of 2004. SELF DEFENSE or death of some salesmen has been produced in Providence, Minneapolis, New York, Chicago and Los Angeles and is published in Women Playwrights: Best Plays of 2002. Other work includes The Slow Drag (New York and London), Valerie Shoots Andy, Heroin/e(Keep Us Quiet), Freakshow, Dead Wait and Take My Breath Away, featured in BAM’s 1997 Next Wave Festival. Kreitzer holds a degree in theater and literature from Yale University and has received grants from NYFA, NYSCA, the NEA, TCG and the Jerome and McKnight foundations. She is an associated artist with Clubbed Thumb, a member of The Playwrights’ Center and The Dramatists Guild and currently lives in Austin, Texas.

From the Playwright:

Carson Kreitzer

“This is a play about physics, but it is also a play about anger, an anger so big and unstoppable it can be directed at one man in Germany and wind up decimating the population of two cities in Japan. What fascinates me about this story is the intersection of such a dizzying array of subjects: rage, control, the ethics of science in wartime, passing (as a gentile), passing (state secrets), the age-old persecution of the Jews turned modern and efficient with Zyklon B, then given a new twist by the House Un-American Activities Committee. In physics, simultaneous realities can exist as once: the chair is solid: the chair is mostly empty space. When observing an event, the outcome is different relative to your position. This is the truth as I know it: elusive, multi-faceted, changing under observation. Also, capable of great explosion.”
–Carson Kreitzer, playwright

The Reviews:

“Kreitzer has a huge vision… Oppenheimer is superb theater…” —The Cincinnati Enquirer

“So much brilliance, ambivalence, ego, history, myth, science, moral argument, emotional heat, poetry and sheer dazzling theatricality are compressed into the mere two hours it takes for Carson Kreitzer’s The Love Song of J. Robert Oppenheimer to detonate on the stage…that by the time it is all over, you might easily feel you’ve been exposed to dangerous levels of radiation.” —Chicago Sun-Times

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Life During Wartime

The play begins with Tommy being initiated into the hard sell tactics of a home-security company by his boss Heinrich. On his first assignment, Tommy meets Gale, a divorced mother with whom he immediately falls in love even though she is quite a few years older than he and has a teen-age son. Tommy soon learns that the home-security company is involved in a scam whereby they burglarize the homes in which the system has been installed. Just after Tommy decides to propose to Gale, her house is broken into and both she and her son, Howard, are killed.

In the second act, Tommy confronts Heinrich with the break-in, but Heinrich refuses to accept responsibility, saying that Tommy was naive to believe in the possibility of finding happiness in such a dangerous world. Tommy begins to receive visits from Gale’s ghost who comforts him. Also present throughout the play is the spirit of John Calvin, the sixteenth-century religious leader whose belief in Original Sin threads the play with the same feeling of hopelessness and futility that Tommy experiences upon the loss of Gale. It isn’t until the last scene when Tommy meets Megan, a woman who might possibly be the reincarnation of Gale, that he comes to believe in the possibility of honestly and lovingly living in the modern world despite the hardships one inevitably faces.

The Playwright:

Keith Reddin

Keith Reddin is a long established writer and actor who is considered by many to be a staple of Chicago theatre. He has written and acted in numerous plays with many local, regional, Off-Broadway, and Broadway theatres. Keith Reddin graduated from Northwestern University and attended The Yale School of Drama. As an actor, he achieved critical acclaim for his performance as a Russian clerk mistaken for a powerful official in The Goodman Theatre’s 1985 production of “The Government Inspector.” As a writer, Reddin made his debut with the dark comedy “Life and Limb” at Wisdom Bridge in 1984, and since then many of his plays have been produced around the world with considerable success. His works have been premiered in Chicago by such legendary theatre companies as Wisdom Bridge, Remains, American Blues Theatre (now American Theatre Company), and Goodman.

In addition to “Life and Limb,” Reddin’s canon also includes “Rum and Coke,” “Highest Standard of Living,” “Life During Wartime,” “Big Time,” “Nebraska,” “Brutality of Fact,” “Black Snow,” “The Innocents Crusade,” “Almost Blue,” “Synergy,” “All the Rage,” “Can’t Let Go,” and his newest work “Frame 312.” In 1993, “Black Snow” won the Joseph Jefferson Award for Best Production of the year. In 1998, Reddin became a playwright in residence at The Goodman where many of his productions were staged by longtime friend and colleague, the late director Michael Maggio.

For film, Reddin has written the successful screenplays “It’s the Rage” and “The Alarmist,” both of which were adapted from his plays. He also wrote the screenplay for the 1993 television film, “The Hearts of Justice.” In addition to writing for film, he has also appeared in several films including “Lolita,” “The Doors,” “Reversal of Fortune,” “Crossing Delancey,” and “Big.” Chicago Tribune Arts Critic Emeritus Richard Christiansen commented in a 1993 interview that “From the beginning of his career as a writer of darkly comic satires, in which, Reddin says, “bad things happen to good people,” he has been transporting his characters into times that are often strange and disenchanting. Reddin’s work has always had its dark side, but he has tried to leaven his views of the world through humor.

Born in Hackensack, N.J., in 1956, Mr. Reddin grew up close enough to Manhattan for frequent trips there. “My grandmother was a great lover of theater and she sort of passed it on to my mother, so they would both take me to Wednesday and Saturday matinees,” he said. “I saw Ethel Merman do a revival of ‘Annie Get Your Gun’ when she was way too old to do it. But I mean, I saw Ethel Merman.”

He later performed in high school and then studied acting and Russian literature in college. In one course, the director Frank Galati (“The Grapes of Wrath”) taught the process of adapting works of literature into plays. “He would give us Faulkner short stories and say, ‘Now make a play out of it,’ ” Mr. Reddin said. “One of the books he gave me was ‘Black Snow.’ ” Mr. Galati told him that someday he should make a play out of it.

Years later, after Off Broadway and regional productions of plays like “Life and Limb” and “Nebraska,” Mr. Reddin received a call from the Goodman Theater in Chicago asking for a Russian adaptation. That resulted in “Black Snow,” which was a hit, earning him a 1993 Joseph Jefferson Award.
Life in the theater has certainly had highs and lows for Mr. Reddin, too, though his enthusiasm has not wavered. He is quick-witted and energetic, giving off a palpable excitement about the prospect of putting on a play. As Mr. Bundy put it, “He has a completely infectious love for being a theater artist.”

Reviews:

A dark and menacing comedy about an impressionable young home-security salesman who falls in love with the woman he’s supposed to be conning. “…an absurdist tragedy—a black comedy that sets out boldly for those modish laughs…and then turns some corner of feeling and shudders into real emotion.” —NY Post

“Reddin…creates roles that actors can sink their teeth into…Reddin is a gifted writer.” —Variety

Incorruptible

Directed by David Sinkus

A dark comedy about the Dark Ages.
Welcome to Priseaux, France, circa 1250 A.D.: The river flooded again last week; the chandler’s shop just burned to the ground. Nobody’s invented the wheelbarrow yet. And Sainte Foy, the patron of the local monastery, hasn’t worked a miracle in 13 years. All eyes turn to the Pope, whose promised visit will surely encourage other pilgrims to make the trek, and restore the abbey to its former glory. That is, until a rival church claims to possess the relics of Sainte Foy– their bones are working miracles. All seems lost until the destitute monks take a lesson from a larcenous one-eyed minstrel, who teaches them an outrageous new way to pay old debts.

The Playwright

Michael received a Bachelor of Music in viola performance from Oberlin Conservatory and a Master of Arts in theatre from Villanova University, where he is now an assistant professor of theatre. Because of his background as a musician, Michael considers his plays compositions: characters are instruments, scenes are movements; tempo, rhythm, and dynamics are critical; and melody and counterpoint are always set in relief by rests–beats, pauses, the spaces in between. 

For PBS, Michael has written three short films and co-authored the feature-length PHILADELPHIA DIARY. Awards include the Roger L. Stevens Award from the Fund for New American Plays, a Barrymore Award for Outstanding New Play, the F. Otto Haas Award for an Emerging Theatre Artist, a Mid-Atlantic Emmy Award, a commission from The Ensemble Studio Theatre/Alfred P. Sloan Foundation Science and Technology Project, and fellowships from the Independence Foundation, Mid-Atlantic Arts Foundation, and Pennsylvania Council on the Arts.

Michael Hollinger

From the Playwright about Incorruptible:

“There was a relic downstairs, the finger of somebody,” playwright Michael Hollinger recalls of a visit to New York’s Cathedral of St. John the Divine. That gave him the idea for “Incorruptible,” a comedy set in a monastery, being produced by Washington Stage Guild through Feb. 6.

In the play, the monks at a monastery in France, circa 1250, are distraught because their holy relics, the bones of Saint Foy, have not precipitated a miracle in years, and few peasants want to pay the penny fee to pray before them. In dire straits and eager to attract the pope’s beneficence, the monks dig up their graveyard and sell the bones to churches around Europe as relics.

Hollinger learned of the medieval practice of selling fake relics in his research. “This idea of spiritual ends with the most earthly means — dead bodies, body parts — really struck me as a wonderful apparent contradiction,” he says. Fake relics aside, “a devout Catholic who reveres relics would say that’s not a contradiction at all,” but rather a question of faith.
So his play becomes “about a quest for the nature of faith. Or maybe I would call it the spiritual versus the material.”

When he wrote the play in 1992, says the Philadelphia writer (and associate theater professor at Villanova University), he didn’t intend to “send up the church, but . . . at some level, I was certainly talking about what’s universal about the inevitable corruption of a spiritual institution.”

The Catholic League listed “Incorruptible” in its 1998 Report on Anti-Catholicism, citing a production at Florida Stage. “I took it as a point of pride,” Hollinger says, but he adds that more often the play has been “really well reviewed by Catholic papers.”

Stage Guild’s Bill Largess, who plays the entrepreneurial Brother Martin, agrees “there’s a certain irreverence to it, but I’m a practicing, devout Catholic [and] I don’t find anything offensive about it. It’s poking fun at things that really happened.”
Hollinger, a Quaker, calls himself a “generalist” in his choice of subject matter. A recent work about evolution, “Tooth and Claw,” ran off-Broadway. Baltimore’s Everyman Theatre presented his “Red Herring,” a McCarthy-era murder mystery and love story.

“I can just dig around in the Middle Ages . . . and satisfy my curiosity and [then] dive into something else entirely different,” Hollinger says. “I just always try to mix it up for myself, partly to cleanse my palate or refresh myself and partly as a challenge to just say, now what’s this all about?”

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