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    Warehouse Presents Inaugural Sam Shepard Festival August 31 Through September 22

    Few American playwrights leave as long a shadow Sam Shepard. When he passed away late last year, the New York Times called him, “one of the theater’s most original and prolific portraitists of what was once the American frontier.”

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    The Guardian dubbed him “one of the visionaries of US theatre [who] created a fresh vernacular for exploring the disparity in American life between myth and reality, past and present, fathers and sons.”

    For over one generation – and I include myself and two of the people who stoked that original love of theatre in me – he was a voice that grabbed us by the throat and shook. And haunted and bewildered. He’s still revived every few years on the most acclaimed stages in New York and London.

    However, as Kristofer Green, artistic director of Warehouse Theater, pointed out, “There isn’t a lot of Sam Shepard done in Columbus. For somebody who’s widely thought of as one of the greatest playwrights of his generation, it’s amazing that [Shepard’s] work isn’t more widely produced. We could have done ten shows.”

    theater near me
    Casey May (as Bradley), from L to R, Joyce Leahy (as Hallie), Ryan Kopycinski (as Tilden), Jim Coe (as Dodge), Emmi Robison (as Vince) and Abigail Worden (as Shelly) in the Warehouse Theatre production of Sam Shepard’s “Buried Child.” Photo by Jennifer Schaaf.

    That was the impetus for Warehouse’s Sam Shepard Festival. While they aren’t doing ten, they’re presenting three full productions and three readings, encompassing inarguable classics. I discussed this exciting theatrical event with Kristofer Green, who organized the festival and directs True West; James Harper, who directs the Pulitzer Prize-winning Buried Child and plays Eddie in Fool for Love; and Brandon Maldonado who stars in True West.

    The three full productions are True West, Buried Child, and Cowboy Mouth, the latter directed by Michelle Steinhour. Green said, “I always had the thought of doing True West and Buried Child in rep. Then when [Shepard] died, it was so surprising. Because I’m such a huge fan of his, I thought: I want to do more. I want to showcase more of his works that aren’t as well-known.”

    Buried Child and True West I knew I wanted full productions of,” Green said, and there’s no better place to start with the Shepard oeuvre than those two. The New York Times called it his “best, most resonant play.” For the same outlet, Shepard said, “I just wanted to give a taste of what it feels like to be two-sided. It’s a real thing, double nature. I think we’re split in a much more devastating way than psychology can ever reveal. It’s not so cute. Not some little thing we can get over. It’s something we’ve got to live with.”

    For the festival, True West has Kristofer Green at the helm, with Brandon Maldonado and Justin King alternating between the roles of the brothers Austin and Lee, Trenton Weaver as Saul Kimmer, and Josie Merkle as Mom. It’s Green’s first crack at directing Sam Shepard since college. “I wanted to tackle True West because it speaks to me a little more than Buried Child,” Green says. “I also wanted the challenge of a show where two people switch characters. The first week of our rehearsal, we blocked the entire show one way, I think with Brandon as Lee and Justin as Austin.

    The next week we said ‘Forget everything.’ They came in, switched roles, and we did the whole thing fresh. It’s interesting, something I didn’t expect to happen: everything is different. I wanted them to explore the characters on their own and come to their own conclusions instead of being influenced by the other person. When Brandon is Lee and Justin is Austin, it’s a different show than when they’re switched. Even little things, like the way they handle the back and forth with car keys, the way they hand the car keys off is different. The way they’re writing is different. It’s actually been easier than I thought as far as directing and it’s been a lot of fun.”

    Brandon Maldonado chimed in, “I’ve never done something like this [where I alternated roles] before. I was focused on making each character totally my own and it wasn’t as difficult as I thought. When I do Lee, it’s like Lee is in his own little room up there and when I do Austin, that door closes and the Lee door opens. We’re running scenes and if one of us forgets a line, you’d expect [the other] could easily jump in because we know both. But it’s like, ‘Nope, I’m in Austin mode.’”

    Green added, “There’s a danger if you let the characters live in the same room, they’ll be too similar – that was a concern I had because it’s the same actor playing them. But it’s not.” Maldonado said, “We talked about this a little last night. What I love is not knowing what happens next. When you know every single line, how do you retain that reactionary state? How do you react honestly? And I feel like it’s been fairly okay.”

    Buried Child won the Pulitzer and formalized Shepard’s coming out on the world stage. The New York Times said about its original 1978 New York production, “Sam Shepard does not merely denounce chaos and anomie in American life, he mourns over them. His corrosive images and scenes of absurdity never soften to concede the presence of a lament, but it is there all the same.”

    The Times said on the occasion of the last Broadway revival, 38 years after its debut, “[I] t’s always worth revisiting Mr. Shepard’s haunted mansion,” and talked to Shepard around the same time where he said, “[W]hat I wanted to do was to destroy the idea of the American family drama.” James Harper, known and acclaimed around Columbus as an actor, makes his professional directing debut on this Buried Child.

    Harper said, “I’m a literature nerd, and it’s a genius piece of literature. His dialogue is so specific and I saw fully fleshed out human beings on the page. The narrative itself is timely in so many ways. It’s almost prophetic. He wove the family’s trauma narrative into a larger, national trauma narrative.in a fantastic way. It forces you to make connections as a person and as an actor, connecting your personal trauma to these characters.

    “But he also uses levels of allegory to connect the individual pain to a larger construct of pain and trauma. He weaves it all together in a brilliant tapestry. And uses Americana, this sense of nostalgia we all sort of know. Taken all together, I’m a little jealous of my actors. It’s so real it’s almost outlandish.”

    The wild card of the full productions is the riotous, surreal Cowboy Mouth. Green said, “Cowboy Mouth is just so different I wanted to challenge the audience in this town. People are going to come in and not know what to expect. They’re either gonna love it or they’re really not going to love it, it’s that kind of show.”

    Written by Shepard and Patti Smith, who played the main characters in its original 1971 run, Cowboy Mouth grapples with the role of art and what the act of creation means in our lives. It stands as one of the first plays to capture the energy of rock-and-roll on a stage in ways that didn’t seem pandering or grafted-on and it still holds onto its shocking newness.

    Green said, “That show is so specific to [Shepard] as a person and nobody does that show. The history and personal-ness was so interesting. I wanted to challenge the actors in this town and I think we found two great people to encapsulate those roles [Joey Gerolmo as Slim and Christina Yoho as Cavale]. [Gerolmo] plays guitar and there’ll be a drum set on stage. [Yoho] learned to play a little guitar. It’ll just be the two of them on stage… until the entrance of Lobster Man (Casey May).”

    Besides the three full runs, the production makes room for three one-performance readings: Heartless, Fool for Love, and Curse of the Starving Class.

    Green said, “Fool for Love” and Curse of the Starving Class are probably the next two [often produced]. They’re so brilliantly written and their point of view is so specific, I couldn’t not do those shows. Curse of the Starving Class is the other ‘family’ show [with True West and Buried Child].”

    Curse of the Starving Class premiered at the New York Shakespeare Festival in 1978. The New York Times called it an “acrid comedy” and a “sprawling but often scabrously funny play about poverties of the spirit and the stomach.” The festival’s reading is helmed by Jesse Daniel Trieger who worked with Warehouse and Green in Bloody Bloody Andrew Jackson and can be seen as the titular character in Short North Stage’s Toxic Avenger, with a stellar cast including Ella Palardi and Scott Douglas Wilson.

    Fool for Love has been performed often but this physical, dysfunctional love story never seems to exhaust itself. The New York Times called it, in a review of the recent Broadway production, a ”savage, cyclical dance” with “the gut-clutching suspense generated by a full-throttle cliffhanger.” Green called it “An amazing, amazing play.” Michael Solomon directs a cast headed up by James Harper as Eddie and Kelsey Hopkins as May.

    In a testament to the power of Shepard’s work, Harper recalled his previous stint as Eddie in his early 20s. “A young lady came to see the show – a student from OSU, she was assigned to see it as part of a class. After she saw it, she said she didn’t know anything about Sam Shepard or the theatre but after seeing the show she realized she was in an abusive situation. And she needed to get out. As a young person, in my 20s, I had my head up my ass in several different ways, and I’d never heard anything like that before. That kind of catharsis was novel to me. That really moved me to a different space.”

    Green said, “Heartless, we partly did because it’s the only play of his where the female characters outnumber the male. There are four women and only one man, which is sort of the reverse of how he normally does things. Plus, it’s a play he wrote later in life that kind of harkens back to earlier in his career. The story is so avant-garde in a way it [recalls] the original, early ‘70s stuff.” The Heartless reading is directed by Emmi Robison and features Jennifer Schaff and Susan Gellman.

    Whether you’re a longtime Shepard fan or a fresh-faced newcomer to his world, everything at this festival is worth seeing.

    Schedule

    True West
    FRI 8/31 at 8 p.m.
    SAT 9/1 at 8 p.m.
    SUN 9/2 at 3 p.m.
    FRI 9/7 at 8 p.m.
    SAT 9/8 at 7 p.m.
    SUN 9/9 at 7 p.m.

    Cowboy Mouth
    THU 9/6 at 8 p.m.
    SAT 9/8 at 11 p.m.
    SAT 9/15 at 11 p.m.
    SUN 9/16 at 8 p.m.

    Buried Child
    FRI 9/14 at 8 p.m.
    SAT 9/15 at 7 p.m.
    SUN 9/16 at 3 p.m.
    THU 9/20 at 7 p.m.
    FRI 9/21 at 8 p.m.
    SAT 9/22 at 8 p.m.

    Readings

    WED 9/5 at 7 p.m.
    Curse of the Starving Class

    SUN 9/9 at 3 p.m.
    Heartless

    WED 9/19 at 7 p.m.
    Fool for Love

    The Sam Shepard Festival runs from August 31 to September 22 at the MadLab theater. For tickets and more info including discount packages, visit https://www.warehousetheatre.org.

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    Richard Sanford
    Richard Sanfordhttp://sanfordspeaks.blogspot.com/
    Richard Sanford is a freelance contributor to Columbus Underground covering the city's vibrant theatre scene. You can find him seeking inspiration at a variety of bars, concert halls, performance spaces, museums and galleries.
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