The theater world seems so Spring Awakening-obsessed, Moxie has shied away from posting about it here (for the most part). But we do love it (more than anything else on Broadway, in fact) and we've been following Broadway World's ongoing interview series titled "Going Geeky on 'Spring Awakening'".
Here's an interesting tidbit from part 3 of the series, and interview with Michael Mayer and Kimberly Grigsby. Here's a cool tidbit about a part of the show that Moxie has always been curious about:
BB: ...Most of the scenes are played very straightforward. The actors talk and relate directly to each other in the scene, and then the songs are done kind of a concert scenario with the microphones. Except for one scene between “I Don’t Do Sadness” and “Blue Wind”. The scene itself is done on the mics, and I was wondering what your reasoning was for taking that scene specifically in such a different way?
MICHAEL [MAYER]: It’s a complicated, and here’s a really geeky, answer. There are lots of reasons for it, but I would say there are three main reasons. One is the stupid, obvious reason which is I knew I wanted them to be singing at those mics for their songs and getting them from the scene to those mics was a complicated, near impossible thing to do without it being really awkward. That was one thing but number two, the second reason is that in the play itself, I mean the source material, we find out at the very end of the play that the masked man, which doesn’t exist anymore, says to Moritz in the graveyard, “I came to you once before and I tried to stop you from killing yourself”. Scholars have agreed over the decades that what that refers to is that he sort of, as a shape shifter, had come in the form of Ilsa. So it wasn’t really Ilsa, it was the masked man in disguise as Ilsa. So that means that the actual scene between Moritz and Ilsa as originally written by Frank Wendekind a hundred and some odd years ago wasn’t a real scene and that they never really connect. Which they don’t, right? So she says, “Come with me” and he says, “I can’t” they’re really in their own world. And the third reason is that it was an homage to Elizabeth LeCompte, the director and artistic director of the Wooster Group and I’ve just always been a fan of theirs and I just thought, you know, I really believe in the theory of the avant-garde which is that the avant-garde is there for the practitioners. It’s not there for the general public and so people like me who are not such brilliant artists but the ones who have more traffic in the commercial world and real people, we go to see the work that is done by the true masters and the true innovators like Richard Foreman and Elizabeth LeCompte and Peter Brook and people like that, and we take from them and we sort of make it accessible. Anyway, so that’s why. Those are the three reasons.
Cool! Moxie never would have guessed that Ilse's mysterious appearance in the second act had that kind of back-story behind it. It makes Moritz's death a lot sadder, imagining that Ilse is actually the spirit of a grown-up Melchior, attempting to save his friend's life. Of course, there's no easy way of incorporating that into this staging, but we're glad to know it nonetheless.
Part 1 of the series was an interview with Stephen Spinella (a favorite of Moxie's from his stint on 24 last season). Spinella talked about the beginning of his own career as an actor, and how he owes much of his success to his long friendship and collaboration with Tony Kushner.
SS: Oh yeah, Tony Kushner [and I] met when we were in graduate school in NYU and we had an extended argument one afternoon in the student lounge about, y’now the relative merits of the Village Voice verses the New York Review of books and we sort of became friends and he started directing stuff. He was in the directing program and I was in the acting program. And he put me in a couple of projects and that summer he wrote a play called “The Age Of Assassins” which I don’t think has ever been published, and asked me if I would do it. If I remember right it was a four hour evening in a very small theater on 18th street and the cast had about, I don’t know twenty different actors in it. It was a huge, huge production.
BB - How long was the process between when “Angels of America” started to come into development and when it hit Broadway?
SS - Well, we were doing another play called “Bright Room Called Day” and that was about 1985 and he said he had an idea. We were talking one afternoon, he said he had an idea to write a gay play and it would be just gay men and his preliminary idea was that it would include Roy Cohen, at least one Mormon character and it would deal with AIDS. Then the Eureka Theatre in San Francisco picked up “A Bright Room Called Day”. They actually came to see the production we did in this tiny theater on 22nd street. They decided to do the play at the Eureka and while he was doing it there with Oscar Eustis. Oscar Eustis was then the artistic director of the Eureka Theatre who is now running the Public Theatre. Oscar asked Tony, y’now if he had a gay play because it was San Francisco and Tony said, “Well I’m thinking about this play that would include Roy Cohen, a Mormon character and it would deal with AIDS.” And he said “well, if you can write it for the company I’ll commission it.” The Eureka Theatre company had three women in it and one man. So the play that originally was supposed to be all men now had to include three women, so he created the angel, Harper and Hannah. And by bringing those characters in the thing sort of grew exponentially and that’s how it turned into a two evening play.
Spinella goes on to explain how much impact Angels in America had on his career:
I mean that made my career. I didn’t have a career before that. I mean I hadn’t done anything really significant. I don’t think I had more than two paying jobs in New York City before I came in with that over a ten year period. I had done some regional stuff and a couple of interesting projects, but it was all regional stuff and that changed everything. That absolutely changed everything.
Aww... just one more tale of people who "grow up" together in the theater, and then both end up being so accomplished. Moxie wonders which writers of our generation will end up being the Tony Kushners of the world.
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