Stebos

Cherry Blossoms (from Chekhov)

May 25, 2013July 3, 2021Stebos

Theaterlab Gallery, New York City.

“What is there in the empty space of the role? […] You have to discover material for the role and organize the scenes in pauses, between phrases, between the lines and even between words.”
Jurij Alschitz, 40 Questions of One Role

I see silence as the zero-point energy of theatre, the point where everything can be created from nothing. How can a short scene expand – and to what extent – into a longer piece, and at what distance lines and fragments of the text can still cohere or instead become other?
To attempt a response to this question, in Cherry Blossoms I explored the silence between lines and words, as a place for events to occur in the absence of speech.
The actors and I devised three versions of the same brief dialogue from the first act of Anton Chekhov’s The Cherry Orchard. Two sisters, Anya and Varya, reunite after one of them has been on a long trip. The different lengths of these versions – about 1, 3, and 5 minutes – depend on how the silence in the interstices of the text is either ignored or allowed to blossom.

Cherry Blossoms was developed for the May 2013 Forward Flux collaborate:create “Power of Silence” 3-week residency at Theaterlab. For more info click here. With Rebecca Tucker and Kelly Sloan.

The Tortured One by Jason Sofge

May 25, 2013July 3, 2021Stebos

Theaterlab, New York City.

THE OPPRESSOR.
Verminous game, thou art caught! Ensnared as a loathsome bug stuck in the great spider’s silken strands.
Jason Sofge, The Tortured One

The Tortured One was developed for the May 2013 Forward Flux collaborate:create “Power of Silence” 3-week residency at Theaterlab. For more info click here. With David Riley and Joyana Feller.

As we struck up a conversation on our first creative meeting, Jason Sofge had an idea for a character to be able to use silence as a weapon. In this harsh power struggle, one character would always speak, while the other would remain silent throughout.

In addition to the peculiar disproportion in the dialogue, the final text provided a fascinating directorial challenge: how to stage a piece in which, due to the extreme violence described in detail in the text, what occurs can hardly be shown on stage in a realistic fashion? With the freedom we were given to explore by the playwright, the actors and I discovered an uncanny territory of ambiguity between the heightened language of the piece and an everyday situation around a tea table.

Resident Artist: “The Power of Silence”

May 25, 2013December 28, 2020Stebos

Theaterlab, New York City

In April 2013 I was selected as one of the 20 resident artists for a three week marathon on the theme “The Power of Silence” produced by Forwardflux at Theaterlab in New York City.

This was an awesome experience made of fruitful discussion and unexpected discoveries, but most of all of intense collaboration with artists from many disciplines, including visual arts, dance, and even advanced mathematics. Additionally, since I was involved in four projects overall, I enjoyed stepping out of my usual role of director and perform as actor in a couple of them.
For more info, pics and videos, click on the titles below.

Cherry Blossoms, an exploration of the pauses between words in Chekhov’s The Cherry Orchard. Director.
The Tortured One, a one act play by Jason Sofge on “weaponized silence”. Director.
Singer, a staged reading inspired by Carson McCuller’s The Heart is a Lonely Hunter. Director and actor.
Frameables by Dan O’Neil. Actor.

The residency culminated in a 3 hour performance on May 19, 2013 that took over the three spaces at Theaterlab. For the full program click here.

Chaz (from Luigi Pirandello’s Cece’)

January 2, 2012January 5, 2021Stebos

Stevens Theatre, Gettysburg College, Gettysburg, PA

An adaptation in four parts for the students of my Modern Italian Theatre course. Based on a list of physical actions, we devised and rewrote four versions of the same play, which was set, in turn, in an informal college environment, a morbid Eighteenth century, a flashback from the point of view of one of the minor characters, and a world of puppets.

An account of the theory underlying this course can be found in my article “The Short Play and Postmodernist Stage Directing: A Virtual Experiment with Pirandello’s Cecè.” published in Quaderni d’Italianistica 32.2 (2012)

The Liar by Carlo Goldoni

April 4, 2009May 31, 2021Stebos

Kline Theatre, Gettysburg College, Gettysburg, PA.

The Theatre Arts Department at Gettysburg College asked me to direct a mainstage production during the 2008-09 season. Thus, I adapted and translated the play into English in collaboration with Susan Russell, Chair and Professor of Theater Arts. The action was set in contemporary Venice Beach, California and the Italian aristocracy was transformed into its American counterpart based on wealth.

Also, in line with Goldoni’s biography, I imagined that the playwright himself was writing in a haste, in order to keep his promise of delivering as many as 16 new comedies during a single season, and thus win a bet against his competitors. Since everything was being created on the spot, the actors received their parts page after page and the set itself was brought in piece by piece and moved around as the play developed. You can read more in my director’s notes here.

Since we were dealing with lying at its “best”, I asked each member of the production to write a biographical note with a twist, and include a half lie and a full-blown one. You can read the entire program here: try to find the lies! Some are really funny and you can probably tell without knowing the person directly.

Ohio lmpromptu by Samuel Beckett

January 2, 2006December 28, 2020Stebos

Some obscure black-box room in snowy Madison, Wisconsin

In this theoretically infused production I worked with Stephen O’Connell, a talented MFA actor, to deconstruct the idea of “presence” by having the actor play both parts of the play, first in front of a mirror, then to a video of himself previously recorded.

Below you can find both the final product and a series of steps that led to it. For a director, the process is at least as important as the end result.

Final presentation

Rehearsals

The first day of rehearsal was a lot about finding various approaches to the text in a constant process of exploration, starting with the alliterative sounds in the play. Although the video is not always in focus – directing and filming at the same time is not advised 😉 – this rehearsal demonstrates a post-modern style of acting/directing that does not ever come to a closure, while at the same time never giving up on potential further meanings. It also details the game of mirrors that will produce the final video.

The second day we tried to gauge the boundaries of the text, from a jazz version to a more expressive one with words only, up until an esoteric experiment of inner displacement in front of a mirror (first part). Finally we tapped into the forces of the four elements: water, air, fire, earth with surprising results (second part).

The third day’s rehearsal tried to blend all layers previously explored, but was also mostly devoted to figuring out how to record a video of the Listener to be played, later, to the same actor playing the Reader.

Alexis by Marguerite Yourcenar

February 10, 2002December 29, 2020Stebos

S. Giovanni Bosco Theatre, Modena, and San Martino Theatre, Bologna, Italy

By special arrangement with the Yourcenar Estate, I presented this monologue within the context of the “La manica tagliata” (The Cut Sleeve) LGBT festival, with Francesco Stella as the protagonist. Since the piece is particularly long, it offered a challenging field for experimentation in the areas of dramaturgy, storytelling, and composition.

La Traviata (from Giuseppe Verdi and Alexandre Dumas)

February 1, 2001January 9, 2021Stebos

Teatro del Tempo, Parma, Italy

For this dinner theatre show, I combined scenes from Verdi’s opera and Dumas’s Camille (La Dame aux camélias), with music played by an ensemble directed by Alessandro Nidi (Parma Conservatory). Two sets of performers, four actors and three singers, led the audience into the depths of passion as seen through the different conventions of spoken and musical theatre. The show had a lot of coverage in the newspapers and on TV since it was held during the year of the celebrations for the first centenary of Verdi’s death.

Read a series of articles published by the newspaper Gazzetta di Parma including a glowing review by Valeria Ottolenghi here. (in Italian, translations coming soon…)

Here is an 11 minute promotional video of the show:

The Two Gentlemen of Verona (from Shakespeare)

December 14, 2000June 5, 2021Stebos

I was called by Numeriprimi who wanted to stage a Shakespearean play in an imaginative way at the Teatro del Tempo in Parma, Italy. For this company of young actors, who had just graduated from a professional course supported by the European Union, I chose The Two Gentlemen of Verona.

In addition to providing an original translation, I dramaturged the script in several directions:

I substituted several scenes with speechless actions to take advantage of opportunities for physical theatre;
to better employ one of Numeriprimi’s performers, I substituted the clown character with a winged Cupid on roller skates who recited aphorisms from the humorous Murphy’s Law of Love, a prominent theme in the play;
finally, I added several songs, each in fact a Shakespearean sonnet, translated into Italian and set to original music by Marco Caronna.

With the tunes played by Luca Savazzi and sung by a gifted vocalist and company member, the show came to resemble a musical.

Below you find both an 8 minute promo video and the two parts of the full show:

Promo

Part 1

Part 2

The Giants of the Mountain by Luigi Pirandello

October 23, 2000June 1, 2021Stebos

Teatro del Tempo, Parma, Italy.

With members of the Numeriprimi Company I organized a public lecture about Pirandello’s The Giants of the Mountain (I giganti della montagna) for the students of the Italian Lit course at the University of Parma (Prof. Marzio Pieri). It included a dramatized reading, with actors working vocally to portray the many roles each of them was called to play. While stage directions were read aloud, a visual artist drew each character on a series of large sheets, building up to the impressive final scene where each of them was visible simultaneously around the theatre.

Read an article published by the Gazzetta di Parma (in Italian):

Stebos, scholar/artist

Author: Stebos