Tempest: Jason's Shots

Here are some fantastic photographs of our final rehearsal taken by my good friend Jason Sexton. His website is:http://jasonsextonphoto.com/

...and sometimes I get cranky and wind up writing Letters to the Editor

Published in this weeks edition of "Hometown Oneonta"
(The Daily Star wants it to be 177 words shorter)

During the course of my apartment hunt, I was recently shown an apartment with a hole in the ceiling large enough to fit a dining room table into. The owners of the building treated the fact that the tenants of the apartment upstairs may at any moment become roommates with a blasé indifference that needs to be seen to be properly admired. They assured me that the obvious massive structural damage was no problem and could be patched up and ready for me to move into by tomorrow.
The truly astonishing thing about this story is not merely that it is perfectly factual and presented without the slightest exaggeration, but that the landlords in question were actually willing to rent Non-Student Tenants.

A person like myself who has been searching for less than a year might actually stand a chance of finding a place to live here.

This sort of thing must be stopped!

Oneonta, as you may know is in the midst of a severe housing crisis. Of all the apartments here, a mere 97% of them are made exclusively available for student rental.

Clearly this is not sufficient. All local rental units must be converted to student-only housing without delay!

Unfortunately the landlords of this town are forced to contend with a persistent population of non student renters, who, with their unreasonable demands, are far from ideal tenants. These are the sort of tenant who will actually have the audacity ask for their security deposit back, request to be allowed to keep pets, and worst of all demand to live in the kind of conditions where the SPCA will allow animals to live. Our poor landlords are virtually powerless against this outrage. The rules governing rental housing in our beloved town are so hard on landlords that they may occasionally consider obeying them! Some are left no choice but to rent to so-called “Young Professionals” (which we all recognize as a euphemism for things like:“Adjunct Professor” or “New Family”).

It is essential that the town council do everything that they can to eliminate the subtle menace of these adult renters from gaining a toehold in our beloved town. If we allow such undesirable persons to find a place to live here, they may eventually buy houses, start businesses in our precious vacant storefronts and disrupt the cherished Status Quo with completely unwelcome prosperity. I urge you, Citizens of Oneonta, to do everything in your power to prevent this dangerous element from making their homes here. Keep our rents high and standards of living low! Make sure our younger population stays transient and do your part to prevent terrifying change from taking root. We must do everything in our power to prevent any potential of a population increase.

Only by taking definitive action against this menace today can we keep things exactly the way they are!

John Ryan
Oneonta?

Tempest: Before and After

    I have very self-consciously not posted anything on this blog for some time. Partly because, as I stated in my last entry, I didn't want to give anything away to the audience before they had the opportunity to see the show. Another element in this decision was knowing how involved a process this build would be. In short, you can either talk about swimming the English Channel, or start swimming. You can not do both at the same time. Now that the dust has settled, and the final curtain has come down, I can discuss a little of my process and display some of the results here.

    It should be noted I can only speak to MY end of the creative process of The Tempest, because that is the only part I was wholly involved in, and thus,fully understand. Nobody should ever make the mistake of believing that I accomplished anything on my own. Theatre is by it's very nature, a collaborative process. This show was the work of many hands. I am deeply grateful to everyone who participated in The Tempest. It would have been a very different entity  if even one of the 30+ people involved were not a part of it. I intend to give full credit to certain key players in a later post. For now please accept my deepest gratitude and know that you made this show both nothing like I expected and everything I could have hoped for.

Last November I posted a few of my early process shots. I thought I would begin by showing you what these puppets look like now that they are complete. If you want to see the drastic changes these have undergone you can check out my original blog here

First here is one of the two seagulls that were in the show. They have come quite a long way from the bald foam. If you look carefully, you can see that two of the rods have been repaired. I wish that I had managed to take better pictures during the show and rehearsals. one of the most enduring images of this production for me was this seagull silhouetted against the purple lit Cyc curtain.

Next here is the head of our heron. Because of his "eyebrows" and the funny walk the puppeteers found for him during rehearsal, he has been christened "Groucho". Notice that he has different eyes from the original process shot.  Also. the puppeteer who operated him found the original controls cumbersome. I needed to shorten them for her ease of manipulation and comfort

 Finally, Trinculo. Aside from one stage, Trinculo was the "guinea pig". He defined the look and feel for the rest of the human characters for me, I only wish I could take credit for the beautiful costumes of these puppets, but they are the work of Kristen Palazzoli. I will discuss them in great length later. The hair turned out nothing like I planned, but in retrospect, couldn't have logically been any different.

More later. Thanks to all!