MR. BURNS Workshop in Seattle

Earlier this month, Steve Cosson along with Associate Artists Anne Washburn and Michael Friedman were out in Seattle for a two-week workshop of MR. BURNS: A POST ELECTRIC PLAY at Seattle Repertory Theatre. Below are some cool photos from rehearsal, plus some of the Space Needle!

The readings got a fantastic write-up by Brendan Kiley in The Stranger. It contains a really interesting discussion about the script (which is still a work in progress) and points to some of the fascinating questions raised by the text. Here's an excerpt:

"The conceit of Mr. Burns—a single episode of The Simpsons growing from light entertainment into an epic, given the proper cultural/material conditions—is simultaneously cheeky, touching, and sad. Did the Iliad come from such circumstantial, vicious origins? Or the Oresteia? Or the Bible? Or everything we call culture?"

For the article, click HERE! There's also a very cool illustration inspired by the show drawn by James Yamasaki at the top of the article - check it out!

And for more info about MR. BURNS, click HERE!

Tutkiva teatteri - Investigative Theater

Tutkiva teatteri means "Investigative Theater" in Finnish - a fact we learned when Alix Lambert, one of our R&D Group playwrights and Associate Artists, was interviewed by Janne Junttila, a Finnish journalist, who is writing a book about contemporary documentary theater. The video of the interview, below, shows her talking about her project Crime, USA, for which she's been traveling around the country conducting interviews with criminals, cops, crime writers, pawnshop owners, the FBI, the DOJ, experts on serial killers, former gang members, and more. The journalist also got some footage from inside an R&D Group meeting, showing a short clip of Mia Chung's project and the discussion. Check it out!

Tutkiva teatteri from Janne Junttila on Vimeo.

For more information about the artists and projects in last year's R&D Group, click HERE.

PLUS, Janne Junttila has collected short excerpts of the interviews he has made here www.dokumenttiteatteri.fi. Interviewees include Judith Malina (a student of Erwin Piscator), Anna Deavere Smith, Nicolas Kent and Richard Norton-Taylor of London's Tricycle Theatre, German group Rimini Protokoll, British director Peter Cheeseman's widow, one Russian, Icelandic and Finnish theatre group. We're thrilled to be included in this awesome project!

Climate Models!

 

 

These fascinating climate models are from http://www.gfdl.noaa.gov/visualization to help us visualize the future of the planet. They show the relationship of surface air temperature and sea-ice cover from 1860 through to 2100. Watch as the sea ice disappears and the earth heats up (by a lot)! We worked with these models as part of a recent reading of THE GREAT IMMENSITY!