Play/Write Director Francesca McKenzie

 The city is full of activity and beautiful weather that beckons us to come outside to play before it gets too blazingly hot. Given these circumstances, it is difficult for a teacher to keep a student’s
interests for very long. The end of this month marks the third full school year I have taught in a New Orleans public charter school. Although spring has its distractions, post-LEAP test taking
time is the most opportune occasion for real education to happen. In my years of experience, it is this season where students reap what they have sown and you can see how much they have really learned. You can actually see the light bulb go off in a students mind as a concrete idea develops, travels out of their mouth, and then illuminates their entire face. 

MORE: Watch highlights from previous “Play/Write” Showcases

To bear witness to this is one of the best experiences I’ve ever had, and is what keeps me in the education system. 

The most memorable “light bulb” times I have seen are when students are in untraditional classroom settings: in the middle of a corn row at a school garden, sitting in the audience of a sold out Shakespeare show, in line at the Creole Creamery or staring wide eyed at a painting in a museum. There are a lot of problems with our school system – no question there – but it is amazing to find so many teachers in this city that are dedicated to providing students a multitude of full enriching experiences to grow and recognize their unlimited potential. 

Goat in the Road’s Play/Write program is absolutely one of those experiences. 

Join us Friday May 11th at 7pm at the Play/Write Showcase held at Dillard University. Five professional theater organizations, including Cripple Creek, will produce ten short plays written by middle school students. The Showcase is the culmination of an intensive playwriting program with Goat in the Road teaching artists that began in January. Goat in the Road and Cripple Creek are joined by Amplified Voices, The NOLA Project, Skin Horse Theater, and Dillard University Theatre in creating this inspiring evening. 

For most of these students this will be the first time they have ever created something and put it out for the world to see. This Friday may be the scariest day of their lives! It may also be an important opportunity for them to recognize their potential for creative work and how important their voice is. This is going to be an excellent night of theatre not to be missed. We guarantee it will tickle your funny bone and play on your heartstrings. Most importantly, by coming, you are supporting ten young people using their brains well. Help us turn on the light bulbs.

Tanapeka Valley in the moonlight

Monday night, Cripple Creek’s own Selena Poznak was bestowed the highest honor for theatrical lighting designers in New Orleans – the Big Easy Awards Committee deemed her exotic blend of soft interiors, moody accents and hallucinatory flashes of static worthy of the honor of “Best Lighting Design” for 2011′s “The Future is a Fancyland Place.” 

Selena also has awards for her design in 2011′s “Marisol” and nominations for “Threepenny Opera” and “After the War.” 

Cripple Creek is proud of Selena and her achievements. She shows up early and stays late, working long hours and under tough conditions to marry her vision to reality. We could not be more pleased with her work. 

A full list of Monday’s winner’s can be found here.

Bold move, we know

JOIN OUR RANKS! ALL ROLES OPEN! ALL ADULT AGES WELCOME!

Wednesday, March 21st 7-10pm
Saturday, March 24th 2-5pm

Cold sides provided! Come ready to move! Email Emilie Whelan to set up a 30-minute audition: whelan@cripplecreekplayers.org
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IT IS TIME TO END THE PELOPONNESIAN WAR.

THE YEAR IS 411 B.C., and Lysistrata has gathered all the Grecian widows and wives of soldiers to start a revolution with a radical oath: withhold sex from all men until a treaty for peace is signed. What follows is a sexy, brutal romp through gender and democracy. Live music by Aurora Nealand and choreography by Rachel Carrico! From the production team that brought you The Madwoman of Chaillot and Marisol, come be a part of the comedy that has lasted nearly 2500 years – onstage this May at The Allways!

Performance Dates: May 18th – June 3rd

Ian Hoch

Congratulations to all this year’s Big Easy Theater Award nominees! 2011 was an unbelievable year full of exciting theater. Young companies like Skin Horse, the NOLA Project, the Elm Theater and many others are making more and more of a name for themselves as theater artists, and their hard work and bold visions are gaining more and more attention from audiences and critics.

Cripple Creek is pleased to share the honor of these nominations with the aforementioned companies and especially our dear friends and frequent collaborators at Goat in the Road Productions. Writing and refining “Fancyland” with them was a wonderfully challenging and rewarding project and we are thrilled to be recognized for all the heart and soul that went into bringing it to New Orleans audiences.

Thank you to the Big Easy Committee, thank you to our peers and colleagues for your passion and talent, thank you to theatergoers all across the city for supporting local theater, and the biggest thanks of all to everyone to the “Fancyland” cast, crew and design team. The time is come, y’all!

Nominations for “The Future is a Fancyland Place”

• William Bowling, Best Musical Director
• Phil Cramer, Best Set Design
• Selena Poznak, Best Lighting Design
• Emilie Whelan, Best Supporting Actress in a Drama
• Best Ensemble Cast
• Andrew Vaught & Chris Kaminstien, Best Original Work

Further nominations for Cripple Creek company members:

• Andrew Vaught, Best Director of a Comedy, “Our Man”
• Emilie Whelan, Best Supporting Actress in a Comedy, “Midsummer Night’s Dream”
• Andrew Vaught, Best Actor in a Comedy, “The Norman Conquests”

Hornstrumpot, Sir!

 The history of Mardi Gras Krewes is filled with the sinful, the sublime, the segregated, and the synthesised. It is a storied tale that only promises to get storier as the years roll along. For the past three years, Cripple Creek has had its own Krewe… The Krewe of Ubu! However, unlike most Krewes, this one has an end date, a time when the wheels would fall off the floats, and the donkeys would become stubborn asses and stop to relieve themselves, effectively destroying the merriment and grandeur of the experience. 

This Friday and Saturday at 9pm, Krewe of Ubu will reach that time. It is highly doubtful that in his Absinthe-induced reality, Alfred Jarry wrote a fourth ‘Ubu’ play. We have accepted this reality and have taken the only logical step; to make the third and final installment as insane and ridiculous as possible. 

There is no other way. 

SEE MORE: 2010′s “UBU ROI” and 2011′s “UBU COCU“ 

We have been fortunate enough to find a piece of “Classical” theatre that fits so well with the joyous insanity of the town we work in. Maybe because he was French, or maybe because he was just so wacky, or maybe because he was all jacked up on hallucinogens, Alfred Jarry wrote three plays that perfectly fit this time of year in this particular city. The ‘Ubu’ plays speak to the tangential madness within each of us. They speak to the horrific way that morals, ideas, and systems of doing things gradually petrify within us and make us grotesque. And they speak to the ability of a well-executed bit of debauchery to undo all of it. 

The play makes no sense; the play makes perfect sense. It makes perfect sense for you to be there. What’s a parade without people, and what is your Mardi Gras without some well deserved insanity? 

Let your Green Candle be your guide for the next few weeks. 

Ubu Enchaine’
Friday and Saturday
Doors Open at 7:00
Band at 7:30
Ubu at 9:00
$20 Gets you everything you need!

"Ubu" Director Alden Eagle

Cripple Creek is proud to complete Alfred Jarry’s “Ubu” trilogy this carnival season. Not just because we’re completists who enjoy trilogies, but because this is a feat that few theater companies would even contemplate.

Jarry’s initial production of “Ubu Roi” in 1896 was an infamous fiasco. Jarry himself gave pre-show introductions, apologizing to the audience that the actors weren’t better prepared. He moved and spoke stiffly and pretended he was a mechanical man, then made way for the show. The first word in “Ubu Roi” is the nonsense word “Merdre,” which is almost, but not quite, French for “shit,” often translated into English variously as “pschitt” or “shittre.” Contemporary audiences hear worse things on basic cable, but in 1896, this was quite ostentatious. The opening-night audience was a mix of avant-garde types and old-school Parisian theater patrons, and that very first word caused a mix of cheers and denunciations so emphatic that order could not be restored for fifteen minutes. The rest of the evening was not free from further interruptions, and so “Ubu Roi” opened and closed on the same night. Jarry died before live actors would ever perform one of his plays again.

READ MORE: Full details about our production and its accompanying fundraiser party

After this debacle, Jarry was unable to mount productions of “Ubu Cocu”or “Ubu Enchaine,” two sequels he later wrote. Neither play was performed in his lifetime, despite the fact that Jarry seems to have given up on writing for actors and instead wrote the final plays with marionettes in mind. Perhaps he thought foul-mouthed, violent marionettes would be easier for sensitive Parisian theater audiences to stomach than foul-mouthed, violent actors. It didn’t matter–then, as now, Jarry’s plays are scarcely ever produced.

Selena Poznak, Shannon Flaherty and Emilie Whelan as the "Palcontents" in 2010's "Ubu Cocu"

“Ubu Roi” is perhaps the most famous play that almost no one has seen, and the other plays in the trilogy are produced far less often, if that’s even mathematically possible. Try searching for past productions, and you’ll find very little. In fact, if you google “Ubu Cocu,” the middle play in the trilogy which we produced in 2011, Cripple Creek comes up quite near the top of the results. I can find no evidence of any live performance of “Ubu Cocu” in English besides our own. Doubtless there have been others, just none in the past twenty years or so when people started recording every last thing on the internet for eternity. I see that there was a Canadian production of “Ubu Enchaine” within the last few years. I have not yet learned of any American theater company that has attempted all three plays.

TICKETS: Use your credit card to secure advance tickets. Two nights only!

It makes perfect sense to me that it would be a New Orleans company that would accept this challenge. Pere Ubu is, to me, a sort of Mardi Gras King gone horribly awry. Ubu is driven purely by his greed, anger, jealousy, and lust, and every moment of his life is spent in dark revelry. I think this makes Ubu a perfect and necessary part of the New Orleans carnival calendar.

I love looking for video clips of “Ubu” plays. They are, as a rule, delightfully bizarre, and often essentially unwatchable. I think some productions go out of their way to “feel” avant-garde and serious and ponderous, which makes them interesting, perhaps, but not much fun.

We just treat these plays as straightforward comedies, albeit comedies with unusually high body counts, because that’s what we’re good at. I don’t know how Jarry would feel about all this. He might like our sloppy, comedic versions, but maybe he’d prefer it if we were a little more stiff and stylized. I don’t much care, though. “Ubu” is ours now.

– Alden Eagle

"The People's Tree"

Dear Friends and Comrades,

As Cripple Creek celebrates the holiday season with a much-deserved rest, it is
only proper to extend our well wishes to you, the people who have allowed us to reach this point. Cripple Creek has much to be grateful for. We have a forum to show our work and an audience that will listen when we talk. Our relationship with the Allways Lounge has given us a home, a stage… and a bar. Thousands of theatre companies in this country struggle for just those amenities. We live in a city that inspires and infuriates us. Here we see the best of humanity at work and its sins and foibles first hand. For all of its challenges, New Orleans is a difficult city. But as Arthur Miller once said, “A playwright lives in an occupied country. And if you can’t live that way you don’t stay.” New Orleans is a place that needs and challenges the brave we end our year determined to keep pressing on.

New Orleans is a home, and a calling, and in it’s specific way, a blessing. We are blessed with a community of individuals who push us creatively. Like-minded organizations that produce inspiring work by the skin of their teeth and thrive under the pressure and freedom of independent work. Friends like Goat in the Road who have struggled with us in the trenches of original work and who we rely on to inspire us on a regular basis. Personally, I am blessed to be in a company that is in continual evolution, that is always attempting to discover original ways to solve problems, run an organization, and present work that challenges audiences to be better citizens. I don’t mean for this to be a public love letter to my company, but as I count the joys in my life and the things I am thankful for, I realize how lucky I am to work with so many individuals who share my passion for artistic integrity, social justice, and late 19th century French Surrealism.

I think I can safely speak for the rest of Cripple Creek when I say that the biggest blessing before us is you, the person reading this entry. Through your small contributions of time, money, and interest, you have propelled us over the years. Our work does not and cannot exist in a vacuum. It is linked to the interests, hopes, and passions of our audience. Thank you for your continued interest in our work. We set ourselves the goal of always pushing forward, and the fact that you, our audience has stayed with us and grown along the way makes the journey worthwhile.. In this business you have to have friends. Thank you for being ours. Please join us in 2012 for UBU ENCHAINE, LYSISTRATA, and THE SHAKER CHAIR.

Yours in Holiday Solidarity,
Andrew Vaught

AUDITIONS ARE BY APPOINTMENT! Please e-mail Andrea Watson at pillowmancasting@yahoo.com to set up a time.

Auditions will be held at NOCCA on Saturday, December 17 from 11:30 to 1:00 and Sunday, December 18 from 11:30 to 1:00. Callbacks will be held Sunday, December 18 from 1:15 to 4:00. Please prepare a 60-second monologue, and be prepared to read from sides that will be provided at the auditions, and, of course, bring a headshot and resume. (Monologues may be from “Balm in Gilead” if you so desire, but by no means have to be.)

“Balm in Gilead” is scheduled to rehearse in August of 2012 and run in September.

“Balm in Gilead” takes place in 1966 in Frank’s diner, an all-night coffee shop on Manhattan’s Upper West Side peopled by a makeshift community of dealers, junkies, hustlers, prostitutes, dreamers and runaways.

CAST LIST:
Bob
Xavier
Tig, a male prostitute (hustler)
Martin, a herion addict
Rake, a hustler
Dopey, a hustler-addict
Ernesto, a hustler – Colombian
Tim
Carlo, a Colombian
John, the waiter/grill man
Terry
Rust
Judy
Fick, a herion addict
Babe, a herion addict
Kay, the waitress
Franny, an almost transvestite boy
David, much like Franny
Bonnie, a prostitute
Ann, a prostitute
Stranger, about thirty-five
Frank, about fifty
Al, a bum, about fifty
Joe, a New Yorker
Darlene, an attractive girl

NO ROLES HAVE BEEN PRE-CAST!

“When [Wilson's] people can’t be classified outright as deviants … they tend to suffer from that all-American sickness, rootlessness. They’re isolated, cut off from the society around them, and, more often than not, marooned in a no-man’s- land between a past that has failed to live up to their hopes and a future that looks at best uncertain, at worst very forbidding indeed. … They are, in Mr. Wilson’s own words, ‘losers who refuse to lose.’” – Benedict Nightingale, The New York Times, 1984

Emilie Whelan

Artistic Director Andrew Vaught

One thing we never have enough of at Cripple Creek is time. We commit ourselves to mounting four full productions a year. Four weeks of rehearsals for each show and then a month to run each show means that eight months out of the year are taken. This is not unusual. Most theatre companies who produce a combination of established and original work devout themselves to a similar time frame. Our new show, The Future is a Fancyland Place, has broken that routine.

Our Comrades-in-Arms, Goat In The Road Productions, work the opposite way. They spend six months to a year building a show from scratch, and their results are always impressive. Once it was decided that Goat Chris Kaminstein would direct a co-production between our two companies, those of us at Cripple Creek knew we were in for a ride. This show has taken nine months to create. The script has gone through ten drafts. We have had three separate rehearsal sessions, a workshop production, and a 120 person feedback forum. In that time, Cripple Creek has also produced Ubu Cocu and Marisol and Goat in the Road has toured the east coast with Our Man. So while we’ve been busy building a play we’ve also been busy building our theatres.

I think it’s important to break out of the comfort zone we sometimes fall into. I say that, but any member of the company will tell you that I’m the biggest baby about doing it! However, the artistic community in New Orleans will only grow if every company allows itself those moments of exploration and discomfort. You build a company by pushing your work to the limit and growing accordingly. I am proud to say that Cripple Creek has never been complacent with our choice of material or how we seek to work together as an organization to create the best possible work we can.

The training and process of Goat in the Road is designed to strengthen and focus the work of an ensemble. It is, in essence, Greek Democracy in the studio. Ideas are tested and explored, then either discarded or kept. A vocabulary unique to the ensemble is built in the room and employed to the betterment of a show. It’s wonderful to see a company so young and full of ideas dive into the work at hand with such an original and specific approach. We also do an awful amount of push-ups and ab crunches, so I should thank them for my pants hanging loose at the moment.

Cripple Creek is a large assortment of individuals with divergent interests and approaches. This is our strength. And the more the individual members get to explore and bring back what they discover the stronger we will be. I am grateful for GRP’s friendship and patience these past nine months. This show shall be something to see.

Read more about Fancyland here or purchase tickets here.