AP:  An annual $150,000 prize has been established by the foundation of Tony-winning playwright-director Arthur Laurents and partner Tom Hatcher. The Laurents/Hatcher Foundation Award will be given for an unproduced, full-length play of social relevance by an emerging American playwright. The prize includes a $50,000 cash award for the selected playwright and a $100,000 grant for production costs of the play’s premiere at a nonprofit theater.

The foundation said Thursday it’s the first major award for playwrighting to be named in honor of a gay couple. The 92-year-old Laurents wrote the books for “Gypsy” and “West Side Story.” Hatcher was Laurents’ partner of 52 years. The actor and real estate developer died in 2006.

Submissions from invited applicants will be accepted June 15 to Sept. 15. The first award recipient will be notified March 15.

According to tax filings, the Laurents/Hatcher Foundation is based in Riverhead, NY and had approximately $5.6 million in assets in 2008.

Laurents’ generosity brings to mind Aaron Copland, who left his copyrights to a foundation that supports American music. The Aaron Copland Fund for Music has been giving grants totaling about $2 million annually for almost 20 years now.  In a recent interview, former Copland Fund president John Harbison said that the income flows primarily from just four pieces of music.  The late Virgil Thomson, another “bachelor composer” (no direct family heirs), also established a foundation with his will. But his music and writing never had the same kind of popular success as did that of Laurents and Copland.

Early on in the film a playbill for “Caesar” has the clear statement “Music by Marc Blitzstein” and later the leader of the pit band (never addressed as Marc, but presumably the composer) gets into a brief shouting match with Wells as does just about every other character in the movie, except when they’re kissing his talented brilliant ass.

It’s a sweet film, with lots of period detail that reminded me a bit of the brilliant 1999 adaptation of “The Cradle Will Rock,” but without the political messages, just the feel of the Manhattan arts scene during the Depression.

Cute Zac Efron plays a naive youth hoping he can make it in the theatre while also standing up to the boss.  (Don’t count on it kid.)  It’s the first Zac Efron film I’ve seen and it says something that I wasn’t always thinking, “Oh, that’s Zac Efron.”

The producers of the film didn’t go to the effort of finding Blitzstein’s own original score for the Welles production.  Even if it survives it’s probably only some fanfares, drum rolls and sundry entr’actes. The film’s suitable but not memorable soundtrack is by Michael J. McEvoy.

According to Internet Movie Database, the bandleader in the film is played by Jools Holland. While the actor in the film didn’t exactly resemble photos of Blitzstein, other than the pencil moustache, I don’t think he much resembled the Jools Holland who’s a band leader with a show on USA. But I’ve never seen that show, so I am now out of my league.

Still, it was a nice touch including Blitzstein’s name on one of the film’s properties.

I caught a screening of “Wild Combination” on November 11 as part of the quirky little iEAR series at RPI, here in Troy. The filmmaker Matt Wolf was on hand and took a few questions.  During his final comments he revealed that he’s currently making a documentary about Jerome Robbins who he’s not liking (news flash: nobody did). But Wolf says that he probably would have liked Arthur Russell, even if they might not have been close friends.  Based on Wolf’s beautiful film, I feel much the same way and am also reminded of how tricky it is be very friendly with an artist when you don’t grove to his work.

Russell died of AIDS in 1992 at age 40.  As with so many other gay men of his generation who passed on way before their time, it’s hard to know what more he might have accomplished and whether he’d ultimately find a mature musical voice. Judging from this distant vantage point, Russell’s challenge was to bring together his disparate interests in folk music, the avant garde and disco.

Wolf’s film is a loving tribute that made me root for Arthur and be touched by the tragedy of his life and the still palpable grief of those loved ones left behind, namely his parents and his partner Tom Lee.  It’s based primarily on archival footage and Wolf said that every scrap of film that exists of Russell is in the movie. Admirable work, for sure.  We see Russell singing as he plays cello, also playing guitar and generally hanging out at venues like The Kitchen and Experimental Intermedia.  There’s footage of Ginsberg speaking at Russell’s memorial, and the dozen or so talking heads who were interviewed include Philip Glass. There’s also plenty of colorful original footage and enough keen editing to show the hand of a smart and promising filmmaker.

What’s not present is much of an understanding of the gay experience. The memories of Arthur’s slightly trouble childhood in Iowa — being too smart, picked on at school, etc. — are set up to suggest the youthful presence of a great artistic persona. But what it really sounded like was just another fag child suffering on the playground.  Painful but very familiar.  Wolf also includes two comments from interviewees that simply aren’t believable.  There’s Arthur’s mother saying she did a double take when she heard, second hand, that her son was gay. As if every mother doesn’t always have more than an inkling.  And then Arthur’s companion tells of how he spotted (cruised) Arthur three times in the East Village before finally approaching him. But then he adds something like, “whether or not we might both be gay never crossed my mind.” Hello?  You were chasing him around your neighborhood hoping for what? An evening of watching the Yankees.

Anyway.

After setting up his subject as a mighty innovator and iconoclast for the first two-thirds or so of the 71 minute film, Wolf does let his interviewees talk about Russell’s difficult personality (he could lead a band, but not be a member of one) and his jealousy and paranoia (at one point he was convinced the Rolling Stones were stealing his ideas).  Besides the friendship with Glass and Ginsberg (who admits to a crush), there’s documentation of two brief collaborations of interest:  he played with the Talking Heads a few times and he wrote music for a Robert Wilson creation, “Medea,” though Wilson pulled Russell’s music after only one performance.

“Wild Combination” (the title comes from a Russell song, by the way) also puts forth the facts of Russell’s death from AIDS with admirable clarity and matter of factness. I liked how one friend said that Arthur was always rather spacey and dissasociative and that AIDS ultimately made him more so.  And my eyes got moist when Russell’s dad recalls a brief final conversation with his son in the hospital (“You’re a good sport.” “Really?” “Yeah, really.”)

The recent revival  – or new but long overdue? –  in Russell’s music serves as a kind of coda to the film. This section runs a little long, but is still heartening.  Russell was a finicky dabbler and made numerous takes, edits and mixes of his music, so there’s thousands of tapes that might be fodder for still more releases to come.

Hearing his mumbly but soulful voice, jumping between registers and heavily laden with echo, I thought of Antony and the Johnsons.  Bridging avant garde and disco, or serious and pop (or whatever the latest terms are) is a never ending effort and apparently younger generations are seeing something prophetic in Arthur Russell.  If not for AIDS, he might have been right there with them.

As much as I’ve loved that slow and lush music and its popular 1992 recording by Dawn Upshaw, I don’t remember ever checking out the words, which are sung in Polish. But supertitles provided translations during the performance of “Lipsynch,” seen on Sunday October 11 in the Harvey Theater as part of the Brooklyn Academy of Music’s Next Wave Festival.   And the poetry provides a potent prelude to what ensues:

My son, my chosen and beloved

Share your wounds with your mother

Because, dear son, I have always carried you in my heart.

While there’s other vocal music sprinkled throughout the nine-hour show, only one character does, almost, lipsynch.  That’s Sarah who we see doing some light housework, smoking a cigarette and mouthing along to Burt Bacharach’s “Do You Know the Way to San Jose?” as it plays on the radio.

Sarah’s a sometime prostitute and also the housekeeper for an elderly, wheelchair-bound speech therapist, who was a mentor and mother figure to Ada, who’s an opera singer and soloist in the Gorecki and who adopts Jeremy, who’s own mother dies on an airplane in the opening scene, while he was just an infant.  After a youthful stint leading a satanic rock band, Jeremy becomes a filmmaker, and writes a script based on what he knows about his birth mother. He researched her heritage in Nicaragua, but didn’t learn the truth about how she got to Germany only to die in a plane headed to Canada until the audience also finds out, at the play’s end.

These relationships, and many others besides, actually make plenty of sense and become quite affecting as they are revealed throughout the daylong journey.

Spending so much time in the theater — the nine hours includes four intermissions plus a 45-minute dinner break — fostered a sense of community in the audience.  I shared supper with a lively bunch sitting near by, including an acting student in her early 20s who’d only been in the city for two weeks.

Manhattanites probably still complain about having to travel all the way out to Brooklyn in order to take in BAM’s unique offerings. But I rose early and took Amtrak down from Albany to see “Lipsynch.”  Not only did I buy a train ticket, I bought my seat for the show, too. That’s not something I’m accustomed to doing. One of the few fringe benefits of being a perpetually struggling freelance writer is free tickets.  BAM’s publicity office pleaded limited availability of press tickets, but were good enough to comp me for Philip Glass’ latest opera “Kepler,” which I’ll return for in November.  (That same week I’ll also catch Lepage’s staging of Berlioz “Damnation of Faust” at The Met.)

I had little doubt that Lepage would be worth the time, effort and money.  My familiarity with him grew out of my relationship to BAM.

After beginning my arts career with a season-long internship working for Philip Bither in the Next  Wave office, I was a loyal subscriber for all of my 13 years living in the city before moving upstate in 2000. I focused my ticket buying on the music and dance offerings but generally trusted Joe Melillo and Harvey Lichenstein’s tastes. And so I took a chance on Lepage’s “Seven Streams of the River Ota” in 1996.  Also an eight- to nine-hour immersion, “Ota” weaved together another bundle of stories involving nothing less than the Holocaust, Hiroshima and AIDS.  I find it difficult to even put all three of those tragedies into one sentence, but Lepage’s show was masterful and transcendent, very human and often hilarious.  It’s not an exaggeration to say it was one of the greatest things I’ve ever seen.

“Lipsynch” doesn’t quiet raise to that level, but it doesn’t shoot as high either. Instead of placing characters in epic catastrophes, they face health issues like schizophrenia and brain tumors, or are trapped in sex slavery and incest. Plus there’s just plenty of good old fashioned family alienation.

Lepage’s trademarks as a director are in the use of audio and visual technology and the reliance on large sets made of multi-panel units.  In “Lipsynch” there’s plenty of fancy live video and audio technology new and old, including cassettes and open reel tape decks.   A large crew wheels in and out all manner of complicated but multi-functional sets.

But in a departure from Lepage’s visual focus, “Lipsyche” is, above all, about sounds and voices.  The whole idea for the piece, which Lepage wrote in collaboration with the actors of his Toronto-based company known as ExMachina, came to him while riding in an airplane. An operatic soprano was warming up in first class at the same time a baby was crying in coach.  Both of those show up in the first scene and are followed by:

• a surgeon illustrating the parts of a brain that affect speech
• voice lessons and the unexpected intimacy they often bring about between teacher and student
• speech therapy
• overdubbing spoken dialogue for a film
• lip-reading
• multi-track recording of vocal music with no texts (one track sounded like a percussion line, two and three tracks together like Steve Reich, and the final four-track like a kind of Medieval take on Meredith Monk)
• choir practice
• jazz scatting
• electronic transformation of a female voice into the male register (a la Laurie Anderson)
• the emotional effect of remembering a deceased parent’s voice
• multiple overlapping conversations in a crowded restaurant
• voices raised in an argument (though the actors are unseen)
• the pervasive, wallpaper characteristics of radio news, as it drones on and on
• poetry recitation
• the necessity of changing one’s voice to change one’s identity.
• recording of audio books
• actors creating a laugh track
• the uncanny ability to identify a person’s age, body type and province by listening to a voice
• the voices heard in one’s head, sometimes as a symptom of mental illness.
• voice mail
• and, of course, cell phones with and without hands free devices.

Many of these drive the plot, while the presence of certain things, especially the brain surgery, seemed a little obvious.

There were only nine actors in the show and each played multiple parts. At least half of “Lipsynch” was performed in languages other than English, including French, Spanish, German and Italian.  Frequently the supertitles dropped away with little effect, since the gist of things was clear enough.  Who needs to know every invective hurled during an argument.

Also present was another trademark of Lepage’s own creations (as opposed to his increasing work in opera) and it’s something that I relish:  silence.  What a rarity in the theater!  Several pivotal scenes were conducted with no dialogue, just some random street noise or the sound of news commentators on talk radio.

In a brilliant and luxurious device, one scene of at least 10 minutes in length was performed twice, back to back.  It takes place inside a small Toronto bookstore on a snowy evening.  First, we watch from the street, looking in through the dirty windows at Michelle, a middle aged woman who’s wrestled with mental illness.  She glimpses out on the chilly sidewalk a priest dressed in vestments and a little girl in play clothes. It’s obvious that they exist only in her mind. All we hear are traffic noises.  But then time jumps backward and we’re inside the warmth of the shop and listen as Michelle patiently assists the browsers and shows an impressive knowledge of literature and poetry.  In the scene’s final action, she hands a large book to a young man who departs without paying.  On first viewing, it seems she’s carelessly giving away the stock. But on second encounter, we hear that it’s a loan to a struggling student burdened with homework.

There were many other wonderful moments in “Lipsych,” lots of funny lines and a wrenching denouement that most of us figured out by the time the last intermission rolled around.

After all those voices, disembodied and incarnate, and all that modern technology, the marathon ends as it began with some of the Gorecki symphony. The singer, Rebecca Blankenship who played Ada, appears much as she did at the beginning. But now, she’s not just a singer, but she’s one more voice that’s not yet been included in the play — that of the earth itself.

Where has he gone

My dearest son?

Perhaps during the uprising

The cruel enemy killed him…

He lies in his grave

and I know not where

Though I keep asking people

Everywhere.

SCHENECTADY – Sometimes theatrical producing means simply investing money into a big ambitious venture, as Proctors Theatre has done a bit lately with Broadway musicals. But producing can also mean finding some dough and also putting together a team of artists to create something new. That was the case with a new hour-long multidisciplinary show that premiered Friday night in the GE Theatre.

“From Within and Outside a Bright Room” was conceived by Peggy Gould, a dancer and actress, who performed with a team of four other women, each of whom displayed a strong stage presence and distinct talents. The piece is a kind of follow-up to Tony Kushner’s “A Bright Room Called Day,” a play that Gould stage managed at its 1985 premiere. Over the years, she’s been exploring its themes and adapting portions of its texts, which address life in Berlin during the rise of Hitler.

Though the show was part of the Dangerous Music series, it consisted primarily of spoken monologues. Cautious fear and simmering anger came through regularly, and yet the whole was a pleasantly serene experience. It’s as if the performers knew that the linking of Reagan and AIDS and Bush and Hurricane Katrina with Hitler and the Holocaust would not be new information to the audience, so it would do little good to shout about it. Actually, there were just as many soliloquies about the foibles of humanity, including the fleeting nature of memory, the desire for spiritual attainment, and the necessity of food.

Lyrical moments were plentiful, thanks to several Schubert lieder, sung unaccompanied and beautifully by soprano Elizabeth Phillips, as well as some modern dance episodes. During a series of “videorants,” each woman addressed a camera while her live image was projected above the stage. Dancer Jules Skloot, brunette and clad in black, was captured so tight that only portions of her slow moving upper limbs and jittery face were seen on screen. Meanwhile, Phillips sang a jazz standard about missing a lover.

Pamela Sneed, a writer and actress, had the most varied or volatile presence. She could be almost self-deprecating one moment and rather terrifying the next as her dark eyes bore down on the audience.

A lively opening chorus in tight harmony was composed by Eve Beglarian, who also held her own in the delivery of texts. Her final chorus, “Flood,” was accompanied by an image of a broken levee.

Originally appeared in the Times Union.

In the ensuing years, the space has been used for a variety of civic activities, and there have been attempts at having a resident organization, such as a professional repertory theater company, a community theater troupe and a folk music group. But since 2003, when Cohoes native and off-Broadway actor Jim Charles, 47, moved back home with his partner Tony Rivera, 35, a dancer with a background in management, the city of Cohoes has had not just a theater but also a professional theater company.

C-R Productions at the Cohoes Music Hall, as their nonprofit organization is known, has a paid staff of five, an annual lineup of a half dozen musicals and a hopping box office. Between the main productions and a variety of children’s programs, last year’s performances were attended by more than 20,000 people. The company has a base of 1,000 loyal subscribers. Its final production of the season, Stephen Sondheim’s “A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum.”

“Their performances have brought thousands of people to downtown, where we never had anybody coming to downtown previously,” says Cohoes Mayor John T. McDonald III. “The shows bring people from a radius I never would have dreamed of, like people from the Berkshires. Five or six years ago, I never would have believed that would happen.”

Although Charles and Rivera carry the respective titles (and ensuing duties) of artistic director and producing director, they occasionally appear on stage as well. Charles himself is leading the cast of “Forum.” He plays Pseudolus, the high-strung singing and dancing slave who goes through madcap antics to gain his freedom.

Actually, the role isn’t much of a stretch for Charles, since juggling myriad tasks and maintaining a generally good humor is how he and Rivera run the Music Hall on a daily basis.

“We’ve been here four years, but just now got the go-ahead (from the city’s historic preservation watchdogs) to put some stuff on the walls,” says Charles, standing in the lobby and rolling his eyes at the empty brown walls as only an actor could. “We’re very lucky,” he continues, “the community loves this place.”

Charles and Rivera’s first show in Cohoes was “Tonight, Tonight, Tonight!” a one-night-only revue in March 2002. It was born out of a post-9/11 desire to look beyond life in Manhattan, where the couple had been living.

“We called about 15 of our friends from off-Broadway and television and said we want to do a revue-type show,” recalls Rivera. “We got a cellphone with a 518 area code, and that was our box office.”

“Tonight” included local as well as out-of-town talent, as have all subsequent productions, and met with huge popular success. And it led to Charles and Rivera being courted by new fans in Cohoes.

“I used to call them every other day and say, `Get up here,’” recalls Eunice Antonucci, owner of Smith’s Restaurant. As one of the only dinner spots in Cohoes, Smith’s has benefited from the traffic brought in by the theater, and Antonucci has joined the board of C-R Productions. But she appreciates more than the commerce.

“We like coming out of their shows singing and tapping our feet,” she says. “We need that. This is a depressed area with a loss of the mills and business.”

“We’ve cornered the market on the musical theater fix people need from September to May,” says Rivera, who played Bernardo in the 2004 production of “West Side Story.”

Every season at Cohoes includes a mix of classic Broadway musicals alongside newer staples from the ’80s and ’90s. For example, next year features “Carousel” and “42nd Street” as well as “Little Shop of Horrors” and “Miss Saigon” (but don’t look for a helicopter on the small Cohoes stage).

Each show is rehearsed and mounted in a tight two-week production period and runs for three weekends. A typical cast numbers 12, with half that many more musicians in the pit. Last fall’s “Ragtime” was the largest production to date, with an onstage company of 37.

What sets Cohoes apart from almost any other professional house in the country is the absence of amplification. In contrast to today’s Broadway, where the sound is as powerful as at the movies, hearing the natural voices of the performers re-emphasizes the intimacy and immediacy of live theater.

“When Jim first told me it was an acoustic house, I said, `You’re kidding.’ That’s very rare and it means we have to get actors who can handle it,” states music director Michael McAssey. A 20-year veteran of off-Broadway and regional theater, McAssey relocated from Aspen to join the Cohoes team this season. He continues, “In a lot of ways (singing without a mike) is a lost art.”

That observation is borne out every time auditions are held.

“A lot (of young actors) don’t get the concept,” says Charles, “I say, `We’re an acoustic house,’ and they say `What?’”

“C-R Kids” is the umbrella name for a variety of educational activities at the theater. Coming up is a Circus Summer Camp. In December, 3,000 children saw school-day performances of “The Sound of Music.” The January production of “Disney’s High School Musical” featured a local cast of 32 kids, culled from 250 who auditioned.

“We treated them like professionals. We’re not like the high school, where you rehearse for four months,” says Charles, who recalls that his own teenage theatrical ambitions were met with a dearth of local opportunities for training and performance. He’s gratified that one place where he did connect with like-minded souls is still around – the Spenwood School of Dance and Gymnastics.

“You knew from the beginning Jim would do something with the theater, one way or another. He was a showman, he came in that door and you knew,” recalls Margie Pascale, who’s run Spenwood for 45 years and gave Charles his lessons in tap dancing.

When Charles came in the door again, this time as a producer and director, Pascale had no trouble recognizing him. In fact, the two did more than renew acquaintances. Dancers from Spenwood were prominently featured in the revue “Tonight!” and the school’s studios are frequently used for rehearsals of upcoming shows.

C-R Productions has received some of its most substantial funding for its education programs, including a $22,000 grant from the federal No Child Left Behind program to fund after-school enrichment activities for Cohoes middle schoolers. The largest grant to date has been $50,000 from New York state, secured by Ron Canestrari, the majority leader of the state Assembly and former Cohoes mayor. The funds are designated for capital improvements including lights, sound equipment and curtains.

The organizations’ current operating budget stands at around $300,000, with approximately two-thirds of that figure covered by earned income from ticket sales and subscriptions.

The city of Cohoes provides gratis use of the theater and covers the utilities. But the company does pay rent in downtown Cohoes – on a 2,500-square-foot scene shop and seven apartments that house actors. “That’s seven National Grid bills,” says Rivera, who hopes to one day have all operations outside the theater consolidated into one building.

To date, Rivera and Charles have not given themselves salaries, functioning in essence as full-time volunteers. To cover their own living expenses Rivera teaches gymnastics at Spenwood and Charles gives voice lessons to 20 or more students a week.

Except when one of them is performing in a production. Then, something has to be cut from the busy routine. But as they look toward a fifth season and beyond, Rivera and Charles have reached a certain comfort level so that even during the peak of a production period, they’ll take time to leave the theater and have dinner. Carving out personal time will become an even bigger priority, since the couple is taking steps toward adopting a child in the next year.

“We’ve grown into this. … It’s not as consuming at this stage,” says Charles. “We’re in this for the long haul, with our commitment to the city, the community and the building.”

Originally appeared in the Times Union, April 29, 2007.

Also available in Artists & Activists: Making Culture in New York’s Capital Region.