Highlights from the Idylls Show, November 20th Launch

All photos by Douglas Mowbray.

Entry into the Athenaeum

 

Opening the Show:  Sue Struve
"A Native Chief's Captive Woman Guards One Freshly Caught"

Sue Struve - "Captive Woman" in Idylls

 "Welcome.  This is your introduction to the wilderness and barbaric life."

 Kimberly Mikec 
"A Sorceress Casts a Spell on her Faithless Lover"

"...and all I'll do is run my fingers over his strong chest."

Kimberly Mikec - "Sorceress" in Idylls

Rachel Morrissey
Anne Ashbaugh's "Leda" and more...   (as in, "More, more, more, more!")

 "Great Car!  Great Car!" (in homage to Richard Foreman)

Rachel Morrissey - "Leda" in Anne Ashbaugh's soliloquy

Harlie Sponaugle
"A Mother Feels Her Estranged Daughter's Labor Pains"
  

Harlie Sponaugle - A "Mother" in Idylls

"Is that your cry?"

Genna Davidson
"Antigone Buries her Brother's Body Against Orders of the King"
  

Genna Davidson - "Antigone" in Idylls

  

"I feel I've gone the uttermost limit of daring..."

Interlude:  Old Songs

Songs of Hipponax

Old Songs - L to R: Rebby Sharp, Mark Jickling, Chris Mason, and David Brumbaugh

"Hermes, blissful Hermes

You  know how to wake the sleeper"

Carol McCaffrey
"A Saint Preaches to the Birds"

"so that you may fill the pure air with song..."

Carol McCaffrey - "A Saint" in Idylls

Margaret Anthony
reading Kharms

Margaret Anthony, reading Daniil Kharms' "An Optical Illusion"

"...showing him his fist!"

Paul Morton
"Palamedes, Inventor of Numbers, Alphabets, and Lighthouses, Muses Upon his Accomplishments"

Paul Morton - "Palamedes" in Idylls

"No more than a seafarer in soul am I..."

The Cast

And so there you have it, the show, this iteration of Idylls, this incarnation of it, November 20th 2011...

and here I am - hosting and welcoming then, and welcoming now and soon to come, next iterations, incarnations...

Magus Magnus

For a look at the full set of photos, click
http://www.flickr.com/photos/buddhakowski/sets/72157628162249269/with/6392465665/

- - -
Don't forget to order the book, Idylls for a Bare Stage 
(http://twentythreebooks.com )
for its three-part offering:  poetry on the page, poetic monologues for the stage, and - through the book's introduction - an old-new theory and practice for Acting and Theatre (with a chewy set of monologues for the actor)...

Through the reinvented form of the Idyll, affirmation of the actor as an independent artist, the audition monologue turned on its head into theatre itself, theatre that can be done almost anywhere.

And please check out my other books as well:   
Heraclitean Pride http://furniturepressbooks.com/books/magnuspride/  
and Verb Sap http://narrow-house.blogspot.com/

Both Heraclitean Pride and Verb Sap can be ordered from SPD Books
http://www.spdbooks.org/Search/Default.aspx?AuthorName=Magus+Magnus

Many thanks from M.

Performer Profile: Paul Morton

Paul Morton in "Palamedes, Inventor of Numbers, Alphabets, and Lighthouses, Muses upon his Accomplishments"

Paul Morton - "Palamedes" in the Idylls

    The Palamedes Idyll is one of four original compositions in Idylls for a Bare Stage, although the only one to be performed Sunday night (the rest having some relation to source texts).  Still, I can't say it's "wholly" original - going beyond the philosophical difficulty in saying that about anything.  Although the piece doesn't jump off from or follow another specific source, trace materials about this mythic inventor, this great Greek originator, seeded the inspiration... mythic facts, such as the detail that Palamedes - like Heracles, Jason, Ajax, and Achilles - was a pupil of Chiron the Centaur.

     It quickly became clear Paul had the tools to take on Palamedes:  rich voice, instinct, understanding.

     Yet, it is his free-wheeling process that takes him into the part.  Plowing, plunging.  It reminds me of the first thing I watched him do, during that Actors' Center workshop developing the techniques of the Idyll/poetic monologue, when one of our exercises triggered in him an instant persona for the piece at hand:  suddenly, he had an appropriate accent for the part, and the right tone and pacing to take him all the way through the scene - basically, it was performance-ready immediately, albeit in so far as what it was on book. 

     For the Palamedes Idyll, the complications of its rhythms between the abstract and the personal, between pristine mind and messy human endeavor, between analytic science and irreducible awe make it somewhat more involving for any actor.  Paul's free-wheeling plunging with each rehearsal took him powerfully into it, passes by turns led on or driven by the text; he kept everything loose with pass after pass at it, each a deepening, "knocking it out" as he calls it, each pass an incorporating, soon to find the character, soon to find the voice, then soon to find the thoughts, into the life of Palamedes, into what was Palamedes and was now his, Paul's.  So stick around - he'll knock you out with his Palamedes constituting the finale for Sunday's show.

     Paul Morton is an actor and lifetime resident of Alexandria.  Stage shows performed in include Fences, Hair, Taming of the Shrew, Lysistrata, Of Mice and Men, Romeo and Juliet, Comedy of Errors, Native Son, The Music Man, Victor/Victoria, Teahouse of the August Moon, The Curious Savage, The Crawlspace Waltz, The Christmas Carol, Intimate Apparel, and The Last Meeting of the Knights of the White Magnolia.  He is also an actor of commercials, educational videos, and industrials.