Thurs. Dec 3 @ 8 p.m.
Sneak Preview before it opens off-Broadway! Witness a new play in development from Target Margin Theater, Off-Broadway's award-winning experimental theatre company.
The Really Big Once, a company-created, dreamlike collage of a play is based upon the collaboration between Tennessee Williams and Elia Kazan on their daring Broadway production of Camino Real during the politically charged 1950s. Drawing upon their production notebooks, letters, memoirs, Kazan's HUAC testimony, and scenes from Camino Real, director David Herskovits lends his bold, theatrical vision to this play about two great theatrical giants and how they changed American culture.
A discussion and reception with the artists follows the presentation!
Want to know more? Click here for a New York Times interview with The Really Big Once Director David Herskovits.
Still more? Click here for a New York Times feature on The Insights & Revelations Performance Series and its presentation of The Really Big Once.
A Note From The Director:
In 2006 I met Elia Kazan's widow Frances and we got to talking about some
papers she thought were interesting, and a curious short play by Tennessee
Williams that had haunted her husband. I expressed a polite willingness to
look the material over. A few days later a fat manila enveloped arrived on
my desk, and I opened up a magical trove of documents that has inspired my
work for the last three years. The play was "Ten Blocks on the Camino Real,"
and the letters and notebooks all surrounded Kazan's work with Williams as
they created "Camino Real." That play was an unprecedented artistic adventure
and a risk for both men; their collaboration was passionate, tempestuous and
loving. The final year was shadowed by Kazan's testimony before the HUAC and
its seismic impact on his life. Camino flopped. Years later Kazan would say
that it was the closest he came to the avant-garde, 'and I never got it
right.' Yet Camino has proven to be one of Williams' most enduring plays; the
dream-like poetry of the production influenced generations of theater
artists to come. I found myself moved by the story of my own history, the
history of experimental creation in American Theater.
We set to work creating a new play, to make its world premiere in April
2010. With the permission and support of both Kazan and Williams' estates, we
have used letters, notebooks, memoirs, interviews and notes, much of this
source material unpublished, in a series of workshops to build the story of
these two giants and how they shaped American culture.
That story is "The Really Big Once."
Tickets are $25. To order tickets, call (914) 698-0098 or visit www.Emelin.org
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