Richard Maxwell, former intern...
This article came out in the New York Times yesterday:
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/02/19/theater/richard-maxwell-comes-full-circle-with-oneills-early-plays.html?pagewanted=all
I put this in here to inspire the young directors out there who can afford to intern, to do it. And if you can't, then, find other ways to get in the rooms. But not just anywhere. Look for people who inspire you and get in their rooms, find a way, there is always a way, and you learn things that you never thought possible.
Richard Maxwell fascinates me. He founded a theater company in Chicago years and years ago that no longer exists called the Cook County Theater Department. If you live in Chicago find someone older than you and ask them about Cook County. They speak of this company with affection.
I had a teacher when I went to Columbia who had been working in New York with the Wooster Group and other "downtown" theater companies, and he showed us a video of Richard Maxwell's company there, called New York City Players. I still think of this video and the style of the piece, even though I saw it over 12 years ago. The plays were musicals, but were all performed in this unaffected, almost 2-dimensional style, which you'd think would get boring, but something about the flat banality of the performances really brought to light some thing to me. And really spoke to the apathetic world in which we lived.
I just dug this up on another website when searching him:
“If I had to pin my style down, I’d call it realism.” This is how the acclaimed playwright, and one of Entertainment Weekly’s 100 most creative people in entertainment, Richard Maxwell, sums up his style. And how true. As he sees it, “It’s not another reality that you’re trying to create. You’re seeing what happens in the moment, which is, for me, the highest reality.” Maxwell often casts people who don’t know how to act, preferring to see people be “afraid and brave.” His experimental style is evident in the songs he writes for his plays, and in the way, as the New York Times states, his characters “often deliver lines without inflection...The less demonstrative their behavior, the deeper they seem.”
He has a style all of his own.
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/02/19/theater/richard-maxwell-comes-full-circle-with-oneills-early-plays.html?pagewanted=all
I put this in here to inspire the young directors out there who can afford to intern, to do it. And if you can't, then, find other ways to get in the rooms. But not just anywhere. Look for people who inspire you and get in their rooms, find a way, there is always a way, and you learn things that you never thought possible.
Richard Maxwell fascinates me. He founded a theater company in Chicago years and years ago that no longer exists called the Cook County Theater Department. If you live in Chicago find someone older than you and ask them about Cook County. They speak of this company with affection.
I had a teacher when I went to Columbia who had been working in New York with the Wooster Group and other "downtown" theater companies, and he showed us a video of Richard Maxwell's company there, called New York City Players. I still think of this video and the style of the piece, even though I saw it over 12 years ago. The plays were musicals, but were all performed in this unaffected, almost 2-dimensional style, which you'd think would get boring, but something about the flat banality of the performances really brought to light some thing to me. And really spoke to the apathetic world in which we lived.
I just dug this up on another website when searching him:
“If I had to pin my style down, I’d call it realism.” This is how the acclaimed playwright, and one of Entertainment Weekly’s 100 most creative people in entertainment, Richard Maxwell, sums up his style. And how true. As he sees it, “It’s not another reality that you’re trying to create. You’re seeing what happens in the moment, which is, for me, the highest reality.” Maxwell often casts people who don’t know how to act, preferring to see people be “afraid and brave.” His experimental style is evident in the songs he writes for his plays, and in the way, as the New York Times states, his characters “often deliver lines without inflection...The less demonstrative their behavior, the deeper they seem.”
He has a style all of his own.
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