Cecilia Fannon

So, I've bee inspired to take out a journal entry of mine that I wrote about Cecilia last year.

Sunday, 6 August 2006

"I thought I'd be a dancer. But I'm not that good at it. Truly one of the great things to happen to American theater is that I never danced on stage." ~Cecilia Fannon

I wish I had a picture of Cecilia to share. She is a playwright and from what I've heard and researched, a mighty damn good one! She is a small woman; small-boned. If you look at her, she seems very fragile and meek. What makes her a powerhouse, to me, is her quick mind and dry wit, her intelligence and humor. The woman just knows what she's talking about. I'm so intrigued by people's minds. I sometimes feel so inadequate because I feels sometimes my mind is not up to par or whatever. Okay, enough of that! On to Cecilia...I also love when she laughs because it's so contagious! When something absolutely kills her, she turns very red! Cecilia is another woman that I know that is soft-spoken with a great laugh. She prefers to devote her time listening to her students' work rather than following along with the script and being the narrator for the stage directions. She takes careful notes. She knows the questions to ask. At the reading, yesterday morning, she was wearing a soft yellow, cable-knit short-sleeve sweater with (I think) khaki pants. I don't remember the pants. I remember her blouse, though. Because it set off her light red/orange hair. I think the frames of her small glasses also had red in them.

At one point, during the reading, I looked over at her and thought, "I need to paint her something." I already know the colors I'm going to use.

I first met Cecilia earlier this year. I got a ring on my cell from some number I was not familiar with, at all. And it was her asking me if I was available and interested to read a play from a student of hers at SCR. HELLO! Of course! I was ecstatic! I had given her my headshot last year around March because she wanted any of Karen's students that were interested in participating in readings for her playwrighting classes. I never got a response back until that ring on my cell. She said that she was sorry that it took her a year to get back to me. I told her that it was better late than never! HELLO! Seriously. She wanted me to read for her Advanced Playwrighting class, a play by Michael Buss titled, THE TRIALS AND TRIBULATIONS OF SANJAY GUPTA. I would be playing Sanjay's 17 year old daughter, Millie. A pretty girl. Ha! Cecilia also said that she really liked my headshot. Which totally took me by surprise. "I really do like your headshot. And I'm VERY picky about headshots. Yours is a good one." And that was that. That began my association with Cecilia.

The reading was pure joy. We all had so much fun up there with each other. Michael said that he wanted us to get up and move around and be free. We didn't have to stay in our seats. We took total advantage of that direction and we all flew!

I was also involved in another reading for her student, Scott Samson. I was a last minute replacement. Karen was in charge of finding a person to fill in that day since Cecilia was in NY at the time.

The play was titled, REALLY USEFUL PEOPLE. And I played about 5 characters in that piece; ranging from a Louisiana torch singer to Liz Taylor in, "Suddenly, Last Summer," from a black Starbucks employee to a newscaster. Seriously. It was great! Though, I got my script a few minutes before the reading and did not have time to go over it. I went into the bathroom with the script and started to thumb threw it. Karen had highlighted all the parts I was to play. So, I came upon a couple of sections that were italicized. Yeah. Yyyeah. I had to ... wait for it ... SING! Yes. I had to SANG!!! What?!!! I was crazy! Karen came in at that moment and I said to her, "Karen...I have to sing..."

"Yeah."

"Karen. You've never heard me sing."

"You'll be great."

And she rushed out of the bathroom! Mm. Mm. Mm. No, she didn't. Yes, she did. She SURE did. I mean, I had NO time to be nervous. Man! I had to sing, "Stormy Weather," and two other songs. One of the other songs went like this: "This will be/An everlasting love..." Makes me think of Natasha Richardson in THE PARENT TRAP because that song was part of their soundtrack. Anywho...I just went for it. On EVERYTHING. I had fun. I was free. It was great! Wonderful time!!!

After both readings, Cecilia had emailed me, thanking me for participating. Please. She doesn't have to thank me. I'm so grateful that she thinks of me every now and then and wants me to be involved. I want her to use me! She was sad that she wasn't able to be there for the second reading. But, I believe, she had a funeral to go to. She's a New Yorker. And she wrote to me, "No doubt you were wonderful..." I mean...stuff like that makes me feel good because it's from people that know my work first. She is someone that I do respect. I remember Karen coming up to me the last day of class, I believe, and told me that Cecilia asked her, "So, what's this Lovelle like?" And Karen told her that I was reliable and a good actress. "We need to get you out there. Let's get you started." I absolutely love that woman. She's really good for me that Karen Hensel.

Yesterday, I was involved in a reading of scenes for her students. All us actors, had to run by the time the last scene was read. I felt bad for jetting but I had to go. It was past 2 and we were supposed to be out at around 1 or so. So, obviously, it was "or so"!!! I didn't want to leave without saying, "Bye" and "Thank you," to Cecilia. So, I did. I gave her a hug we chatted and she walked me out. She mentioned my headshot again and said, "I love your headshot. I really do. There's such joy in it. And you look chubby." I laughed at that and she said, "And OBviously, you're NOT chubby!" She told me to keep her updated with what I'm doing. She said that she thinks I'm an eloquent actress. "You're wonderful at cold reading. You do such a good job. You really are good." Wow.

[Her] class is so full of talent. It's a bit overwhelming. They're all so fun and creative and intelligent folk. I love it. I love to surround myself with people that really care about the craft and always want to learn and are open to criticism and improvement. It's important for artists. Plus, I'm in my element. It makes all the difference.

There's this deep well to Cecilia. She's full of depth. I don't know. How can she not be? It's in her eyes. Makes me want to get to know her. Same thing with Karen.

I have to keep going. I can't stop. I have to keep faithing in myself.

I need an audition. LIFE IS A DREAM (this was the production I was involved with last summer not the South Coast Rep one) will be coming to a close and I'll be jobless, acting-wise.

Er...I'm jobless both ways!

http://www.citybeat.com/archives/1998/issue506/onstagearticle1.html
http://www.cincypost.com/living/1999/redcor011499.html

So...I just saw her a couple of hours ago at the play reading. For the first act she read the stage directions and the second act she played a character named, Mrs Morgan. She was Good. I was rolling on the floor! The play is titled NUDE AND SUNFLOWER by Reba Thomas. I played, Clara, a dancer. A dancer working in a cabaret who has a German accent and sings! *whew* It was loads of fun. I am still so in awe with Cecilia's students.

During our break, she came up to me and we started to talk about the Bowers Museum gig. I'm Very Excited! I swear, I'm totally enamored with her. Oh! She told me not to chop off my hair. I told her that I had wanted to get it cut like Mia Farrow in Rosemary's Baby. "No! Cut it after the show if you're gonna cut it." But, really, I can't cut it because of my new headshots. I don't wanna get new ones just because I hate my hair and wanna chop it all off! Ha! I told her that I was re-learning French and she went off with that one! She told me that she speaks Italian and that she got that Rosetta Stone program for French. She loves it. She made it sound like it was a program that hypnotizes you, puts you in a trance. And she said, "It's like they're brainwashing you! I love it." Then, with her eyes wide-open, "You begin to think in French! So, you don't really have to 'translate.' It's wonderful!" God! She's makes me smile.

You know...she reminds me of Deborah Kerr in From Here to Eternity.

http://www.ocregister.com/ocregister/news/homepage/article_1259298.php
(There are 2 photos of her in this article)

HAMLET at South Coast Repertory

See it.

One day, mark my words, I Will Be Ophelia.

Currently watching: Notes on a Scandal

Article on LIFE IS A DREAM

Sunday, January 28, 2007

A 'Dream' revisited
Director and translator see relevance and beauty in the masterpiece of a Spanish playwright.

By PAUL HODGINS
The Orange County Register

Pedro Calderón de la Barca isn't a name that sparks instant recognition, even from theater know-it-alls. The 17th-century Spanish playwright wrote well over 200 works during his long and productive career, but unlike Shakespeare, Calderón was writing mostly for a select audience: the court of Spain's King Philip IV.

Even his universally acknowledged masterpiece, "Life Is a Dream," is more read and talked about than performed. The only recent major American production was held at Brooklyn's BAM Festival in 1999.

That kind of obscurity is just fine with director Kate Whoriskey and playwright Nilo Cruz. Whoriskey is directing Cruz's new translation of "Life Is a Dream" on South Coast Repertory's Segerstrom Stage; it begins previews this week.

"I'm a purist; I like to have my own personal response to the material," said Whoriskey, an associate artist at SCR whose work there ("Antigone," "The Clean House," "The Caucasian Chalk Circle") is often characterized by bold visual and thematic concepts.

Whoriskey once watched other versions of a Shakespeare play she was going to direct. "It didn't work. What happens is I'll go, 'Oh, that's a good idea, this is a good idea.' I like to come up with my own thread. If I see a great piece of theater that's a (production of) a classic, then I don't want to do it."

"I like to start with a clean slate," said Cruz, a busy Cuban-American playwright whose "Anna in the Tropics" won the 2003 Pulitzer Prize. "I speak Spanish, so I looked at the original script. There were a couple of editions that had slight changes here and there. But I wasn't interested in looking at other translations."

Cruz saw a staging of "Life Is a Dream" years ago in Miami. "I was a very young man; it was before I was involved in theater. They were really trying to honor the play. People were dressed in fur. It was in the original Spanish, which is like Shakespeare – it takes me a few minutes to adapt my ear, then I'm fine."

Whoriskey had never seen a production. "I just read the script and got really interested," she said. The play's themes struck the director as potentially resonant to a 21st-century American audience. "It's about fate and revenge and what it means to be a good or a bad leader."

At first glance, the story seems set in a universe completely removed from the here and now. Calderón placed the action in Poland, which was then a far-off and exotic locale for a Spanish audience. Whoriskey and Cruz are less specific about the setting, but they have chosen to make it otherworldly. Walt Spangler's sets feature jagged, blood-red mountains, hovering celestial objects and a huge, menacing bird.

"It's set in an entirely fictional landscape," Whoriskey said. "We're not pulling from any one area. We're making our own vocabulary."

Born under a bad sign
In his review of the 1999 production, New York Times theater critic Ben Brantley described "Life Is a Dream" as "part morality play, part fantastical allegory and part gut-grabbing revenge tragedy, with a cosmic sweep that looks back to Sophocles and a pointed, playful awareness of theatrical illusion that anticipates Pirandello." Dense, obtuse, full of repetition and odd subplots, it defies easy staging.

Calderón was inspired by the age-old philosophical quandary about life's waking and sleeping moments. How do we know what's real and what isn't? When does life begin and dreaming end?

The play's plot is as strange as anything Shakespeare ever devised. Segismundo, a prince, has spent his whole life in a barren jail cell because his father, Basilio, a firm believer in astrology, is convinced that his offspring will turn out to be bad news. According to his life horoscope, if Segismundo ascends to power he would bring doom to the kingdom.

Nearing the end of his life and reign, Basilio finally decides to set Segismundo free. The young man is drugged, brought to the court, and restored to royal splendor. But his vengeful behavior seems a strong confirmation of astrological predictions, so he is returned to his cell and told that his brief visit to the palace was all a dream.

Like most plays of the Spanish Golden Age, "Life Is a Dream" is crowded with subplots, minor characters and romance. Whoriskey and Cruz have kept most of those details, although they did cut Calderón's script liberally.

"There is a lot of repetition," Cruz said. "It's not a short play. But when I worked on (Shakespeare's) 'Taming of the Shrew,' there's a whole segment that's left out at the beginning." Whoriskey pointed out that "Hamlet" and "The Tempest" are frequently trimmed as well.

"I feel that Nilo had a real respect for the playwright that I didn't share at first," Whoriskey said. "At the workshop I said, 'We've got to change that ending. It just doesn't work.' He said, 'No, we can't just change it. We have to work within certain parameters.' "

The ending has been altered, but carefully, the director said. "In the original, it's basically about being able to triumph over your emotions. I think we are living in a time where emotional truth leads you to the right intellectual decision. We've been tweaking that ending so that it's not jarring for our audience."

No horses, please
One major alteration Cruz made was ignoring Calderón's rhyming couplets in favor of free verse. "I've never liked rhyme. And what I wanted to do was maintain the fluidity that it has in Spanish without going into rhyme. When one is doing a translation for the sake of rhyme, one loses the context of what the characters are actually saying. I wanted something that was a little more modern-sounding and yet maintained the eloquence and beauty of the language."

Though Whoriskey describes the play as "a parable for modern America" in several respects, she has been careful not to make the parallel too overt. "In rehearsal, we put a hood on somebody and I said, 'Whoa, that's Abu Ghraib in a way that's so bald, and it pulls the audience into trying to make an association at a moment when the story should stand on its own.' We're constantly coming up against the issue of how much (the audience will) infer."

The director also found that while the play is full of opportunities for humor, it has to be used judiciously.

"How you go from one moment to the other is essential. In rehearsal I thought, 'Oh, this part will be funny,' and it was. And then I put it up against the previous moment and realized, 'This is awful because it undercuts the weight of the scene.' "

Whoriskey made some curious discoveries about the play's dream sequences. The concept of dream vs. reality is crucial to the plot, but the difference between the two worlds isn't as clear as she initially thought.

"The play goes in and out of dreamscape all the time. l discovered the dreams aren't just when it says, 'This is a dream.' The moments that are supposedly real, there are dream sequences hidden inside of those, too."

Whoriskey promises that her production will do justice to the play's grand scope and Calderon's heroic and sweeping vision. But there are practical limitations. The play opens with a spectacular scene of runaway horses – something that any theater director would find challenging.

"I've seen horses portrayed beautifully on stage, but the effect is always really expensive. To spend all that on something that just lasts a moment is a waste." She smiled. "But I do include a riding crop!"

Cruz isn't new to the challenges of translating and adapting Spanish classics. He has worked on four other plays, including two by Federico Garcia Lorca, often considered the most difficult modern Spanish playwright to translate.

"I really try to honor the writer. I love Lorca very much, and I learned a lot about language in translating his work. When I was doing my first translation of Lorca, 'The House of Bernarda Alba,' I found that most translators don't honor his language. There's a very simple line: 'Pepe el Romano camina con la luna,' which translates as 'Pepe el Romano walks with the moon.' It's often translated as 'Walks by moonlight.' Well, that's pedestrian." Cruz showed his disdain with a shrug. "But to walk with the moon – that's beautiful and very theatrical.

"People sometimes don't trust what the writer is trying to do. You just have to pay close attention, that's all."

LIFE IS A DREAM at South Coast Repertory's Segergstrom stage. Previews begin Friday, February 2nd. Opening night: Friday, February 9th. Closing night: Sunday, March 11th. More info at: www.scr.org, or call: 714 708 5555

Currently listening to: Corinne Bailey Rae

LIFE IS A DREAM at SCR

South Coast Repertory
SEGERSTROM STAGE
655 Town Center Drive
Costa Mesa, CA 92628

LIFE IS A DREAM
By Pedro Calderón de la Barca
Translated and Adapted by Nilo Cruz
Original Music by Rob Milburn and Michael Bodeen
Directed by Kate Whoriskey

CREATIVE TEAM: Walt Spangler (set design), Ilona Somogyi (costume design), Scott Zielinski (lighting design), Rob Milburn and Michael Bodeen (sound design), Warren Adams (choreography), John Glore (dramaturg) and Erin Nelson (stage manager)

CAST: John de Lancie (Basilio), Daniel Breaker (Segismundo), Jason Manuel Olazábal (Astolfo), Richard Doyle (Clotaldo), Jennifer Chu (Estrella), Matt D'Amico (Clarín), Lucia Brawley (Rosaura) and Luis Vega (Revolutionary Leader/Servant) with Michael Irish, Ary Katz, Ceilidh Lamont, Lovelle Liquigan, Tara Louise and Andrew Scott

TICKETS: $20-$51 previews; $28-$60 regular performances.

RUNS: February 2 – March 11, 2007

PREVIEWS:
February 2 FRI at 8:00pm
February 3 SAT at 8:00pm
February 4 SUN at 7:30pm
February 6 TUE at 7:30pm
February 7 WED at 8:00pm
February 8 THU at 8:00pm
OPENING NIGHT: February 9 FRI at 8:00pm
REGULAR PERFORMANCES:
February 10 SAT at 2:30pm (Pay-What-You-Will)
February 10 SAT at 8:00pm (Press Night)
February 11 SUN at 2:30pm
February 11 SUN at 7:30pm
February 13 TUE at 7:30pm
February 14 WED at 8:00pm (Post-Show Discussion)
February 15 THU at 8:00pm
February 16 FRI at 8:00pm
February 17 SAT at 2:30pm (Inside the Season)
February 17 SAT at 8:00pm
February 18 SUN at 2:30pm
February 18 SUN at 7:30pm
February 20 TUE at 7:30pm (Post-Show Discussion)
February 21 WED at 8:00pm
February 22 THU at 8:00pm
February 23 FRI at 8:00pm
February 24 SAT at 2:30pm
February 24 SAT at 8:00pm
February 25 SUN at 2:30pm
February 25 SUN at 7:30pm
February 27 TUE at 7:30pm
February 28 WED at 8:00pm
March 1 THU at 8:00pm
March 2 FRI at 8:00pm
March 3 SAT at 2:30pm
March 3 SAT at 8:00pm
March 4 SUN at 2:30pm
March 4 SUN at 7:30pm
March 6 TUE at 7:30pm
March 7 WED at 8:00pm
March 8 THU at 8:00pm
March 9 FRI at 8:00pm
March 10 SAT at 2:30pm (ASL-interpreted)
March 10 SAT at 8:00pm
March 11 SUN at 2:30pm
CLOSING NIGHT: March 11 SUN at 7:30pm

POST SHOW DISCUSSIONS:
Wednesday, Feb. 14 and Tuesday, Feb. 20
Discuss the play with members of the cast following the performance.

INSIDE THE SEASON: Life is a Dream
Saturday, Feb. 17, 10:30am–12:30pm
A 2-hour comprehensive class featuring creative personnel from the current production. Tickets: $10.

BOX OFFICE WINDOW HOURS: 10am to 8:30pm Tuesdays through Saturdays; noon to 8pm Sundays; 10am to 6 pm Mondays and non-performance days. American Express, VISA and MasterCard accepted. (714) 708-5555.

LOCATION: Folino Theatre Center, 655 Town Center Drive, Costa Mesa CA 92626. One block east of South Coast Plaza at the Bristol Street/Avenue of the Arts exit off the San Diego (405) Freeway.

More 411: www.scr.org