Thursday, May 30, 2013

01 - Angela Santillo and The Unfelt Wonder


Being a playwright, I felt it was only appropriate to interview a fellow theatre artist for this first installment, so  on May 26th, 2013, I interviewed Angela Santillo about her solo show, The Unfelt Wonder, which will be performing at the Dixon Place Lounge on June 4th.

Throughout the course of her interview, we discussed the business of theater, her passion and struggles for being a theatre artist and the transformation of her solo show.

Angela performing a monologue from The Unfelt Wonder

Angela's insights on creating art and persevering in the theatre arts are inspiring and thought provoking.  It is my hope that fellow theatre artists can relate to what she says and that people outside the field are able to get a deeper insight into this career.  So...without further ado...:










Angela Santillo is a New York based playwright and actress. Her plays have been workshopped and performed at Dixon Place, Pan Asian Rep, Abingdon Theater, The Nightborn, Communal Spaces, foolsFURY Theater, Play on Words Productions, Playwrights Center of San Francisco, Sarah Lawrence College and Saint Mary’s College.  Her play Sera (dir. Rebecca Engle, Saint Mary’s College) was a national finalist for the 2010 David Mark Cohen Award and was also given a Distinguished Achievement Award in Playwriting by the Kennedy Center’s American College Theater Festival.  A lover of devised and ensemble created work, writing collaborations include: Oh, the MOON! with choreographer CatherineMarie Davalos, Love in a Heat Death Universe with Benjamin Stuber, Aftermath, Maine co-created and performed with Jeanette Plourde.  Recent acting credits include:  Sheila Callaghan’s Port Out, Starboard Home (world premiere, foolsFURY Theater at ZSpace and LaMama), Know How (film, The Possibility Project) andUnfelt Wonder (solo show, Pan Asian Rep's New Works Festival).  BA: Saint Mary’s College.  MFA: Sarah Lawrence College, recipient of the Lipkin Playwriting Award

The Unfelt Wonder
The doctors are talking, the public is debating and The Unfelt Wonder still wears big black gloves.  A twisted dark comedy performed by one, The Unfelt Wonder follows one woman’s attempt to escape the lifelong scientific experiment that has denied her physical contact with objects, people and herself.


Tuesday, May 28, 2013

The Project Project: What's Up With That?


I'm tired of immediacy.
Even more so, I'm tired of my own personal need for immediacy, to produce complete and finished pieces of work in every aspect of my life.  
I see this weariness most people; the rush towards completing a task in order to move onto, and complete, the next one.  It's my belief that we are a product obsessed society, more focused on giving reverence to the product than to the process.  There's a comfort in having something to show for the work that you've done, whether the result is negative or positive because it gives us something concrete to talk about and share with others.    
But we are always working on Something.  And while those Somethings have little goals we aim to accomplish, the longer journey of their completion and existence is often lost.  If Life is a journey and the projects that we pick up along the way are ones we choose to do because they're an extension of ourselves, then shouldn't there be just as much focus on the process as the product it produces?
That's why I started The Project Project, a long term experiment in which I will interview a person/band/collective every other week about a project they're working on and follow up with them once a year for the next three years.
Basically that's 25 different projects being tracked over a three year period.
That's a lot of  work horror excitement 
Definition of the word project: An individual or collaborative enterprise planned and designed to achieve an aim.
As you can see by the definition I copy and pasted straight out of a Google search, anything can be defined as a project as long as its purpose is to achieve an aim.  I'm interpreting it broadly and loosely so as to include as many different types of people as possible from as many different fields as I can.   This is not only so I can have different perspectives represented, but so theatre artists, doctors, scientists, bakers, musicians and athletes  all have a chance to c0-exist together and have their stories told and followed.  
We often get so entrenched in our own communities that we wind up knowing little else about the reality of other careers other than how they're poorly creatively portrayed on television and in the movies.  I not only want to learn about other people's lives, but hope that this project will bridge gaps between communities and allow them into other people's  worlds.  This will hopefully allow stereotypes to be smashed and perspectives to be widened by the participants and by those who follow the project as well.
Will this be a success?  
We'll find out in three years.
But for now, I hope you enjoy the journey.