SABBATICAL ADVENTURES

Because this was a staged reading, no set was needed. The director, however, decided that the image of the show should be present as a visual. He also added two music stands and a box that served as a "table" to hold a few props.  During the staged reading, the audience was very responsive. I could hear them react and laugh. And as expected, the lip-synch songs felt too long and they were a challenge to perform, especially without actual costumes and props. Before the reading, we told audience members that they could stay behind once the reading was over because we wanted to hear their opinion. After the reading, some audience members stayed and we had a lovely 30-minute conversation. In the end, the audience said the lip-synch felt a little too long and that shortening the length of the numbers would benefit the script. Our hunch was correct.  To sum up the audience's impressions, the show made them feel as if "I was in someone's living room," "listeni...

I've arrived in Wooster, OH as planned. In the next two days, I will be giving a workshop on "solo performance" and preparing for the staged reading.  The artistic director of Teatro Travieso is also a full-time faculty at The College of Wooster . His theatre company does a lot of collaborations with the drama department at the college. That relationship allows Dr. Noriega to use the college's theater spaces for his own projects. This staged reading of Introducing Moderna Suspiros will take place in one of their performing spaces, the Shoolroy Arena, which is a performing studio that holds about 100 people in a "black box" theater-style space. The Shoolroy Arena Theatre is located inside their bigger theatre complex known as "The Freedlander Theatre."  As I walk around campus I see a few posters announcing the staged reading: One thing about the image is that the idea for the show came from me but the image helped me solidify what the character a...

Where I Work Fall 22 has become the semester to fully work on both, my sabbatical play and the planning of my sabbatical trip.  So far the one-person show has had three different re-writes, it has been read by three different theatre professionals: a theatre producer, a dramaturg, and a playwright, and by two closed friends who are university professors.  Once they all read the play I met with them, either in person or through zoom. I listened to their impressions of the script; we discussed the themes, the messages and character(s) and the goals of the story, and I listened to their suggestions. Afterward, I wrote a new version of the play and I was finally able to give the script a title:  Introducing Moderna Suspiros .  The play is "a comedy about a wannabe Latinx drag queen who is reflecting on life and love after COVID. The show intertwines music with the experiences of a man who laughs at life despite adversity and aging.  This latest version of the script...

Photo by  Vlad Hilitanu  on  Unsplash I am creating this blog as a means to document my sabbatical work, which is divided into two parts:  1: A trip to Italy in relation to Commedia dell'arte and its characters and  2: t he writing of a new play based on the "Commedia dell'arte findings.   Officially, my sabbatical was supposed to start in the spring of 2021 with the trip to Italy and then, in the spring of 2022, I was going to write the play. But then the pandemic hit and the sabbatical plans were flipped and adjusted to the situation.  The trip to Italy was postponed to Spring 22, thinking that by then things would be back to "normal." This meant that the writing of the play needed to happen during spring 21 and instead of writing a play based on "Commedia," the play would now be either a multicharacter play or a solo piece and either type of play would have to be a collaboration with a Latinx Theatre Company.  Two Latinx theatre companies came ...