Having played Òran Mór in Glasgow, the Traverse in Edinburgh and Eden Court in Inverness we asked CHORALE company member Valerie Gogan for her thoughts on returning to her home country of Scotland with the Sam Shepard Roadshow. It’s not returning to Scotland for the first time, but it is very special to me - having left in the 80ʼs to go to drama school (LAMDA) - I surprised myself by missing my homeland hugely, the people, the humour, the sensibility and really all that is unable to be put into words - “the soul of Scotland”. I love that I am a Scot, even if I have now lived south of the border longer than I have up north. I “met” Sam Shepard in my recollection when I watched an afternoon viewing of the film The Right Stuff and he had me from the get-go. And was introduced to his writing later, mainly working with our director Simon Usher - who it turned out had worked with Joe Chaikin in his (Simonʼs) early days at the Riverside Studios in London. A few years ago he presented the duologue The Hunger to a group I was working with and asked if any of us would be interested in working on this piece for a one-off performance at the Globe (I believe it may have been meant for two men - but I loved it - it spoke my language and I volunteered) not knowing that this wonderful piece was written by Sam Shepherd and Joe Chaikin. On starting our production, CHORALE, I have now seen it performed magically by Joe Chaikin himself as a solo performance, with music, in Shirley Clarkeʼs innovative video Tongues, which we are showing with our workshop. Absolutely wonderful. To come home to Scotland and to be working in general on this wonderful trio of theatre pieces (plus the film, Savage/Love) is quite special. All these pieces of theatre make me feel inspired and energised, full of guts, challenge and beauty. Happy to come home, hope you enjoy it too.
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© Nina Sologubenko & Arnim Friess
Sam Shepard was one of America's most adventurous and poetic playwrights. Sam Shepard begins and ends with a road: the route to promise and fulfillment, or damnation - though sometimes the two seem perilously close. CHORALE was a rare opportunity to experience his work through this unique roadshow that traveled the length of that road, backwards, forwards, and any other way it is possible to go. "Sam Shepard was one of America's most adventurous and poetic playwrights. Sam Shepard begins and ends with a road: the route to promise and fulfillment, or damnation - though sometimes the two seem perilously close. CHORALE was a rare opportunity to experience his work through this unique roadshow that traveled the length of that road, backwards, forwards, and any other way it is possible to go.Just as Bob Dylan introduced Hank Williams to Arthur Rimbaud, Sam Shepard, formerly America's most wanted man, lured Beckett on to a flatbed truck with Kerouac, Corso and the Beats and drove them across America hard, fast and furiously, in search of a new sublime. Our roadshow is a stop along the way and everyone's invited to the truckstop. The Holy Ghostly is a young man’s confrontation with everything that formed him and how it might be stopping him getting where he wants to go. The Animal (You) is the liberation; the assault on life as reckless adventure. But sadness and loss descend as we see a life or lives unfold in what can only be called an outbreak of ‘rock-and-roll Beckett.' In The War in Heaven the road reaches a bend attended by illness, breakdown and reflection: and maybe recovery. The films Savage/Love and Tongues show a man submitting to the joy and pain of his relationship with ‘others’." Simon Usher We're receiving great notices and mentions in the press and on social media about our Sam Shepard Roadshow. Here's what people have been saying about CHORALE so far... Press Quotes ★★★★ "There are a lot of bits to this ‘roadshow’ of works by Sam Shepard. As well as two of his plays, there’s a rare 1981 film of his work performed by Joseph Chaikin and a mash up of his poetry and prose with musical accompaniment. Oh, and there’s a gig too. In fact, I didn’t even make it to the gig, which is really an added extra to two ‘main’ programmes (which you can watch over two nights, or – in one instance – a whole day). It’s worth catching all of it. The works by the American screenwriter, playwright, actor, buddy of Bob Dylan and one-time lover of Patti Smith are so intriguing and varied they more than warrant Presence Theatre’s holistic approach. Seeing all the pieces demonstrates how diversely Shepard deals with recurring themes. Father-and-son issues crop up again and again, as does the fallacy of the Great American Dream and the ghosts that haunt the US’s vast deserts. The ensemble, made up of three actors and one musician (Ben Kritikos of band ‘Herons!’) are versatile, and in their competent hands Shepard’s often obscure dialogue achieves real depth. John Chancer is great as a desperate, mad father in the best of the two plays, ‘The Holy Ghostly’. Its narrative completely confounds our expectations, beginning as a father-and-son trip into the desert, and becoming a riff on death, trauma and those we leave behind, following the appearance of fire, guns, a bazooka and a mad shaman spirit. It runs alongside the other programme’s ‘The War in Heaven’, co-written by Shepard and his mentor and collaborator Chaikin, which is too static, hard to grasp and ultimately the most disappointing of the pieces. The additional section starts with intense, poignant film ‘Savage/Love’ performed by Chaikin. Prose-poetry mix ‘The Animal (You)’ follows, which is beautifully compiled by actor Jack Tarlton and director Simon Usher. Shepard’s fragmented rhythms are transporting; listening to it, and to this roadshow as a whole, you’re faced with a surreal yet romantic vision of a troubled America." Daisy Bowie-Sell "WE WERE given warning of gunshots, swearing and smoke. In the event however, the gunshots were few, and the swearing no more than that heard today in most films or TV dramas, but the smoke was superb. All credit to designer Carmen Mueck for giving us a column of smoke which lasted throughout the first play, The Holy Ghostly, and was all but the star of the show, and that's not forgetting either the corpse or the ghost of a Navajo demon. Directed by Simon Usher, and presented by Presence Theatre and the Actors Touring Company in association with the Belgrade Theatre, in entirety this Sam Shepard Roadshow is made up of three plays, two films and one gig, but we were treated to the shortened version of two plays, one film. Think of Jack Kerouac's On The Road and of any road movie you have ever seen, of deserted Amercan badlands, of motels and lonely, freewheeling men, and you will come close to knowing what the works of playwright, poet and actor Sam Shepard are all about. In The Holy Ghostly a father and son, while doing nothing more innocent than toasting marshmallows around a camp fire deep in the Mojave Desert, ripped one another apart using a mix of love and hate. In the film Savage/Love, made in the 1980s by Academy Award-winning director Shirley Clarke, actor Joseph Chaikin came up with an absorbing solo performance, while in The Animal (You), the most powerful piece of the evening, we hit the road with Shepard's prose and poetry as passengers, accompanied by the rock'n'roll music made by American guitarist and songwriter Ben Kritikos of the band Herons! All praise to the cast – John Chancer, Valerie Gogan and Jack Tarlton plus Ben Kritikos – for making this challenging and exhausting drive through the mythic and mysterious, tough and testing, world of Sam Shepard, so believable and bewitching." Frank Ruhrmund "Wonderful evocative imagery & deftly acted." Kernow Arts Spy ★★★★ "It looks like someone's been stranded at the drive-in at the start of the first night of this bite-size tour through some of American playwright Sam Shepard's little-seen works by Presence Theatre and Actors Touring Company in association with the Belgrade, Coventry. There's bump n' grind bar-room blues playing, and, in front of a back-lit big-screen, some drifter in a sleeping bag remains comatose throughout the screening of Shirley Clarke's 1981 video of Savage/Love, Shepard's dramatic collaboration with actor/director Joseph Chaikin. As the title suggests, Shepard and Chaikin's 25 minute masterpiece, performed to the camera by Chaikin himself with jazz duo accompaniment, is a relentless incantation on the highs and lows of obsessive amour. On video, it becomes both an impressionistic interpretation by Clarke and an essential document of Shepard and Chaikin's fertile collaboration, which also sired Tongues and The War in Heaven, both seen as part of the second day of Chorale alongside Shepard's 1970 play, The Holy Ghostly. There's a distinct whiff of patchouli oil for The Animal (You), a compendium of Shepard's prose fragments knitted together by director Simon Usher and actor Jack Tarlton, who performs alongside John Chancer, Valerie Gogan and musician Ben Kritikos like some pan-generational art-rock poetry troupe. From behind microphones, the three men declaim Shepard's retrospective meditations on fathers, sons and barefoot girls on trains who look like Tuesday Weld. Inbetween, explosive litanies on the visceral power of rock music leap out with abandon. All this converges as a rolling interior monologue with the irresistible pull of the road at its heart in a piece of beguilingly poetic rock and roll theatre." Neil Cooper “Memorably intense performances … a fine, sustained reflection on the forces that drive Shepard’s male characters onto the road.” Joyce McMillan “Completely and utterly fascinating … what a treat it’s going to be for people.” Janice Forsyth THE BEST OF EDINBURGH “An interesting two-day event dedicated to the work of American playwright Sam Shepard kicks off on Friday evening with a double bill featuring a screening of the film Savage/Love and a new play The Animal (You), which is based on Shepard’s short stories.” ★★★★★ “A tour de force … unmissable.” Jane Howard, Behind the Arras “Evocatively conjures up all those endless highways, motels and empty badlands that dominate Sam Shepard’s work.” Jonathan Lovett Twitter Facebook On a rainy night in California: Sam Shepard and Duarte
On a recent rainy night in California, Jack Tarlton was in Duarte, the town where Sam Shepard spent his formative years. And, following a little detective work, the actor found himself at Shepard’s old house. “After some slight hesitation, the current owners welcomed me in,” Tarlton tells me, seemingly still surprised by the hospitality he received. “I mean, I was just a complete stranger who’d turned up on a bike at their house in the middle of a rainstorm on a Saturday evening. "They confirmed that it was the Shepard family home, showed me around, and told me stories of him leaving home to go to New York. They were incredibly friendly. They didn't know that their house features in some of his short stories so I promised to send them a copy of one of his books.” The visit was part of a personal research trip undertaken by Tarlton as preparation for CHORALE: A Sam Shepard Roadshow, the new project which the actor has developed with director Simon Usher for their Presence Theatre company, and which takes to the road for a tour of the UK from May. This ambitious venture will introduce audiences to seldom-seen Shepard plays as well as premièring a new piece, The Animal (You), fashioned by Tarlton and Usher from a wide selection of Shepard’s short stories. The Roadshow will also encompass music (Ben Kritikos of the band Herons! has composed a score for the productions and will perform gigs post-show), rare screenings of Shirley Clarke’s films of Savage/Love and Tongues and a series of interactive workshops. “In a way, the idea for CHORALE is really of a residency as much as a touring show,” Usher explained when I met with him and Tarlton to discuss the project. “We turn up at a theatre and present a range of shows and also do some activities with people during the day. Of course you want audiences to have an emotional reaction to the work, and there’s plenty in these plays to provide that. But at the same time you want people to engage in other ways too.” “So wherever we play two dates or more we’ll do workshops,” Tarlton adds. “We’ll start by screening the film Tongues, and then participants will go on to create a short performance inspired by the film’s themes.” Beginnings of CHORALE A co-production between Presence Theatre and Actors Touring Company in association with Belgrade Theatre, CHORALE actually began life at the Arcola in London in 2011, with a one-off performance called Making the Sound of Loneliness. Tarlton was performing in Actors Touring Company’s production of Roland Schimmelpfennig’s The Golden Dragon at the time, and ATC’s director Ramin Gray encouraged the cast to each present a piece before or after the evening’s show. Tarlton had harboured the hope of “doing something” with Shepard’s stories for years and this proved a perfect opportunity. “We presented a very rough version [at the Arcola] but it seemed to work and we felt that we had something,” he says. The show was then commissioned and restaged for the 2012 Latitude Festival where it received an enthusiastic reception, leading to the most ambitious incarnation yet in CHORALE. “The road’s what counts. Just look at the road,” remarks a character in Shepard’s 1972 play The Tooth of Crime. And the notion of a roadshow does seem particularly appropriate for Shepard, a writer for whom the seductions and dangers of the road have always been central preoccupations. With its evocations of deserts, highways and motel rooms, lost souls, hard drinkers and fractious, fractured families, Shepard’s work feels quintessentially American. Are there particular challenges for a British company in presenting it? “Directing American plays is challenging,” Usher admits. “There’s a certain energy in Shepard’s work that’s not necessarily in the English rhythm of doing things. And it’s much more about the rhythm than just getting the accent right.” “That’s one of the reasons I spent two weeks in California,” says Tarlton. “It was about living there and absorbing small-town America, going to Duarte and then into the desert on the edge of Joshua Tree and walking for four or five hours a day. And also just going and sitting in bars and talking to people. “The other thing, though, is where do you go to research Shepard? In his work he traverses the whole continent. But going to Duarte seemed to make complete sense because it’s informed so much of his writing, this place that he ran away from. I think that what we all run away from informs our adult lives far more than we think.” Asked how he first discovered Shepard’s writing, Usher recalls that he was “a big fan of the American poets of the 60s, of the Beats, the New York poets and also of American music. So Shepard was very much in the picture. I liked theatre but I didn’t like mainstream theatre. I was into the New York avant-garde and Shepard was part of that scene. I liked the disregard for theatrical convention in his work, and that he wrote plays that were like rock songs.” Tarlton first came to Shepard’s writing primarily through his short stories. “I just loved the world that he created there and the wonderful detail. He can make going to a motel room for the night sound exciting and sexy, and make you feel that anything can happen. There’s something inherently cool about those stories. “But you go back and read them again and see that there’s a lot of pain and fear that’s being masked. In his most recent collection, Day Out of Days, he lets that out, the mask slips.” Since The Animal (You) interweaves pieces from the range of Shepard’s short story collections, audiences will experience a unique take on the development of Shepard’s voice in CHORALE with, as Usher puts it, “the mature voice talking to a youthful, exuberant one.” The Roadshow will supplement Tarlton’s dramatisation of the short stories in The Animal (You) with productions of two Shepard plays: 1968’s The Holy Ghostly (which hasn’t been produced in London since its 1973 King’s Head première) and 1985’s The War in Heaven. Father and son and Joseph Chaikin Shepard’s early plays, Tarlton remarks, are “extraordinary and some of them are quite insane. He doesn’t seem constrained by logic, and he’ll often pursue a visual metaphor. You also get these sudden transformations of character. The Holy Ghostly combines the best of his dialogue writing with that wonderful wild side. It’s his ghost story, about a father and son in the desert trying to destroy the ghost of this Navajo demon. It’s short and sharp and really funny. There’s such an energy to it, and you can feel Shepard’s joy in discovering his craft in this early work. “So much of his writing is informed by the relationship between father and son. The stories are autobiographical in some sense. However, it’s very easy but also very dangerous to read them all as autobiography. Even the most autobiographical ones are filtered through fiction somehow.” Another important ghostly and fatherly presence in the Roadshow is that of the actor/director Joseph Chaikin, Shepard’s mentor and collaborator on The War in Heaven. This poetic monologue was in development when Chaikin suffered a major stroke and, afterwards, “became the means by which he reconstructed his ability to speak and to use language” says Usher, who directed Chaikin in the UK première of the piece in 1987. “There was something about Chaikin’s acting that was different from anything I’d seen before,” the director recalls with palpable emotion. “It was almost Gnostic: he seemed to be in touch with forces larger than the individual self. It felt like he touched the inside with every word. “The beautiful thing is that Chaikin was at his strongest in Beckett and had this close, intense relationship with Beckett, professionally and personally. And The War in Heaven is Chaikin’s gift back to Beckett, in a way. It’s a monologue that contains many voices, in which you get the inside and the outside of the person simultaneously. It’s a beautiful work and something I really wanted to revisit.” Chaikin died in 2003, but CHORALE audiences can experience his performances through the screenings of Clarke’s films of Savage/Love and Tongues which will be included in the Roadshow and explored in the workshops. “We want CHORALE to be as multi-disciplinary as possible,” Tarlton affirms. “And we don’t want it to be a passive experience for the audience. We hope that people will experience a whole range of things, and that we’ll be able to present a huge range of Shepard’s writing, and Joe Chaikin’s work, and see how it can transcend genre and even form. And because it’s a double-bill, where we do two nights or more, people can come and see one set of shows one night and then experience something completely different the next. “We’re also doing work with Connect, the charity supporting people who are living with aphasia, because of the connection with Chaikin. We hope to do workshops focusing on aphasia and communication, as well as a fundraiser night for the charity at the Bussey Building.” With the possibility of an extended autumn and winter tour being discussed, do Tarlton and Usher see the Roadshow as something that will continue to evolve and develop and transform as it progresses? “We hope so,” Usher says. “With Presence, we want to think about working long-term and really developing stuff. A problem with theatre in this country is that everything’s so short-term. Things aren’t always developed to anything like the potential they could be. That’s because of the whole way the business works. But there’s so much more that you can do. "So the concept of a Roadshow does suggest longevity. And also the possibility of absorbing all kinds of related particles as well, which might be Shepard-related or Chaikin-related or Herons!-related.” “It could well be that it gradually evolves into something different,” Tarlton agrees. “We’ll discover out on the road.” Tour dates CHORALE: A Sam Shepard Roadshow will tour to the following venues: Belgrade Theatre, Coventry (10-17 May), Rhoda McGaw Theatre, Woking (23-24 May), Òran Mór, Glasgow (28 May), Traverse Theatre, Edinburgh (30-31 May), The Poly, Falmouth (5 June), The Acorn, Penzance (6 June), Eden Court Theatre, Inverness (12-13 June), the CLF Art Café at the Bussey Building, London (16-28 June), and Dugdale Art Centre, Enfield (3-4 July). Read the original interview at British Theatre Guide With thanks to David Chadderton. Read more interviews and reviews from Alex Ramon at Boycotting Trends |
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