Tag: Adam Remsen

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Quark Theatre Presents Will Eno’s Wakey, Wakey

Photo: Tony Isbell Adam Remsen as Guy

After a pandemic-prompted hiatus, Quark Theatre is back and ready to start its fourth season with Wakey, Wakey by Will Eno. 

This is not the first time Quark is putting on Wakey, Wakey, having performed it back in October 2019, but, as Quark co-founder Adam Remsen says, “A lot of it seems a lot more personally relevant. It’s such a layered script. And counting both of the productions we’ve done, I’ve probably gone through that script a hundred times now, and I continue to find new things that I have not noticed before.”

The play opens with a presumably terminally ill Guy, rousing from a nap and asking, “Is it now? I thought I had more time.” For the next hour of the play, Remsen, who will reprise his part as the protagonist, explains, “It’s this sort of meandering monologue, where he talks about all different things — a lot about love and life and death. Though, that makes it sounds very serious, and it’s a very funny play. For something that deals with such heavy subjects, I’m always amazed at how lightly it keeps moving along. It’s so well-written.”

Interestingly, the playwright Will Eno went beyond providing the script, Remsen says. “When we did the show for the first time, we applied for the rights and we got them and got an email that Will likes to be personally involved in productions of his play.” So the group emailed with Eno, asking questions and receiving long, detailed, and personable responses. “It’s unheard of. I have literally never heard of another playwright doing that,” Remsen continues. “There were some points in the play that were confusing, and it helped us kind of figure out what was going on with those and what we were going to do. He was also very clear … that he understands that every production is different and the goal is to make this your production.

“It’s such a personal play, and it actually specifies in the script that when the play ends that in the lobby there are food and snacks and drinks provided and everyone should come out in the lobby including the cast and have a little small reception or party.” This intimacy, Remsen adds, will also be afforded in the size of the space being lent by Germantown Community Theatre. “It’s a small theater; it’s a hundred seats. … We want people to be as close as possible to the stage.”

As such, this play is within Quark’s affinity for simple, nuanced performances. “[Co-founder and director Tony Isbell] and I enjoy theater that takes out anything extraneous,” Remsen says, “where it’s just the actors, a script, and an audience. … We stick to fairly small shows, fairly new shows usually, and the kind of shows that we do are the kind no one is going to do in Memphis if we don’t do them.” 

Wakey, Wakey will run through July 17th, Thursday-Sunday, but Quark isn’t stopping there this season. Unlike seasons past, this season will have four productions, not two. Up next is What Happens to Hope at the End of the Evening, which Quark put on in March 2020, having to cancel its run after two performances. 

Wakey, Wakey, Germantown Community Theatre, 3037 Forest Hill Irene Road, opens July 7, 8 p.m., $20.

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Intermission Impossible Theater

Quark Theatre Gets Daring (Again) With ‘Wakey, Wakey,’ GCT goes ‘Barefoot,’ ‘Pond’ at POTS

Adam Remsen and Sarah Solarez in Wakey, Wakey.

Quark Theatre’s slogan is “small plays about big ideas,” to which fans will readily concur.   If you go and are not provoked in some way, if you don’t squirm, if you don’t talk about it afterward with your companion, then you probably weren’t there.

Quark’s next show is Wakey, Wakey by Will Eno, an acclaimed playwright and Pulitzer Prize finalist. Tony Isbell, one of Quark’s founders, directs Adam Remsen (another Quark founder) and Sarah Solarez. Sound design is by Eric Sefton, with original music by Eileen Kuo, and lighting design by Louisa Koeppel (also a Quark founder).

The play runs 8 p.m. Fridays and Saturdays, and 2 p.m. Sundays through October 6th. It’s at TheatreSouth, 1000 Cooper St., southwest corner of the building. Tickets are $20. Here’s the website.

Isbell spoke to us about Quark’s philosophy and the production:

Quark’s plays aren’t particularly traditional. I suppose that’s true with Wakey, Wakey?

Sometimes I call it an experience because it’s not really a typical play in some ways. It’s kind of like an eccentric TED talk. It involves the use of quite a few projections and recorded sound while the protagonist talks directly to the audience. There is an aspect that’s more a traditional play with another character, but there’s a good bit of it that’s a direct address to the audience.

You’ve had the rare experience of talking with the playwright as you were putting this together, right?

When we applied for the rights to this show last year, we got an email from the company that handles the rights. It said that Will likes to be involved in local productions of his plays and here’s his email. So, when we started to work on it, we contacted him. I thought that was pretty cool since he’d been nominated for the Pulitzer Prize for drama for a previous work. He replied within 20 minutes and we’ve emailed back and forth a few times and each time, he answered right back.

He seems to be as super nice human. We talked about our approach and our limitations because we have basically zero budget for our show. He was fine with that and much of our approach. Sometimes he’d suggest we try something instead, but never been anything less than enthusiastic and supportive and friendly.

So that must have given you confidence going in?

Yeah, because this is different. All of his plays might be described as eccentric. He’s previously been described as the Samuel Beckett for the millennial generation or something like that. He’s really not, that’s really not quite accurate, but I can certainly see it in him and his writing. This play in particular is what you might call a miniature or a chamber piece.

There isn’t a whole lot of plot. There are two characters, one a man named Guy and a young woman named Lisa. Guy spends part of the show talking directly to the audience. He talks about matters of life and death, and how to deal with life when you are facing extreme situations and it’s very funny and kinda out of left field. But it’s also very moving.

I’ve seen it dozens of times and I still tear up at certain places because it just captures the humor and the joy and the sorrow of being alive. And it reminds me, in some ways, of Our Town though it’s not in any way similar to what’s happened in Grover’s Corners. You kind of get that we all just try to do the best we can and we’re all here together and shouldn’t we all be doing our best to make things easier for other people instead of more difficult? It’s a play that I think has kind of a therapeutic or healing dimension to it. I think people will come out of this show feeling very uplifted and very centered. It ranges from goofy to profound.

How do you choose the scripts that you produce?

Adam and I have tried to produce things that haven’t been done in Memphis, or that Memphis isn’t going to produce because they don’t really fit the mold of what other theaters might want to produce. We deliberately look for things that are challenging and thought provoking, whether that’s the intent of the script or the manner in which it’s produced. Secondary factors: that they are one-act shows that can be produced without big, detailed sets or costumes. This show is our biggest exception to that because it does require a great deal of video and still images and the sound and projection.

Barefoot in the Park at GCT

Neil Simon’s Barefoot in the Park is playing at Germantown Community Theatre (GCT) through September 29th. The rom-com has fun with newlyweds (he’s uptight, she’s a free spirit) in their 5th-floor walkup apartment as they deal with neighbors, relatives, stairs, and Manhattan. Get tickets here.

On Golden Pond at Playhouse on the Square

Opening Friday at Playhouse on the Square is On Golden Pond, which is kind of like a geriatric Barefoot in the Park: Couple in love working out their differences while family members and people from the neighborhood keep showing up. In this one, Norman and Ethel Thayer are at the family lake house instead of Manhattan. Through October 6th. (And there’s one more connection: Jane Fonda was in both movie versions). Score your tickets here. 

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Intermission Impossible Theater

Krapping You Negative: Beckett Finds Love at Theatre South

Tony Isbell is Krapp. I mean that in the best possible sense.

A question that is seldom asked: What does Samuel Beckett’s mini-masterpiece Krapp’s Last Tape have in common with poop porn? Consider the “reaction video,” a digital-era phenomenon that came of age following the release of Two Girls, One Cup, a pornographic short depicting two women enjoying a pint glass full of human chocolate. Here’s a classic reaction video of somebody showing the infamous TG1C clip to their grandmother. As viral content goes, it’s horrible. And a stone cold classic. 
 

Krapping You Negative: Beckett Finds Love at Theatre South

So, what’s the point of this strange comparison? For starters, I want to demystify Beckett, whose work is often characterized as being difficult and detached. Also, in both a formal sense, and as a piece of entertainment, Krapp’s Last Tape functions identically to a reaction video. If granny makes you laugh, blush, cringe, or shake your head, you’ll have no trouble at all engaging with Krapp. In both cases the comedy and the pathos are are rooted in the relationship between a candid observer and the content stored on his/her technology. Only instead of watching girls go wild, Beckett’s titular curmudgeon sits at an old reel-to-reel tape recorder and listens, in real time, to a decades old recording of himself reviewing an even older recording of himself. It’s an Escher portrait of a mirror selfie, reducing one man’s entire life to 40-minutes of covert clowning. It is, by turns, hilarious and hateful, and in a masterful performance that lives up to that description, Memphis actor Tony Isbell hits every single note, high and low.

Krapp’s Last Tape hasn’t just aged well, it’s become even more resonant in the age of Instagram and #TBT. Contemporary audiences are primed to sympathize with a solitary man interacting with his device.

Me

Update: I’m in my kitchen writing a review of Krapp’s Last Tape. And I need a shave. Also, even though you can’t see it, there’s an entire bunch of overripe bananas hanging behind my head.

Toward the end of his opening night performance Isbell struggled to detach a spool of tape from Krapp’s antique recorder. That’s all part of the show. But when the spool finally released something seemingly spontaneous and wonderful happened. The actor reeled backwards, hitting a pendent lamp hanging above his head. Planned or not, the result was more effective than any expensive special effect ever could be. The lamp swung like a mad pendulum, casting the protagonist in light and leaving him in darkness over and over again until, at last, all potential energy was spent. Action, reaction, etc. Visual metaphors don’t get much better or more basic than that. 

Krapp’s Last Tape shares the stage with a neatly packed production of Beckett’s rarely-seen micro-drama, Ohio Impromptu. The show’s action consists of a stationary “reader,” (Adam Remsen) reading a book to a similarly stationary “listener,” (Isbell), who remains silent but sometimes knocks to indicate he’d like to hear a passage repeated. Remsen’s interpretation is smart and sympathetic but, through no fault of his own, it’s never all it could be. Beckett wrote for unique voices. Krapp’s Last Tape, for example, was inspired by a radio performance given by British actor Patrick McGee. While Remsen did his job beautifully, Ohio Impromptu cries out — like a strange disembodied mouth — for a special voice that paints vivid pictures in the surrounding blackness. That’s why I’m looking forward to a repeat performance when age and experience have seasoned the soft-spoken actor’s pipes. 

Krapping You Negative: Beckett Finds Love at Theatre South (2)

A strange disembodied mouth

My favorite thing about this night of independently produced theater is its origin story. The nutshell: a couple of actors realized they both loved a play that’s easy and inexpensive to stage, so they staged the damn thing. Because, why not? More like that, please.

Big things really do come in small packages. I should probably use that line to connect this closing graph to the poop porn in my opening. But, in spite of having just typed the words, “poop porn in my opening,” I’m not that kind of critic. It’s hard to imagine a more modest production than Krapp’s Last Tape and Ohio Impromptu. It’s equally hard to imagine a more satisfying night in the theater. 

Standing. Clapping. 
Me

Picture, or it didn’t happen!

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Beckett’s Krapp’s Last Tape at First Congo

What started as an obscure joke on Facebook has turned into a rare treat for Memphis theatergoers and fans of actor/director Tony Isbell.

Isbell created a lively Facebook discussion when he posted a status update saying, “I’ve just eaten, I regret to say, three donuts and have only with difficulty refrained from a fourth.” Some commenters liked donuts. Others liked them a lot. But Isbell wasn’t really casting about for snack affirmation. He was dropping a nerdy hint to fans of absurdist playwright Samuel Beckett.

Actor Adam Remsen, who’d been directed by Isbell in productions of Glengarry Glen Ross and Six Degrees of Separation, recognized the allusion and answered, “Oh Krapp.” A conversation started that has resulted in an independently mounted production of Beckett’s mini-masterpiece Krapp’s Last Tape.

Tony Isbell as Beckett’s Krapp

“It’s like one man’s entire life in 40 minutes,” says Isbell of a play that finds its elderly title character listening to a tape of his somewhat younger self talking about an even earlier tape of his much younger self. It’s not quite 60 years old and maybe even more relevant thanks to Instagram and Facebook.

“When people think of Beckett, they think of Waiting for Godot,” Isbell says. “They think of abstract characters dealing with huge issues. But this play is the most naturalistic thing he ever wrote. It’s exactly what it is: An old man sitting at his tape recorder listening to old tapes of himself and making a new one. It happens in real time. That’s it.”

Remsen shares directing duties with Isbell and joins him onstage for a production of Ohio Impromptu, another rarely seen Beckett sketch with similarly nostalgic threads.

“I’m not really doing that much directing,” Remsen says. “For me, the best part of the process has been getting to watch Tony Isbell perform Krapp’s Last Tape three or four times a week.”