Arden Theatre Company Blog

Fine Dining in Charlotte’s Web

By Christopher Haig, ~~Props~~ Slops Master

Sure, there was a full dinner for twelve in August: Osage County. Yes, it’s true they ate (fake) horse meat in The Whipping Man. But the finest dining on the Arden stage so far this season, has to be Wilbur’s slops – all 7 buckets-full actor Aubie Merrylees enjoys during each performance of Charlotte’s Web.

The slops went through several stages of development before reaching the final product seen onstage now. At the beginning of rehearsals, the cast was supplied with a wheelbarrow of fake foods pulled from our prop storage. Fake vegetables, fruits, sandwiches and other faux food made of plastic, rubber and foam made up the first slops.

Through rehearsals, director Whit McLaughlin decided what was working and what was not. One of his overriding concepts on the production was the use of real things over fake things. We aimed to avoid the usual children’s theatre prop versions of things.

In light of that design choice, it became apparent that the large fake foods were not right. Our next step in the research and development of the slops was to create fake items that looked more like leftovers instead of whole pieces of fruits or vegetables. We pulled leaves off some of the faux foods and made fake skins and other debris. While this looked closer to the real thing, it still didn’t seem right.

During the last week of rehearsals, we took a giant step closer to the right answer when we realized we were missing the secret ingredient – SLOP JUICE.

See below for my secret Slop Juice recipe!

Once we started using liquid, the slops themselves needed to look less like newer, whole pieces of food and more like half eaten, decomposing food. So we changed the faux food out for random chunks of foam. Combined with the slop juice this looked really gross, but had a few problems. First, the chunks of foam looked like foam too much to pass for any type of food product. Secondly, we had concerns about Aubie putting his face into a mixture of liquid and foams that may not have been the most “nutritious” shall we say. Wilbur is also supposed to eat an apple right from the slops so we needed to find a way to make them safe and edible.

The answer came to us during the tech rehearsals and was fairly simple considering all the previous steps. The simple decision was to use real food – big green and red leaves of cabbage, green tops of carrots, potato and carrot peelings and some celery. When you add these things to the murky slop juice, you get the perfect recipe for Pig Slops.

SLOP JUICE recipe

Ingredients:

2 qt. water

1/3 cup coconut milk

8 drops of warm brown gel food coloring

5 drops of blue food coloring

Mix all ingredients in a pitcher. Stir. Pour into 5-gallon bucket over your favorite leafy greens and leftover vegetable skins.

Serve up to the little piggy in your barn.
DELICIOUS!

Charlotte’s Web Goes Vertical

By Courtney Riggar, Production Manager

If you have seen Charlotte’s Web, then you have seen Charlotte’s amazing aerial feats in the show. Since Sarah Gliko, who plays Charlotte, had no previous experience at this type of work we enlisted the help of Howard Kanner, owner of Go Vertical climbing gym. Howard functioned as our Stunt Coordinator to make sure that all of Sarah’s gear was safe and that she was properly trained to handle all of her stunts. Through the process Howard got to come and work in the Haas and climb all over the catwalks here, and as part of that he got to know us pretty well and vice versa.

As a way to celebrate our work together and the opening of the show Howard invited us to come to his gym for a little climbing, so he could show us how it’s REALLY done. I took some photos to document our fun time there and I thought I’d share them with you!

Opening Night of Charlotte’s Web

The Arden celebrated the opening night of Charlotte’s Web on Saturday, December 3 by turning the lobby into a state fair! We welcomed community partners Tyler Arboretum, with an interactive spider display, the Garden State Discovery Museum, who helped transform kids into farm animals with fun face painting, and the Pig Placement Network, stealing the show with a live potbellied pig named Bubbles. As kids completed crafts and activities, they acquired stickers which eventually earned a blue ribbon! Kid-friendly food and beverages were provided by Chef’s Market and Hatboro Beverages. After the show, families enjoyed ice cream sprinkled with bacon bits, courtesy of The Franklin Fountain.

Here are photos from the evening!

The Lincoln Man

By Ryan Prendergast, Arden Professional Apprentice

In the second act of The Whipping Man as Caleb and John prepare for their Passover seder, the elder slave Simon (Johnnie Hobbs, Jr.) announces that Abraham Lincoln is dead, the victim of an assassin’s bullet. He recalls the experience of meeting Lincoln only a few days before on the streets Richmond after the Union army occupied the city on April 4: “I walked out to him. And I stopped right in front of him. And he stopped. And we looked at each other… I bowed… Only thing I could think to do… [and] he bowed back… Only thing he could think to do I guess.”

Hearing these words in the play took me back to a sunny September morning when I stood on the sidewalk outside Ford’s Theater in Washington, D.C. It was the culmination of whole summer’s Lincoln pilgrimage. My mother is a huge fan of the Doris Kearns Goodwin bestseller Team of Rivals and that summer my family did it all: the new Abraham Lincoln Presidential Library and Museum in Springfield, Illinois, the solemn Lincoln Tomb at Oak Ridge Cemetery. Standing in the burial room with Lincoln’s body just below our feet was a surreal experience, only equaled by a visit to the colossus Lincoln Memorial in Washington, D.C. Ford’s Theatre was now the only stop left.

Ford’s Theatre is still an active venue, restored to its 19^th century splendor. (The Lincoln box forever remains unoccupied out of respect.) The theatre was closed for rehearsals the day of my visit but the basement museum beckoned. Here the displays meticulously recreate Lincoln’s activities that day and offer an impressive array of artifacts, from the suit he wore to Ford’s Theater that fateful evening (his famous top hat rests a few blocks away at the Smithsonian) to the Derringer pistol used by John Wilkes Booth, and most ominously, a pillow stained with Lincoln’s blood.

Every single piece was important and significant, but something seemed to be missing. Here were the real things he wore and touched, but Lincoln still seemed a phantom of the past, close but somehow just beyond reach. Where was the conduit for this Lincoln of the past for us today? Hearing Johnnie Hobbs was the final spark. I saw Lincoln in his famous stovepipe hat bow to Simon on the charred streets of Richmond. He was real for me because he was real for Simon. None of the faded burial curtains or plaster masks seemed significant until that moment.

It’s really easy for a “history play” to become a “history lecture.” It’s a rarity when a figure from history steps out from the dusty pages and becomes something tangible, worthy of the apostrophe: “Father Abraham… there’s your Moses…”

The Civil War at the National Museum of American Jewish History

By Leigh Goldenberg, Marketing and PR Manager

On Tuesday, November 15, members of the Arden’s Sylvan Society joined members of the National Museum of American Jewish History at the museum for an event inspired by our production of The Whipping Man. We noshed and had a glass of wine on the museum’s third floor, with a gorgeous view overlooking Independence National Historical Park. Then, our Associate Artistic Director Ed Sobel led a discussion about American Jews during the Civil War with Rabbi Lance Sussman, from Congregation Keneseth Israel.

While the initial reaction to the premise of The Whipping Man (A Jewish Confederate Solider? With slaves who are practicing Jews, too?) might seem improbable or imagined, Rabbi Sussman gave us an overview of the time period that enforced playwright Matthew Lopez’s premise. In the 1800s, a small percentage of Americans were Jewish, yet those Jews lived in various parts of the country, primarily in urban centers. And like all Americans, Jews were divided when it came to slavery, aligning with their neighbors and political affiliations rather than their religion. So yes, there were Jewish slaveholders and Jewish officers in the Confederate Army, just like Caleb DeLeon in our play.

The Whipping Man both celebrates and challenges tenets of the Jewish faith, which Rabbi Sussman addressed as well. Simon’s assertions about asking questions and wrestling with God have direct biblical ties. And while Judaism in no way encourages the treatment the DeLeon family gave to John, the Jewish people have a history (like people of most backgrounds) of using violence when in a position of power. Rabbi Sussman got a chuckle from the crowd when sharing this saying: Jews are just like anyone else. Except more so.

After the conversation, we were able to tour the museum’s permanent collection, which takes us through the history of Jews in America, beginning in 1654. The Civil War section features stories, documents, and artifacts that reflect the story from The Whipping Man. (I even spotted a reference to a DeLeon just across from a Confederate uniform that looks like Cody’s costume in the play!)

We are grateful to have such a rich and relevant resource in the NMAJH, just a few blocks from the Arden. If you’ve seen The Whipping Man, you’ll no doubt find value in viewing the collection. And if you’ve already been to the museum, or are intrigued about this period in America’s history, we welcome you to see The Whipping Man. You can even book a tour at the museum with tickets to the show! Get details on that package by calling 215.923.3811 x. 141

Now tell us, how does this play and time in history challenge or enforce your ideas?

Sounds of the Civil War

By Christopher Colucci, Sound Designer for The Whipping Man

If I were, for some strange reason, asked the question “do you think there is a possibility that you will ever attend a Civil War reenactment in your lifetime?” I would have surely answered emphatically NO. I also never thought that I would have a reason to buy and to play an Autoharp; an instrument which I associated primarily with elementary school music classrooms. And I never imagined that my summer reading list would include books about African-Americans living in Richmond, Virginia in 1865; who happened to be both former slaves and Jewish. My work as the Sound Designer for the Arden Theater’s production of The Whipping Man by Matthew Lopez (running through December 18th) gave me the opportunity to do all of these things.

One of my favorite parts about working in the theater is the opportunity it gives me to explore new ideas, new stories, and even new sounds that I might otherwise never get to experience; and so soon as I knew that I would be working on The Whipping Man I began to look for information that would help me to better understand the world of the play. In a script note, playwright Matthew Lopez recommends a book that influenced him in his writing; 1865: The Month That Saved America, by Jay Winik; which I bought, and in it read that according to ear-witnesses (a sound designer’s favorite kind!) to the battle of Richmond, where an estimated 100,000 shells were fired, the war sounded like “a flock of blackbirds with blazing tails beating out in a gale” and “a metallic storm.” An earsplitting roar to be sure. These details suggested to me that it might be interesting to begin our story with some of the terrifying sounds which precede Caleb’s entrance at the beginning of the play.

It occurred to me, too, that the impact of this battle cacophony might be stronger if it was preceded by a serene Civil War-era song. I discovered a recording of “All Quiet on the Potomac Tonight” (Click here to listen) which was originally published as a poem in Harper’s Weekly in 1861. The gentle, almost pastoral music belies the tragic story in the lyric, whose first verse ends with a beautifully melodic phrase about the death rattle of a soldier dying in the field. Terrifying battle sounds juxtaposed with peaceful music seemed like the perfect way to begin.

But how was I going to get the authentic Civil War battle sounds that were needed for the play? There are many, multi-terabyte sound effect libraries available to the film and theater designer which cover a mind-boggling diversity of sound needs – but none of them were able to give me the authenticity and specificity that I felt we needed. My solution came by surprise on a beautiful summer day in August; I just happened to be biking in the New Hope area when I came upon a sign saying that there would be a Civil War battle reenactment across the river in Lambertville, New Jersey that very afternoon.

Here’s a little sound designer secret – we always carry a recorder wherever we go. I had mine that day, and as a result in one afternoon I was able to gather all the artillery shots, all the cannon explosions, all the battlefield music and chatter; in short, all the authentic atmosphere I could have ever dreamed of. I also was able to take lots of pictures of the event which were then shared with the rest of the design team (at the bottom of this post) Thanks to all the men and women who participated in that Civil War Living History Weekend – you made our show that much better!

The Whipping Man has a number of scene transitions where different set pieces are added, taken away, or simply moved around on the set. This sometimes takes time; music and sound is a good way to help move things along, support the story, and to keep an audience fully engaged. I was looking for a music that would evoke the diverse cultures and identities that exist alongside one another in such a unique way in the world of this play. For example, there is a significant tradition of Civil War-era “folk” music; as well as the themes of African-American and Jewish cultural identity in conflict and in concert with each other. I was interested in making music that would, subtlety, conjure each of these threads in the play. So, for our design I chose to include the folky sound of an Autoharp, the deep and beautifully resonant voice of local actor, Carl Clemons-Hopkins, to add a touch of the traditional Spiritual, and to complete the trio, a clarinet. How and where we used these elements changed many times over the course of making this production, but what remains for the audience, I hope, is a sense of the unity and coherence of both the themes in the play and of our design choices.

Working on The Whipping Man gave me the opportunity to enlarge my understanding of world, as well as to deepen my empathy for my fellow human beings. Come to the Arden and have an experience for yourself! We hope you enjoy The Whipping Man.

Opening Night of The Whipping Man

After closing August: Osage County on Sunday, the Arden opened The Whipping Man this Wednesday, November 2nd. Members of the Sylvan Society celebrated at a pre-show reception at Revolution House (formerly the Snow White Diner!) at Second and Market Streets, with cocktails and hors d’oeuvres. Terry Nolen and Amy Murphy toasted the opening night and congratulated director Matt Pfeiffer on a terrific production.

After the performance, guests enjoyed a post-show reception in the Arden lobby provided by 12th Street Catering and Hatboro Beverages.

Here are photos from the evening!

How is this night different?

By Leigh Goldenberg, Marketing and Public Relations Manager

Each spring since I’ve lived on my own, I’ve hosted a Passover Seder for friends and family. My hosting involves the cleaning, setting the table, and leading the pre-dinner service. My mom does all the cooking. We find it to be a fair division of labor for a holiday that encourages relaxing (and drinking four glasses of wine.)

If a Seder is not familiar to you, here’s a quick explanation. (You can find more extensive information in the Curriculum Connections for The Whipping Man) Seder is the ceremonial meal during which we retell the story of the Exodus of the Hebrew slaves from Egypt. Moses and the Pharoah are the main characters, and plot twists include ten plagues and the parting of the Red Sea. Seder translates as “order,” so most every Seder follows the same steps, each with meaning and symbolism attached. Many of these symbols reflect the springtime occurrence of the holiday, focusing on rebirth in a way that will certainly be familiar to those that celebrate Easter. (In fact, Jesus’ Last Supper was most likely a Seder, and Easter is the only Christian holiday that corresponds to the lunar calendar as all Jewish holidays do.)

Just like having Christmas in July, you can imagine it would be odd to have Passover on the wrong time of year, at the start of autumn when everything begins to die and hibernate. Yet, we are opening The Whipping Man this week and none of the actors who have a Seder on stage each night had been to one before. Hosting an October Seder felt necessary. The script walks the actors (and in turn the audience) through many of the steps and symbols, just like a Haggadah (the book we use on Passover).

My mom happily baked two kinds of kugel, a brisket, her famous matzah ball soup, and allowed my dad to make a plate of gefilte fish. My parents, husband, brother, and fellow member of the Arden marketing staff Ryan Klink sat around the table alongside the three actors in the cast (Johnnie Hobbs, Jr., James Ijames, and Cody Nickell) as well as Director Matt Pfeiffer, Stage Manager Stephanie Cook, and Assistant Director Eric Wunsch (the lone member of the team who grew up with Passover). The Goldenbergs were excited to share one of our favorite traditions with the artists that bring it to life on stage.

My family’s Seder might be more casual than some, but we follow all the steps and then infuse off-key singing, props for the ten plagues, and allow time for plenty of discussion. I always look forward to the connections my dad makes between the holiday and whatever is on our minds. The Whipping Man was ripe for this commentary, as the connections between the African American slaves and the Hebrew story we retell each year are numerous. At this special Seder, he pointed out that Passover, like most holidays, can be taken as a metaphor, having the Hebrews stand in for really any group of people that do not experience true freedom. My dad also pointed out one of his favorite things about Judaism in general, with Moses as a prime example: Jews argue with God. We don’t just accept and listen, we question and argue back.

A week later, as I watched The Whipping Man with its very first audience, my dad’s words were almost repeated verbatim by Johnnie’s character Simon. Simon’s pride in being Jewish was so similar to my father’s and his desire to host a Passover Seder in any given circumstance echoed my mother’s. Cody’s character Caleb and James’ character John, both Jewish men around my age, question their faith and aim to reconcile it with the other aspects of their life in a way that was also extremely familiar to me personally (not to mention anyone that saw My Name Is Asher Lev).

Like any favorite holiday, I could write pages on the stories and connections. But what I’m really interested in at each Passover when we invite friends to their first Seder, just like at any play when we invite our first audience, is the conversation. What connections do you see in your own life to this story of Jews? Of newly freed slaves? Of Americans looking to reconcile their religion, their politics and their family?

I know this is a discussion I can’t wait to have with my family once they’ve seen the play. And again at our next Seder in the spring.

The American Family

By Ed Sobel, Arden Associate Artistic Director and original dramaturg on August: Osage County

“Home is the place where when you have to go there, they have to take you in.” — Robert Frost, The Death of a Hired Man

It’s hard to find a play that isn’t in some way about family. The great tragedies of ancient Greece (think Sophocles’ Oedipus or Antigone) while pursuing ideas of political power, responsibility, and free will have as their principal advocates members of the same family. (Oedipus murders his father and sleeps with his mother. Antigone rebels against Kreon, her uncle, because she wishes to properly bury her brother.) The mighty Shakespeare’s discourses on the ability to take meaningful action (Hamlet) or the vicissitudes of inherited power (Henry IV) look at humanist and existential questions as they play out within family dynamics. (Hamlet seeks to avenge the murder of his father by his uncle. Young Hal navigates his difficult relationship with his own father, and tests a surrogate in Falstaff.)

The American dramatic tradition is equally, if not more tightly bound to the familial – even plays thought to be primarily of social significance and commentary (Death of a Salesman, Raisin in the Sun) revolve around contests between parents and children or husbands and wives. With August: Osage County, Tracy Letts draws upon his own family lore, amplifying these stories with an artist’s delight in extreme behavior and moral ambiguity. But while outrage and outrageousness permeate the play, one should not be so distracted by the emotional fireworks as to lose track of the social critique. It is not just the pathology of the American family about which Tracy is concerned, but the American family.

Photo by Mark Garvin

The play begins with the interrogation of a Native American woman who agrees to take on the job of caring for this family, descendents of those who have invaded her homeland and destroyed her people. What follows is not only an investigation into familial betrayals and rivalries, but the diagnosis of dysfunction for an entire class of people. With its large cast of characters and form (a three-act structure) Tracy is not only referencing theatrical days of yore, but also demanding a canvas large enough for individual relationships to take on metaphorical significance and sweep. In one of our earliest conversations about the script, Tracy told me that the play was partly about what happens when “men abandon the field”. Certainly the male characters in the play abrogate responsibility for themselves and others in ways both hilarious and damning. We leave it to you to determine whether the women follow suit.

Sweltering around the arguments, not to mention outright fisticuffs, of the play is the sticky truth that no matter what the members of this family do, they can not extract themselves from their familial history or the family fabric. Their original sin, as with O’Neill’s great tragic families in Long Days Journey Into Night or Desire Under the Elms, is simply being born. Their continued afflictions – addiction, greed, self-interest, moral confusion– are inherited as surely as the mythic American values – the right to happiness, self-determination, ambition, capitalism – of which they are extensions or complements.

Family. We all have one. Some may even have one that looks like the Westons. We all have a country. Even one that looks like America.

What took you so long? This house doesn’t even have walls.

By Glenn Perlman, the Arden’s Technical Director

Building the set for August: Osage County – on stage through October 30 — presented some real challenges. Some came from the award-winning author, Tracy Letts, and some came from Director Terry Nolen and Scenic Designer Dan Conway. The playwright prescribes a three-story house occupied by thirteen characters including a forty-minute dinner scene. And Terry and Dan wanted the audience to feel included in the action. That meant we would stage August in the thrust, where the audience gets a sense of itself, and where watching other audience members watch the play adds to the overall experience — the shared experience that is the essence of live theatre.

With lines like “there’s an Indian in my attic,” there’s no way to do this show without an attic. So the challenge becomes how to create a house, large enough to fill the space and accommodate all the actors, physically solid enough to actually support second and third levels that are real acting areas, and yet open enough for every one of our 365 audience members to see and hear what’s going on.

The solution: get rid of all those pesky walls.

The set of August: Osage County. Photo by Mark Garvin

The design is a house with a layout that is not far off from one that may really exist. The kitchen’s right off the dining room. One step down to the sunken living room. One step up to the first-floor study. A stairway to the second floor with a hallway off to some bedrooms and four steps up to a split-level attic. Dan looked at images of dozens of Oklahoma farm houses, pulling out the little details like doghouse dormers and bead board walls. Then he stripped down the whole house to the essence — just a “skeleton” of the roof lines. A couple of doors and windows.

The audience feels like they are peeking into the house.

We built this house over the summer, taking advantage of our time between seasons. Our small but mighty staff (read: me and another guy) framed the levels with 2×8 joists in the space, just like you’d build a real floor of a house — not like scenery. Of course there is some extra engineering involved (a little hidden steel support to compensate for where load-bearing walls would normally be, sections that are suspended by steel cable from the catwalks above, and some hidden bracing to keep the entire structure from swaying when people move around on it) but generally it’s built just like a real house. Just minus the walls.

We could have built a real house as easily.

The Arden takes great pride in strong physical production values, and we endeavor to always make effective and efficient use of our resources. Building this set in the space over the summer was key in our ability to create what this particular play needed. Once it was populated with furnishings, the incredible cast and fleshed-out with lights, sound, and costumes, the play comes to life in an amazing way.

I hope you enjoy peeking into our little Oklahoma farm house.