ceramicmatt

Pre-Post-Show talkback with the cast

Thu, 18 Feb 2021 07:51:21 GMT

After a year of working on this play, the cast chats on the eve of Opening Night.

An Update from the Home Office

Tue, 28 Apr 2020 18:35:20 GMT

Thank you to Chris Roquemore and Clyde Hancock for these wonderful videos to keep everyone in the loop!

The Quality of Life Pre-Pandemic

Thu, 23 Apr 2020 22:19:24 GMT

Tonight originally would have been our Opening Night for The Quality of Life .

We cannot open this evening as planned, but please enjoy this video,

created by Chris Roquemore and Clyde Hancock,

filmed one week before everything changed.

Thank you to the wonderful Chris Roquemore and Clyde Hancock for this terrific video about The Quality of Life before the pandemic.
Check back soon for the update video filmed a few weeks later.

A Quiet Build

Thu, 23 Apr 2020 01:32:37 GMT

The Playhouse is normally abuzz. There are classes full of children learning and laughing, Cabarets rehearsing with the sounds of beautiful voices and piano keys wafting through the halls, or lip-trills and tongue twisters and groans from weary muscles in warm-up before rehearsals or performances. On any given day, there is a symphony of receipt machines, phones, printers, and knocks on doors, microwaves humming with Tupperware dinners on the lunch and dinner breaks, coffee machines beeping and tea kettles whistling,

and squirrels in the gutters scampering to their usual acorn storage places.

(RIP, Earl of Squirrel. 4pm isn’t the same without you, friend.)

There are the familiar voices of our beloved volunteers and staff, playing “Marco Polo” to find where Scott is in the building before climbing the stairs looking for him, the jolly fun of our wonderful set-building team underscored by hammers and drills and saws, Spotify playlists that are always a fun guessing game of whose turn it was to pick the music that day. And then, there are also the ever-exciting noises of a loved, older building in Cloverdale that fill every silent stretch, the ones that make the imagination run wild: ACs kicking on and off, water fountains whirring, creaks and groans of unknown origin, and whatever mischief our ghost is up to.

(Yes, we have one. We think he’s friendly.)

Scott Grinstead, our Technical Director at the Playhouse, has a fantastic group of volunteers who work so hard (while always with a cheerful and generous energy) to build every set for each production. They are a well-oiled machine and a great group of humans to boot. “More hands make lighter work,” as they say, and our set crew keeps things fun and light even while doing the heavy lifting! So, now that we are practicing good social-distancing for the safety of our Playhouse family, poor Scott is doing the heavy lifting sans the team. His hard work and dedication to keeping our little theatre chugging along during this difficult time is truly inspiring.

So, I asked Scott to share what makes this set-build in a pandemic for The Quality of Life unique for him, and here are his thoughts:

“It’s eerily quiet. That’s the biggest change of building a show during quarantine.

At some point, on every show, there comes a time in the build where I find myself alone for a few days, finishing details or painting. But this is different. This is like walking into a ghost town. Even when my wife and I were producing shows in different venues with just the two of us, it wasn’t this quiet.

And I know that a lot of people are experiencing this at their workplaces and homes, especially if they live alone. And I feel for them. Many of us, especially in theatre, aren’t equipped for this kind of loneliness, for lack of a better word. And the theatre, to me, has always been a place that is so alive. It’s a collaborative art form filled with different voices and ideas. But for right now, for my part, it’s just me.

I miss the volunteers, the jokes, the music choices, the sound of power tools running in the background;

that sense of life in the space. So, as I build The Quality of Life alone, I am keenly, ironically aware that

that’s what’s missing: Life.

I know that, eventually, it will all go back to normal, and the building will be alive again.

And maybe we’ll be better for it and appreciate it more. I hope.

But right now, it’s too quiet.”

Scroll through below to see the original sketches and designs for our set by designer Charles Eddie Moncrief III

(and visit his website to see more of his work here !)

And here are some pictures of Scott’s progress as he builds our world,

the fire-wrecked remains of Neil and Jeannette’s home in Berkeley, CA:

A Conversation with the Cast of The Quality of Life

Wed, 15 Apr 2020 00:00:00 GMT

Check out our conversation with the cast about working on this play under these unique circumstances:

Why This Play?

Tue, 14 Apr 2020 00:00:00 GMT

The 2020 Season at the Cloverdale Playhouse is themed “Seeing Through Different Eyes”.

Each of the titles selected explores the idea of looking at the world in new ways, walking in another’s shoes, or examining the world through the lenses of people who tend to be misunderstood or unacknowledged. The Quality of Life by Jane Anderson is about that and much more. Dinah and Bill, a devout, church-going couple from the Midwest are struggling to keep their lives intact after the loss of their daughter. Dinah is compelled to reconnect with her left-leaning cousins in Berkeley, California who are going through their own trials. Jeannette, an earthy, high-spirited woman, and her husband Neil have lost their home to a wildfire, and Neil is dying of cancer.

The two couples – one solidly on the left, the other resolute in their conservative Christian beliefs –

are made to confront their huge dissimilarities.

AND, BOY DO THEY! These characters find themselves navigating every difficult issue that divides them while desperately trying to connect to each other on common ground in order to cope with their different losses. They all need each other, though the reasons why aren’t clear from the beginning. Their extreme differences of beliefs and opinions threaten to drive a wedge that may create even more suffering, but the things that unite them are just as powerful, if not more so. As audience members, we may walk into this play firmly siding with one character or another, seeing ourselves steadfastly aligned with that person’s opinions. Yet, as the play progresses, the characters put cracks into our prejudices and arguments, just as they do with each other. Each character at times reinforces stereotypes of “the other” in our society, and just as quickly they break those stereotypes apart, either with incredibly compelling reasoning and support or complete contradiction.

This is also a play about the masks that we wear. Every character has deep, well-kept secrets or feelings buried so far down that they themselves don’t acknowledge them. We all want to protect ourselves from the truth at times, especially if the truth is painful. Watching the moments in the play- when someone’s mask starts to slip, when it is being held onto tightly with both hands, when someone begins to see through the words to what is going unsaid- it all makes for a powerful human drama (that also has some very funny moments!).

The masks are even written into the stage directions, set descriptions, and notes from the playwright!

On the first page of the script, Jane Anderson describes the set:

“The devastation is breathtaking. But an effort has been put into making the site not only livable,

but aggressively cheerful …”

And the actors are instructed:

“Both hosts and guests are doing their best to stay upbeat. No sorrowful pauses, please.”

In rehearsals, we have been talking a lot about the moments when we question whether the character is lying, either to themselves or the others, whether they are even aware of the moments of brutal honesty when they say things that their character, for the first time, admits as the truth. It is an incredible “Actor’s Playground”, this story. There is so much to unpack! What’s being said? Is it true? What’s going unsaid? Which cards are being held close to the chest here? Who’s showing their hand and why? What’s meaningful to us as the storytellers in this moment, and what is the audience learning for the first time?

In an upcoming blog installment, we will give you a glimpse into what we call “table-work” (which is one of my favorite parts of the process), where we discuss all of these questions and much more!

The Journey Begins

Tue, 07 Apr 2020 00:00:00 GMT

“Nothing to do but keep on moving…” -Dinah in The Quality of Life

It’s a well-known mantra in the theatre that “the show must go on.” Now, in this frightening and challenging time of global pandemic, theatres all over the world are struggling to uphold our age-old adage. No theatres want to cancel shows, but unfortunately that has been a common outcome of this crisis. Many have closed their curtains, some for the final time. We have adopted new mantras about taking intermissions or leaving the ghost light on (a theatre tradition of leaving a single light bulb glowing on the dark stage to ward off spirits and protect the space when the theatre is unoccupied). Many have tried to get creative about continuing to produce content, streaming performances, postponing shows for live audiences, hopeful that we will all get back to the business of show someday soon.

Before COVID-19 changed the game, the Cloverdale Playhouse was gearing up for a very exciting stretch. We had special editions of our two music series: a St. Patrick’s Day Guitar Pull- complete with some great musicians sprinkling traditional Irish songs among their original works- and a Playhouse Cabaret celebrating the work of the great Stephen Sondheim on his 90th birthday. We were excited to start another 8-week term of our wonderful Playhouse School for K-12th graders. We were also about to begin rehearsals for our second mainstage show of the ninth season (themed “Seeing Through Different Eyes”), Jane Anderson’s beautiful play The Quality of Life .

The current irony of that title is not lost on us.

The health and safety of our patrons and our artists is our first concern, of course, and so we began cancelling the immediate things, unsure how long this situation would last or how optimistic we should be. But a play that wouldn’t be performed for almost another month would be okay, right? Wrong. So, how to proceed? Our love of this play filled with incredibly powerful messages (especially now), the exceptional cast of actors who have been so generous with their support and eagerness to make this work, and our enduring need as artists to keep creating in good times and bad kept us hopeful that we could find a way. The show must go on… but how?

Obviously, we postpone in the hopes of doing a regular run in late May. Meanwhile, we pursue every other option we can think of: live-stream a performance to the audience, move the play to our outdoor Courtyard Stage with fewer seats measured 6-ft apart, create a touring version of the set that can be moved outside later in the season without affecting our calendar for the rest of the year, etc. With the ever-updating cycle of information in the fight to understand, address, and recover from this crisis, there really is no way to predict or plan with any certainty. But, if we prepare for many options now, maybe we will be able to bring this play to you someday!

So, the idea was born to document our journey on the road to keeping this production a reality.

Lift the veil (ahem, the curtain ) of the behind-the-scenes challenges, triumphs, bumps and bruises along the way to making a play in a pandemic. For many, the usual process of producing theatre remains a mystery. How do we get to that final step of the performances that audiences see? We asked ourselves, “Why not share with our audiences the way things might have developed under normal circumstances while addressing the sudden and unique challenges we will face along the way in these new parameters?”

The Playhouse has a display in our hallway for each production that we lovingly call the “Journey Board”.

On this board, we exhibit designer sketches and photos from every phase of the rehearsal process starting from the first day.

Our new “Journey Blog” and video diary will be a way of bringing that idea along for this unusual production.

We hope you will follow along and share the adventure with us!