Category Archives: Uncategorized

>>POST-SHOW EVENTS | AN OCTOROON

February 14, 2016 | Following the 2pm matinee performance

Join dramaturg Ramona Ostrowski and guests Lynne Layton from the Massachusetts Institute for Psychoanalysis and Professor Sunil Swaroop of Emerson College for a conversation after the 2pm matinee of AN OCTOROON on Sunday, February 14th. The discussion will explore the ways that depictions of race and nationality can inform American perceptions of identity and belonging.

February 21, 2016 | Guests TBA, Following the 2pm matinee performance

ABOUT THE SPEAKERS

Lynne Layton, Ph.D. is Clinical Assistant Professor, Part-Time at Harvard Medical School and supervising faculty at the Massachusetts Institute for Psychoanalysis. She writes on race, class, gender, sexuality and contemporary culture and is editor of Psychoanalysis, Culture & Society.

>>THEATRE & EDUCATION ON THE FRONT LINES OF BOSTON COMMUNITIES

panel banner

February 2, 2016 | 6:30PM to 8:30PM
Location: ArtsEmerson’s Paramount Theatre (559 Washington Street)
RSVP HERE

Race and class have now become a National Conversation — from media headlines to heated conversations in the street, communities are wrestling with how to have very difficult discussions that move us forward. As Boston’s theatre for the people working at the intersection of theatre and social change, Company One Theatre, through its production of Branden Jacobs-Jenkins award-winning play, An Octoroon, and the synergy it creates with its Stage One Education Program, offers an effective way to explore these explosive issues.

Join Company One Theatre for an exciting panel discussion about how we can all more broadly, effectively, and artfully combine theater and educational programming to engage the city, schools, and the community in the fight for greater social equity. You will also have the opportunity to learn more about Company One Theatre’s current educational programs from the people that are impacted the most — the teens themselves.

The Panel Features:

• Summer L. Williams | C1 co-founder, Director of Public Relations, and the director of An Octoroon

• Tracy Strain | Filmmaker and director of The Lorraine Hansberry Documentary Project

• Caesar McDowell | President of the Interaction Institute for Social Change

• Kendra Taira Field | Assistant Professor of History and Africana Studies at Tufts University

• James Milord | Company One Teaching Artist

The panel will be moderated by Mark VanDerzee, another of the Company One Theatre Founders, and C1’s Education Director. The C1 Educational Team will provide examples of our curricular material and will be available to discuss their use.

Please click HERE to secure your seat, or reply to this email, by January 14th. And be sure to bring a friend, or SHARE this event with your network!

 

What’s Next 2 (Left)

This November, our award-winning production of Idris Goodwin’s HYPE MAN is back for 3 NIGHTS ONLY as a special fall fundraising event in support of C1’s New Play Development.

Get tickets!

>>STUDIO SESSIONS: AN OCTOROON

 

STUDIO_SESSION_SLIDER_2

Wednesday January 13th 6:30-8:30PM
Restaurant: Abby Lane, 253 Tremont St., Boston
Rehearsal: Emerson/Paramount Center, 559 Washington St., Boston

Part cocktail hour, part exploration of the rehearsal process, Studio Sessions is an opportunity to interact with our productions prior to opening night. Toast AN OCTOROON, before heading over to the rehearsal room for an inside look at how the show gets pieced together. Complimentary appetizers, cash bar. RSVP HERE.

Poolside Politics: A Conversation with Ruby Rae Spiegel

ruby_studio-235

Playwright Ruby Rae Spiegel and Dramaturg Jessie Baxter recently took some time to chat about the driving force behind Dry Land’s inception and why it’s important to tell teen stories.

JESSIE: What was your inspiration for writing this play?

RUBY: It was a couple things — there was this article that I read called “The Rise of the DIY Abortion” in the New Republic, and that really got the ball rolling in my head. When I work, I usually pair a piece of journalism with my own experience, and I had also helped a friend through, not an abortion, but something similar and quite difficult. That was a very profound experience for me, so that plus the article got me thinking about women’s bodies and friendship, and how those intersect in these times of crisis. Buy Generic Cialis http://www.healthfirstpharmacy.net/cialis.html

Did you swim as a teen?

Yeah, I was a swimmer on a team in middle school, but I actually wasn’t very athletic. I quit right when flip-turns became a thing, because I was just too scared. I wasn’t a very good swimmer, but I was a very good pianist. I played piano for 11 years of my life, until I was 15, and I worked really hard at that. So I kind of paired those two experiences together. With piano, I internally pushed myself a lot and worked really hard from a young age, and I think that’s something that young athletes have a lot experience with.

Swimming is also an interesting choice for the play because even though it’s a team sport, it’s still a very solitary activity.

R: Absolutely, swimming has this divide where you might be working together on a relay race or something, but it’s really your body alone in the pool. I remember hearing the gun go off, and you just go into your zone. My other interest in talking about swimming and athletes was that we hear a lot about girls being tough on their bodies because of media images, and I was interested in exploring that and eating disorders, but from a different angle — where someone is really pushing their body and obsessed with perfection, but in a way that doesn’t have to do with beauty standards.

I’m interested in your choice to focus on the teen girl experience. How did you approach these characters?

The dialogue just sort of flowed for me, I think because I’m so close to those ages. In high school I wrote a play about middle school, and in college I wrote a play about high school…I like to write when I have a bit of perspective, but maybe not too much perspective, that I start to narrativize an experience. Something that I get frustrated with is that you see a lot portrayals of teenagers where there’s a really simple way that they draw it back to the parenting. If a teen has an issue, it’s because they have this certain kind of home or something, and that has always felt like it doesn’t give teenagers enough credit. They have their own issues because they’re people, they’re not just products of their environment or their parents, though those are obviously a big part of it. It felt really important to me to make them teenagers dealing with a problem that’s political and immediate. I was interested in going to that really hot space and trying to find empathy and truth and specificity with it, because every teenage abortion story is specific and has to do with specific people. It just felt very important to me to make them high schoolers.

We’ve spoken a lot as a production team about how this play is ultimately a story of friendship, and how two people who begin as strangers grow close after sharing an intense experience. Can you speak to that?

I’m really drawn to unlikely friendship stories, and so I started with the character of Amy and I thought, she’s very guarded, she has a lot of friends, but — and I think this is very common with young women who are guarded — she doesn’t want to reach out to her closest friends with an issue, because she doesn’t want that kind of institutional memory of this experience. That’s why I included Reba, as a way to show that Amy has people, and decided not to reach out to them. So that was part of the unlikely friendship story for me: for Amy to be truly vulnerable, she had to be with somebody who didn’t know her at all. I also think female friendship has to be portrayed more. People are really hungry for honest stories — stories without parents, stories about women without boys or men. Taking away these elements shows a female experience that is a huge part of a lot of women’s lives and just isn’t represented very much. Also, in doing that, you don’t get the trope of two super close girlfriends chatting, but two autonomous individuals trying to understand each other and trying to get something done. I was interested in something where the people are quite different, but through a difficult experience find common ground. Tramadol online http://kendallpharmacy.com/tramadol.html

One of the things I love about the play is that you so deftly weave all these various “issues” into the text without it feeling like an “issue play.” How did you decide what to include and what to leave out about what’s going on in the lives of these characters?

I know that I have a minimalist style and I’m very allergic to cliche, so that makes me go to these hot spots where I say, “Okay, I’m gonna do a play that deals with abortion, female friendships, eating disorders, alienation…all of these issues.” That works well for me because I tend to want to tell the least amount of information that I can. Nobody is going to be like, “Oh, an audience is here, so I’m just going to tell you about myself.” So for myself it’s about working with this tension where I have all the information I have to convey, but the challenge of how to do it realistically and without cliche. There’s also the fact that you see a lot of one-issue things, but nobody lives a one-issue life. We have so many intersecting concerns and problems, and so even though it might seem like a lot — tackling somebody with an eating disorder, suicide, somebody who’s going through an abortion — that just really rings true to my life and my experiences. You don’t categorize people like that when they’re real people, so it was a challenge I was interested in representing.

Toward the end of the play, Amy muses a little about what her life might be like as an adult. Can you talk about that moment and the importance of voicing her potential future?

I think that that was a really important moment for me. There was this piece in Elle that actually said it quite beautifully — that the play is about going through an abortion, but also about getting through it and resiliency. So I think that moment is showing that you’re not branded by your experiences, no matter how much that seems to be the case. In this day and age, when there’s so much stigma around things that women go through, I wanted to show that even though Amy is not a perfect person, she’s a resilient person. There are a lot of people in this country who think that that self-abortion is a sin, so there’s a lot going against her, and so the fact that she believes in herself is a really important part of the play.

How did current cultural discussions and depictions of abortion narratives impact the way you approached the play?

It’s easy to be reticent about putting one of these stories out there because there are so few of them. Sometimes I was afraid that this story would become one of the few, and people would take it as a representation of the whole, whereas I just wanted to show that there are so many different kinds of specific abortion stories. So the more media that was coming out, the more excited I was, and the less of a burden I felt about portraying a perfect abortion story — whatever that is. I also did some research and set the play in central Florida, where the closest Planned Parenthood to where I imagine the characters live had been bombed several times in the past ten years. I also wanted to draw attention to the fact that in many states somebody like Ester would be criminalized — it’s criminal behavior to aid somebody in a medical abortion. So all of this was circling around the play, and I absorbed a bit of it, but I also wanted to shut some of it out so that I could make these characters not be representations of the whole, but specific women going through something that I felt was a very true experience.

We had a few women from the Boston Doula Project come speak to our cast, and a big thing we took away from that conversation was that nobody has the same experience with abortion, it is very individual and specific.

I think that’s huge to talk about. I was really interested in trying to take the play out of the pro-life vs. pro-choice conversation, to try and talk about how it is hard, but a lot of things are hard, and there can be resiliency. It isn’t a perfect thing, but it also isn’t necessarily this kind of horrifying, scarring experience. There are just so many difficult experiences that we all go through — someone’s parents getting divorced could be a lot worse than their abortion, or somebody’s friend getting ill could be more difficult. I think it’s really important to talk about how it is a difficult experience, but that it shouldn’t be stigmatized.

Do you consider this a political play?

Yes, I do. There are other representations of abortion that are more like documentary theatre, or about protestors or abortion doctors, and that kind of story is usually labelled as more political. It’s important to me to label it a political play, even though they talk about boys and their hair or whatever. Those things can coexist; a story about female friendship that includes an abortion is just as political as documentary theatre piece on abortion providers.

>>DIVE IN | POST-SHOW EVENT SERIES

DIVE IN WITH US

>>ABOUT OUR COMMUNITY PARTNERS 

Amplifying Performance Consulting, LLC

APC is a psychology practice committed to helping a wide range of individuals.  APC addresses the needs of athletes, patients with eating disorders, performers with disordered eating and financial executives.  Combining the tools from clinical and sport psychology,  APC aims to improve well-being in both the personal and professional domains. amplifyingperformance.com

Boston Doula Project

The Boston Doula Project provides free, compassionate and empowering support to people experiencing abortion. We promote the doula model of physical, emotional, spiritual and informational support for people throughout the full spectrum of reproductive experiences. bostondoulaproject.org

Boston GLOW

Boston GLOW empowers girls and women to confidently use their voices and become leaders in our communities. Girls’ Leadership (GL) identifies and rewards motivated female youth who possess powerful ideas through scholarship, micro-grant, and mentoring programs. Boston GLOW’s Organized Women (OW) engages and inspires a network of women at issue-focused events and in numerous service and leadership training opportunities that help them reach their full potential. 

Massachusetts Institute of Psychoanalysis

Founded in 1987, MIP offers a training program in psychoanalysis and a one year postgraduate fellowship program. We are an open organization providing a community in which anybody with an interest in psychoanalysis may become a member and participate. MIP offers psychoanalytic forums, presentations of works in progress, and an annual symposium where analysts of national and international reputation dialogue about comparative positions on topics of current interest. mipsa.org

Planned Parenthood Advocacy Fund of Massachusetts

The Planned Parenthood Advocacy Fund of Massachusetts (PPAF) is the advocacy and political arm of the Planned Parenthood League of Massachusetts (PPLM). Formed in 1984, PPAF believes that working within the political process is critical to advancing PPLM’s mission to increase access to sexual and reproductive health services and comprehensive sexuality education for women, men, and families across Massachusetts. www.pplmvotes.org

Peer Health Exchange

Peer Health Exchange’s mission is to give teenagers the knowledge and skills they need to make healthy decisions. We do this by training college students to teach a comprehensive health curriculum in public high schools that lack health education. Our vision is that, one day, all teens will have the knowledge and skills they need to make healthy decisions. peerhealthexchange.org

Suffolk/Center for Women’s Health and Human Rights

The Center for Women’s Health and Human Rights (CWHHR) at Suffolk University is the first academic institute in the United States to focus on women’s health and human rights in the social sciences, arts and humanities, and public policy. Founded in 2003, the CWHHR is committed to furthering the dignity and wellbeing of women and girls everywhere by exploring and extending the linkages between women’s health and human rights. suffolk.edu

Studio Sessions︱DRY LAND

Studio Session Image2
Tuesday, September 15  I  6:30 – 8:30pm
Barcelona South End Wine Bar
525 Tremont Street

Part cocktail hour, part exploration of the rehearsal process, Studio Sessions is an opportunity to interact with our productions prior to opening night. Toast Dry Land at Barcelona in the South End, before heading over to the rehearsal room for an inside look at how the show gets pieced together. Complimentary appetizers, cash bar.

Click to RSVP!

BosTEEN | COLOSSAL

20150722_213441

BosTEEN: COLOSSAL was a terrific night! Teens from Hyde Square Task Force, Lyric First Stage, and Emerson College’s Pre-College Acting Program came together before the show for some fierce competition.

Participants battled for high scores in Trivia, Turf-Tac-Toe, and networking questions to win prizes, including tickets to upcoming shows in the city.

After the show, C1’s Professional Apprentices led a post-show conversation with members of the cast about overcoming challenges, making tough decisions, and told some behind-the-scenes stories from the rehearsal process.

Be sure to look out for our BosTEEN: DRY LAND dates and info, coming soon!