By Samuel Beckett Pan Pan Theatre
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BAM 2014 Next Wave Festival #EMBERS Brooklyn Academy of Music Alan H. Fishman, Chairman of the Board William I. Campbell, Vice Chairman of the Board Adam E. Max, Vice Chairman of the Board Karen Brooks Hopkins, President Joseph V. Melillo, Executive Producer Embers By Samuel Beckett Pan Pan Theatre BAM Harvey Theater Sep 17—20 at 7:30pm Approximate running time: 55 minutes, no intermission Directed by Gavin Quinn Sculpture by Andrew Clancy Lighting design by Aedín Cosgrove Sound design by Jimmy Eadie With Henry Andrew Bennett Ada Áine Ní Mhuirí American stage manager R. Michael Blanco Season Sponsor: Presented in association with Irish Arts Center Embers by Samuel Beckett presented through special arrangement with Georges Borchardt, Inc., on behalf of Time Warner is the BAM 2014 Next Wave the Estate of Samuel Beckett. All rights reserved. Festival Sponsor Major support for theater at BAM provided by: The Francena T. Harrison Foundation Trust Stephanie & Timothy Ingrassia Donald R. Mullen Jr. The Morris and Alma Schapiro Fund The SHS Foundation The Shubert Foundation, Inc. 2014 Next Wave Festival ABOUT EMBERS “Silence in the house, not a sound, only the fire, no flames now, embers. Embers.” Henry sits on a beach, remembering and imagining stories and incidents from his life. Tormented by his father’s suicide, his own dysfunctional family history, and his failure as a writer, hallucinations and reality merge as he attempts to stoke the fire of his creativity. First broadcast on radio in 1959, Embers takes us on a journey into the haphazard world of Henry’s imagination, a world of ever-shifting mental leaps, ruminations, and ambiguities where creative story- telling and unfinished memories both real and unreal coalesce into one. Was Henry’s father washed out to sea while taking his evening swim, or did he commit suicide? “We never found your body, you know…” Excerpts from THEATER IN AN EXPANDED FIELD? EMBERS REIMAGINED BY PAN PAN Embers is in a sense an installation of sculpture with words . You look at something and you hear words, so it’s an experiment in those two parts coming together. Basically it’s the elements of light, sculpture, and words all oscillating and happening at the same time. —Gavin Quinn, 2013 Embers is staged within the more familiar setting of a traditional theater space, and in this respect it departs somewhat conceptually from its predecessor [All That Fall]. It also includes two live actors, although the audience is largely unaware of their presence, as they remain mostly hidden for the majority of the performance. Despite these arguably significant changes in form (actors and theater), the central elements that go into constructing the works are strikingly consistent: a pre-recorded soundscape, a pre-programmed lighting system, and a carefully engineered listening environment. And yet with Embers, in a move that seems to signal that they are determined to further undermine the disciplinary boundaries of theater, Pan Pan introduces yet another unexpected material element, that of sculpture. On the stage of Embers sits a four-meter-high wooden skull. It has been fashioned out of 222 layers of individually cut crenellated plywood and has deep slatted eyes and smoothed out teeth. The slats on the eyes open and close like the bars of an old radio, providing the audience with a rare glimpse of the actors who are housed inside. During the course of the performance a series of different lighting effects are projected onto the skull’s undulating surface, making it behave like an LED screen or a digitally rendered image. Surrounding the skull are 562 miniature disc-shaped speakers. The speakers have been attached to a series of transparent polycarbonate strips and are extended floor to ceiling. Not merely an aesthetic device, the speakers perform a real and necessary function within the work. Pushing sound waves out onto the audience with considerable force, they create what Pan Pan’s audio designer Jimmy Eadie characterizes as a fully immersive sound environment (2013). Once again utilizing the term instal- lation to justify the construction of this very particular and fully embodied audio experience, Quinn contends: “[the speakers] hang as a kind of sound installation. So, it makes you aware of Beckett and makes you aware of the medium of sound” (2013, lecture). —Judith Wilkinson, Journal of Beckett Studies, 2013 #EMBERS Photo courtesy Pan Pan Theatre Pan Photo courtesy Pan Who’s Who GAVIN QUINN ANDREW CLANCY Director Sculptor Gavin Quinn is the joint artistic director of Pan Andrew Clancy is a sculptor. His work is in Pan Theatre, which he founded with Aedín both public and private collections and over Cosgrove in 1991. His productions include the last 20 years he has exhibited widely. He his own play A Bronze Twist of Your Serpent also designs and builds sets. He has designed Muscles (named best overall production at for about 25 productions including Pan Pan the 1995 Dublin Fringe Festival); Cartoon; his Theatre’s Deflowerfucked, Macbeth 7, One- own play Standoffish at the Adelaide Festival; healing with Theatre, and Oedipus Loves You. Deflowerfucked; Mac-Beth 7; One: Healing With Theatre; The Playboy of the Western World in Beijing and Dublin, in Mandarin; Oedipus Loves You, which he co-wrote with Simon Doyle; The Crumb Trail; The Rehearsal: Playing the Dane, which won Irish Times Theatre Awards for best production and best set design in 2010; All That Fall at the Project Arts Centre, Dublin, and BAM; Do Di Zhu (‘Fight the Landlord’) at the Shanghai Dramatic Arts Centre and at the 2011 Shanghai Expo; A Doll House at the Smock Alley Theatre, Dublin, and the Brisbane Powerhouse; and Everyone Is King Lear In His Own Home at last year’s Dublin Theatre Festival. His opera directing credits include Tom Johnson’s The Four-Note Opera, Ian Wilson’s Hamelin and Carmen for the Opera Theatre Company (OTC); The Magic Flute for OTC and English Touring Opera (ETO); The Abduction from the Seraglio for ETO at the Hackney Empire, London; and Così fan tutte for Opera Ireland. Who’s Who AEDÍN COSGROVE JIMMY EADIE Lighting designer Sound designer Aedín Cosgrove co-founded Pan Pan Theatre Jimmy Eadie works in sound design and with Gavin Quinn in 1991. Her design credits production. He released four albums with the for the company include The Playboy of the band Into Paradise, and a solo album under the Western World in Beijing; The Crumb Trail; name Amusement, and was a member of the The Rehearsal: Playing the Dane at the 2010 Dublin band the Idiots. He has released many Dublin Theatre Festival, where it won Irish Times collaborative works with Irish artists, and has Theatre Awards for best set design and best worked closely with the Crash Ensemble since production; Do Di Zhu (“Fight the Landlord”) 1997. As a sound designer, he has worked at the Shanghai Dramatic Arts Centre and the with Rough Magic Theatre Company, Cois Ceim Shanghai Expo; All That Fall, for which she won Dance, Dadgha Dance Company, and RTÉ. the Irish Times Theatre Award for best lighting Presently he works at Bow Lane Recording design in 2011; A Doll House at the Smock Alley Studios in Dublin where he has engineered Theatre, Dublin; and Everyone Is King Lear In and produced albums for numerous acts. He His Own Home, Dublin Theatre Festival 2012. teaches at Trinity College Dublin and Windmill Her recent designs for opera and dance include Lane Academy. Eadie has worked with Pan Pan Falling Song and Five Ways to Drown for Junk Theatre since its early productions. Ensemble; and Don Pasquale, Così fan tutte, and Carmen for the Opera Theatre Company. Photo: Ros Kavanagh Photo: Ros Who’s Who ANDREW BENNETT ÁINE NÍ MHUIRÍ Henry Ada Andrew Bennett’s previous work with Pan Pan Áine Ní Mhuirí began her career at the Abbey includes Everyone Is King Lear In His Own Theatre, Dublin, where she appeared in The Home, All That Fall, Mac-Beth 7, Oedipus Loves of Cass Maguire, The Plough and the Loves You, and The Rehearsal, Playing the Stars (with which she toured the US), and The Dane. His work with the Corn Exchange Field. Her engagements elsewhere include The Theatre includes Freefall, Cat on a Hot Tin Voices of Shem at the Gate Theatre, Dublin; Roof, Everyday, Lolita, The Seagull, and Foley. Exiles and Juno and the Paycock for the Work with the Abbey/ Peacock includes The Royal National Theatre; Dirty Dusting on tour; Importance of Being Earnest, The Playboy of Solemn Mass for a Full Moon in Summer for the Western World, Translations, The House, Rough Magic; Philadelphia Here I Come! on Tarry Flynn, and Fool for Love. He has worked tour with the Second Age Theatre Company; with Druid, Rough Magic, Passion Machine, John Gabriel Borkman at the Focus Theatre, and Bedrock. Film and television credits include Dublin; and A Doll House and All That Fall for Angela’s Ashes, Paths to Freedom, Pure Mule, Pan Pan Theatre. Her films include The Lonely Prosperity, Garage, Your Bad Self, Pentecost, Passion of Judith Hearne, The Field, Playboys, Chris O’Dowd’s Moone Boy, Foyle’s War, Damo The Run of the Country, Puckoon, Blind Fight, and Ivor, Noble, and The Stag. and Boy Eats Girl. Her television credits include Teems of Times, The Irish RM, The Price, Fair City, The Clinic, and Jack Taylor for RTÉ; and Ballykissangel for BBC Television, for which she received a CFT Excellence Award (USA). Who’s Who PAN PAN THEATRE R. MICHAEL BLANCO American Stage Manager Pan Pan Theatre was formed in 1991 by Gavin Quinn and Aedín Cosgrove.