Whit Andrews Joins VTP As Literary Manager

VTP is pleased to have James "Whit" Andrews as literary manager and head of the PEN IS A MIGHTY SWORD contest jury.

Whit has worked in theatre for 35 years as a director, producer, administrator, playwright, actor and designer. He has directed over 85 productions, acted in 100 and produced 185 more. He recently completed a 10 year stint as Executive Director of The Little Theatre of Winston-Salem, one of America's largest community theatres. Prior to coming home to North Carolina in 1993 he spent 16 years as Producing Director of THEATREWORKS at the University of Colorado/Colorado Springs. At THEATREWORKS, he founded the Playwrights' Forum Awards, one of the premiere short play competitions in America. The Forum received thousands of submissions from around the world. It presented 28 world premieres, including Tall Tales, the first completed segment of The Kentucky Cycle, winner of the 1992 Pulitzer Prize.

The The Pen Is A Mighty Sword contest is now closed and we have begun the difficult task of picking the top three plays - difficult because the quality of the play submissions has been consistently outstanding. Both Whit and Kim Terrell, VTP's artistic director, are impressed with the high quality of the submittals. "So far, reading has been a sheer joy and all indications are that it will remain that way." The depth and breadth of the subject matter is both astounding and heartening. It reminds us anew that talented playwrights the world over invite us to remember and to discover our humanity through stories that are simultaneously "age-old" and brand new.

Winners will be notified and announced no later than August 15.

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Playwright Kato McNickle - Weird and Amazing
by Kim Terrell

I met Kato McNickle at the 2003 conference for Theatre in Higher Education where her play "Swimming in the Ocean" was directed by VTP member, Sharon Andrews and performed as one of the ten-minute entries.

At the time I was struck by Kato's marvelous use of language, sound and space; the completeness that she was able to achieve in a ten-minute piece. As a result of that meeting, I read several of her full-length plays and realized that "Swimming in the Ocean" was literally the "tip of the iceberg". On a recent trip to Connecticut, I met with Kato to talk about theatre. I was particularly interested in what she likes about writing for the stage and how she goes about constructing a play.

'"I love the opportunity to create spaces with physical depth where every detail is important, everything is available nothing is edited." She talked about her interest in the evolution of the human brain and how theatre helps to develop powers of observation by not telling the audience what to look at or what to hear or how to think about what is unfolding before them.

"I've read a lot about the evolution of brains, both human and animal. I found a piece of information that explains why young people who are interested in theatre tend to excel. It seems that people who excel in their fields be it science, art, medicine, building, composing - whatever the endeavor, people who excel have one thing in common - they all have a heightened sense of observation. All people who excel have that in common. It sounds simple, but it's not because so much of what we experience today deadens observation."

Kato, who is in her late twenties, maintains that it's critical to get young people interested in theatre so that they have a place where they can go and "turn off their filters". "Theatre does not tell us where to look, how to think, what to hear, how to feel. Film, on the other hand, edits out everything that the editor and director don't want seen, so does television, so do video games. When you walk into a theatre, it never should be immediately obvious what's going to be important. We look at an empty set and have no idea what it means, we hear sounds and sometimes they are part of the play and sometimes not and we have to figure that out. We can look anywhere we want because a camera isn't making decisions about what we see. We can watch the person speaking, or the person listening, or something else entirely. It's our choice. Everything is right there in the room. Every detail is important. But we decide how important.

That's why I think about how each moment of a play folds into the next moment. How the discrete actions, sounds, lines, and intentions fold into one another moment by moment. I think about what's in the room, what sounds are part of the action of the play, how the intentions unfold, what is seen, what is unseen. I think about it all. Then I turn it over to the audience so that they can make it their own."

Listening to Kato I envision a multi-dimensional puzzle and realize that Kato is a puzzle master. She builds imagery through discrete pieces that do not always make sense at the moment we hear, see or feel them but everything eventually falls into place often forcing us, the audience, to telescope backwards to the moment when the unifying piece was introduced. Much like life, we often do not know the importance of an event when it is occurring but we do understand it in retrospect. Kato's work, like life, forces retrospection.

'Characters don't tell the truth because people don't tell the truth. Life is about getting to the truth, not being told what it is. Truth must be discovered. I control the velocity and volume of the language through punctuation. Punctuation is important and paying attention to it allows the director and the actors to discover the truth of the play."

"I like to leave enough room in my plays so that the audience can make the play their own. Theatre is art and like art, it needs to make you stop. Anne Bogart tells a wonderful story about having a few hours to visit an art museum. She goes in thinking about everything that she wants to see and is stopped by one painting. She spends her entire time in the museum in front of that one painting. It made her stop. That's what I want to do . . . make you stop."

I ask Kato what she writes about.

"I try to write stuff that I'd like to see, that I'd like to be in, that I'd like to direct. I like weird and amazing things. Things that make me stop!"

Kato has plenty of subject matter, for life is nothing if not, weird and amazing. For more information on Kato McNickle visit her at
http://members.aol.com/katomcnick

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AESOP GOES MODERN - Audio Theatre of the Mind and Imagination

This June, The Virtual Theatre Project releases, Aesop Goes Modern, the first audio theatre CD from their series entitled Clips from Classics. Written by Kim Terrell, scored and produced by Marc Solomon, directed by Daniele Suissa and performed by The Virtual Players; Mark Fuller, Chandler Fuller, Heidi Mages, Sean Mahon, Shawn Ross, Tom Paradise, Marc Solomon, Kay Stratton and Kim Terrell. Created specifically for children, Aesop Goes Modern is audio theatre at its best, a dramatization of a selection of short fables complete with the morals that have stood the test of centuries.

This is our first venture into the intensely visual media of sound. Audio theatre is intensely visual precisely because it is sightless. Everything takes place in the imagination of the audience, the mind of the listener. As Yuri Ravosky suggests, "The distinguishing task of the audio dramatist is to use sound, language, voice and music to evoke and to suggest - to inspire the listener into becoming part of the theater troupe, into taking on the functions of scenic designer, lighting technician, costumer, make-up artist and special effects technician. No two listeners see the same audio play. The more the audio play stimulates images in the mind's eye, the more intense and personal the listening experience."

VTP has embarked on the audio theatre journey because we are keenly interested in developing our own imaginations while helping to develop imaginations in young minds. Our society has become one in which visual and visceral stimulation tend to crowd out individual imagination and interpretation and our theatre company is interested in exploring alternative theatre experiences, ones that promote flights of imagination, introspection and personal interpretation.

Aesop Goes Modern was written to allow young audiences an experience not bound within the usual borders that frame mainly visual experiences like film, television and video games. In fact, the physics of mass, time, and space that dictate the realities of a stage or screen experience do not apply to audio theatre because it is incorporeal. Objects exist in a myriad of times and spaces and do so in combinations of 3reality2 not available in other mediums.

For more information on this series email us at Aesop@virtualtheatreproject.com or call Kay Stratton or Sean Mahon at 323-663-0112.

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