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OnStage – Feathers and Teeth
Feathers and Teeth features
Page 3 - A Conversation with Feathers and Teeth Playwright Charise Castro Smith
Page 11 - Stage Screams: The Horror Genre in Theater
Page 14 - A Costume Designer’s Perspective
Page 15 - Listen Up: Making Noise with Feathers and Teeth Foley Artist Carolyn Hoerdemann
Page 17 - Paving the Way for Latino/a Work: Feathers and Teeth Director Henry Godinez Champions New Voices at the Goodman
The Production
Page 20 - Why Feathers and Teeth? A Letter from Artistic Director Robert Falls
Page 22 - Artist Profiles
The Theater
Page 47- A Brief History of Goodman Theatre
Page 50 - Ticket Information, Parking, Restaurants and More
Page 55 - Staff
Leadership and Support
Page 66 - Civic Committee
Page 70 - Leadership
Page 90 - Support
At the Goodman
Page 149- New Voices and New Stories: the Annual New Stages Festival
Page 159- Events
Page 164- Exploring Identity with Students and Youth Artists at the Goodman
Page 167- What’s Next
September – October 2015
Goodman Theatre
Co-Editors-: Neena Arndt, Lori Kleinerman, Michael Mellini, Tanya Palmer
Graphic Designer: Cori Lewis
Production Manager: Michael Mellini
Contributing Writers/Editors: Neena Arndt, Jonathan L. Green, Lori Kl
einerman, Julie Massey, Michael Mellini, Tanya Palmer, Teresa Rende, Steve Scott, Willa J. Taylor.
Cover photo by Paul Elledge
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A Conversation with Feathers and Teeth Playwright Charise Castro Smith
By Neena Arndt
Charise Castro Smith, who penned the genre-blending play Feathers and Teeth, sat down with the Goodman’s Associate Dramaturg Neena Arndt to discuss her inspirations for the play and why she likes to mix comedy with horror.
Neena Arndt: What was the catalyst for Feathers and Teeth?
Charise Castro Smith: I trained as an actor and only started seriously writing about five years ago. As an actor I was always cast as girlfriends or in sidekick roles. The juicy, cool roles I wanted to play were usually dudes. I would love to play Richard III, but chances are they’re going to cast a dude. I started thinking about this with my last play, The Hunchback of Seville, in which the lead character is a hunchback lady. So for this play I thought, “What about female psychopaths? Where are they on stage?” I wanted to create an awesome, crazy role for a woman to play. I started with the character of Chris and originally thought the play was going to be about this young girl who was a psychopath. I read The Psychopath Test: A Journey Through the Madness Industry by Jon Ronson, which I really loved. The book explores whether this condition of non-empathy is a nature or nurture issue. But then my thought process moved away from that and I started watching ‘70s horror films and became really interested in how horror can actually be a way to understand the obsessions or fears of a culture. It also provides access to some really primal issues—this play is a horror play, yes, but it’s also about a grieving family. As I was finishing the play and developing it in subsequent workshops, I became very interested in the idea of revenge plays.
NA: How would you describe the genre of the play?
CCS: My friend put it in a way that I really love—she called it a “thrilledy.” She said, “It’s a thriller comedy.” And I was like, “Oh yeah? Okay, yeah, I’ll take that.” I love the juxtaposition of a genre with comedy. The play I mentioned earlier, The Hunchback of Seville, is historical, but it’s funny. A play I’m currently working on is science fiction, but it’s also funny.
NA: Feathers and Teethhas a lot of elements of horror but also involves a family that recently lost its matriarch. What are you looking to explore about grief and loss, or about what it means to lose a parent?
CCS: I’m extremely fortunate that both my parents are living. My grandma died seven years ago and I was very close with her. With grief, I think first you try to deny it and then you are angry. Then there are the stages of grief, right? Seven years later I’ve accepted it in a way, but I don’t know if there’s ever a way to really forget about it or fully let it go. You just kind of negotiate it. In the play, Chris, the daughter, deals with loss in a really specific way by seeking revenge and acting out; she’s really angry. Arthur, her father, handles it in a different way. He’s totally in denial and shuts the door to the past. Both of those methods of coping really come back to bite them—literally. I think there’s this primal thing that we can manage in different ways, but ultimately we can’t really control it.
NA: This play was developed over the past several years as part of the Goodman’s New Stages Festival. How did that process work for you?
CCS: [Director] Henry Godinez and I have developed a way of talking about the play and I totally trust his vision. During that process I learned how not to tip my hand too much early on—how to preserve the suspense as long as possible. Sometimes people ask me what I want the audience to know about the play going into it. My response is “not much.” The fun things about the play are the surprises.
Stage Screams: The Horror Genre in Theater
By Neena Arndt
For the first time in its history, Goodman Theatre dips a toe into the crimson waters of horror with Feathers and Teeth. The play focuses on a family whose matriarch recently succumbed to cancer, but rather than taking the form of a taut emotional drama, Feathers and Teethplumbs its emotional depths through a mysterious combination of humor and horror. In the play, the family home is invaded by someone or something who, like the family’s grief, threaten to eat them alive.
“People think horror is too morbid,” says Scott T. Barsotti, a Chicago-based playwright known for curdling the blood of audiences with his eerie work, “but to me, closing yourself off to entire realms of the emotional spectrum is far more morbid than any ghost story.” Barsotti’s plays have been produced most frequently at WildClaw Theatre, a seven-year-old venture whose tagline boldly declares “storytelling is in our blood.” The company was formed to fill a void in Chicago’s robust theater scene, as few companies regularly produce horror plays. Barsotti, however, is convinced horror works are on the rise. “Playwrights are getting more comfortable straying away from traditional ideas of comedy and drama and experimenting with genre—not just horror, but science fiction and fantasy as well.”
Horror traces its origins from folklore, religious traditions and cultures across the world focused on death and the possibility of an afterlife. Demons, werewolves, witches and other supernatural creatures make frequent appearances, giving forms and names to the deep-seated fears that lurk within us all. Western literature and theater are dotted with elements of horror, from the sword-wielding demons in Dante’s Inferno to the ghost of Banquo in Shakespeare’s Macbeth, to the gigantic helmet that falls from the sky and crushes a character in Horace Walpole’s The Castle of Otrano. Horror didn’t become a truly defined genre until the 19th century when writers like Mary Shelley and Edgar Allan Poe began penning stories and novels with chilling narratives involving the reanimation of corpses, or a heart that beats long after its owner has expired.
Even while horror literature grew in popularity, few theater artists embraced it fully. One notable exception was Max Maurey, who served as the artistic director of Paris’ Le Théâtre du Grand-Guignol from 1898 to 1914. Under his leadership the theater earned a reputation for presenting horror plays that featured bleak worldviews and copious special effects. Grand-Guignol playwrights often created characters who suffered from insanity or underwent hypnosis; these altered mental states allowed them to commit unsavory acts, including torture and graphic murders. And while for much of theater’s history evil characters in plays had been punished or brought to justice, Grand-Guignol criminals were rarely taken to task; this invoked a frighteningly chaotic world for the audience. In one such play, André de Lorde’s Le Laboratoire des Hallucinations, a surgeon discovers his wife’s paramour on his operating table and renders him zombie-like in a gruesome brain surgery; when the patient awakes in a crazed state, he drives a nail through the doctor’s head. In another de Lorde play, L’Horrible Passion, a nanny strangles her young charges. De Lorde’s interest in such horrible acts was rooted in a burgeoning understanding of mental illness, and he often collaborated with Alfred Binet,
a psychologist best known for developing IQ tests. Patrons of Grand-Guignol likely saw little science in de Lorde’s work, however, and Maurey took pride in the number of audience members who fainted during performances—the average was two each night.
The Grand-Guignol closed its doors in 1962 after suffering a decline in audiences since the 1940s. The theater’s leaders chalked up its demise to the Holocaust. “Before the war, everyone felt that what was happening onstage was impossible,” said its final director, Charles Nonon. “Now we know that these things, and worse, are possible in reality.” Yet, whatever toll the atrocities of war might have taken, horror found an audience in the late 20th century on film. Inspired both by literature and ever-improving special effect techniques, filmmakers dominated the horror genre, addressing topics ranging from nature gone awry (The Birds), to physical manifestation of the devil (Rosemary’s Baby), to cannibalism (The Texas Chainsaw Massacre). As a literary genre, horror held strong, with Stephen King selling 350 million (and counting) copies of his books.
Why, then, has such a prevalent genre enjoyed lesser popularity on stage? Barsotti offers his theory: “We see more horror in literature and film because horror is a genre primarily concerned with the imagination, and that makes it inherently more cerebral, introspective and reactive. Inner monologue and anxiety are much easier to depict in prose or through film editing than they are on stage, and of course visual effects can help a lot of the storytelling in cinema. That can be harder to pull off live.” Still, he is quick to point out, “Theater has a way of sucking us in, while film keeps us at a distance and reading happens at our own pace—we can put a book down if we start to get too creeped out. But nothing beats the empathic experience an audience has with live actors.”
Thrilling Nights at the Theater
By Michael Mellini
Horror may not be the most prevalent genre on stage, but several plays and musicals have attempted to send audiences home in fright. Learn about a few below!
Dracula
Bela Lugosi terrorized theater audiences in a 1927 stage version of Bram Stoker’s novel. A nurse armed with smelling salts was even stationed in the lobby of Broadway’s Fulton Theater to revive fainting theatergoers. Dracula descended on Broadway again in 2004, this time in a short-lived musical version.
Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street
Seeking revenge on the judge who wrongfully imprisoned him, deranged barber Sweeney Todd teams up with local pie shop owner Mrs. Lovett, who has the gruesome idea of baking Sweeney’s victims into her entrées. Stephen Sondheim’s 1979 musical received the Tony Award for Best Musical and was adapted into a 2007 film from Hollywood’s macabre masters Tim Burton and Johnny Depp.
The Woman in Black
Adapted from Susan Hill’s novel, The Woman in Black has haunted London audiences with its chilling ghost story for 25 years and counting. A businessman visiting the secluded mansion of a recently deceased client encounters a mysterious figure who may be responsible for tragic events that have struck the local townspeople.
Little Shop of Horrors
Inspired by the 1960 horror comedy B-movie of the same name, the Little Shop of Horrors musical infuses the tale of nebbish florist Seymour Krelborn with toe-tapping tunes reminiscent of the Motown era. When Seymour acquires a unique looking plant at a mysterious market, he soon discovers that not only can the plant talk, but it’s developed a taste for human flesh. The musical ran off-Broadway for more than five years and Frank Oz directed a 1986 film adaptation.
Carrie
Tormented telekinetic teen Carrie White wreaks havoc on her high school wrong-doers in a musical adaptation of Stephen King’s novel. The 1988 musical ran only five performances and became notorious within theater circles as one of Broadway’s most high profile flops. In 2012, the musical’s creative team reworked much of the show at off-Broadway’s MCC Theater. The new version has since played regional theaters across the country, including Bailiwick Chicago.
Frankenstein
National Theatre of Great Britain and director Danny Boyle (Slumdog Millionaire) brought Mary Shelley’s novel to electrifying life in a much-lauded stage adaptation of the horror tale. Oscar nominee Benedict Cumberbatch (The Imitation Game) and Johnny Lee Miller (Elementary) alternated in the roles of Dr. Victor Frankenstein and his monster, making the play one of London’s hottest tickets in 2011.
A Costume Designer’s Perspective
Feathers and Teeth is set in 1978 in a Midwestern factory town. Charise Castro Smith’s script includes stage directions that reference pop culture, fashion trends and important figures from the era including Farrah Fawcett, Led Zeppelin, polyester suits, The Brady Bunch and Richard Nixon. Costume designer Christine Pascual was tasked with designing clothes that would befit a seemingly tight-knit family of the late ‘70s. Above are sketches of Pascual’s costumes featured in the play.
Listen Up: Making Noise with Feathers and Teeth’s Foley Artist Carolyn Hoerdemann
Actress Carolyn Hoerdemann takes on the unique role of a Foley artist in Feathers and Teeth by providing a live soundscape for the mysterious creature that invades the home of the family at the center of the play. Below Hoerdemann describes the responsibilities of a Foley artist and why she’s excited to fill the stage with intriguing noises each night.
Named for Jack Foley, the term “Foley artist” dates back to the early days of radio dramas and silent films, when filmmakers needed someone on hand in the studio to create sound effects. Universal Studios called on radio drama artist Jack Foley to provide sounds for their productions. A Foley artist’s sound station could feature any number of props including brushes, metal, bells, doors and much more.
My experiences as a Foley artist began years ago when I was in a play that featured a Foley artist performing alongside the actors on stage. As we mimed with props, the Foley artist provided the accompanying sounds. It was fascinating and moving. I have also directed radio horror plays for WildClaw Theatre of Chicago’s Deathscribe, an annual horror festival of live radio dramas that utilize Foley artists on stage. It’s a very unique and fun night at the theater.
My involvement with Feathers and Teeth was sort of a happy accident. The play began life as a reading during the Goodman’s 2013 New Stages Festival. Director Henry Godinez and Charise Castro Smith felt they needed the visceral sound of Feather and Teeth’s creature to be included to achieve the full effect of the play. The casting director asked if I would be able to create the sounds of the creature with my voice, which then resulted in me creating more sound effects in the rehearsal room, and this ultimately became a happy alchemy of voice and Foley artistry. I was thrilled when I was asked to return for the play’s workshop production at New Stages the following year. Hearing the sound effects live rather than pre-recording them adds another layer to the play that’s so alive, juicy and tangible. Charise now says she can’t imagine the play without the sound effects present. I’m truly humbled and thrilled at this sentiment.
I approached creating the noises of the creature just like I would any character. I must try to find the truth and vulnerability of the creature. It has motivations, desires and needs just like any other character and forms connections with each of the characters in the play. I did look to certain things for inspiration: from baby animals to noises I make myself when in an intense situation.