Cardboard Masterpieces

We love seeing the ordinary transformed into the extrordinatry.  Such is the case when sculpture artists create with non-traditional mediums like LEGO or carboard.  Their creativity inspires us to reconsider the normal as something liquid, something waiting to be altered into a new and surprising thing.

The full article featuring this full-sized cardboard car by Chris Gilmore and other amazing creations can be found here.

Puddles Pity Party perfects Brecht's Alienation Effect

M&P cofounder, Tobin Atkinson, did much of his MFA thesis work dissecting Brecht's theatrical theory better know as the "Alienation Effect".  Atkinson even penned his own play entitled The Alienation Effekt which employs most of Brecht's principles.

Last weekend the M&P crew discovered and fell in love with Puddles, a sad-yet-golden-voiced clown covering Lorde's pop hit "Royals".   The persona of Puddles immediately distances the audience from the set up of pseudo-lounge act.  We are comfortable with the reality of handsome combo musicians and lovely backup singers when this unexpected creature enters the scene.  A truer "wtf" moment never existed.  However, the second Puddles starts to sing the song (far better than Lorde ever does), he makes you listen to the song in a "new" way.  You actually hear the song differently.  

By "alienating" the audience through unexpected extremes, signage, and altering the words to pop tunes, Brecht was attempting to get his audiences to listen intellectually to the song rather than emotionally.  Puddles, whether he knows it or not, nails what Brecht was always striving to achieve:  reality disrupted by a giant in a clown outfit, a suitcase with a web address, and pop song (where you can actually understand the damn words!), and a voice that could melt butter.  

Viva La Puddles!

Folger's Fascinating Forge Request

Washington, DC's Folger Library is mounting Romeo and Juliet this fall (2013).  The director and designers wanted weapons that "fit" the production.  So rather than pull rapiers, etc, from stock, they commissioned Baltimore Knife and Sword to design and build all new functioning weaponry for what sounds like one hell of an R&J.

The link to the Washington Post article is here.  But watch the post-tv video for the "real" story (you might have to register with post-tv to see, but worth it).

Meat & Potato in American Theatre Magazine



We were flipping lazily through the October 2013 issue of American Theatre Magazine the other day and discovered an article by Salt Lake City theatre critic Barbara M. Bannon detailing all of the new plays presented annually in our home town. 

Late in the article Barbara mentions Meat & Potato cofounders Tobin Atkinson and Marynell Hinton and their collaborative work on The Odyssey and Aliens: The Puppet Musical.

It's an amazing feeling to be shocked and humbled all at once.

Breathing New Life into Old Stories

Marynell recently saw an article about Mark Morris directing Britten's exceedingly dated Curlew River for Tanglewood. At one point when looking over the original stage directions that accompanied the libretto, Mr. Morris said:

 “It’s so dated, it’s so corny, it’s so bad...I just said, wait a minute, first of all, everybody tear that out of your scores." He then spent rehearsals getting dancers to "talk and communicate" to each other rather than perform. He encouraged the singers to converse rather than orate.

And it sounds as though Mr. Morris has adopted a theatrical style that we have already started to embrace for our 2014 premier of Beowulf:

 "There are just a few props and no monks’ robes, masks or makeup. No attempt is made to disguise the fact that Mr. Bell is a young man playing an elderly woman."

But that's what the M and P mission has always been: to tell compelling stories in the most powerful way possible. We've done it with Dickens, and Poe, and Verne, and the Sci-Fi masterpiece Aliens.  Why try to invent a compelling story when 5 million of them have already been written?  Find a good story that illustrates a timeless human condition and tell it a way that makes even the X-Box generation lean forward wanting to know what happens next.

Curlew River is a companion piece to Purcell’s Dido and Aeneas.

Wrecking Orchestra Tron Dance

Just found this on youtube. If meat & potato had the money, this is the kind of stuff we'd want to do: TRON, DANCE CRAZE IN THE MAIN FRAME

The Continuing Appeal of THE ODYSSEY

Marynell found this incredible story in the New York Times about a group of puppeteers preparing to mount their newest event "Odysseus at Hell Gate". The traveling audience are the war weary Greeks walking through streets lined with creatures inspired by Homer's classic. The puppet makers are Alex Kahn and Sophia Michahelles.

Here's the link to the article.

Small Crimson Parasol

Meat & Potato Theatre recently assisted the Calvin Smith Elementary Drama Club by building a handful of set pieces for their production of folk tales entitled TWO FOR THE SHOW: HEGGITY PEG & SMALL CRIMSON PARASOL. The latter is a retelling of "Little Red Riding Hood", but set in Japan rather than the Bavarian woods.

The Calvin Smith Drama Club is directed by Kathleen Atkinson, a M&P board member. The fight and dance choreography for the shows were directed by Enid Atkinson, former associate producer of M&P.

Here Small Crimson Parasol meets grandmother who looks a little under the weather...



Here Heggity Peg arrives at the children's house, looking through the window we built.



Here is the bamboo screen we built for the story set in Japan. The unit rotated to represent the Heggity Peg woods on the other side.

Hello Baby Universe

While it would be more marketing saavy to toot our own production horn with the successful opening of AROUND THE WORLD IN 80 DAYS last weekend, this NY Times article seemed noteworthy. Wakka Wakka Productions has created BABY UNIVERSE-A PUPPET ODYSSEY, an hour long puppet play about the end of our current world and the desperate search to create a new one before the last human perishes.

Hmmm...you mean you can have a socially relevant "meassage" play AND be entertaining at the same time? You mean Brecht wasn't the last person to think in those theatrical terms? Who knew?








(pictures from the Wakka Wakka website and NY Times)

More 80 DAYS Travel Posters

Michael finished the travel posters for the AROUND THE WORLD IN 80 DAYS set. Here are the two 8'x5' monsters. There are 3 7'x4' posters also. They will hang above the playing area.

80 DAYS takes shape

Meat & Potato has been in pre production for Around the World in 80 Days for almost 2 months now.

Marynell made final adjustments to her translation of the French script.

Tobin designed and built a portable set which sits disassembled in his garage.

The play has been cast with 5 very capable, exciting actors: Kirt Barnes, Susan Maurer, Roger Dunbar, William Richardson, and Kent Hadfield. All five actors are new to the M&P stage.

Enid Atkinson returns to M&P and has sent each cast member a dialect tape and notes to help them with their accents. Enid is also choreographing the three dance moments in the show.

David Evanoff returns to M&P composing two new songs for the show.

Heather Meyers, having just completed a run of Hamlet at Pioneer Theatre Company, returns for a third time to M&P as our capable stage manager.

Sam Mollner, lighting designer, returns for his third M&P show--IN A ROW!

Two new artists join the M&P team in this project. Megan Crivello and Tobin worked together for two years in the Playwrights' Laboratory before she took on the role of costume designer for 80 Days.

Lastly, Michael Skorney assists Tobin with the set elements of the show by generating five vintage travel posters that will hang above the set in the Studio Theatre at the Rose Wagner. The posters highlight the various places the characters travel during the play. The pictures on this blog entry show the progression of the "India" poster and the first hours of work on the "England" poster.

We start rehearsals in 10 days!

Admiration for puppet opera

M&P loves the power of the doll. We have worked puppets into half of our productions to date. Four productions have been completely puppet-based including our DC productions of Beginnings, Hard Times, and Roshomon and our SLC production of Shadows of the Bakemono.

It is with special admiration that we acknowledge the Gotham Chamber Opera and the Tectonic Theater Project's production of “El Gato Con Botas” (“Puss in Boots”), a 1947 children’s opera by Xavier Montsalvatge sung in Spanish. Thanks for the inspiration! Please read the whole NY Times article.

LA's Mobile Puppet Theatre

We listened in awe to the NPR story about LA artist Joel Kyack and the puppet show he performs in the back of a truck on the congested freeways of southern California. The show is called "Superclogger" after the name given by locals to describe the notoriously bad traffic jams that occur on the LA freeways.

Meat & Potato is a great supporter of all things puppet and loves that Mr. Kyack and friends are taking them to the streets...literally. Mr. Kyack has even discovered a way through a short wave FM signal to pipe dialog of the show directly into the radios of the cars behind him so that drivers (audiences) can hear what's being said.

Best of luck to Mr. Kyack and thanks for the inspiration!

Lauren Gunderson's Article on the State of Theatre

Thank you to Lauren Gunderson for the opening salvo of her new blog exploring why the ancient art of "live theatre" is still with us, even in our media-filled, technologically advanced age.

A lot of her statements sound like she was either a founding member of meat & potato, or a least had sat in on some of our production meetings. Marynell and I have been striving to create "tribal" events in which everyone one in the room (actors and audience alike) are experiencing an important story together--or as Ms. Gunderson puts it: Actor+Audience+story=Theatre. As we say throughout our website, "The true origins of theatre are when one member of the tribe sat on this side of the fire and told stories to the rest of the tribe sitting on that side of the fire."

And praises to Ms. Gunderson for mentioning that ever-important element so often missing in today's "modern" theatre: theatricality. When did theatre a) become a place where screen writers "test" their scripts before sending them off to a Hollywood producer, or b) become a place where characters talk us to death, analyzing an issue to the point of "good god, when's the intermission so I can get the hell out of here? If I wanted a sermon, I would have gone to church instead"?

(Picture is from "How the Robin Got Its Red Breast", Beginnings, meat & potato 2005)

Everyman Production Shots

Stills of the Meat & Potato production of EVERYMAN & JUDGMENT DAY are now on the company's website.

(Josh Thoemke as Death and Rebecca Marcotte as Everyman.)

Everyman Set

With some luck and great advice from a couple of friends, the Everyman centerpiece hangs 9 feet above the stage floor.



The original stained glass window was found with some luck in Paris. The plywood frame was suggested by George Maxwell at Pioneer Theatre and the food color stain (yes, Food Color!) was suggested by my old army buddy-cum-set designer Maylan Thomas.

Sam Mollner helped paint the frame. Marynell was patient and encouraged when needed.

EVERYMAN Approaches: Publicity Photos

Publicity shots taken in the basement of the Rose Wagner Performing Arts Center and sent to various local news outlets.

Michael Gardner as the devil Tutivillus with Julia Goldman as Angel.


Josh Thoemke as Works and Rebecca Marcotte as Everyman.


Rebecca Marcotte as Everyman and Josh Thoemke as Death.

EVERYMAN in full swing

Props and costumes for EVERYMAN and JUDGMENT DAY are coming together. Since the two plays oppose one another thematically, so too must all of the "plastics". Where JUDGMENT DAY illustrates how to get into heaven by merely accepting Christ as your personal savior and filled with devils, angels with attitudes, dead souls, and the 4 horsemen of the Apocalypse--EVERYMAN shows how a person's deeds in life will determine what happens after death, and is filled with energetic allegorical characters, hip hop beats, and a rousing musical number of "We Are Family."

The devils in JUDGMENT DAY start out as displaced workers: sort of THE OFFICE-meets-a-BDSM convention. In order to avoid being judged themselves, the devils decide to repackage themselves. They transform from "Average Joe's" dodgeball team to something out of a Terry Gilliam movie. Toby and Dorcas change their names to "Misery" and "Retribution", while Tutivillus mutates from used-car-salesman to demonic chieftain. Rachael Zimmerman is costuming the show and chose a mask for the transformed Tutivillus: an exaggerated Commedia dell'Arte mask, bright red.

A picture is the mask in the the process of being built.

Admiration for Pioneer's 42nd Street

We love spectacle on stage. For us, the battles in HENRY V will forever trump the seemingly endless yammering of WAITING FOR GODOT. So when Pioneer Theatre's recent production of 42nd Street started with 20 dancers slamming out the same tap step simultaneously, we were in heaven!

And although some of the students in the Playwrights' Laboratory complained at the sappy script, they were countered by others who pointed out that there has to be a reason this story has floated across the American stage for almost 80 years. The play lives on its spectacle.

Thanks to Charles Morey's direction, Kevin Alberts' costumes, George Maxwell's sets, and Patti D'Beck's choreography for the reminder that not every play has to enlighten or save the world--that the word "play" has more than one meaning.

Photo: Lea Kohl and Jeffrey Pew star in Pioneer Theatre Company's production of the Tony Award-winning "42nd Street." (Tom Smart, Deseret News)

EVERYMAN & JUDGMENT DAY set

During our wanderings through Paris's Monmartre district last September, Marynell wanted to wet her whistle on a Coca-Cola. She popped into a drug store and I wandered into a strange looking cathedral that stood nearby--the Eglise-Saint-Jean-de-Monmartre, to be exact.

The church was designed by architect Anatole de Baudot in an Art Nouveau style (built 1894 - 1904). And it was pure dumb luck to look up and discover this stained glass window:



The stained glass is "Le cheval blanc de l'Apocalyse" (The White Horse of the Apocalypse) designed by Pascal Blanchard and executed by Jac Galland.

Marynell and I loved the imagery, colors, and power so much that we decided to make it the center piece of our spring production, EVERYMAN & JUDGMENT DAY. Both plays emerged from liturgical drama (religious stained glass connection), they address the incredibly human concern of death (figure of death), and JUDGMENT DAY specifically deals with the apocalypse (Death as one of the Four Horsemen).

I'll be constructing a facsimile of this wonderful window and will hang it over center stage. It will be back lit, of course, to really get those colors to pop.