Read it here: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/george-heymont/follow-the-money-playwrig_b_835149.html

There are 5 more performances of the play – tonight, tomorrow, and Thursday-Saturday of next week. Information can be found at sfolympians.com

THE ENTANGLED PLAYS and the Birth of The Flying Island Theater Lab – I have been in talks with the Palo Alto Art Center this last year, and have just founded a theater lab that will create new work inspired by the art the center exhibits. You can learn more about The Flying Island on its own blog. Our first project is a piece I am co-writing with Megan Cohen that we are calling The Entangled Plays. Here’s the blurb about the project:

The Entangled Plays

By Megan Cohen and Bennett Fisher

Directed by Kate Jopson and Addie Ulrey

Produced by Bennett Fisher and Elena McKernan

The Palo Alto Art Center in conjunction with The Flying Island Theater Company presents a staged reading of new plays inspired by the current exhibit The Nature of Entanglements. Two promising young voices of the San Francisco theater scene – Megan Cohen and Bennett Fisher – will each compose a short play in response to the pieces from the exhibit, then entangle them together – mirroring the other’s style and borrowing the other’s plotline until the two separate pieces weave seamlessly into one.

Please join us for a free public reading of The Entangled Plays one night only at the Palo Alto Art Center on Friday February 11 at 7pm. A reception will follow.

HERMES receives a full production at No Nude Men - Tickets are already going fast for the fully staged version of my play HERMES, which had its first public reading at the No Nude Men Olympian Festival last year, and we have not even begun rehearsals. I have tightened the play up since the first reading, and am very impressed with the creative team that is attached – the director, Tore Ingersoll-Thorpe, the actors, Geoffrey Nolan, Juliana Egley, Lauren Spencer, Carl Lucania, Brian Markley, and Brian Trybom, and an awesome design crew that includes my dear friends Alejandro Acosta and Tanya Orellana. HERMES was inspired by the Lehman Brother’s role in the Greek financial crisis, and, each time I look at a newspaper, the topic continues to be relevant. The show opens March 3rd at the Exit on Taylor in San Francisco. Be sure to purchase tickets in advance here.

PURE BALTIC AVENUE at the 10th Annual BOA Festival – The 9th BOA Festival last year was a terrific event, showcasing an impressive array of local talent from some of the most exciting theater companies in the area. The pool this year is just as good, and I am honored that my play PURE BALTIC AVENUE has been chosen. PURE BALTIC AVENUE was inspired by an NPR story I heard about mortgage fraud, and might very well be the craziest thing I’ve written. The festival suffered a tragic loss this year with the death of one of the founders of Three Wise Monkeys, Richard Bernier. Please donate freely in his memory to ensure that the great work continues. The festival opens March 6th at the Boxcar Theater in San Francisco.

THE DRAGON at the San Francisco Theater Pub - I am directing a one night reading of one of my favorite plays, Evgeny Shvart’s masterpiece THE DRAGON. A monumental play in the Russian theater from the Soviet period, THE DRAGON has been largely overlooked in the United States, but its story of good intentions and bad governance still resonate. The reading is at the Cafe Royale Bar in San Francisco on Monday, March 21.

Stay tuned for more details on each of these projects, and many more announcements about my work this year. I promise to update with greater regularity.

In 2010, this is my top ten, in no particular order.

1) Founding of the San Francisco Theater Pub. When I started the company early in the year with Stuart Bousel, Victor Carrion, and Brian Markley, we hardly expected such a fantastic response so soon. Since our first performance of Euripides’ Cyclops in January, we have produced 11 other projects, collaborated with over 100 local actors, writers, directors, and theater artists, and become something of a local nexus for members of the theater community. I’ve been blessed to have done so much work in this first year – directing Cyclops, Audience, and Ubu Roi (two of which I personally adapted), performing in The Theban Chronicles, and writing for The Pint Sized Festival – and am very proud of every project we’ve produced. We’ve mounted a lot of interesting, challenging theater – Greek tragedy, Czech absurdism, American poetry, and new work – and the response has been overwhelmingly enthusiastic. I am grateful that we have had such a fruitful first year, and are still going strong.

2) Directorial debut in San Francisco with Vaclav Havel’s Audience – Folded into an amazing year with the Theater Pub was directing my first full production in San Francisco, Vaclav Havel’s Audience. Since writing my honors thesis on Havel’s writing, directing his play The Increased Difficulty of Concentration my senior year, and traveling to the Czech Republic on a grant to meet the man and other Czech theater makers, I have wanted to direct another Havel play. Audience is my favorite one act of all time, and I could not have asked for a better cast – Paul Stout and Nathan Tucker – and a better location – a bar. It was quite a learning curve mounting a full production in an unconventional space, and I am eternally grateful towards the creative, design, and production team that made it possible.

3) Query published in Eleven Eleven Literary Magazine - Meg O’Connor, Alana Waksman, Brian Trybom, and Kathryn Wood rocked my one act play festival Query at the Bay One Acts Festival this year, so much so that it got picked up for publication in the latest issue of Eleven Eleven. A wonderful epilogue to what was already a magnificent experience.

4) Assistant directing Mirrors in Every Corner and Habibi at Intersection for the Arts – I’ve done a bunch of stuff with Intersection now, but being able to work on two powerful new plays by two talented young writers. Doing a play with Campo Santo reminds me why I do theater in the first place, and in both cases, the process and the product were outstanding.

5) Performing in Antony and Cleopatra at Marin Shakespeare Company – Hard to beat performing Shakespeare outdoors in Marin for a summer, especially when it’s a hidden gem like Antony and Cleopatra, and especially with such a good group of people. I feel I learned so much about the performance of Shakespeare sharing the stage with such accomplished veterans, and now am committed to performing in all 39 plays (Edward III and Henry VIII might be hard ones to check off). I should also note that this project marks the seventy billionth collaboration with Sam Leichter, who is a great friend and wonderful actor. Nice to know that our path’s are still crossing.

6) Dramaturgy for The Tempest at Cutting Ball Theater – The Tempest is such a rich play to sink your teeth into as dramaturg, and Rob Melrose’s daring, provocative take on the play was a blast to work on. I’ve been floating in the Cutting Ball orbit for a while, working on a number of readings and other projects, but it’s great to finally dive into something bigger with the company. Looking forward to more projects with them coming down the line.

7) Hermes at the San Francisco Olympian Festival – With the full production coming down the pipeline next year, the reading seems more like a prologue to a bigger thing. But the reading is how we go there. Personally, I think it’s one of the best plays I’ve written, but the cast – Lauren, Juliana, Charles, Carl, Vijay, and Sam (hey! there he is again!) – really brought their A-game. Thanks especially to Stuart Bousel, another great friend and collaborator, for mounting the whole festival and for his support of the play.

Three short plays, great product, no supervision – I had three full productions of three different shorts this year – Query at BOA, In It To Spin It at ShortLived, Pound It at Pint Sized – and didn’t do much more than hand the directors the script and say “good luck.” I think I watched a rehearsal or two of Query, but never saw the other two before they went up in performance. In all three cases, I was thrilled with the product. It’s a good feeling to know you’re works in capable hands, and that the writing can speak for itself.

9) Hamlet and The Birds for Middle Schoolers – This year, I threw two very difficult plays at two different sets of middle school students in two different Bay Area schools, and in both occasions they rose to the challenge. Middle schoolers commit to the work so freely and completely, and are great to direct.

10) Watching – In the 5 minutes when I was not in rehearsal for something, I tried to see as much as I could. The Merchant of Venice on Broadway, Scapin at ACT, In The Wound at Shotgun, Equivocation and boom at Marin Theater Company, 1001 at Just Theater, Terroriska at Threshold, the other plays at BOA, ShortLived, Pint Sized, and the Olympians- I could go on. So much great stuff, here and there. All of it feeds my own stuff.

In our first meeting before rehearsals began, our director Rob Melrose said, since three actors were playing all the roles, that his version of The Tempest was, in essence, a story about a father overcoming his prejudice and letting go of his daughter. For Rob’s conception, there were really only three true characters in this story – Prospero, Miranda, and Ferdinand. The other characters appear not so much as distinct individuals, but as aspects of these first three. As the story progresses, the three become the other characters to reflect or explore the relationships between one another, but the underlying narrative remains the same. Rob joked sometimes about the difference between “the Shakespeare version” and “the Rob Melrose version”, but it was clear to me from the very first rehearsal that, above all else, that Rob wanted to tell the story of The Tempest, that his concept and all it entailed was beholden first to the spirit of Shakespeare’s play. When taking an experimental approach to a classic work, there is always the risk of the concept overtaking the text, but working as dramaturg on this production (and serving, as I see it, as the advocate for the writer), I feel that Rob’s vision reveals more of  The Tempest than many productions that purport to be more faithful.

The key that makes the concept work, that makes the Shakespeare and Melrose version essentially one and the same, has to do with the Elizabethan concept of the human mind. In her essay “The Dark Backward and Abysm of Time: The Tempest and Memory”, Evelyn Tribbe explains that Elizabethans imagined the brain as a kind of vault, a region that could be explored, navigated, and mapped like any region in physical space. We see the traces of this reasoning later in the development of pseudo-sciences like phrenology (which assigns emotions and temperaments to specific regions of the skull), but for Shakespeare’s play, it muddles the line between the world of the island and the world of thought. Audiences might puzzle at the title The Tempest when the storm itself only appears in the first scene of the play, yet the longer and more terrible storm is not on the sea, but in Prospero’s “beating mind.”

Psychological imagery and metaphor abound in The Tempest. In Prospero’s Island: The True Alchemy at the Heart of the Tempest, Nick Cobb notes that Shakespeare has linked Caliban and Ariel to the alchemical concepts of “the soul” and “the spirit” respectively – the former being the earthier, more primitive id aspect of the psyche, the latter the airy, imaginative superego. Later in her essay, Tribble argues that when Prospero tells Miranda the story of their flight and berates Ariel with the story of Sycorax, the language might suggest that he is controlling or even creating the narrative instead of simply relating it. When Prospero rages at the conspiracy of Caliban, Trinculo, and Stephano to assassinate him, one wonders if he is more concerned with the conspiracy itself or the fact that he, a man who prides himself with absolute control over the mind, has forgotten something. The warring forces on the island reveal a hidden conflict in the brain. Prospero fights and then reconciles not only with his enemies, but also with his own conscience. He sets his imagination (Ariel) free, acknowledges his id (Caliban) as his own, brings the conflict to an end by letting go of grudges and prejudice, and eventually prizes an understanding of human relationships over the understanding that comes from books.

Indeed, as Shakespeare’s writing suggest, the intellectual delight of a Jungian or Freudian readings of the play is incomplete if it fails to acknowledge that human element. Rob has managed to touch on something that I feel is essential in The Tempest, which is the necessity to temper the cool, lofty intellect with empathy and compassion – accepting, as Prospero says, that “the rarer action is in virtue than in vengeance.” Reducing the cast to three actors allows us to see this struggle with greater clarity, simplifying and crystallizing in each set of relationships the prejudices, detachment, and, yes, even cerebral intelligence that so often stand in the way of forgiveness. Prospero’s line to Miranda that “to the most of men this [Ferdinand] is a Caliban/And they to him are angels” is deliciously curious when the actor playing Ferdinand has just minutes before left the stage as Caliban. We in the audience cannot help but wonder whether Caliban is worthy of such hatred, or whether Prospero is blind to the fact that the monster is the same as the prince. At the end of the play, when the multiple characters converge together, we understand that the three are no longer preoccupied judging the others, but able to look inward.

For me, that truth is vividly, abundantly clear in our production. I love seeing these psychological readings manifested on the stage, but I find it even more wonderful (and more vital) that Shakespeare’s story becomes clearer because of it. Rob, the cast, and the creative team are still very much on Prospero’s island, but now able to explore some of those uncharted inlets. In my mind, that is the greatest kind of fidelity to aspire to – a production that takes risks, probes deeply, and uncovers more of the richness that has made the play so enduring. I hope you find the result as revealing and enriching as I have.

-Bennett Fisher, dramaturg

The Tempest runs now through November 28. Visit www.cuttingball.com for tickets and information.

What: The Tempest by William Shakespeare, directed by Rob Melrose

When: Running now through November 28

Where: Cutting Ball Theater, San Francisco

My role: Dramaturg

Information: Rob Melrose’s three actor production of the play has just begun previews this weekend. I feel that our Tempest represents experimental theater as its very best – with three actors switching between all the roles, the parallel relationships and psychological dimensions of the play are wonderfully clear. Having read innumerable essays about the Freudian and Jungian aspects of the play for my work as dramaturg, it is a rare treat to see these theories manifested so vividly onstage.

Tickets: Visit Cutting Ball’s website www.cuttingball.com.

What: Habibi by Sharif Abu-Hamdeh, directed by Omar Metwally

When: Running now through November 21

Where: Intersection for the Arts, San Francisco

My role: Assistant Director

Information: Habibi is a wonderfully moving play by my good friend Sharif Abu-Hamdeh, and I am thrilled to report that the critical and audience responses has been incredible. Like all good plays, it’s hard to sum up the plot in a single sentence, but the narrative weaves together a story about a father and son, the experience of Palestinian immigrants, and art theft. The show is now extended through November 21, and it is certainly not one to miss.

Tickets: Visit Intersection’s website at www.theintersection.org or call the box office at 415-626-2787 ext.109.

What: Antony and Cleopatra at Marin Shakespeare Company

When: Running now through September 25.

Where: Marin Shakespeare Company, Dominican University Amphitheater, San Rafael

My role: Proculieus, general under Octavius Caesar.

Information: I play a supporting role in a fantastic production of this rarely produced and aptly titled Shakespeare play about the lives and deaths of Antony and Cleopatra. We are about half way through the run (I have been late to update the site), but there are still many chances to see it. I would highly recommend coming to this one since a) I think the production is really strong and b) this is the first time I’ve performed in a full production in almost a year (and this is it for this calendar year, since I am largely writing, dramaturging, and directing these days).

Tickets: Call the box office at 415-499-4488 or visit the ticket home page on the website (http://www.marinshakespeare.org/pages/ticketorder.php)

Whenever people discuss topics like “community and theater”, I think of that Henry Ford quote “If I’d asked my customers what they wanted, they’d have said a faster horse.” I feel that everyone can agree on the fact that we want a theater that is attentive to its audience, that enriches them by meeting their needs, but I believe that selecting material for the future based on what has succeeded past, or even simply asking the audience the question “what do you want to see?” leads to poor decisions just as, if not more often, than it leads to good ones.

Theaters in the area, large or small, rich or poor, generally rely on an intimate pool of returning artists and collaborators and survive off a loyal audience following. If those theaters, as they often do, simply listen to the voices in this group – audience, administration, and artists – they cannot expect anything than a continuation of the status quo.  In order to expand, diversify, or even survive, I think they need be more willing to bring in new blood directly from the community.

This means hiring actors, writers, and directors who live and work locally. This means increased willingness to hire artists who may not be in that keyed in to the “theater world” but have something to share. Most importantly, this means hiring young collaborators, taking an active role in their development as emerging artists, and empowering them to actively shape the creative process.

I had the honor of assistant directing Chinka Hodge’s Mirrors in Every Corner for Campo Santo last year. Most people involved in that production – the writer, several actors, a large portion of the design team, and myself – were under thirty. We were supported by an established organization and assisted by a lot of seasoned veterans in key roles, but the creative process was marked by the desire to nurture a young voice – one created by and responsive to our generation. I think this factor more than anything contributed to the success of the production. We extended twice and sold out every performance. Most of the audience each night was young and not what I would consider the normal theatergoing public. They came because they understood the play was meant for them. Most theaters would be disinclined to throw support behind a world premiere play by a first time playwright, since they would not consider it a safe bet, but I think this example indicates how utterly the normal criteria often is. We would probably not have drawn the same crowd for “Whose Afraid of Virginia Wolf.”

I don’t think we need to throw out the old in any way either. I am one of the founders of the San Francisco Theater Pub, and in our brief tenure, we have produced a number of totally obscure plays with great popular success. Our first event was a reading of Euripides’ Cyclops, a play that is almost never performed by established theater companies and relegated to the sort of academic curiosity file of the Greek canon. Our reading drew a crowd of well over 100 people and everything that might have made that play so unsavory to a theater – its short length, the extreme darkness of the comedy, its crassness, and the fact that it is all but unknown outside of scholarly circles – made it such a success in the bar. Moving forward, we have performed other off-the-beaten path classics like Aeschylus’ Seven Against Thebes or Havel’s Audience, with a similarly enthusiastic response. The draw of free theater in a bar is certainly a key factor, but really what these elements do is remove the level of pretention or self-importance that is often attached to the classics. The audience is drawn to them not because it is “good theater” but simply because it is fun. It becomes responsive to the community because it is about the communal experience of going to see something with other people, hanging out afterwards, and supporting what is generated locally.

To fully appreciate the importance of Ford’s quote, we need to stop worrying about the format and think about the need, step back from the infrastructure we have in place and get at something a little more fundamental in the form that has been pushed aside. Discussing this issue several decades later, we too easily forget the message of Brecht’s “Emphasis on Sport” – the most passionate and articulate plea for theater playing a more active role in the community – and anything we learn from it. We forget that several hundred years ago, with Shakespeare and other Renaissance playwrights, the theater was a place open to and catering to all class of society, and that plays were constructed with the desire to appeal to both the very high and the very low. We forget that, more than a thousand years ago, that the Greeks coupled theater with day long celebrations, that Aristophanes comedies were as immediate as they were scathing, and that the target audience was largely adolescent youth (that term “goat-song” referring to pubescent voice-cracking). Focus on the local, on the young, on all of the people perhaps least inclined to watch 3 three-hour tragedies in a row or some weird V-effect investigation of man’s inner monster, is how they managed then. We would do well to consider that now.

“There are not many myths solely devoted to Hermes. In his function as messenger of the gods, he is a minor yet essential supporting player in the stories of heroes, arriving to encourage, chastise, advise, aid, and occasionally mislead an individual in crisis. In keeping with that tradition, my play is not so much about the god as it is about men. Like the protagonists of the ancient myths, Anne, Jack, Gil, and Brian are men and women with exceptional gifts and ability, capable of heroic or horrific feats if given the right push. In my play, as in those myths, it is Hermes’ presence (literally and figuratively) that provides that vital catalyst.

Hermes is frequently cast in the role of a trickster, a mythological archetype present in many traditions other than the Greeks, but, more than this, he is the god of surrogates and substitutes. Language and mathematics allow us to order the natural world, separating that indistinct jumble of atomic particles that is existence into individual and identifiable parcels. Commerce and trade operate under the principle that a value can stand in for an object. If the truth is undesirable, a lie can be used instead. In my opinion, Hermes’ dominion, inventiveness and expressiveness, represent the highest form of human thought. Poseidon and Demeter have sway over distinct skills like sea travel or agriculture, gods like Dionysus, Athena and Apollo correspond to even more abstract concepts like Justice and Art, but it is Hermes’ area of influence that facilitates each of these. In one of the few myths where he is the protagonist, Hermes steals Apollo’s cattle and makes the first lyre from cow entrails and the shell of a tortoise, which he then gives to Apollo to avoid punishment when he is eventually exposed as the thief. The story showcases Hermes as a master of rhetoric and deceit, but it is his inventiveness, his willingness to turn something of concrete value (cattle, which can be butchered and eaten) into something whose value cannot be measured in concrete terms (an instrument for artistic expression), that gives Apollo the ability to make Art – essentially, to fulfill his function as a god.

Hermes alone allows man to transcend what is tangible, to devise and articulate concepts that have only a tenuous connection to the physical world. Hermes allows us to think of something greater than ourselves. Hermes allows us to be human.

There is wonderful possibility and also hideous power in that truth. Writing this play in a time of global economic collapse, I was intrigued at how quickly our invented world, the culmination of all that marvelous abstract thinking, turned against us. The conceit of the stock market, whose daily worth now seems to have only a rather feeble connection to more material signs of business strength – tonnage of cargo shipped, for instance – has allowed for immense growth and development, but we are starting to see the effect of what happens when the cult of Hermes spins out of control, when invented or supposed reality trumps substantive reality.

I think that is the defining narrative of our era, and the one I wanted to tell when I set out to write this play. In this story, as in others, Hermes is still a supporting player, but I feel that that is the only way to accurately portray him. Unlike the philandering Zeus or thuggish Ares, Hermes’ behavior can never be enough of a curiosity in and of itself – his presence is too powerful and too pervasive to allow him to be scrutinized in the same way. Slippery logic and artful language are more fearsome than thunderbolts. Greed and poverty level more houses than war. We all know this to be true, but are unable to grasp it as firmly as we should. When try to bring him into view, Hermes dances out of the light. We are not capable of knowing his mind. – Bennett Fisher.”