In 1955 Althea Gibson and Angela Buxton were world-ranked tennis players...yet no one wanted to partner with them in women’s doubles. In fact, few even wanted to talk with them. Post-War America was still very segregated and the tennis world was still very anti-Semitic. Eight years after Jackie Robinson had broken the color line in major league baseball, the tennis world lagged behind, clinging to its country club roots. So, Althea, a black woman from Harlem, and Angela, a Jewish woman from Liverpool, were outcasts in two nations. So they decided to join forces outside their own country - and what happened then made history. ALTHEA & ANGELA tells the story of their meeting at an exhibition game in New Delhi, pairing up, and winning the French Open and Wimbledon – the first Grand Slam events that any African-American - male or female - had ever accomplished. It also tells the story of the unlikely events that occurred 40 years later, when one fell upon destitute times...and the other saved her life by a mass appeal to the tennis world.
“Groundbreaking athlete Althea Gibson – the first Black American to win a Grand Slam tennis title – comes brilliantly to life in JB3 Entertainment’s world premiere production of Todd Olson’s Althea & Angela… Compressing such history into a tight 70 minutes with no intermission, Olson chooses the scenes and lines we’re privy to with razor-sharp precision. The snapshots the audience gets – mostly centered on 1956 but flashing forward and back in time – expertly imply two entire lives and multiple intersecting worlds. Horn burns her performance onto the audience’s consciousness…Her chilling, steel-spine delivery of lines like “Losers say ‘It’s possible, but it’s hard,’ winners say, ‘It’s hard, but it’s possible.’” made me sit up a little straighter in my seat. The chemistry between Fischer and Horn clicks and spins like beautiful clockwork. [Director James] Blackmon uses the physicality of the sport and the performance to pulse-pounding effect; he stages the tennis matches with the characters facing the audience in an interesting play between the distance of being in the stands and the almost uncomfortable intimacy of being inside their heads, and he sets up the rest of their life in a similar circling way, always in some sort of motion. It’s an exciting slice of history, well-told; a profound look at the reasons and rewards of connecting with one another; and a dazzling reminder of how much beauty there is in being alive.”
-Columbus Underground
“Groundbreaking athlete Althea Gibson – the first Black American to win a Grand Slam tennis title – comes brilliantly to life in JB3 Entertainment’s world premiere production of Todd Olson’s Althea & Angela… Compressing such history into a tight 70 minutes with no intermission, Olson chooses the scenes and lines we’re privy to with razor-sharp precision. The snapshots the audience gets – mostly centered on 1956 but flashing forward and back in time – expertly imply two entire lives and multiple intersecting worlds. Horn burns her performance onto the audience’s consciousness…Her chilling, steel-spine delivery of lines like “Losers say ‘It’s possible, but it’s hard,’ winners say, ‘It’s hard, but it’s possible.’” made me sit up a little straighter in my seat. The chemistry between Fischer and Horn clicks and spins like beautiful clockwork. [Director James] Blackmon uses the physicality of the sport and the performance to pulse-pounding effect; he stages the tennis matches with the characters facing the audience in an interesting play between the distance of being in the stands and the almost uncomfortable intimacy of being inside their heads, and he sets up the rest of their life in a similar circling way, always in some sort of motion. It’s an exciting slice of history, well-told; a profound look at the reasons and rewards of connecting with one another; and a dazzling reminder of how much beauty there is in being alive.”
-Columbus Underground
BEATLE GIRLS (written for 6 women 55-75)
Nora Sweeney was a teenager when she ran the Beatles Fan Club with a room full of other excited girls, writing the newsletter, answering fan letters, and enlisting the “four lads” to give them everything from autographs to wisps of hair to mail to thrilled fans world-wide. Now Nora and her girlfriends – all decades older – go back in time and tell the inside story of what life was like as the British Invasion began and the phenomena that was “The Fab Four” emerged from post-war Liverpool. A close ensemble of 6 actresses play everybody in the ever-changing world of the 1960s, with music, love, and Beatlemania!
THE BEDFORD FALLS BOYS
CASA BLUE: the last moments in the life of frida kahlo
“Startling…Eccentric…Kahlo's life as a series of surreal vignettes…[Olson] and his co-authors created a mosaic, "a picture made of broken things," that defies any attempt to fashion a coherent, linear narrative out of Kahlo's life…This is an ingenious approach to Kahlo's complex personality, and Olson masterfully directs this exceptionally ambitious production, which is stuffed with complex sound and lighting cues, as well as the occasional appearance of marionettes that descend into the action…[CASA BLUE] more closely resembles a peyote hallucination guided by the spirit of a self-absorbed woman frantically trying to mythologize her physical suffering, her emotional turmoil and her modest artistic output.”
-St. Petersburg Times
-St. Petersburg Times
BEST RISKY PROGRAMMING: Casa Blue
American Stage’s 2006-2007 season was relatively conservative, reflecting the tastes of its graying audience. But one show at the year’s end was anything but staid: Casa Blue: the last moments in the life of frida kahlo. This ode to the Mexican artist was distinctly avant-garde: grating, uncompromising, alien and unnatural. Four different actresses played Kahlo at various stages of her life, the movie Frankenstein played on a screen in the background as ghoulish marionettes fell from the ceiling like injured demons, an atmosphere of nightmarish grotesquerie pervaded every scene. Writers Jeremy Childs, Karen Garcia and (American Stage artistic director) Todd Olson offered not a typical biodrama but a visual phantasmagoria, macabre and unpredictable — and not only was the audience not offended, but the demand for the play led to an extended run. Maybe that gray audience isn’t so conservative after all.
-Creative Loafing "Best of the Bay" Awards
-Creative Loafing "Best of the Bay" Awards
"Stunning...engrossing...
...Raw and bare and exotic…literally overflowing with life and color and anguish…Like a new ride at a theme park, every twist and turn has an unanticipated thrill…The whole thing comes at you with a screaming jolt and keeps on a-coming…How strange the mixture, how full the experience…You will wish you had a rewind button.”
"An astonishing event...
...Exciting…Outstanding…I can’t think of anything else like it… A formidable work of imagination…Just when you thought that old-fashioned realism had all but obliterated theatrical innovation, CASA BLUE comes along to say the avant-guard is alive and steaming…The play is fast-paced, disjointed and deliberately jarring. It’s also a visual phantasmagoria, macabre and even nightmarish…You can’t ignore the force of what you’ve sat through, its inventiveness, unpredictability, technical brilliance, and modernity. This is theatre as if written by Stravinsky or maybe Shostakovich: grating, uncompromising, alien, unnatural…You come away shocked and overwhelmed…The play has a coherence that’s inarguably artistic…You have to admire the writing troika for having the courage to use Kahlo’s life as the occasion for this bizarre and unsparing drama…A rarity for American Stage: an avant-guard piece that’s getting its first production…I’m impressed with American Stage for making the decision – and having the daring – to debut it in the Bay area.”
-Creative Loafing
-Creative Loafing
"A vivid pastiche of art...
“Watching Frida flash by: The life of a dying Frida Kahlo replays as a vivid pastiche of art, passion and struggle…a multimedia production, including clips from some of the movies Kahlo loved, such as King Kong, Tarzan andFrankenstein; puppets and masks; film and a slide show of her art.”
–St. Petersburg Times
–St. Petersburg Times
“Passionate…fascinating…moving…nightmarish…
...a warts and all portrait, told in a multimedia format designed for the MTV generation, with a nod to Kahlo's own artistic vision…filled with moments of beauty and poignancy…It makes you feel like you are peeking inside a Mexican home, with lots of surprise touches, some achieved by the moody and spiritually alive lighting by Joseph P. Oshry…Each [actress] has her own individual strengths, but together they convey a complete portrait, at least one as intriguing as the portrait Kahlo painted of herself…There is plenty within this sometimes curiously told story to inspire and move you. And you have to cheer a local company that takes a chance on an original production that can draw in an audience looking for something new and adventurous.”
-Sarasota Herald Tribune
-Sarasota Herald Tribune
"An inspiring docudrama...
...and fitting celebration of the artist on the centennial of her birth…With so much material to assimilate, it’s a wonder the script didn’t end up disjointed and unintelligible, particularly since the play rejects the conventional linear format. Instead, the meandering narrative is self-sustaining, and the script contains occasional shards of poetic genius…Olson, Garcia and Childs sort out all the puzzle pieces in this mélange approach, reeling from the catastrophic to the comic in a matter of moments.”
-Seminole Beacon Leader
-Seminole Beacon Leader
CITIZEN THORPE
1999. Jerry’s father has died, leaving his estranged son nothing more than a cryptic challenge to, “go find a hero.” So Jerry, a new Ivy League grad, deals with the passing of his oppressive father by throwing himself into his first job – a lowly production assistant at ESPN (entertainment sports network). Here he is assigned to research a forgotten athlete, dead for a half century, in order to prove his place in ESPN’s series of the 100 most important sports figures of the 20th century. Jerry’s journey starts in 1888 on a dusty Oklahoma Sac & Fox reservation, and moves through the deadliest years of college sports, the first great Olympic scandal, and finally to Hollywood and the dawn of the American sports superstar. He also finds a poor boy with secrets, astounding events lost to history, and a few answers to the mysteries between fathers and sons.
HURRICANE BROTHERS
Book, Music and Lyrics by Rob Hartmann and Todd Olson
It was 1900 – the dawn of a new century – and Americans were unshakable with pride. Two brothers, Isaac and Joseph Cline, worked diligently in the Galveston Weather Bureau office in the late summer of 1900…but on September 8, Texas was hit with what is still the deadliest natural disaster in our nation’s history. And while the last known survivor of Galveston only died two years ago, this cataclysmic event is largely forgotten. The Galveston Hurricane killed 16 times more people than the Chicago Fire two years before…six times as many as the Titanic 12 years later…four times as many as in The World Trade Center 101 years later…seven times as many as Hurricane Katrina 105 years later…and more than all of the U.S. fatalities from 300 tropical storms and hurricanes since. Now, through letters, wires and witness accounts, the ghosts of Galveston, as well as the Cline Brothers, come back to tell their story of what really happened that fateful night.
Rob Hartmann is adjunct faculty in the graduate musical theatre writing program at the Tisch School of the Arts at NYU, and composer of Macabaret, Hereafter, and The Vanashing Point. Todd Olson is producing artistic director at American Stage and creator of My Way, I Left My Heart and Casa Blue.
It was 1900 – the dawn of a new century – and Americans were unshakable with pride. Two brothers, Isaac and Joseph Cline, worked diligently in the Galveston Weather Bureau office in the late summer of 1900…but on September 8, Texas was hit with what is still the deadliest natural disaster in our nation’s history. And while the last known survivor of Galveston only died two years ago, this cataclysmic event is largely forgotten. The Galveston Hurricane killed 16 times more people than the Chicago Fire two years before…six times as many as the Titanic 12 years later…four times as many as in The World Trade Center 101 years later…seven times as many as Hurricane Katrina 105 years later…and more than all of the U.S. fatalities from 300 tropical storms and hurricanes since. Now, through letters, wires and witness accounts, the ghosts of Galveston, as well as the Cline Brothers, come back to tell their story of what really happened that fateful night.
Rob Hartmann is adjunct faculty in the graduate musical theatre writing program at the Tisch School of the Arts at NYU, and composer of Macabaret, Hereafter, and The Vanashing Point. Todd Olson is producing artistic director at American Stage and creator of My Way, I Left My Heart and Casa Blue.
JOE CORSO RE-ENTERS FROM THE WINGS
mentioned in the February American Theatre Magazine
Todd's JOE CORSO is 1 of 5 new plays selected for the
Great Plains Theatre Conference!
My play, JOE CORSO RE-ENTERS FROM THE WINGS, has been chosen from over 600 submissions as one of the top five MainStage selections for the 2012 Great Plains Theatre Conference! It comes with a $500 prize and a week with a director, actors, and an all-conference reading paneled by Rebecca Gilman and Constance Congdon!
JOE CORSO RE-ENTERS FROM THE WINGS (4m/2w) is about what happens when the biggest professional theatre in the region posthumously produces the world premiere of a landmark play by an American icon…only to learn that the playwright might not have written the play at all? It’s the 30th anniversary season at Atlantic Repertory Theatre, and this year will finally be the one to stabilize a fragile institution after a tumultuous economic period. But then long-time Artistic Director Joe Corso opens the season with an instant classic, the last work by an American master…but it’s a play that espouses a theme so controversial that he and the theatre come under fierce attack from a group that is usually its strongest supporters. Inspired in part by the events around California Musical Theatre and the now infamous Proposition 8 initiative, JOE CORSO is a comedy about the inner battles of a regional theatre, and tackles many touchy areas like sexual orientation politics in the theatre, newspaper critics in a dying medium, board members with subversive agendas, and marketing directors who will do anything to get butts in seats.
JOE CORSO RE-ENTERS FROM THE WINGS (4m/2w) is about what happens when the biggest professional theatre in the region posthumously produces the world premiere of a landmark play by an American icon…only to learn that the playwright might not have written the play at all? It’s the 30th anniversary season at Atlantic Repertory Theatre, and this year will finally be the one to stabilize a fragile institution after a tumultuous economic period. But then long-time Artistic Director Joe Corso opens the season with an instant classic, the last work by an American master…but it’s a play that espouses a theme so controversial that he and the theatre come under fierce attack from a group that is usually its strongest supporters. Inspired in part by the events around California Musical Theatre and the now infamous Proposition 8 initiative, JOE CORSO is a comedy about the inner battles of a regional theatre, and tackles many touchy areas like sexual orientation politics in the theatre, newspaper critics in a dying medium, board members with subversive agendas, and marketing directors who will do anything to get butts in seats.
OUTSIDE THE LIVING BODY
Tom Benson has burdens as big as himself - almost 400 pounds: he’s just received word that his mother is on her deathbed and he must come immediately. As this writer prepares to leave L.A. to return to Sioux City, Iowa, he braces knowing that he’s about to encounter his abusive younger sister. Entering the hospital, Tom’s memories flood back in time to years of hospital visits with his wife Shari, battling infertility - something about which his family knows nothing. Just then Lilly – their near-comatose matriarch – begins muttering cryptic family secrets. Meditating on what it means to be an outsider in his own family, Tom’s thoughts drift to the struggle to procreate through “in-vitro” (“in glass”) fertilization – literally “conception outside the living body.” The story culminates in a surprise visit by a forgotten relative, a birth, a death, startling revelations, and a meditation on living in the modern world.
SEAGULL IN THE PANDEMIC (after Anton Chekhov)
What would happen if Chekhov’s masterpiece took place during the pandemic? Turns out that Chekhov – a doctor – already crafted a story about people who didn’t listen to health advice, got colds and fevers, and suffered from exhaustion and depression. Perhaps they all stayed in the country because the theatres in the cities were closed? This stirring new adaptation tells the same story of mothers, sons, lovers, and the future of live theatre during a perilous time. And during a pandemic, not everyone makes it to the end of act 4.
SECTION 60, a song cycle for heroes
Music by Waldo John Wittenmyer
Lyrics by Waldo John Wittenmyer and Todd Olson
Book by Todd Olson
A new soldier comes to be buried in Section 60, the plot of land in Arlington Cemetery recently dedicated to the incoming dead from Iraq and Afghanistan. But he is not alone. There reside the ghosts of the newly dead, lamenting the freshness of their sacrifice, searching for answers, and reaching out to comfort the mourners who walk among them. Driven almost completely by Waldo’s eclectic rock score, Section 60 is at once a song cycle of protest, and a requiem for heroes.
Waldo John Wittenmyer is an Austin, Texas-based rock musician and leader of the band The Naturals. This is his first work for the theatre. T. Scott Wooten is an actor, director, writer, and sound designer who has worked with American Stage Theatre Company for over seven years. His adaptation of Reefer Madness!!! The Play!!! recently performed at the 2010 Orlando International Fringe Theatre Festival and won the "Best Play" Audience Pick Award.
Lyrics by Waldo John Wittenmyer and Todd Olson
Book by Todd Olson
A new soldier comes to be buried in Section 60, the plot of land in Arlington Cemetery recently dedicated to the incoming dead from Iraq and Afghanistan. But he is not alone. There reside the ghosts of the newly dead, lamenting the freshness of their sacrifice, searching for answers, and reaching out to comfort the mourners who walk among them. Driven almost completely by Waldo’s eclectic rock score, Section 60 is at once a song cycle of protest, and a requiem for heroes.
Waldo John Wittenmyer is an Austin, Texas-based rock musician and leader of the band The Naturals. This is his first work for the theatre. T. Scott Wooten is an actor, director, writer, and sound designer who has worked with American Stage Theatre Company for over seven years. His adaptation of Reefer Madness!!! The Play!!! recently performed at the 2010 Orlando International Fringe Theatre Festival and won the "Best Play" Audience Pick Award.
TOWN WITH A SECRET
On a hot Missouri morning in 1981, with 50 people watching, a town bully was murdered on main street in broad daylight…and no one has ever said a thing, and no one has ever been convicted. TOWN WITH A SECRET unfolds like a Greek chorus (or “Women Talking”) and ten townspeople tell the real story of what happened 40 years ago – including the nature of bullies, corruption of law enforcement, the damage done by crooked Judges, “gaslighting” by bullies, and crucial questions about what will protect citizens when society’s institutions collapse. It is a true story of the darkness in small town America, and why this small midwestern farm community has kept its secrets for so long.
TRUSTEES, VIPERS, & REVENGE
Three firings from the non-profit theatre
(based on true events)
Based on three true stories of arts leaders who were ousted by their own Boards, TRUSTEES, VIPERS, & REVENGE tells the inside story of a not-for-profit model rotted with incompetence and racism, populated by trustees who are accountable to no one, and who operate like entitled (usually white) social clubs. And what happens after grappling with rejection, dark thoughts, revenge fantasies, and employment realities? Revival, fight, surrender, and everything in between. TRUSTEES, VIPERS, & REVENGE is a story about arts workers who struggle to lead and create in a system governed by amateurs.
THE UBER CHRONICLES
A True Story About a Harvard Grad’s 600 Rides While Job Hunting
When Andy was fired from his well-paying job as an Executive Director of an arts festival, his severance dwindled quickly, and he eventually was forced to…become an Uber driver. THE UBER CHRONICLES is his true, inside story of looking for work in the arts while navigating Washington D.C., his family, an unstable economy, and the bizarre industry that is not-for-profit arts.
THE WANDERER FINDS LIBERTY IN AMERICA
Morris Trushinsky is a young playwright who aspires to be the next Eugene O’Neill, but in Milwaukee during World War I, that’s an uphill battle. It is November 1918 and Morris has written his first play, The Wanderer Finds Liberty in America, and is directing it for a fundraiser to help Jewish immigrants newly settled in Milwaukee. But he has a secret: he has received his enlistment letter requiring him to register for military service, for which he could be forced to leave his rehearsals and his dream at any moment. Which would be good news to his overbearing father who thinks the theatre is an unserious business during serious times. Morris also struggles with a cast of well-meaning amateurs, including a near blind young veteran, a genius immigrant from Krakow, a misfit outcast from Kenosha, and a teenaged girl from Milwaukee named Goldie with big ideas about liberty…with which she would make history 50 years later. Part history, part fiction, The Wanderer Finds Liberty in America is a comedy about making theatre under great pressure, the nature of socialism, and surviving during a time of war.
