ALTHEA & ANGELA
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
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.
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, it’s 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
