Note from Kathryn, Marketing at Lunchbox: I’ve asked Mark Hopkins and Charles Netto to write some blog posts for us! Here’s the first one, stay tuned for more! Apparently they had this conversation as a kind of draft for their playwright’s notes.

(Transcript from a conversation between Mark Hopkins and Charles Netto, authors of Super 8, on January 31, 2012.)

MARK

Wow. Charles, do you realize that someone – other than us – is producing one of our plays? An established, reputable theatre company, no less?

CHARLES

It’s like we fooled them, though I’m not sure how we did it exactly.

MARK

Also, did you know that Lunchbox Theatre has a blog?

CHARLES

I’ve heard rumour that this is the case.

MARK

For me, this was NEW INFORMATION. I am very excited!

CHARLES

Not as excited as I am about having a REVOLVE in our play. Am I allowed to give that away?

MARK

Tell me about this “revolve”. Is that some fancy theatre word that theatre people use?

CHARLES

Well, Mark, it is a stage that actually REVOLVES to reveal multiple sets. The last time I acted on a revolve was in Grade 12 for the production of Stalag 17. I played Schultz and spoken German badly.

MARK

Is Stalag 17 a German sci-fi, where aliens live in a Berlin ghetto?

CHARLES

You’re going to give away the aliens in Super 8 if you keep dropping hints like that.

MARK

At any rate, I’m happy that Super 8 will have AT LEAST the same production value as your high school play.

CHARLES

Hey, I went to private school. We had a pretty nice budget, let me tell you!

MARK

That’s a great segue way, Charles! I think the idea of this blog is to give people a “behind-the-scenes” look into Super 8. We just learned that one of the writers was a private school boy. Now, why don’t you tell the nice readers what Super 8 is about?

CHARLES

Even though we wrote it together, I see some themes that I often come back to: traveling, loneliness and simple human connections. Mixed, of course, with your love of meticulous research.

MARK

Oh, the research. Did you KNOW that Redfield, South Dakota, is the pheasant capital of… wait, the United States? The world? Let me look it up.

CHARLES

Wikipedia. Where would we (and really Mark) be without you?

MARK

Yup, pheasant capital of the world. A title that dates back to 1908!

CHARLES

Did they give that title to themselves or is there an official governing body?

MARK

I don’t think there’s fierce competition.

CHARLES

Should we bother explaining to people how we write? You know, how you write all of Will’s lines and I write Angie’s?

MARK

Really, Super 8 is just a transcript of how we first met. (pause) Oh man, there are so many pheasants on Google. I’m staring at this crazy picture of dozens of dead pheasants, strung up on, like… a clothesline.

CHARLES

Save it for the sequel, Hopkins.

MARK

People might not know that Super 8 was first written for the 10-Minute Play Festival, over a feverish 24-hour writing period. How did we manage?

CHARLES

The key to my success as a writer was energy drinks. LOTS of energy drinks. You?

MARK

I’m now trying to wean myself from energy drinks. People keep telling me about this video that shows what Red Bull does to your insides. I’m afraid to watch it.

CHARLES

You should be. I sometimes think, if you keep up your pace of energy drinks, that you’ll become a PSA warning to children. “Mark thinks he’s writing a play, but really he’s just hurting his friends and family. And his insides.”

MARK

And then there’s a picture of me, lying on the sidewalk, a can of Full Throttle in my hand, its neon green contents spilling around my prone, twitching body. I think it’ll be really effective.

CHARLES

True. Of course, you won’t play yourself in the PSA. So the question is: who will play you?

MARK

I think it should be Dave Trimble. That guy is just brimming with talent.

CHARLES

And you’re often mistaken for each other.

MARK

We should really work with him sometime. Hey, wait – did I hear that Dave Trimble is actually performing in the premiere production of Super 8? The WORLD premiere?

CHARLES

I believe he is, indeed, in the WORLD premiere. Of course, in the Mars premiere, Will was played by Zarlock Xegis, and the Jupiter production featured x3jdgu21C, but they’ve got nothing on our WORLD premiere crew.

MARK

(Behind-the-scenes factoid: Charles hates it when people use the term “world premiere”.) Did you know that, of the three Super 8 hotels in Calgary, not a single one has a Super 8 bar? It’s a good thing we didn’t set this play in Calgary, because the inaccuracies would be running rampant.

CHARLES

True. Also, setting it in Calgary might have led to more “hands-on” research than would have actually been helpful.

MARK

You mean, like, actually setting foot in a Super 8 bar? That sounds like a lot of work.

CHARLES

Your need to research everything would have forced us to research every beer. (Behind-the-scenes fact: Mark has never stayed at a Super 8.)

MARK

I can’t imagine that Super 8 bars stock very good beers. But, then, I get to imagine, don’t I? The joys of fiction!

CHARLES

(Behind-the-scenes fact: Mark is a beer snob.)

MARK

All this talk of theatre makes me want to have a beer.

CHARLES

I hear that.

[Mark opens a Red Wheat Ale from local brewery, Wild Rose.]

MARK

Take that, Super 8 bar!

[Mark donated blood today, so this beer may topple him. Also, Charles got a tattoo today. Apparently, a day for needles.]

MARK

You got a tattoo, Charles? What is it? Oh, on an unrelated note, I was thinking we should cut the epilogue for Super 8. It just doesn’t work.

[No reply.]

MARK

Charles? Charles, are you still there? … Charles?

Charles Netto must be one of the most dedicated playwrights. To mark the premiere of Super 8, he got a tattoo! Of the epilogue of the play. Check it out to the right and below.

Charles posted it on Facebook earlier today and some of the reaction is absolutely priceless. The Calgary theatre community is now concerned about dramaturgs getting their hands on Super 8 at this point and insisting on edits to the last scene:

http://www.facebook.com/photo.php?fbid=10151193058420538&set=a.10150571329675538.663696.792075537&type=1&theater

http://www.facebook.com/photo.php?fbid=10151193067790538&set=a.10150571329675538.663696.792075537&type=1&theater

Now this is dedication!

Matthew Thomas Walker as Lette, Adriano Sobretodo Jr. as Karlmann and Kate Lavender as Fanny in The Ugly One by Marius von Mayenburg, translated by Maja Zade. Photo by Benjamin Laird.

Fresh fixation

The Ugly One offers worthy twist on the beauty myth
Published January 19, 2012  by Allie Jaynes in Theatre

 Nothing Ugly about this One

HIGH PERFORMANCE RODEO

There’s nothing pushy or forced about the comedy in Last Christmas.

And that’s what predisposes us early on to a new play by Neil Fleming in which four family members take a game of give and take – and the important choices that go with it – to heart.

The cast members, directed by Pamela Halstead, work especially well together in Fleming’s wellwritten, nicely structured piece about a widowed grandpa who gets together over Christmas with his two intermittently sparring daughters Paula and Debbie, and the rebelwithout-a-cause senior teen who is Paula’s son, Riley.

Gramps, played by well-known former Calgarian Tim Koetting, lets a health bomb drop early in the play that gives him an edge when it comes to playing a variant of the white elephant party game that he initiates later in the show.

Predictably enough, both mothering daughter Debbie (Nicole Zylstra), a social worker and closet author, and her high-powered exec of a sister (played by Karen Johnson-Diamond) – who has a crisis of her own to bear – don’t take well to their dad’s sudden news, but take it their own way once the family fun begins.

For video game enthusiast Riley (newcomer Miles Ringsred, who has the advantage of being only a little older than the guy he portrays), the get-together with mom, aunt and the granddad he doesn’t know very well becomes a dream come true.

Fleming’s trim script has the sound of carefully observed reallife talk between people who know each other well – or else not, but want to. We feel we know these folk. We like them and feel comfortable with them – and so the laughs come naturally and easily.

For her part, director Halstead lets the dialogue “breathe.” Nothing is rushed – so that when we do reach the end of Last Christmas, it really does feel we’ve come full circle, and we’re delighted at how lightly, yet poignantly, emptiness has been filled.

And speaking of filling space, mention should be made of Terry Gunvordahl’s funny surprise of a set. Let’s just say there’s more to it than first meets the eye – in itself an aptly humorous touch.

bclark@calgaryherald.com

Read more: http://www.calgaryherald.com/entertainment/Share+Christmas+with+likable+cast/5806991/story.html#ixzz1hrl1mIhz

FIRST POSTED: SUNDAY, NOVEMBER 27, 2011 10:17 PM MST

It wasn’t the allure of grease paint and stage lights that coaxed Miles Ringsred from his home in Minnesota in 2005.

It was the reputation of the glistening ice at Calgary’s Olympic Oval that had the young speed skater packing his bags and heading north.

“Calgary’s Oval is tops in the world because it has some of the fastest ice in the world. My older sister had already moved to Calgary for speed skating when I decided to come up here,” says Ringsred who, when he was not practising his skating six hours a day, took classes in calculus and physics at the University of Calgary.

He still doesn’t remember exactly why, but in 2008, he took an acting class.

“In was an introductory class but my professor suggested I audition the next year for a senior class,” says Ringsred, who found himself performing in such plays as The Mob, The Liar and King Lear at the university and in Transit Theatre’s production of I Am I at the Motel Theatre.

On Monday, Ringsred opens opposite Tim Koetting, Karen Johnson Diamond and Nicole Zylstra in Lunchbox Theatre’s holiday production of Calgarian Neil Fleming’s comedy Last Christmas.

Last Christmas looks at what happens to a family when the patriarch decides to break with the traditions, which had guided them through so many previous precarious holidays.

“(Fleming) told us some of the things which are autobiographical and pointed out some of the lines that are actually from his family Christmases.

“In our family we try to stay away from politics otherwise things go pretty smoothly.

“I can identify with the teenager I play in Last Christmas even though we don’t have that much in common.

“He was shipped off to boarding school so he feels a bit alienated. I was always very close to my family.”

Last Christmas runs at Lunchbox Theatre at the base of the Calgary Tower from Nov. 28 through Dec. 23.

Playwright Neil Fleming worked as a set designer before writing his first play. Photo courtesy Neil Fleming Read more: http://www.calgaryherald.com/Last+Christmas+heartwarming+holiday+misfits/5769537/story.html#ixzz1hrkfaydV

Play ‘a bit darker’ than usual holiday offerings

Neil Fleming wants his relatives to know Last Christmas is not about them.

The Calgary playwright – one of seven being produced during Lunchbox Theatre’s 2011-12 season – whose holiday comedy opens on Monday, has experienced just as many rocky holiday sea-sons as the rest of us.

However, when it came time to put pen to paper and write a holiday story, he thought hard about how to come up with an alternative to the autobiography card.

“There’s some of that (my family) in there,” he says, “but I tried really hard to come up with a (fictional) family that didn’t resemble either mine or (wife) Jane’s because those are the people that I have to live with for the rest of my days.

Flemind says he pulled bits and pieces from friends’ Christmas stories “and come up with a new (dysfunctional) family that I’ve mashed together into a (single) family. So they’re almost entirely fictional.”

Even if it’s not pulled straight from the pages of Fleming’s own family journal, Last Christmas will have a few familiar echoes for anyone who has ever found family holiday gatherings to be equal parts heartwarming, infuriating and bizarre.

There’s several generations of a family including a granddad who smokes medical marijuana (which he shares with his grandson), all of which leads to a holiday gathering that Fleming says is equal parts funny, heartwarming – and sometimes quite dark.

Just the way more family Christmases turn out than Disney – and Jimmy Stewart – would have us believe.

“It’s a bit darker (than a traditional holiday comedy),” he says. (Lunchbox artistic director) Pam (Halstead) kind of nudged me in that direction, just to be a little bit more real to (the) tensions people can have (between each other at that time of year).”

Last Christmas is one of a pair of plays Fleming has on the go during the holidays. The other is a January workshop production, at Mount Royal University, of Man of the North, an epic set during the fur trade that was read at Fuse, Theatre Calgary’s annual reading series, several years back.

All of it is unlikely, considering the unconventional route Fleming took to becoming a playwright.

While a historical drama fit the scope of the sort of play that Theatre Calgary likes to produce, Fleming’s play ran into a double whammy: the global recession, combined with Theatre Calgary’s production of Beyond Eden, a musical that explored similar aboriginal themes, combined to put Man of the North up on blocks for a while.

“I had some success (in the early 1990s) as a set and lighting designer,” he says, “and then I was just becoming less and less enamoured of the projects I was working on, so I challenged myself and said, maybe I could write some-thing that I would want to work on. Then a friend of mine had a fringe spot in Vancouver, so he said ‘We’re going to do your play that you’re writing.’ Oh, you mean that thing that I have 10 pages of?”

Now, thanks to Mount Royal’s theatre department (and director Glenda Stirling), Fleming’s taking it out of the shop and giving it a new coat of paint.

Undaunted by the pressure of being a first-time writer, Fleming sat down and wrote Now What?, a play he describes as “this whole insane, absurd romp through the space-time continuum.”

“That’s what I’m working on right now,” he says. “There’s a lot of narrative monologues that tell the story – and my work right now is to try to make the story a little bit more active so he’s (the show’s narrator and protagonist) not just being the (fur trade equivalent of the) Stage Manager from Our Town telling the story. He’s in the story, because it’s him, right?

“So I finished writing it,” he adds, “and directed it, which I haven’t done before or since, which was an insane experience – because I don’t really speak ac-tor, like a normal director does. He’s telling his own story.”

“It was very silly,” he continues. “People weren’t sure what to do with it, but the people who came (to see it) really liked it. We got Pick of the Fringe, sold out the rest of the run, and I was hooked (on writing).”

shunt@calgaryherald.com twitter.com/halfstep

Read more: http://www.calgaryherald.com/Play+darker+than+usual+holiday+offerings/5771570/story.html#ixzz1hrFJoQZB

Read more: http://www.calgaryherald.com/Lunchbox+Theatre+Jake+Gift/5695088/story.html#ixzz1eNFk39mY

A gift stemming from tragedy

Julia Mackey in Jake's Gift, photo by Benjamin Laird

Production explores war and redemption
Published November 3, 2011  by Andrew Torry in Theatre