All Eyes on Me

New post on Mrshawking.com!

Photos by Jennifer Giorno and John Benfield

"The ballroom scene by Pendragon Costumes"

When I was first writing Mrs. Hawking, I knew a big part of the appeal of the story would be the trappings and the spectacle. The look of the steampunk setting would add a great deal of gloss to the tale I was trying to tell, and I wanted to take advantage of everything that setting would afford me. And you can't tell a grand caper set in Victorian London without a few gorgeous period costumes.

Though I pitched in with a few looks for the Arisa 2015 production, mostly ones I’d already put together for the Mrs. Hawking photoshoots, our primary costume designer was Jennifer Giorno, also the actress playing Grace Monroe. So the challenge of putting together Victorian ballroom looks that could be changed in and out of in very short order fell on her. Not an easy task on our budget! But she got a great idea to see if we could a costume company to agree to sponsor our production by lending us some pieces. That is where Pendragon came in, a maker of fine costuming with a fabulous selection of steampunk and Victorian looks in their Mad Girl Clothing line.





In return for credit in our program, they very generously agreed to lend us three pieces of handmade eveningwear for our leads. It was an incredible thing to happen to us, as it gave us the opportunity to have some of the most important costumes in the play be particularly beautiful, as well as practical for the demands of the quick change.



A full Pendragon outfit can be seen here on Samantha LeVangie in her role as Mary. It was particularly important that Mary come out looking exquisite-- transformatively so --as an indication of Mary's potential to become a powerful, brilliant, dyanmic person. Jenn asked the company if it would be possible to get Mary’s garments in blue, as I’ve long imagined it to be Mary’s signature color.



The other piece Pendragon so graciously lent us was for Mrs. Hawking, modeled here by Frances Kimpel. This was also a Corset with Bustle, a particularly useful piece not only because it looked so cool, but because its toggle-hooks running down the front assisted in making the quick change a little easier. Because Mrs. Hawking is a widow, of course it had to be in black.

Read the rest of the entry and see the rest of the pictures on Mrshawking.com!

I give you the cast of Mrs. Hawking at Arisia '15!

Mrs. Victoria Hawking: Frances Kimpel
Miss Mary Stone: Samantha LeVangie
Mr. Nathaniel Hawking: Jonathan Plesser
Mrs. Celeste Fairmont: Arielle Kaplan
Lord Cedric Brockton: Francis Hauert
Sir Walter Grainger: Matthew Kamm
Mr. John Colchester: Robert Imperato
Miss Grace Monroe: Jennifer Giorno
Ensemble: Joye Thaller, Andrew Prentice

I am really excited to work with each and every one of these people!

Read more on Mrshawking.com!

This morning I cleaned the house from top to bottom, flitting between the work and scribbling thoughts in my notebook for the one-shot tabletop game I'm running this weekend. I'm always surprised at how much this sort of life suits me. If only I didn't have to worry about that whole distasteful money issue. Anyone in the market for a housewife? I'm very on top of the chores, I'm an excellent cook, I can keep to a budget, and I won't let my figure go. Just keep me in ballet classes and larp costuming and you'll never go off to work without a thoughtfully packed lunch ever again.

The game I'm running is for Carolyn, Ryan, Sam, Aaron, and Gigi, most of whom are new to gaming and would like to get a taste of what theatrical roleplaying is like before they play in a real larp. The game is set in Fairfield, in the universe of the Tailor of Riddling Way, and explore many of the same important themes-- family history, class differences, terrible secrets. I'm writing pregen characters and setting it right after the conclusion of the Tailor story. I am evening including some of the original characters. So far I'm feeling pretty good about what I have, and I think it's going to turn out to be a good game. It's meant to be roleplay-heavy and completely mechanics free as an exercise in acting and storytelling. If it goes well, I'd be happy to run it again for anyone who cares to play.

The Late Mrs. Chadwick had its debut performance yesterday, and I was so happy with how it went. We had a good audience who laughed a lot, and my cast and crew just did such a fabulous job. I even was lucky enough to have Gigi and newly-minted HTPers Ryan Kacani and Aaron Fisher in the audience to see it! It was also kind of cool to have something I wrote seen by people who don't know me, in hopes of increasing the exposure to my work.


I was so pleased with the actors. Lenny and Frances were pretty much the first people who came to mind when I wanted to cast the roles of stuffy, unfailingly polite Arthur Chadwick and Edwin Shrewsbury, and I was so delighted that they wanted to do it. They were hilarious, grasping the particular tone of the humor perfectly and creating characters from this fabulous combination of the mannered way they spoke and their understated reactions to the madness all around them. I just love working with these two, and as usual they did not disappoint.


The title character of Mrs. Chadwick I had to think about much more. She has no lines, but she is demanding all the same-- she has to be physical and loud, and the actress has to be utterly uninhibited. I thought about it for a while, and then I came to Sam LeVangie. I think she has a lot of raw talent, and I really admired the way she threw herself into things and gave them a try. Though I have many talented actor friends who I love casting, I don't always want to use the same people over and over again but instead have a large stable so I can always have the right person for the role. I've wanted to work with Sam for a while now, so I thought this might be the thing. To my pleasure she accepted the part, and she did a wonderful job, looking hauntingly lovely in her pale makeup and white gown as she fearlessly wailed, hurled stuff, and melodramatically flopped around the stage.


And of course, I couldn't have pulled it off without Bernie and Carolyn. They handled the technical aspects, advising me on how to set up the stage, what sort of props and activity were going to be practical, and engineering a sound system to play the necessary sound effects of Matilda's carnage around the house. I am incredibly grateful that they were kind enough to lend their expertise to get my piece off the ground.

As far as directing goes, this show presented an interesting challenge in that it has two very distinct types of humor in it. The first is the witty, wordy kind inherent in Chadwick and Shrewsbury's dialogue. It's a little sophisticated, a little complex, requires a little bit of absorbing in order to get. The second kind of humor is the broad, physical, silly comedy of Matilda Chadwick. She screams, she breaks stuff, she rolls around on the floor. In order for both types of humor to succeed, we had to be careful to not permit them to overlap too much, so the nuances could be appreciated as well as the broader stuff.  

While there were many fine aspects of this production, one of my favorites was the moustaches. I had the idea to use false moustaches early on, and very quickly fell in love with the notion. You know, normally I'm very sensitive to the comfort levels and preferences of my actors and am usually quite willing to change my plan if it makes them feel better about it, but in the case of these moustaches, if my actors had been strongly objected to them, as Ryan Kacani put it after the show, I "would have found new actors." ;-)

So that's my third produced piece of playwriting after To Think of Nothing and Merely Players. It's cool that I was able to use a piece I generated during 31 Plays in 31 Days. And this one was seen by a little more by the public than the others, though it was a small house for a small festival. I need to get more of my work out there, and this is a start. I'm trying to submit more places in hopes of increasing my chance for selection. If you're interested, we still have one more performance next Saturday at 8PM along with Nick's show that Jared is in, Stranger Than Slash Fiction. I know a friend of Jared's managed to buy tickets for it yesterday, so there may be some available still. Go to this website to purchase.

Also, if anyone finds themselves in a position to put on a play, I just want to put it out there that I would love it if you'd consider using one of my scripts. As much as I love directing my own work, I want productions to happen without me as well. So if you need a script, please talk to me and maybe I have something that you would be interested in using. It would be my honor and pleasure.

This fabulous picture is Prentice as Edward of York, eldest son of the Duke of York, besides HTP freshman newcomer Samantha LeVangie as the Duke of Warwick. I place the two of them side by side because originally I'd planned for their costumes were switched. Warwick switches sides twice in the play based on who he believes is the better claim at the moment and is recognized as a cunning military thinker, so I thought dressing the character in all black might stand well for that turncoat nature. Edward was going to have the camo jacket because the rest of his brothers all had variations on that army color scheme. But the black jacket wasn't fitting Samantha very well, and Jenna pointed out that since it didn't conceal her hips, it wasn't helping her much with making her look cross-cast. So on a whim I switched her pieces for Andrew's, and things clicked. The hat remained, concealing her hair and giving the impression of a military beret. She also seemed to move more confidently in the camo. I wish there was a better logic for Edward wearing all black, but he does become a fairly ruthless king and it does look pretty sharp on him. I found a sharp black dress shirt in club storage for him, and asked him to bring in his silver tie that would look white against the rest of it. It is a nice nod to his white-rose York allegiance.



Excusing the terrible quality of this picture, this is Alex Davis, another freshman newcomer, as the Duke of York, the leader of the white-rose party campaigning for the English throne. This was a military uniform I found complete in the Halloween section of the thrift store. Originally I considered this for Alex because he is one of the biggest men in the cast and he might have been the only person to fit it, but I ended up liking how official he looked in it, and the way it echoed the look of Suffolk's uniform. No one was like to confuse Plesser and Alex, so that similarity was safe. Also when they stood across from each other they create a cool visual motif. His dress shirt was white because of the York white rose sigil. The black tie and black belt finish the ensemble. Again I was quite pleased.



Here are the two younger York brothers, Stephen Badras as Richard, later the infamous Richard III, and Lenny as George, later Duke of Clarence. Dave requested that they look alike. When first went to the thrift store, I scoured to the place for anything vaguely military-looking, including the olive-drab jacket that you see Lenny wearing now. She told me she owned one very much like it and brought it in. Since I needed the same costume for the both of them, we put her jacket on Stephen, because he had stage combat to do and it fit him better. She also graciously took the baggier pair of camo pants for the same reason. I like how the jackets give them bulk, making them look like bigger men, and enabling Stephen to counterfeit a strange deformity to his body that is part of being Richard. Their looks are the reason I had originally planned to have Andrew in the camo jacket as their older brother Edward, so as to visually echo them, but I think it worked out.





Here is Alison Thvedt, a third freshman newcomer, as Rutland, the fourth and youngest York son. She is basically wearing what I wore when I played Fleance in that production of Macbeth I was in a few summers ago. I got Alison a black T-shirt similiar to the one I wore, and those cargo pants are mine, bought for the Fleance role. Since they are not really my style since then I've been using them as paint pants, which explains the splatters you may notice on them. I don't think they make any differnce to the look overall. :-) I bought her a hat like Samantha's, again like what I wore as Fleance, but she ended up wearing it as a background soldier rather than as Rutland.

To be continued in part three!