Sunday, Feb 7th Performance Canceled

Due to severe weather, the performance of 

THE CONSTELLATION 

scheduled for tonight, Sunday February 7th, 

is canceled.

Opening January 28th, 2010

Join us for

THE CONSTELLATION

by Gwydion Suilebhan
directed by Jessica Burgess

A love-struck, ambitious, and just-this-side-of-crazy homeless man sets out to win his beloved's heart... but is his true love the USS Constellation, a 150 year-old sloop-of-war, or the feisty flesh and blood woman who rules his world? Set in Baltimore's Inner Harbor and full of local flavor, this comedy explores the unpredictable yet magnificent role an urban historical monument can play in our everyday lives.

Suitable for audiences of all ages.

part of Active Culture's Maryland in Focus initiative

Funded by the Prince George's Arts Council, Maryland National Parks and Planning,
and the Maryland State Arts Council.

January 28th - February 14th, 2010

All Performances At
Joe's Movement Emporium 

3309 Bunker Hill Rd 

Mt Rainier, MD 20712-1922

Artist Bios

Jessica Burgess (Director) co-founded Active Cultures with Mary Resing, and serves on the board of directors.  Her directing credits include: Melissa Blackall’s The F Word (InkWell), Anne McCaw’s OK  (InkWell), James Hesla's A Fistful of Thalers (Rorschach, MYTHappropriations Project); Tom Murphy's The Drunkard (Solas Nua); Will Eno's The Flu Season (Catalyst Theater Company); Deb Margolin's Clarisse and Larmon and Julie Marie Myatt's Mr. and Mrs. at the 31st Annual Humana Festival of New American Plays (Actors Theatre of Louisville); and Jordan Harrison's Kid-Simple (Forum Theatre & Dance). She recently staged readings of Paul Mackie and Dan Sullivan's Wiener Sausage the Musical! for MacBert & Sullivan Ltd. She is a proud alumna of Middlebury College and the 2005 Lincoln Center Directors Lab, a member of the Round House Kitchen, and a recipient of the DC Commission on the Arts and Humanities Young Emerging Artist grant. Jessi is the founding Artistic Director of the Inkwell, DC's only company dedicated to emerging playwrights.

∙Gwydion Suilebhan (Playwright) is the author of Abstract Nude, Let X, The Butcher, The Great Dismal, The Faithkiller (a 2007 O’Neill semi-finalist), The Treehouse, The Constellation, and the prologue to Cardenio Found.  His plays have been produced, workshopped, commissioned by, and read at the Source Theater, Kennedy Center, National Theater, Ensemble Studio Theatre, Rorschach Theatre, Taffety Punk Theatre Company, Midtown International Theatre Festival, Intentional Theatre Group, Theater of the First Amendment, Maieutic Theatre Works, the Towne Street Theatre, and the Capital Fringe Festival.

Actor Biographies

Jason B. McIntosh (Man), a native of San Diego, is a DC based actor and alumni of S.T.A.C. He last appeared in The F Word with The Inkwell.  Jason has also appeared in: Fucking A (Studio Theatre), Antigone (Forum Theater), Jerry Springer: The Opera (Studio Theatre), Rosencrantz And Guildenstern Are Dead (Studio Theatre) and Love And War: The Bards, Broads, and Dames (2007 Fringe Festival). This is Jason’s first production with Active Cultures.

Ben Kingsland (Tour Guide) is delighted to be working with Active Cultures again, after his play Whitehill was featured in their Diving Board reading series.  Area credits include Call of the Wild and Twelfth Night with the National Players, Intelligence at Rep Stage, The Bread of Winter at Theater Alliance, and Complete Works... (Abridged) at Baltimore Shakespeare Festival.  Ben graduated from Johns Hopkins, and (coincidentally) will be getting married on the real-life USS Constellation this summer.  Please visit benkingsland.com.

Lolita-Marie (Woman) won the 2008 WATCH Award for “Best Cameo in a Play,” for her role as Mrs. Muller in Doubt, A Parable.  She most recently performed with the Annapolis Colonial Players as Jesse Brewster in The Violet Hour,  on the historic Lincoln Theatre stage as part of the Harlem Renaissance Festival Celebration, and at the Kennedy Center as part of the Page-to-Stage festival as Michelle Obama in Michelle Obama: Taskmaster, and T-Louise in Blues Theme for Talladega. Please visit www.lolitamarie.com.

Bethany Hoffman (Boss) is originally from Baltimore.  She recently appeared in Active Culture’s Diving Board Festival as Abby in The Sisters of Ellery Hollow.  Previous credits include: Ugly Nelly in Herbie: Poet of the Wild West with Doorway Arts Ensemble (also an artistic associate) for DC Fringe 09; Last Day Girl in Tempodyssey at Studio Theatre; Beatrice in Much Ado About Nothing with Baltimore Shakespeare; Orderly in The Day Room with Woolly Mammoth Theatre; Ms. Marks in Pullman Car Hiawatha at Center Stage in Baltimore. She appeared on HBO's The Wire as a paramedic.  Bethany is also a member of Synergy in Action- a Playback Theatre Company based in Silver Spring; an Equity Membership Candidate; and a member of the Screen Actors' Guild.

Producers:

Mary Resing (Artistic Director) is an award-winning dramaturg, producer and playwright.  Her play, the ASL/English musical Visible Language about Alexander Graham Bell, Edward Miner Gallaudet and Helen Keller, was recently workshopped at both Gallaudet University and the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts, where it was performed on Millennium Stage in August.  In the last few months, in addition to producing the Sportaculture and Diving Board festivals at Active Cultures, she dramaturged dark play, stories for boys at Forum Theatre and an evening of local plays at the InkWell.

James Hesla (Associate Producer) is a nationally known educator, actor and playwright.  As a playwright, his productions include Petri Dish Circus (Active Cultures), Home/Abroad (Beowulf Alley Theatre, Tucson), Behold! (Rorschach Theatre, DC), Relative Gravity (Late Night Theatre, Honolulu), and Graves' Rule (Inkwell, DC). He is a member of the Playwrights' Center and the Writers' Guild.

Interview with Playwright Gwydion Suilebhan, Part One - The Writer

by Jacqueline E. Lawton

Jacqueline Lawton:  To begin, can you tell me a little bit about where you live (maybe where and what sort of neighborhood)--describe the street where you live--what can you hear if you open a window, what can you see if you look out that window.

Gwydion Suilebhan: I live in a 70 year-old enclave in Silver Spring that happens to be called -- in what might be the most odd juxtaposition of terms in nomenclatural history -- Indian Spring Club Estates.  (Seriously, have four words ever encapsulated the tragedies of American history more succinctly?)  It's a gathering of Tudor-style homes on a quiet street, and my study and library are at the back of the house, so that when I look out my window, I usually see whatever wildlife happens to be congregating in my fenced-in back yard at the moment -- squirrels, mostly, though I have spotted the occasional hummingbird and cardinal.

JL: Then tell me a little bit about your favorite place to write. Do you write in the same place? Or do you write when and wherever the impulse strikes you? Describe your favorite place to write. And do you have any particular writing rituals that you follow?

 GS: I write in my head all the time -- when I'm deeply engaged in drafting a new play, in particular, it never leaves me, and I'm almost always mulling over ideas, unless I happen to find myself in a good conversation.  When I start moving from ideas to words, however, I do it in an old leather recliner, a cup of coffee and a heap of papers on the table by my side, my laptop on my lap.  I write first thing in the morning -- I think it's important to give my freshest, most dream-inspired and well-rested brain to my plays.  (The rest of my life can have whatever's left.)  That means I've probably got jazz or classical music playing on the XM radio; lyrics are disruptive to good dialogue.  If I work in the evenings, it's only to edit what I've written -- in which case, I usually listen to classic radio dramas, which I find create a passable form of background white noise in the room.  I'm fairly disciplined, too -- I work almost every day in my most productive periods.  One of my undergraduate professors -- the immensely gifted and not-well-enough-known essayist Joseph Epstein -- once said that if you write 250 words a day, five days a week, in a year you'll have the first draft of a book.  When I heard him say that, I thought... 250 words?  That's nothing.  I can do that.  And he's correct: a little bit of discipline every day yields results.  If you simply wait for inspiration to strike, it never does.  You have to sit your butt down and invite the muse to come.  She still might not accept your invitation, but the more welcome she feels, the more likely she will.

JL: Now, give us a little bit of background where you're from originally, where you grew up, and how you ended up where you are now...

GS: I'm from Baltimore.  I grew up in Pikesville, a largely Jewish suburb on the north side of the city, though I also spent a good deal of time in the Bolton Hill area of the city with my father.  At 17, I joined the carnival... no, really, I actually did, though I left shortly thereafter to go get a degree in poetry from Northwestern.  After Chicago, I wandered a bit -- London for a while, then Boulder -- before I came back home to get a master's degree in poetry from Johns Hopkins.  I've inched steadily away from and back toward the city ever since -- Columbia, Arlington, Capitol Hill, and now Silver Spring -- but it's a bit like orbiting the sun for me: I always feel the tug of its gravity, no matter how far I go.  With my first child on the way, now, too, I'm particularly glad to be close to family... and as a playwright, having what for me is a bottomless source of inspiration nearby is very comforting.

JL: I’m curious, other than being a playwright, what other forms of writing have you done? Were you always drawn to the theater? If so, why? If not, what brought you here?

GS: There isn't a genre of writing, artistic or commercial, that I haven't explored. As I've mentioned, I have two degrees in poetry; I've been tremendously lucky to have studied under some of the greatest poets of the last 50 years, from Robert Pinsky and Richard Howard to Mark Strand and Mary Kinzie.  I taught poetry at the college level for a few years, published a book, served as the poetry editor of a literary magazine -- and ultimately found poetry to be too much like hammering a rusty iron nail into a slab of granite with my head... while only a handful of devotees watched me.  I abandoned the genre without really knowing what I would do next -- knowing only that I simply had to write.  I tried short stories for a while, started (and never finished) a novel, cranked out a full-length screenplay.  I took work as a journalist, writing restaurant reviews and book reviews and straight-up reportage, and I even made a good living for a while writing online curricula for fiction and poetry courses.  But nothing felt right... and I realize now that what I was missing all along was the element of collaboration: the energy I get from working with actors and directors, from the live revision that happens in the rehearsal room, from the minor-but-critical improvisations that happen on the stage, from the immediacy of an audience.  Once I started writing plays, furthermore, so much of my past creative life made sense to me for the first time -- the endless "skits" I'd written with my childhood friends, the hours I spent building sets and running light boards and just plain sitting in the theater when I was in high school and college, the brief foray I made into acting.  I'd been wanting -- even trying -- to be a playwright all along, and as soon as I started letting myself be who I am, I was home.

JL: Describe for me all the sensations you had the first time you had one of your plays produced and you sat in the audience while it was performed...what was different about the characters you created? How much input did you have in the directing of that work?

GS: The very first play I wrote was accepted into a local festival.  This wasn't a full production, but a staged reading -- but for me, this was a big event.  I invited friends and family, got all dressed up, planned a celebratory dinner afterward -- then showed up at the theater for rehearsal to discover that the actor reading the lead wasn't going to be able to make it until five minutes before curtain.  The director would simply read his lines, I was told, during rehearsal.  Being thoroughly naive, I assumed this was standard practice, since nobody else seemed to be worried.  It wasn't until the house was full and the curtain had been held a full ten minutes, however, before the actor finally showed up, by which time I was thoroughly panicked... and my panic became terror a mere two minutes into the reading when the actor in question proved to be both functionally illiterate -- the worst cold reader I've ever heard -- and abominably mis-cast for the role.  I literally wanted to stand up and stop the reading immediately -- and if the same thing happened today, I would.  Instead, I sat in the back row with my head in my hands for the most miserable two hours of my whole creative life.

By contrast, the same play -- which subsequently won an award, had a very productive workshop, and enjoyed two successful readings -- was produced a few months later, and my experience couldn't have been any more different.  I sat in the audience and literally watched my words, my inner life, become gradually more manifest outside of me until they no longer seemed like mine, but something completely other, something I could respond to as well as any other audience member, and I ended up spending the last few moments of the last scene with warm tears of gratitude rolling down my cheeks.  I literally felt like thanking every single person who helped make that evening possible -- the cast, the crew, the director, the other audience members, the masons who built the walls of the theater, the people who had inspired the story in the first place -- all at the same time.

JL: What inspires you to write?  What do you hope to convey in the plays that you write--what are they about? What sorts of people, situation, circumstances, do you like to write about?

GS: I'm a member of a community.  The role I play in that community is storyteller.  I tell the stories that I think my community needs to hear.  (In that regard, I'm a great believer in the idea that the best theater is, or should be, community theater, though the stories that are told in what passes for community theater are sadly not community-centric at all.)  I write because I owe my fair share to the grand human endeavor in which we all participate.  I write because I don't want to take more out of the communal pool than I put into it, and writing is all I have to put into it.  I write, in other words, to be of service.

I offer my community stories because stories help us construct meaning in what often seems like (and probably is) an inherently meaningless existence.  I offer stories because unless we have a regular influx of new narratives, we continue to revisit and eventually become enslaved to the old ones.  New narratives give us new ways of thinking and seeing -- and we desperately need new ways of thinking and seeing.  Of late, the stories that have inspired me the most have centered around humanity's painfully slow accommodation to the great advancements of science in the last 150 years.  We are still discovering what it means to be human and to live in human societies in a world in which things like evolution and the big bang and chaos theory and game theory have eviscerated most of our core religiously-founded beliefs.  Stories -- the right stories -- are the only things that can help us make that transition.

I want to write plays, furthermore, that reflect the diverse lives of the people I live among -- that's also part of being of service.  My plays may come from inside of me, but they aren't only for me.  As a result, the characters I create have always been demographically diverse.  How could they be otherwise, really, if you live in a diverse city like mine?  As a writer, my head is filled up every day with the voices of the people all around me.  Those are the voices I rely on when I work -- the rhythms of speech, the grammar.  I could no more shut them out of my stories than I could blot out the sun... and I don't want to.

Interview Playwright Gwyidion Suilebhan - Part 2, The Play and Beyond

by Jacqueline E. Lawton

Jacqueline Lawton: The Constellation is about a man who steals a ship, but not just any ship, a 150 year old sloop-of-war, the USS Constellation, which is docked in Baltimore’s Inner Harbor. What compelled you to write this play? How did you decide which characters/points of views would appear in the play?

Gwydion Suilebhan: I have been thinking and writing about the USS Constellation for just about as long as I can remember.  The first poem I ever published, in fact, was a small piece about the ship called Her Departure.  To me, the ship is the soul of the city.  The city only exists (like most cities) because of its connection to the water, and that 150 year-old boat is a living symbol of that connection, or what remains of it.  I’ve always thought of it as the heart of the city, embodying all the racial and military and nautical narratives that comprise the city’s story.  I’ve also always been conscious, for most of my life, of the fact that the ship largely seems to be overshadowed by the glitz and glitter of the inner harbor’s “main attractions” – the aquarium, the science center, the shops and restaurants, even the merry-go-round, none of which contain any of the history.  So part of what compelled me to write this play was an urge to say to the city “Hey!  Look at what’s sitting right there!  Right in front of you!  Do you have any idea how important that is?  It’s everything!”

I think the characters (and their points of view) come partially from the same sort of place.  The Tour Guide’s voice is one that calls our attention to the violence and genocide in the ship’s history, which we should probably never forget.  The Man’s voice represents the abolition and liberation that the ship stands for as well.  The Woman speaks, I think, for our general alienation from all of that history, and the Boss for our urge to commodify and transform that history until it no longer resembles the truth.

Perhaps more importantly, though, the characters come from somewhere far more personal.  When I first began drafting the play, I was going through a major life change.  I was daring to do something that felt almost as impossible to me as stealing the USS Constellation would feel – something I was nonetheless absolutely compelled to do.  So the characters are also manifestations of my own struggle to take the first step of that journey – the part of me that was old and weary and needed the change (Man), the part of me that was young and rebellious and had the energy to change (Tour Guide), the part of me that was afraid of the change (Woman), and the part of me that actively tried to stop myself from changing (Boss).

JL: One of the more serious issues in this play is homelessness. What led to the decision to make Man and Woman homeless? Did you always know that they would be homeless? What relationship to the city do you feel the homeless community has, that those with homes, do not have?

GS: Decisions like this, for me, are always made instinctively.  I didn’t consciously say “I think I’ll make them homeless because…”  I just started writing and that’s what came out of me.  It probably had a lot to do with the changes I was going through and a feeling of being alienated from my own “emotional home.”

As the characters developed, however, it became clear to me that Man and Woman were both homeless in very different ways.  Woman is homeless in a more conventional sense – she’s been battered and victimized and is trying very hard to make a new, safe home for herself.  Man is homeless in a more intentional way – he’s off the grid, living unconventionally, not willing to participate in any of the behaviors that make us modern humans.  He chooses to live as an outsider, on his own terms.  This is what helps him see things as he believes they’re supposed to be, not as they are.

As for the relationship that the homeless community has with the city: I’m wary of generalizations and assumptions.  From the outside, homeless people have always looked like ghosts to me – almost (but not quite entirely) invisible, capable of sending a kind of generalized anxiety through you when you actually stop to notice them, not really fully connecting and interacting with the world.  It’s almost as if they symbolize our urban angst… except for the fact that they don’t symbolize anything at all, in reality.  They’re people – disenfranchised, often disabled (in various ways) people, each with a unique story, and each probably relating to the city in a unique way.

JL: Talk to me about how you named the characters in The Constellation.

GS: I resisted giving them names because I wanted to heighten their existence as symbols.  This play is a fable – a modern fable.  Man, Woman, Boss, and Tour Guide are the contemporary equivalents of Aesop’s Crow, Fox, Ant, and Grasshopper or the Brothers’ Grimm’s Princes and Princesses and Tailors and such.  In practice, though, I really think it doesn’t affect the audience’s experience of the play that they don’t have names.  There’s never a moment at which you think “Now who’s that again?”  They acquire their individuality by virtue of the fact that they’re all so different than each other.

JL: Which character in The Constellation shares your passion for Baltimore? Which character in The Constellation sees Baltimore in a way that opened your eyes to the city and revealed it to you in a new way?

GS: This is difficult to answer (like many of your very thoughtful questions).  As I’ve said already, I think all of the characters are parts of me, and I think they’d all appreciate facets of Baltimore that I appreciate, too.  The Tour Guide loves the history like I do, and he probably also shares my passion to talk about it.  The Man shares my urge to idealize it, I think.  The Woman might, if someone asked her, say a few nice words about the simpler things the city has to offer: pretty homes, nice churches, a beautiful hotel or two.  And even the Boss, I feel certain, would brag about the extensive new commercial developments that have helped the city revitalize itself, at least in some areas.

Researching homelessness in Baltimore – for Man and Woman – taught me a few new facts about the city, but I honestly can’t say that I saw it in a new way.  The new way I would like to see it is from the deck of the USS Constellation, the skyline receding into the distance as the ship heads out into the harbor… but I suspect that’s never going to happen.  (I promised I’d bring it back!)

JL: Which aspect of Woman’s character do you most relate to? What aspect of Boss’s character do you most relate to?

GS: I think I’ve answered this already: Woman’s fear of change and her desire for stability and Boss’s need to control and prevent change from happening.  It took me several drafts, though, to get to the point at which I could answer that question.  I demonized them both so much early on, and I had to accept them as necessary parts of the story (and as parts of what I was going through).  Whoever said that writing wasn’t therapeutic was foolish; writing that’s only therapeutic, however, is far too small.

JL: What was the most challenging part of writing The Constellation? Which character’s voice was the most difficult to capture?

GS: Finding the right – the most genuine – way for the ship to get out of the harbor was the most difficult challenge.  In various drafts, various characters (including a few who are no longer in the play) were on board when it sailed out, but it wasn’t until I realized that the play was about the male characters finding each other and jointly leaving the female characters behind (while the female characters both resisted and facilitated that departure) that the ending finally made sense to me.  The most difficult voice to capture was the Boss.  I disliked her so much at first, and I had to ease my way into finding her humanity, to understanding that she wasn’t despicable in her own life’s story, and to give her a vision of her own to give voice to throughout the play.

JL: As this interview is taking place, you’re in the middle of rehearsals for The Constellation. What has surprised you about the play?

GS: The play just keeps getting funnier and funnier!  (Especially as I chip away at and remove all the unessential bits of language that sometimes bog my early drafts down.)  I’m actually always surprised by the humor in my work – people generally think of me as a comedic playwright, I’m led to understand, but I almost never sit down with the intent to write something funny.  I’ve been catching myself laughing at my own lines, which I almost never do (and which is probably a testament to this talented cast).  It’s great fun.

JL: What next for you as a writer?

GS: I’ve just finished a long run of productions in DC, New York, Chicago, and Los Angeles, and for the first time in a long while my calendar’s somewhat open… which is perfect timing, because I’m about to become a new father, and I know that’s going to claim an impossibly large amount of energy.  (At this point, I’m going on complete trust and the promises of some dear playwright friends who’ve also made this transition and managed to keep working.)  I have two plays in progress that will compete for whatever attention I do have.  Midway is an existential comedy (in the vein of my earlier play Let X) that draws on my time working as a carny.  Hot & Cold is a Grand Guignol-style play that juxtaposes the hot zone of a Level IV Biohazard Lab and the cold chill of an ordinary, middle class kitchen on Christmas morning – scientists in terror and a family farce, side-by-side, in an exploration of our national fear of infection.  One of them will surely demand to be written first.  We’ll see.