Did you know that the Penn Glee Club was around long before our football team, our West Philadelphia campus, and most of the University’s fraternities? This academic year marks the club’s 150th anniversary, making it the oldest performing arts group at Penn. In celebration of that milestone, we shot some video at the club’s recent fall show — a collaboration with Penn Dance in Iron Gate Theater. We then put some of the highlights together into this video:
Be sure to keep an eye out for more stories and information about the Glee Club’s last 150 years in an upcoming issue of the Gazette!
“Imagine you are a teenager who is abducted in the middle of the night and forced to become a child soldier or sex slave. Imagine trying to sleep, as your friends go missing everyday, wondering if you will be next. Now, imagine many of the people you know and love will soon die and most of the world has no idea what is happening to you…
Teenagers like Scovia and 13 others don’t have to imagine, this is their life. Having escaped their rebel abductors, these teens and their families are now living together in camps for internally displaced persons (IDP.)
Their stories of suffering and resilience have never been told…until now.”
–Staging Hope synopsis
While Melissa Fitzgerald C’87 is most often recognized for her work as Carol on NBC’s political drama The West Wing, her more recent role has reached people who have never even seen a television. A longtime social activist, Fitzgerald helped create the documentary Staging Hope: Acts of Peace in Northern Uganda. The film will screen tonight as part of the Philadelphia Film Festival.
Staging Hope follows Fitzgerald’s team of actors, playwrights and activists as they help 14 Ugandan teens transform their traumatic personal experiences into works of live theater. Addressing the themes of reconciliation, peace-building and HIV/AIDS, volunteers helped the teens create two plays based on their own lives. “I think in an area where there’s no television and very little access to information, [theater] is a great way to share information,” Fitzgerald says. But at the same time, “a play’s gotta be good or people aren’t going to watch it. We knew we had to deliver some good theater.”
A former English major and Penn Singers alumna, Fitzgerald recently made time to speak about her work in Uganda and her new documentary. Here is a condensed version of our conversation.
From what I’ve heard, social activism has been a big part of your life for quite a while. Tell me about Voices in Harmony.
I co-founded Voices in Harmony in 1995 with several other actors. We knew we wanted to do something in the community in Los Angeles, and [acting] is what we knew how to do. We also felt there was a unique opportunity for storytelling in theater to build bridges because creating a play is such a community activity. We wanted to do something to bring people from different parts of the city together and we wanted to reach economically disadvantaged at-risk teens.
We paired actor mentors with teen mentees, and each team created a short play based on the theme racism/prejudice/intolerance. We had professional writers come in and help write their pieces, then we had professional directors come in and direct them. We put it all together into several evenings of theater and performed around Los Angeles.
It was going to be a one-off, but it was such a wonderful experience for all of us that we just kept going.
How did that lead to your work in Africa?
We started Voices in Harmony long before any of us had success as actors. We were mostly broke and unemployed. We had the passion to do it, the belief that something we were doing was valuable and good, and I think we had the energy of youth. Then I got the West Wing, and continued to do Voices in Harmony. I also started doing some volunteer work during the summers, when the show was on hiatus. I went to South Africa to volunteer with an AIDS organization and in 2006, the International Medical Corps gave me several options to volunteer with them. I was really disturbed by the whole issue of child soldiering—I think it really struck a chord with me because of my work with teenagers—so I chose Northern Uganda. I felt like that was the place I was supposed to go.
And what was it like there?
They let me go around with their field team to several internally displaced persons camps and I was disturbed by what I saw there. A thousand people were dying each week in these camps. There was a cholera outbreak while I was there. The camps were overcrowded and unsanitary. When we were leaving one of the camps, a man came up to us and said, ‘Please don’t let us die in this horrible place. Please tell the people in America what is happening to us here.” Since then, that has been my mission.
How did that mission evolve into Staging Hope?
When I went to Uganda, I had taken my video camera with me. I turned my tapes over to the International Medical Corps and said, ‘Maybe we can make something with this.’ Martin Sheen offered to narrate, and it became [the short film] Hope Not Lost. I never set out to make a movie, but it won a few awards and had a great impact on my family and friends.
I thought, ‘If this little home video camera I brought can make a movie with this much impact, imagine what a well-done movie could do.’ I thought, ‘What if I actually did set out to make a movie? What if I did assemble a team of talented filmmakers? What a huge impact that could have.’
I talked to my friend Katy Fox [G’08] who’s a wonderful producer. Both of us were committed to not just taking stories out [of Uganda] but also to putting something in as well. Voices in Harmony in Uganda seemed like a natural fit for that.
Why did you think a theatre program could help Ugandan teens?
I think that being able to tell your story is an incredibly valuable thing. I think it helps us to make sense of the world. I think when the world has gone mad, as it has in a war territory, it’s even more important to have an opportunity to make sense of the world. These teenagers were able to tell their community what they felt was important. How else, besides through theater, can you share your story and explore big issues in front of a thousand people at a time.
What sort of changes did you see in the teens themselves?
They thrived working on this theater program. We felt strongly that this was the beginning for these teens—an opportunity for them to do more after we left. We asked them what they wanted to do after we left and they said, ‘We want to teach the other children what we learned.’ They’re still teaching other children the theater program that we taught them, and they’re touring the plays that we created together, and more plays that they’ve created since we left.
What are you hoping people take away from this film?
I hope people will be moved by what they saw, and that they will be motivated and inspired to take action and make a change there. There are a lot of actions to take right now, many of them listed on our What You Can Do page. My hope is that we will find distribution for our film, that large audiences will get the opportunity to see it, and that they will be moved to take action because there’s so much that we can do. Right now is such a critical time. I think there really can be lasting peace in central Africa, and that we can be part of that.
Last year, we told you about Jennifer Higdon G’92 Gr’94 both in print and on this blog, and noted that in just three months, she won a Grammy award for her Percussion Concerto and the Pulitzer Prize in music for her Violin Concerto. Over the weekend, Higdon added another accomplishment to her ever-growing list: Her composition Dooryard Bloom–based on the Walt Whitman poem–made its Philadelphia debut. The performers? Penn’s Symphony Orchestra.
Here is Higdon’s introduction to the piece on Saturday night:
And here is the orchestra playing Dooryard Bloom with guest singer Randall Scarlata:
2 – 4 p.m. (Music Department Building): An open-house format encourages alumni to drop in to see the newly renovated building and hear performances by some of the department’s current crop of musicians.
2 – 3:30 p.m. (Claire M. Fagin Hall): A new installation from Kathy Shaver HUP’76 invites viewers to experience The History of Nursing as Seen Through the Lens of Art.
3 – 4:30 p.m. (Claudia Cohen Hall): From Script to Screen, presented by the Penn Alumni Film Festival, will trace the life of a film, from fledgling idea to revised script to alternate endings to big-screen blockbuster. Julie Goldstein C’87, president of production at Endgame Entertainment, will lead the interactive workshop.
5:30 – 6:30 p.m. (Claudia Cohen Hall): See what Penn’s current students are up to in these student-written, -directed and -produced short films.
Saturday, November 5:
10 – 11 a.m. (Music Building): Jeffrey Kallberg, professor of music history, leads a class on the images that define Chopin’s life and music.
10:30 a.m. – 2 p.m. (Locust Walk): Arts fair with alumni-made artwork, jewelry, and artisan crafts up for sale.
11 a.m. – 12 p.m. (Annenberg Center for the Performing Arts): Master class in traditional Indian Kuchipudi dance led by Shantala Shivalingappa.
12 – 1 p.m. (Music Building): Karen Beckman, chairwoman of the art history department and interim head of the cinema studies program, discusses animated works that engage the contemporary war landscape.
4 – 6 p.m. (Irvine Auditorium): Glee Clubbers past and present unite for an afternoon of stories and songs. (The Club celebrates its 150th birthday this year!)
6 – 8:30 p.m. (College Hall): The Alumni Film Festival presents its feature film screening, Thunder Soul. Produced by Jamie Foxx, the documentary showcases the power of arts in education. A panel discussion follows with musician Stephanie Renée W’91; Penn Jazz Combo Director Wade Fulton Dean; arts educator and promoter Edward Epstein; and founder/principal of Different Drummer LLC Marshall Mitchell.
9 p.m. – 1 a.m. (Platt Student Performing Arts House): The annual alumni bacchanal combines with the Platt House’s fifth-anniversary festivities.
Sunday, November 6:
10 a.m. – 12 p.m. (Van Pelt Library): Exhibition of Mark Catesby’s bird art (Kamin Gallery) and of Eugene Ormandy’s time as the Minneapolis Symphony Orchestra’s conductor (Ormandy Gallery).
10:15 a.m. – 1 p.m.: Brunch and guided tour of the Morris Arborteum.
It’s been quite a start to the fall TV season for Whitney Cummings C’04. Both the show she helped create (2 Broke Girls on CBS) and the show she created, wrote and stars in (Whitney on NBC) debuted last month, and both were picked up last week for full seasons.
Then again, Cummings is no stranger to making big splashes in big ponds. She raced through Penn in three years and immediately began performing stand-up comedy after graduating in 2004. She also joined Ashton Kutcher’s candid camera-style show Punk’d that year, helping to prank celebrities including Julia Stiles, Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson and Vivica Fox. By the end of 2008, she’d appeared on Variety’s list of “10 Comics to Watch” and performed lots of stand-up, including on the late-night HBO stand-up series Down and Dirty with Jim Norton and on Last Call With Carson Daily. She had also turned 25.
Cummings soon hit the Comedy Central Roast scene, skewering David Hasselhoff, Donald Trump, Joan Rivers, and of course, all her fellow comedians. Recognizing her growing popularity, Comedy Central offered Cummings a one-hour special. Whitney Cummings: Money Shot premiered in August 2010. Here’s a clip:
Some love Cummings for her bawdiness. (From a recent Tweet: “For a woman being on top during sex is like riding a bicycle: you never do it after college.”) Others admire her biting humor. (From the Donald Trump Comedy Central Roast: “Donald, you are gross, nobody likes you, but you come back every couple of years and nobody knows why. You’re like the McRib.”) And still others praise her penchant for self-deprecation.
That unique blend of humor may explain how she’s managed to launch two successful sitcoms simultaneously this year. 2 Broke Girls, which she worked on with former Sex and the City writer/director Michael Patrick King, follows two waitresses who become roommates. It’s the classic odd-couple pairing–out-of-touch rich girl who’s lost everything and no-nonsense, street-smart girl who’s (unsurprisingly) the more experienced waitress. Here’s the preview CBS put together (complete with Wharton mention):
Cummings’ second new show, Whitney, is a relationship ensemble comedy that’s been compared to Friends. Here’s a taste of that one:
Paul Hendrickson recently explained that his new book“isn’t meant to be Hemingway biography—not in any conventional sense.” Rather, it’s an attempt “to come to a modest understanding of the almost insanely complicated life of Ernest Hemingway through the narrative lens of something in the material world he had loved very much. A possession that was intimately his and he hers for 27 years, which were his final 27 years. Her name was Pilar and she was his 38-foot sea-going motorized fishing vessel, and she lasted him through three wives, the Noble Prize and all his ruin.”
In celebration of Hendrickson’s latest work, published just this month, the Penn Humanities Forum organized a lecture and discussion with the author/creative writing professor last week. Over the course of his 40-minute talk, Hendrickson discussed his goals in writing Hemingway’s Boat: Everything He Loved in Life, and Lost, 1934-1961 [Knopf, 2011. $30.]—“My aim has been to try to lock together the words ‘Hemingway’ and ‘boat’ in the way that the locked-together and equally American words ‘DiMaggio’ and ‘bat’ or ‘Satchmo’ and ‘horn’ will quickly mean something in the minds of most people, at least of a certain age.”—and also outlined some of the major themes and ideas that flow through his water-themed new work.
I recorded Hendrickson’s lecture, and you can hear it in its entirety below:
The Washington Post published a review of Hemingway’s Boat last Thursday, calling it “a large-minded, rigorously fair summation of the best thought on Hemingway’s writing, his life, traumas, pathologies, his family and friends, his even more abundant cast of personal, literary and cultural enemies” and “a valuable new tool for…seeing Hemingway.” Other reviewers have described the book as “inspired” and “glorious” and “fetchingly kinetic.”
A Washington Post reporter for 23 years, Hendrickson’s previous books include Sons of Mississippi (2003), which won the National Book Critics Circle Award in general nonfiction and the Chicago Tribune’s Heartland Prize; The Living and the Dead: Robert McNamara and Five Lives of a Lost War (1996); Looking for the Light: The Hidden Life and Art of Marion Post Wolcott (1992); and Seminary: A Search (1983).
The Gazette profiled Hendrickson in 2006, and that article is available here.
Susan Bernfield C’86 has been busy since her days as a Penn Player. She’s gone to drama school, acted professionally, written several plays, and in 1992, she founded New Georges—a nonprofit theater company based in New York City and named in honor of George Eliot and George Sand. She’s served as artistic director there for the last 19 years, leading the company in its mission to produce exciting new plays by women. On the cusp of her company’s 20th year, Bernfield made time for a conversation about New Georges.
What led you to start New Georges?
It wasn’t ever really my intention to have a theater company. In 1991, there was this mini-resurgence of feminism happening, and I ended up in an acting class where the women were complaining about how there weren’t any parts for them. We decided to start a theater company; we thought there’d be better parts for us if we produced plays by people who were like us. Some of those original partners fell away over the years, but I just kept going.
What’s been the most challenging part of keeping New Georges running for the last 19 years?
At the beginning, there were a lot of things we forgot to anticipate: I found myself saying things like, “We didn’t find someone to strike the set, so I guess I’ll be striking the set.” “I will carry this tire across the street and almost be hit by cars.” You just do everything that needs to be done. It’s really an insane endeavor, especially at the level we were—and in some ways still are—working at. Staying scrappy and small is a huge mandate for us, even now.
The money thing is always difficult, too, and I think it just gets more difficult as you need and have more money. The hardest thing for me is asking people for money, time or other things, which is a huge part of the job. That’s still really difficult for me.
How do you choose the works you produce?
It’s a pretty unscientific process. We are always keeping an eye on what a lot of different people are doing. Often, we develop the piece or we already have relationships with people and we want those relationships to come to fruition in production. We consciously work project to project and not seasonally. Generally, we do two [productions] a year, but they’re discrete projects that may have started at different times. For example, there’s a play we’re producing [next month] that we’ve been working on for two years.
And the works all have to be brand-new?
Yes; usually, it’s [the writer’s] biggest production to date, and for about half, it’s their first production ever. It’s interesting, because when I was growing up and performing at Penn, plays were something you were in. I don’t think we thought much outside the box in terms of interpreting them. The play was something that existed, and that’s what I thought theater was. [With New Georges], I became interested in the idea of starting from the beginning of the process and making a play the best piece of theater it can be. Since we work with early-career artists, there are always textual changes all along the way. During rehearsals, the playwright and director are both in the room, working to come up with this cumulative theatrical vision. That process is what interests me.
What, to you, makes a strong play?
I want to be surprised and see something I’ve never seen before. That can happen through the characters or the method of storytelling. I want to feel like there’s an expansive notion of the world. I’m very interested in things that are magical and surprise me in different ways. I want to see a very different perspective of the world.
Do you think New Georges could have done as well as it has if it were based outside of New York City?
I think so, but we probably wouldn’t have had the same level of support. I do think the status of theater outside New York is really healthy right now, though. The center of gravity seems to be changing very rapidly, especially for new plays.
A scene from Bernfield's play, Stretch (a fantasia), produced by New Georges in 2008. (Photo by Jim Baldassare.)
Tell me about your own play-writing career.
I started out writing solo pieces, as a lot of actors do. I wrote my first play in 1994 or 95, and New Georges produced it in 1996. I’ve written six or seven plays over the years [including Stretch (a fantasia), Big Hungry World, Barking Girl, Out From Under It, Tracy Petunia, and a solo musical, Tiny Feats of Cowardice] and right now I’m trying to reboot a little and write something new.
How has running a theater company affected the way you write?
A lot of what I do at New Georges involves guiding plays and playwrights along. Structure is something I understand well—I know what’s going to come next [in a play] intuitively, not intellectually—and I’ve become more interested in the design moment that’s about to happen rather than what the people on stage are about to say. I’ve become much more visual, so being a producer has really changed my writing that way. I had never pictured myself as someone who would become a visual writer, but now I see the way [scenes] will look almost as much as I hear them.
What’s next for you and for New Georges?
We’re getting ready to kick off our 20th anniversary season next month with a play called Nightlands[on view Oct. 5-29]. It’s a really cool, really theatrical play set in Philadelphia. It’s about a Jewish housewife who wants to become an astrologer, and who studies with an African-American woman in the 1960s.
As for me, I’ve been writing songs and teaching myself the ukulele.
Interested in learning more about New Georges? The company maintains a YouTube channel with promotional videos for its productions and fundraising efforts. Below, Susan talks about what makes her company unique and reveals a favorite New Georges tradition: saving one souvenir item from each production:
A few weeks ago, the University of Pennsylvania Libraries announced that it had acquired the papers and memorabilia of songwriter/alumnus Ray Evans W’36. Does that name ring a bell? If not, maybe this ‘bell’ will:
Or perhaps you’ve heard this classic?
Or, for the television-inclined:
Those famous tunes—and plenty of others you’ve hummed along with over the years—were created by Evans and his songwriting partner Jay Livingston C’37. Together, lyricist Evans and music composer Livingston formed one of the world’s most successful songwriting teams, penning jukebox hits and songs for popular movies in the 1940s, 50 and 60s. The duo won three Academy Awards for best original song and have been described as “the last of the great songwriters in Hollywood.” They collaborated well into their 80s, often performing their classic songs together at benefits.
Evans grew up in the small town of Salamanca, N.Y., and considered the radio his link to the world at large. He idolized New York show writers, particularly Cole Porter, and never missed a movie musical at his hometown theater. Undergraduate banking student Evans met journalism major Livingston at Penn in 1934 when the latter formed a dance band known as The Continentals. Evans played the clarinet and saxophone, and the group performed at fraternity dances and spent breaks playing on steamship cruises. “Life on the ships was so exciting and glamorous; we were living like millionaires,” Evans once told a Gazette writer. “One day on our last cruise we were coming up the Hudson River and I said to Jay, ‘Let’s stay in New York and write songs.’ Eight years later, it paid off.”
Evans and Livingston had their first hit, G’Bye Now, in 1941, and landed a contract with Paramount’s music department four years later. In the following decades, they wrote hit song after hit song, including Silver Bells, Que Sera, Sera, Buttons and Bows and Evans’ personal favorite, Mona Lisa:
The Gazette ran an article about the songwriters in 1997, in which Evans shared his take on contemporary music:
We write special things every once in awhile, but in the rock and roll and rap world, we ain’t it. We haven’t done anything significant for twenty years…If George Gershwin were alive today, he’d be on the corner with a tin cup, because an art form [of songwriting] has disappeared… It’s a sad commentary on our society. We were the last of a golden age when songs made sense.
The Evans collection will be housed in Penn’s Rare Books & Manuscript Library, and includes his clarinet, gold records, ASCAP awards, recordings, photographs, letters and telegrams, sheet music and press clippings.
Only a few days after Robert Carley C’82 stood in his Connecticut office on Sept. 11, 2001, watching plumes of white smoke envelop New York City, he noticed a single bright spot sparkling through the nation’s tragedy and panic.
It came, oddly enough, in the form of a super-sized pumpkin on display at his local liquor store. Someone had painted an American flag onto the gourd, and after stopping to examine it and snap a photograph, Carley began to notice more flags appearing on unusual canvases: barns, trees, houses, trucks, boats, bars, pizza boxes.
“Patriotic tributes were springing up all over,” he says. “Americans had turned to our symbol of the flag and rallied around it, but since traditional flags were selling out, people were improvising to create their own. I knew I was living through a unique time in American history, and I wanted to capture as many of those [tributes] as I could.”
An artist and budding photographer, Carley began to travel throughout Connecticut and New York and anywhere else he’d heard about an interesting flag representation. Before he knew it, nearly a full decade had passed, and he had visited 43 states, photographed more than 1,000 flags, and exhibited his work in more than 50 shows.
“I thought it would be a one-year project,” he says, “but I just kept finding more. I’m relentless. I ask everyone I meet if they know of [a flag] that I haven’t found yet.”
That last part has become especially important: After almost 10 years of searching, there aren’t many painted flags that Carley hasn’t already visited and photographed. (In fact, when I told him that I vaguely remembered seeing a large painted flag in Hamilton, N.J., he swiftly zeroed in on the one I meant and said that he’d already been there. A few days later, he e-mailed me a photograph of the exact flag I’d been trying to describe.)
While those who revel in cliched expressions claim that a picture is worth a thousand words, Carley says that uncovering the stories behind the flags he photographs is an equally important part of his quest: Why did a man in Greenwich, Conn., transform his Porsche into an American flag? Which attendant painted a parking hut in Manhattan with the Stars and Stripes, and how did he do it? Who owns that grain silo with the giant flag painted on its side?
Though he remains on the lookout for new versions of Old Glory, many of the early tributes Carley photographed have since been painted over or begun to fade. But actually, he says, those aging, peeling, painted flags make for interesting photos and further add to his enthusiasm for the project.
With the 10-year mark of 9/11 swiftly approaching, Carley was kind enough to share a few of his favorite photographs with the Arts Blog and to summarize his memories of each:
Stars & Stripes
“This flag was hanging in my hometown near a cemetery on Post Road in Darien, Conn. It was put up to honor the victims of 9/11. It was one of my first flag-themed photos. My town lost six people on that day.”
Flag Man, Queens, NY
“A co-worker spotted this gentleman one morning on her commute. She called me up and gave me the directions to her Queens neighborhood. I drove full speed from Connecticut hoping he would still be there.”
Homefront
“This house is in Kent, Conn., and was painted soon after Sept. 11. The owner had a dream that he should paint his house with the Stars and Stripes. Eventually, he sold the house. It is now painted over and is a furniture store.”
Pizzeria Patriotism
“The owner of this pizza parlor was so shaken by 9/11 that he decided to show his support for the country by painting his pizza boxes like a flag. He started his project in the early morning hours of Sept. 12, 2001.”
Freedom of Expression
“The man who painted this boat is an electrician from the Bronx. He painted it soon after Sept. 11.”
Did you catch David Fox’s recent piece in the New York Times? In “Theater Talkback: Is It Fair to Jeer?” the Theatre Arts Program lecturer explains that while booing at the opera is a longtime tradition, jeering at plays and musicals is a murkier matter. (After all, he notes, “who would dare to publicly excoriate a boy and his war horse?”)
While Fox sites a manners book’s assertion that “if we are encouraged to applaud, we also must be allowed to boo,” he has mixed feelings about actually doing so. “If I were going to boo now,” he writes, “I’d establish clear ethical guidelines, including separating mere incompetence (which is just sad, and doesn’t deserve further censure), from egregious sins like grandstanding, upstaging and generally pandering.” He then says that booing at curtain call is the only acceptable time, and that in some cases, not clapping or walking out can make just as much of a statement.
Fox eventually concludes that he’ll “stick with the silent treatment, [but doesn't] necessarily condemn those who boo. In fact,” he adds, “I wish I saw more thoughtful responses of all kinds. Surely, the knee-jerk standing ovation that rewards anything we’ve paid $150 to see shouldn’t be the only reaction open to us.”
At the time of this post, the piece had generated 108 comments on the question of booing, ranging from indignation (“Theater audiences are becoming rude enough as it is without giving them permission to boo as well”) to staunch support (“…the number of times I’ve stood on stage hoping the embarrassment being presented as entertainment would be openly condemned by the audience, is, sadly, many”).
Looking to delve still further into the great to-boo-or-not-to-boo debate, we asked others from Penn’s Theatre Arts Program to share their thoughts. Here’s what Marcia Ferguson—a professor who teaches acting and directing classes—said:
“Booing is the harshest form of artistic censure – and the most honest. It takes guts to boo, where chiming in on a standing ovation, which has become all too common these days, does not. Theatre audiences used to be much more involved in evaluative action — turning their backs to the stage, drowning out actors, throwing vegetables and eggs, and bringing large signs and banners to protest the actions of theatre management, theatre riots on behalf of boosting/lowering the salaries of popular actors, or to protest inflated ticket prices, all these were not uncommon as far back as the 18th century. I personally would love to see a theatre culture so vital that audiences played out their passions this way. On the other hand, as an actor, it would be devastating to be booed off stage. As David says, we need more passionate, and more intelligent, responses in the theatre. Perhaps booing in moderation should answer the culture of politeness that squelches vigorous feeling in audiences.”
How do you feel about booing at the theatre? Have you ever done it? Would you?
