The Giant Awakens

The blog has been dormant but not the project. In August, playwright Charise Castro Smith came to participate in a week of workshops with the creative team. We sat around the table with the actors and designers, asking questions and making observations that led to a new version of the script.

In September we presented a staged reading of the new script for the Luna Nueva festival and received excellent feedback and questions. The audience found the script intelligent and moving, and wondered how we were going to realize the demands of the script. Someone asked whether the stage directions were going to be read aloud in the show. Someone questioned the science, some asked about the characters' intentions.

Charise took this feedback and crafted her latest version of Boomcracklefly.

Since then Designers have met around the table and to discuss the themes of the play: transformation, power, partnership, love, ambition, entropy, interconnectedness & technology. The themes have yielded images: string, a bed, puppets...

Torie Van Horne, our scenic designer has captured some of these in a mood board of photographs:

http://picasaweb.google.com/torievanhorne/BoomCrackleFly?authkey=Gv1sRgCPmfkbDdw4zWTA#

Stephen Pick, our marketing assistant, then found these photos to draw inspiration for our upcoming photoshoot...

http://www.flickr.com/photos/53706952@N06/favorites/

Your responses to these images?
More soon...

And we're off...!

Delighted to launch this blog with a photo of our only cast member so far, the lovely and talented Emily Gleason, who'll be taking on the role of Lenin, the sister who doesn't die.

As you know, Boomcracklefly is written by Charise Castro Smith, and we'll be producing it at Miracle next Spring. Reese and I have been talking for a few months about the play, a conversation which began with feedback from our play selection committee, Francesca Sanders, Andrew Golla and Karin Magaldi. Some of the comments that have emerged had to do with identifying motivations, learning more about the characters, and finding the core passion of the play. The conversation continues...

Auditions will begin later this week, in the hopes that we'll be fully cast by the end of August (21-25?) when we're planning to have a play development workshop with Reese here at Milagro! So, it seemed like a good time to open up the conversation to our creative team, imagining there are more questions and comments that we can discuss together.

Thoughts?