As I was flying from Philadelphia to London last May, I read an article
about some cabaret-artist in the Austrian newspaper Die Presse.
In German, the other name for Cabaret is Kleinkunst, which means Small Art.
I thought about all the theater I've seen at Swarthmore, and realized that
all of it was big, bulky, pretentious and mostly irrelevant. I realized
that there was a real need for a show that would be close to the community,
doesn't pretend to carry some sort of metaphysical truth, is lots of fun
and provides a meeting space, a place where the members of the community
can meet and relax.
So I got back to school in the fall, and started convincing people that doing an unpretentious and somehow important small-scale show would be a good thing. The three people I first spoke to about this were Mike Williams '98, Anna Fricke '98 and J. Wilson Kello '98. Of this original group, only Wilson ended up working as part of the ensemble that eventually put on the show. Anna wrote a monolog for us, while Mike came as a spectator and had a good time.
While trying to gather enthusiasts, I ran into Emily Salzfass '98, who lived
(lives) a floor below me. We started talking, and she was the first person
who actually got excited about this project, who let me see the first glimpses
of a real show.
Until this point, I had been talking about an ensemble, about a group of
people who would all write, direct and act in the show. I realized now that
the amount of confusion which permeated the whole group of interested
persons necessitated a formalized and increasingly hierarchical structure. I
understood that if this thing is going to happen then someone is going to
have to be in charge. Taking control of this project seemed too big for me, so
I asked Emily to co-direct the show with me.
I asked Ted Florea '98 to produce the show, not really understanding what I
meant by 'produce.' Unfortunately, this was not clarified ever, and so Ted's
role ended up being ill-defined and quite ambiguous.
At the beginning, Meredith Hinshaw '97 was also helping out by giving us
advice and taking notes.
So I went to the Drama Board and said, "I'm doing something really cool so give me 50 dollars!" The Drama Board said that our project didn't fit in with their charter.
Without funding, without institutional support from anyone, without a definite performance space and no script, we had auditions on the 5 and 6 October 1995. The original cast consisted of:
So somehow over the course of that semester, we got some scenes together. During this shaky period in institutional history, Elena quit because she had other stuff to do and wasn't so sure about what was going to become of our project.
But somehow the first show happened...
The second show is another story that I will tell here soon...
Or perhaps there's not so much to tell.. for the second show, Emily and
I wrote scripts starting in January 1996 and finishing in April, right before
production week.. This time we used only our own material.
I thought the second show was more sophisticated, funnier and better done in
general.
Oh, and this time Joel Schultz '97 desgned the lights for us, and Mike Murphy !
was our house manager, which helped a lot.
As you may know, I have been away all year, since September 1996. I'm still not back, and am in fact typing these lines in Woods Hole, Massachusetts, where I'm learning about Sailing and Oceanography. But the point is that Anna Fricke, Ted Florea and Emily Salzfass directed another Cabaret in the Fall of 1996. I heard it was an ass-kicking show, but unfortunately, I have no stories to tell about it, since I wasn't even there.