The world premiere run of Warren Leight's No Foreigners Beyond This Point begins tonight at Center Stage. But several hundred people in the Baltimore area are already familiar with the new play.
The first 100 or so attended two staged readings of the script 10 months ago at Center Stage, which commissioned the work from the Tony Award-winning author of Side Man. Then in September, a draft of the script was read by the entire incoming class at Goucher College, whose academic dean became interested in the play after seeing one of the readings.
"If you're not overly defensive, you can learn a lot," says Leight, who addressed the Goucher students at the start of the academic year. "It was a very thought-provoking, almost dizzying evening. Some of the things I said in response to questions worked their way into the play."
No Foreigners is based on the playwright's experiences teaching English at a rural Chinese trade school with another American in 1980. After the Center Stage readings last January, Leight - who is also a staff producer/writer on NBC's Law & Order: Criminal Intent - says, "It seemed like the Chinese characters were clearer in everyone's mind than the Americans. I think sometimes the characters closest to you are hardest to get perspective on."
Audiences who attended those readings will recognize four cast members. The size of the cast, however, has increased from seven to eight. And Robert Sean Leonard, who portrayed Leight's alter-ego in the reading but has since accepted a role on Broadway, has been replaced by a New York actor named Ean Sheehy, a frequent performer in Leight's plays. "My joke about Ean is, he's done every play I've ever written except the play that made any money," the playwright says.
Nor are those the only alterations. "There's changes in every scene - more rough-tuning than fine-tuning. A couple scenes are re-jiggered completely," he says. The rewrites began between the two Center Stage readings, when Leight split a long classroom scene in the first act in two "and gave it two different purposes." He continued to work on the script at home in New York, where scenes were occasionally read by the Naked Angels theater company, and at the New Harmony Project in Indiana, where he was a writer-in-residence in May.
He's also been rewriting during rehearsals at Center Stage, which he's attended regularly. He's had to work his Baltimore trips around his schedule on Law & Order: Criminal Intent, a job he began in June and that he describes as "the steadiest gig since I taught English in China."
The 45-year-old writer previously worked on a couple dozen screenplays (including the 1993 Matthew Broderick movie The Night We Never Met, which he also directed) but says he has found series TV more gratifying. "They actually want your input, as opposed to movies, where they separate you from what you've written."
Far from luring him away from theater, however, he says, the TV work "allows me to write plays and frees me of a giant layer of anxiety. It allows me to say no to a lot of other people's things that I always was helping out on."
In September, for the second year in a row, he participated in "The 24-Hour Play," a New York benefit in which short plays are created overnight. His 2001 contribution, Nine Ten, about New York jurors the day before the World Trade Center attacks, has already had subsequent productions. For 2002, he came up with We're All So Happy for You, about "five bitter people watching a friend of theirs the night he's been nominated for an Academy Award."
And, he has another commissioned full-length play, James & Annie, about an interracial couple at the end of World War II, premiering at Ensemble Theatre of Cincinnati in March.
Leight's immediate focus, however, is Center Stage, where he can't say enough about the opportunity he has been given to develop an idea that had been percolating ever since his return from China two decades ago. "Everybody just said: 'China don't sell,'" he recalls. "So it was liberating to have someone say: 'That's the [play] I want.'"
Show times at Center Stage, 700 N. Calvert St., are 8 p.m. Tuesdays-Saturdays, 7:30 p.m. Sundays, with matinees at 2 p.m. most Saturdays and Sundays, through Dec. 22. Tickets are $10-$50. For more information, call 410-332-0033 or visit www.centerstage.org.
From Theatre Project
As its contribution to the city's Vivat! St. Petersburg festival this winter, Theatre Project will present a shadow puppet interpretation of Tchaikovsky's Swan Lake by the Ten (or "shadow") Theatre of Moscow on Feb. 18 and 19.
The avant-garde company will perform in only two American cities, Chicago and Baltimore, according to Theatre Project producing director Anne Cantler Fulwiler, who describes the work as "very beautiful shadow puppet imagery."
Fulwiler also announced that Communitas, a multi-disciplinary, site-specific piece by the Washington-based Naoko Maeshiba Performance Collective, will be presented Jan. 10-12. The work uses Eastern and Western theatrical styles to explore pressing issues ranging from youth violence to aging.
In addition, details have been finalized for the Theatre Project's February solo performance series, co-sponsored by Towson University and now titled, "Encounters with Solo Creators." Here's the lineup: The House of the Deer (Feb. 7-9), by Hungarian performance artist Eva Magyar; Solista (Feb. 13-23), by three Finnish women solo performers; Ben Franklin: Unplugged (Feb. 27-March 2), by San Francisco-based Josh Kornbluth; and Second Skin (March 14-16), by another Californian, Joan Schirle.
During his stay at the Theatre Project, Kornbluth will be developing a new work, Love and Taxes, and is expected to give several staged readings.
For more information about any of the Theatre Project presentations, call 410-752-8558 or visit www.theatreproject.org.
'Sidebars' series
Theatre Hopkins ushers in its new series of "Sidebars" this weekend with three performances by John Astin and three Hopkins students in Just Let Me Say This About That, a narrative poem about a press conference by John Bricuth (otherwise known as Johns Hopkins University Writing Seminars professor John Irwin).
Astin, best known for portraying Gomez in the 1960s TV series The Addams Family, is a Hopkins visiting professor and alumnus. Show times are 8 p.m. tomorrow and Saturday, and 2:15 p.m. Sunday in the Merrick Barn on the Homewood campus. Tickets are free, but a donation of $10 is suggested. Call 410-516-7159.
Script list
The Baltimore Playwrights Festival has announced a partial list of scripts to be included in three 11 a.m. Saturday marathon readings of plays under consideration for the 2003 festival: Nov. 23, Riding the Wave, by Marilyn Otis, and The Return of Halley's Comet, by Hale Northam Bliss; Dec. 7, All Saints Eve, by Bob Racine, and The Bread Man and The Playwright, by Lee Dorsey; and Dec. 14, Coming Forth by Day, by Constance C. Harold.
A one-act play titled Bus Stop Purple Heart, by Calvin W. Walton, will also be read after the festival board meeting, which begins at 8 p.m. Dec. 17.
A record 87 scripts were submitted for next summer's festival. All readings are free and are held at Fell's Point Corner Theatre, 251 S. Ann St. For more information, call 410-276-2153.
Auditions
St. Paul's Players. Auditions for a March production of Guys and Dolls will be held beginning at 7 p.m. Dec. 8-9 at St. Paul's Lutheran Church, 201 Mount Royal Ave. in Aberdeen. Needed are actors, singers and dancers ages 15 and up. Auditioners should be prepared to sing, dance and read from the script. A prepared monologue is required and an accompanist will be provided. For more information, call 410-272-3111 or 410-515-7767 or e-mail director Phil Kilby at Drama50@hotmail.com.
The Baltimore Playwrights Festival. The festival needs experienced directors who can cast, rehearse and direct readings of new works. The Playwrights Festival selects the directors, and the directors are responsible for casting the reading. Interested directors (no actors, please) should send a resume or a brief description of directing experience to: Chairman@BaltPlayFest.org or call the festival office at 410-276-2153.