SantaFe.com

Profiles of Artistic Director Tone Forrest, Resident Playwright and Board Member Craig Barnes, and Clara Soister (Actress and Director).

On January 7, 2008, I met with members of the Red Thread Collective for two hours at Java Joe’s Coffee Shop to discuss the theater company’s history, its vision for professional, quality drama in Santa Fe, and its upcoming performance schedule.

One of my earliest recollections is of my Scots grandparents talking about the importance of the red thread: “If you follow the red thread, you can unravel even a hopeless tangle.” Artistic Director Tone...

Friday, February 8, 2008
by Jeffrey Laing

On January 7, 2008, at Java Joe’s Coffee Shop, I met with Red Thread Collective members Tone Forrest (Artistic Director), Craig Barnes (Resident Playwright and Board member), and Clara Soister (Actress and Director) on the community needs for the growth of theater in Santa Fe with a schedule of upcoming productions.

Tone, Craig, and Clara all agree that money is needed to create an important and challenging theater community. The irony is that while Santa Fe is an arts town, there is little funding for the drama. All three RTC members see the absolute need for a performing arts center....

Friday, February 8, 2008
by Jeffrey Laing

Author Sallie Bingham is known for her novels, short story collections, and memoirs. She has also had a career in the theater that began with backyard reworkings of Shakespeare’s classics at her Louisville, Kentucky, home. She dragooned her fourth grade class girl friends to perform in these productions while she wrote, directed, and acted the leads herself. Sallie heard an adult member of the audience whisper the following: “Shakespeare would turn over in his grave.” Not understanding the phrase, Sallie intuited that it was not high praise. By the sixth grade, her friends rebelled...

Friday, February 8, 2008
by Jeffrey Laing

In a recent interview with co-founders Argos MacCallum and Ron Mier, I discovered that the “umbrella” in the Santa Fe’s Teatro Paraguas’s (TP) name is two-fold in nature. One aspect of the term “paraguas” is an attempt to be inclusive in terms of subject material and audience: to reflect the Spanish and Latin traditions, the Chicano experience, of Northern New Mexico as it interacts with the Anglo and Native American cultures. It also refers to the goal of the company to be a collective of individuals who are provided with the opportunity to develop artistically.

Friday, February 8, 2008
by Jeffrey Laing

Carol Carpenter is a native New Mexican (Artesia) and resident (Madrid) who currently is an administrator and dramatic writing instructor at the College of Santa Fe. She has had a writing career that has spanned publishing fiction in small magazines to Hollywood where she wrote trailers and promotional pieces. However, it is as a playwright that Carol Carpenter shows enormous promise. Her most recent play, Wild Dogs, pits the residents of Madrid against Disney Productions when the mega-company invaded the fiercely independent village to shoot the big budget film,

Wednesday, February 6, 2008
by Jeffrey Laing

The Arden Players (TAP) is a recent welcome addition to the Santa Fe theater community. The company has presented accessible, intelligent, and entertaining productions of Shakespeare’s Much Ado about Nothing (2006) and The Merchant of Venice (2007) and is currently in pre-production and rehearsals for a Spring 2008 set of performances of the Bard’s Scottish play at El Museo Cultural Center.

The Arden Players is the brainchild of Deborah Dennison. She has transformed her life-long devotion to and passion for Shakespeare that has informed and defined her tenure in professional and...

Tuesday, January 15, 2008
by Jeffrey Laing • SantaFe.com

On December 7 & 8, 2007 at Wise Fool Studio (2778 Agua Fria Street), Santa Fe’s Theater Grottesco (John Flax Artistic Director and Co-Founder) produced a solo puppet show of six related stories by solo puppeteer Eric Bass (Co-Founder of Sandglass Players of Putney, Vermont).

The evening was appropriately titled Autumn Portraits as each vignette focused on the interplay of the puppeteer and a solo puppet that in each instance confronted its history, its present, and its imminent death. The puppet O’Neill, a vaudevillian that clearly had “died” many times on the boards and always faced his...

Tuesday, January 15, 2008
by Jeffrey Laing • SantaFe.com

As with all theater companies, Theater Grottesco (TG) attempts to tell stories. The essential challenge is how to connect with the audience on emotional and spiritual levels as well as on the more literal level of narrative. Company co-founder and artistic director John Flax is always searching for a “new way of telling a story” with his experienced ensemble attempting to discover “what forms make something new.” John makes the analogy between the congruence among TG’s ensemble actors and a no-look pass from a highly skilled point guard on an experienced basketball team. That flash of...

Tuesday, January 15, 2008
by Jeffrey Laing • SantaFe.com