Premiere
World Premiere production | The Off Center, Austin, TX | November 7 – 24, 2013
Production Team:
- King John – E. Jason Liebrecht
- Elinor – Florinda Bryant
- Constance – Barbara Chisholm
- Arfur – Jeffery Mills
- Blanche – Adriene Mishler
- Pembroke – Jay Byrd
- The Bastard – Robert Faires
- The Bishop – Tom Green
- King Philip – Lowell Bartholomee
- Dauphin – Robert S. Fisher
- Playwright – Kirk Lynn
- Director – Madge Darlington
- Lighting Designer – Stephen Pruitt
- Costume Designer – Olivia Warner
- Environment – Thomas Graves & Madge Darlington
- Composer – Peter Stopschinski
- Production Manager – Dallas Tate
- Stage Manager/Operator – Sam Accettulli
- Sound Designer/Operator – Robert S. Fisher
- Master Electrician – David Higgins
- Asst. Stage Manager – Colton Perry
- Carpenters – Jesse Bertron, Thomas Graves, Hannah Kenah, Jeffery Mills
- Box Office Manager – Tina Van Winkle
- Front of House Manager – Dallas Tate
Special Thanks:
The wonderful and generous Nicole Blair of Studio 512 for her production sponsorship. A blessing! The University of Texas at Austin Department of Theatre of Dance for selecting Rude Mechs as Resident Theatre Company which has yielded terrific interns! Ana Fairhurst for the hand knitted scarves and Elizabethan ruff used in the photo shoot. Joe Carpenter for swords (my blade, my blade, my blade). Leigh Fisher for Rennaissance frogs! Jon Watson for standing in for The Bastard in rehearsal while our Bastard was in Poland. Everyone who participated in the readings, dropped in to rehearsals and gave feedback, or just made us better because you were watching – thank you! Kim Turner and all the front of house volunteers! Production / UT Residency Interns Patricia Bennett and Colton Perry. Sarah Rassmussen, Lue Douthit, and the Black Swan Lab for New Work at the Oregon Shakespeare Festival who helped workshop FIXING KING JOHN.
What Was Kirk Ever Thinking
Rude Mechs creates new works collaboratively, and we believe it is important to acknowledge the work that is done prior to getting the show ready for production. This work begins often with the Co-Producing Artistic Directors finding consensus around a project’s concept. That done, a collaborative team refines the concept, develops content, structure and style, and gets the piece on its feet. This collaborative team eventually expands to envelop to the entire production team as the work is created.
However, this production was scripted entirely by Kirk Lynn. Here’s what he was thinking:
I was running, listening to the White Stripes cover of “Stop Breaking Down” on 2011’s Live in Mississippi album. I started thinking about Robert Johnson who wrote and recorded the original in 1937. Would he like this version of his song? Would he recognize it? How would he feel about the Stones? Did I really care?
The poet Charles Simic included in a memoir a list of all the things a writer might be trying to do in a work of art. I think he came up with six or seven things, among them the contradictory effort to honor the classics while at the same time to overthrow them and to make some room for him or herself. A feeling developed. I wanted to cover a classic of the theatre and make it sound as wild and new as the White Stripes had done to “Stop Breaking Down.” I wanted that same tension: an attack borne out of respect. I liked the idea of mining the plays of Shakespeare least produced in my lifetime. I love Shakespeare, but I sometimes feel, to paraphrase a character in Mac Wellman’s “The Professional Frenchmen,” Shakespeare is a cudgel we use to beat down our contemporaries. Not many scripts compare well in terms of depth and beauty and broad popular appeal. Actors like to feed on the language, designers like to wake up the settings, directors like to burrow to new depths. If you’re a writer, how do you participate in Shakespeare, outside of admiration?
‘Fixing’ Shakespeare has been a great means of participating in the work. I started a morning practice, in imitation of the Austrian writer Thomas Bernhard’s ‘finger exercises.’ I downloaded the text of “King John” and every morning I rewrote 5 or 6 lines, a page on a really good day, as much as was easily available to me. I translated the text into contemporary English to make it speak in our language and added curse words to make it speak my own language. Once I had translated the full play I went back through cutting it down to 10 characters by any means: combining characters, cutting sub-plots, ignoring historical fact. Then I edited the play with no loyalty to the original, simply trying to tell a good story in rich language, and to expose some genuine emotion of mine about self-regard and repentance.
The play was read with friends in Austin and strangers at the Oregon Shakespeare Festival at the invitation of Sarah Rasmussen and Lue Douthit. Then again and again in Austin. Always cutting. If the project started with my desire as a writer to participate with Shakespeare’s work, it’s now held together and completed by the participation of all the actors, directors, and dramaturgs who read and shared their thoughts and passion. When Rude Mechs wanted to make “Fixing King John” one of our works and Madge Darlington threw her hat into the ring to direct, I was really happy. Our connection to Shakespeare is deeper than just our name (taken from the ‘crew of patches’ in Midsummers). Rude Mechs’ second show, “curst & Shrewd,” was Shawn Sides’ thesis production and used a director’s tools to fix Shakespeare’s Taming of the Shrew. And many of the Rudes met at UT’s Shakespeare at Winedale program. Madge, Lana and I were Horatio, Hamlet, and the Ghost of Hamlet’s father, respectively. Madge really worked hard on me when we met at Winedale in the early 90’s, to help me extend beyond my comfort zone.
Madge cast the play with an eye toward the spirit of inclusion implicit in my desire to participate in Shakespeare’s work. Madge welcomed Rude company members as well as performers from the community with whom we had never worked. Inclusiveness is always hungry. We’re excited to have an audience. We’re eagerly vain to believe that there might be some flavor of what it would be like to see a new Shakespeare play. It was fairly normal practice in his time to steal plots and themes from other plays. And Shakespeare was nothing if not committed to cursing and smut. But as much as this performance owes to Shakespeare, it is also in debt to the other artists name-checked in this introductory note, the full cast and crew, the greater Austin community, and to the complete collective body of the Rudes. The stuff they got—as Jack is wont to say—“will bust your brains out, baby, hoo hoo, it’ll make you lose your mind.”
