Hi … This is Lee Breuer,
You may have gotten a missive or two or three from me before as I have been writing the Mabou Mines Christmas Fund Raising Letter each year. If you did, this one will be a surprise because it’s hopelessly serious… yet seriously hopeful …
I saw Bunraku, the Japanese classic puppet theater for the first time in Paris in 1968 on their first ever tour outside Japan and was so enraptured that I vowed then and there to introduce this brilliant musically based form of puppetry and staging that performs tragedy with Shakespearean grandeur, and comedy with Aristophanean abandon to western audiences. (Chicamatsu Monzaemo wrote the first plays for Bunraku less than fifty years after Shakespeare died.) It’s been forty-six years since my epiphany. If I’m going to make good on my vow it is now or never.
The first part of my trilogy – La Divina Caricatura is scheduled to open at La Mama’s Ellen Stewart Theater on December 10 of this year and play through December 22. This is the most ambitious, original work I have ever embarked upon. It is a mixed-media pop-opera. The score by legendary bassist Lincoln Schleifer (with additional songs by Bob Telson and John Margolis) takes us on a tour of pop music from the 50’s to the 80’s and is integrated with poetry, rap, original lyrics, and a superb live band. Soul music icons comprise the male gospel/soul quartet and woman’s trio backing up two extraordinary, masterful soloists with Bunraku puppetry performed by fourteen of New York’s best puppeteers, and a three projector video installation.
Complex and multi-layered to be sure – but not as complex and multi-layered as the finances! There are two presenting and three producing organizations involved: La Mama, St. Ann’s Warehouse, piece by piece Productions, Mabou Mines and Dovetail Productions -- and despite the most generous development funding I’ve ever had the thrill to receive, (we’ve been working for the better part of four years) – we need a final infusion of funding in order to open the show.
To give you a wee idea why – think how come no one before us, ever, has been fool enough to attempt a full-scale Bunraku work in America? It’s ‘numbers’! For every puppet there are six artists involved, a designer, three puppeteers, a speaking voice (actor) and a singing voice. If you multiply the five leading puppet characters by six that’s thirty-six artists involved in bringing the puppets to life. When you add the minor characters it’s mind-boggling. To extrapolate from Calvin Coolidge – if “The business of America is business.” – producing Bunraku is most un-businesslike, hence, un-American. Only the state supported classic Bunraku in Osaka Japan has the politico/financial power to do great art that is bad business.
If producing La Divina Cariatura is not business like, what is it ‘like’. The only answer seems to be ‘love-like’. La Divina Caricatura has assumed the character of a labor of love – and like all labors of love, has bigger dreams than pockets.
This is the best cast I have ever assembled. Many of the singers are from The Gospel at Colonus, the puppeteers from Peter and Wendy, Red Beads and Porco Morto and the finest award winning Mabou Mines actors (OBIE winners: Ruth Maleczech, Greg Mehrten and Maude Mitchell) from shows like Hajj, Lear, and DollHouse in the wildest combinations you can imagine. ‘The Poppers Quartet’ is composed of two Soul Stirrers (Ben Odom and Gene Stewart) and two Steele’s (J.D. and Fred), ‘The Wild Women’ features R&B legend Maxine Brown. Our star, the lead voice of Rose is the great Bernardine Mitchell, (Antigone in Gospel at Colonus), and the voice of John Hamm Jones is John Margolis, composer and lead vocalist for the Comédie-Française production of A Streetcar Named Desire. Designer Alison Yerxa made magic in Gospel at Colonus. Director of puppetry is Jessica Scott (puppeteer extraordinaire from: Peter and Wendy, Red Beads, Porco Morto). And Rose the dog is the only puppet ever to win an OBIE (designed by Julie Archer for An Epidog).
Some of the writings, in their past lives before they became parts of a single trilogy of plays, have won an OBIE for Outstanding Achievement (The Shaggy Dog Animation), The Kennedy Center Fund for New American Plays supported by American Express (An Epidog), The Villager Best Production Award, (Sister Suzie Cinema) and OBIEs for writing, directing and Best Actor (A Prelude to Death in Venice with Bill Raymond).
Enough name and credit dropping. The message is simple. What’s needed to open is: $25,000. The cast is very large and uniformly brilliant, the house is ideal, under three hundred seats – if it were larger you’d be too far away to see the puppets properly-and our “anti-rip off” ticket prices are too good to be true.
Please put some icing on this multilayered cake -- All contributions go to Mabou Mines, which makes them tax deductible.
AND GET A TASTE OF “LA DIVINA” BY WATCHING OUR TWELVE MINUTE VIDEO PRESENTATION.
And if your interest is peaked—do us the consummate favor of hitting the forward button a few times and send this missive and the La Divina link to a few of your friends.
One friend of ours has said:
“Lee Breuer is most worthy of any support he needs. At least once a decade he creates a production that has a profound effect on the course of American theater.”
Des McAnuff: Tony award winning director, former artistic director of the Stratford Shakespeare Festival and the La Jolla Playhouse.
