Review of Performance Anxiety

My friend Ben Lundberg runs a little group called Orange Hats who create an archive of audience response to shows. They did one for Hamlet previously, and now they've done a great one for Performance Anxiety. Enjoy!

Gig: Brave New Works

Our friends at the upstart Pipeline Theatre Company are hosting an evening of short works by emerging theater companies next Tuesday. The companies taking part are Pipeline Theatre, Built for Collapse, Fresh Ground Pepper, Shark Mother Arts Collective, and ... US. For one evening, you can get your finger on the pulse of six brand-new companies. And it's free! Or, for a suggested donation of $10, you can also go out drinking with us afterwards at Bleecker Tavern and get $4.50 for 24 oz glass of Budweiser, Bud Lite, or Yeungling Lager.

Our contribution is a post-apocalyptic unrequited homosexual love story film noir. You'll love it!

Details:

Evening: Brave New Works

Date: Tuesday, 13 April 2010

Time: 22:30 - 23:55

Location: 45 Bleecker St.

Reservation: BraveNewTickets@gmail.com

We'd love to see you there, and as usual, come and introduce yourselves!

The Orange Hats Get Audience Response for Hamlet

The Orange Hats: NYC - Organs of State presents HAMLET from Ben Lundberg on Vimeo.

We're thrilled that the Orange Hats came out to interview audience members for response after our production of Hamlet. The audience, after all, is the final judge of the work.

ORGANS OF STATE'S HAMLET

Organs of State

Presents

HAMLET

by William Shakespeare

directed by John Kurzynowski

A cast of eleven actors explores the corrupt and grief-stricken world of Shakespeare's tragedy through meticulous structure and free experimentation in order to figure out what's really so rotten in the state of Denmark.

CAST: Jaclyn Backhaus, Jonathan Bock, Matthew Capodicasa, Tommy Heleringer, Stacy Jordan, Anastasia Olowin, Miguel Pinzon, Jon Riddleberger, Eugene Michael Santiago, Tina Shepard*, and Kyle Williams

Producers: Guy Yedwab and Sydney Matthews
Set and Lighting Designer: Natalie Robin
Sound Designer: Kate Marvin
Assistant Director: Dinah Finkelstein
Stage Manager: Cynthia Hennon

presented at The Paradise Factory 64 E. 4th St, New York City, NY 10003

Thursday February 25th at 8pm
Friday February 26th at 8pm
Saturday February 27th at 2pm and 8pm
Sunday February 28th at 2pm
Tuesday March 2nd at 8pm
Wednesday March 3rd at 8pm
Thursday March 4th at 8pm
Friday March 5th at 8pm
Saturday March 6th at 2pm and 8pm

tickets are only $15 – make reservations at Brown Paper Tickets.

*member of Actor’s Equity Association
Equity Approved Showcase

Happy New Year: New Website + New Show

Happy New Years, fans!

We hope you spent the night in style, and had a great time ringing in the New Year!

To ring in the new year, we decided to redesign our website. It should be cleaner and better laid out. Take a look and let us know what you think! It's at http://www.organsofstate.org/

Oh, and while you're there, you can find out information about our next show -- Hamlet, directed by John Kurzynowski! John and a cast of eleven actors are exploring the corrupt and grief-stricken world of Shakespeare's Hamlet through meticulous structure and free experimentation in order to fully understand what's so rotten in the state of Denmark. It will be going on from February 24th to March 6th at the Paradise Factory.

As always, we'll make sure to keep you in the loop as to what's going on in 2010, and we look forward to seeing you at our shows in the new decade!

Yours
Guy Yedwab
Artistic Director

Love, Love, Love

When I first showed up to NYU, one of our intro-level courses brought in some film producer and asked him a bunch of questions. One of the questions was "How did you get to be a film producer?" and the answer sent along the lines of, "Well, I wanted to be an actor or a director, but very quickly it turned out that I didn't have the talent for that at all, so I turned into a producer so I could at least be near what I loved."

I'd heard that a bunch from producers, and a few times from directors, and often from stage managers and casting directors. I felt a chill in my spine and I swore to myself I would never be a producer or any one of those other jobs that is filled with sad people who gave up on their dreams.

Well, now that I'm a producer (although I haven't given up on acting and directing!) I wanted to account, at least for myself, as to why I'm a producer. For those who produce and aren't doing it because it allows them to fill the holes in their heart because they let their dreams die, why produce?

The first time I wound up producing, it was because I was a director, and I knew that if I didn't produce my work, it wouldn't happen. Vanity producing, in other words. That's pretty simple to explain.

But right now, I'm producing my friend John Kurzynowski's production of Hamlet, and I am involved creatively only to the extent that I get to occasionally put a creative word in John's ear. Why do I do it?

The answer: love.

It turns out that a producer is just someone who falls in love with projects that aren't their own -- falls in love so hard that they have to fight to make the project.

I had worked with John previously, I was the assistant director on a fantastic production of Ibsen's Doll's House that was his independent project. It was outstanding, in equal measures because of his clear, whimsical, and sharply intelligent directing, and because of the clear, whimsical, and sharply intelligent performance given by the actress playing Nora, Stacy Jordan.

When John turned to me one day as we were walking through McCarren Park and mentioned casually that he's had a desire for some time now to direct a production of Hamlet starring the same Stacy Jordan as Hamlet, I imagined it in my head, and I fell in love. I told him right there that I would do what it takes to bring that performance to the stage.

The moment where I tell someone I would kill to produce their play feels a little like proposing. One of my friends wrote some music in her song composition class that brought me to the level of tears -- harmonies that I had never heard before, harmonies that were perfectly suited for the live stage and intimate spaces. And when she mentioned off-hand to one of our teachers that she wanted to write an opera, I had to grab her after class and say, "If you write it, I will make it happen." I practically fell on one knee.

I see a lot of work in development, because I try to read people's work very closely and give them good feedback, and also because I'm often in classroom environments. It kills me -- KILLS ME -- to see good work that is sitting on a playwright's desk, or kicking around in a song-writer's mind. When I fall in love with a piece, my first impulse is to do whatever it takes to make it real. To produce it.

The next step, of course, is to actually make it happen -- and then convince people to come and see the thing you love, hoping they'll love it too.

Yours,

Guy Yedwab

Artistic Director

Things I Do Other Than This

Hi everyone,

Being Artistic Director of Organs of State is only one of my many hats. I also, when I get the chance, update an arts policy blog called CultureFuture. Of late, I've been in conversation with a gentleman named Ian Moss, who writes an arts policy blog called Createquity, possibly the finest in arts policy blogs. So I'm pleased to announce that my first article contributing to Createquity has gone up, an in-depth analysis of a report entitled "Breakthroughs in Shared Measurement", about efforts to quantify progress made by arts non-profits.

If the arts are something that interest you, and you want to know more about the world that goes into putting art in front of you, I think you should check out all of those links.

Yours,

Guy Yedwab
Artistic Director (and other things besides!)