Clybourne Park by Bruce Norris
Beloit College, 2018
Credits:
Directed by John Kaufmann
Scenic and Lighting Design: Chuck Drury
Costume Design: Lauren Roark
Photo Credit: Ziming (Simon) Wu
Featuring: Joshua Block, Kaela Hadaway, Aaron Hirst, Abby McCully, Aya Sternoff, Kerry Randazzo and Timothy Thumbi
7:30 p.m., April 20, 21, 22, & 27, 28, 29, 2017
By William Shakespeare
Neese Theatre
Directed by John Kaufmann
Scenic and Lighting Design: Chuck Drury
Costume Design: Lauren Roark
“...something wicked this way comes.” A set of witches and a bloody thirst for power inspire the world’s most infamous power couple to act on their darkest political ambitions.
Baby With The Bathwater – A play by Christopher Durang, Directed by John Kaufmann
7:30p.m., Sept 29, 30, Oct 1, & 6, 7, 8, 2016
Kresge Theatre, Beloit College
For Mature Audiences Only
A biting satire about terrible, terrible parenting by one of American theatre’s most twisted comic minds. All targets are fair game in this irreverent window into how NOT to raise a child.
Scenic Design: Chuck Drury
Lighting Design: Sam Gartzman
Costume Design: Emma Kravig and Michael Thomforde
Performers: Silvia Abelson, Conor Fogarty, Alice Gehrke, Omid Niliaram and Phillip Timmons
Scenic and Lighting Design: Chuck Drury
Costume Design: Donna Thalman
Choreography: Chris Johnson
Musical Direction: Alyssa Taubin
Rent is a rock musical with music and lyrics by Jonathan Larson loosely based on Giacomo Puccini's opera La Bohème. It tells the story of a group of impoverished young artists struggling to survive and create a life in New York City's East Village in the thriving days of Bohemian Alphabet City, under the shadow of HIV/AIDS.
I have been performing Starball for over ten years now. With changing venues and audiences, I never get tired of performing the show. At the start of the show, audience members are asked to write down a remembered dream. The dreams are then collected in a box. Through music and astronomy, we introduce people to the mechanics of the night sky. For the rest of the show, we randomly draw dreams from the box and use them as inspiration to create original constellations in the sky. The show has taken me to many different planetaria, conferences, and inspired new projects. In the summer of 2014 I taught a course at Beloit College called “Astronomy, Art and Archetypes,” a class inspired by my experience with the show. In the morning, students studied astronomy with a physics professor, worked with me in the middle of the day on creative endeavors, and ended the day with mindfulness meditation led by our Spiritual Life director. We took field trips to the Adler Planetarium, the Yerkes Observatory, and tracked the real sun, stars and moon. Students created their own astronomical rituals and a “Beloit Henge” project.
Beloit College Theatre, 2014
Directed by John Kaufmann
Scenic and Lighting Desing: Chuck Drury
Costume Design: Donna Thalman
I taught a class about the play concurrent with the production. Students heard guest faculty from different disciplines discuss the play ("The Astronomy of Midsummer," etc.) and completed lab projects that connected them to the production. Students created lobby art, program notes, sewed costumes, ran the sound board, designed t-shirts or baked show-themed intermission treats. Students created an Instagram page and a Terrarium article to promote the show, and the college archivist documented previous campus productions.
Beloit College 2015
Conceived and Directed by John Kaufmann and Rebekah Evans
Click here for "Beloit Buzz" coverage of Race Replays
Beloit College experienced significant racial tensions in the spring of 2015. Inspired by participation in Sustained Dialogue groups and a forum theatre workshop with Julian Boal at the 2015 Theatre/Pedagogy of the Oppressed Conference in Chicago, we created Race Replays to address campus issues head on. Race Replays was presented in October of 2015 as an #blacklivesmatterbeloit event and again in May of 2016 as part of #makingequityrealatBC.
Race Replays is a workshop/performance that uses theatre as a tool to facilitate positive conversations about race. Developed by Beloit student Rebekah Evans and Theatre Professor John Kaufmann, Race Replays uses structured play, improvisation and audience interaction to get people thinking, talking and acting in new ways. Actors present short scenes involving race that one might overhear on a college campus. As you can imagine, things can get awkward, frustrating and offensive. But since it’s theatre, we can stop time, examine intentions and even replay scenes to explore different outcomes. In Race Replays, it’s up to the audience to guide the action to a more positive place. Augusto Boal called theatre “a rehearsal for the revolution,” but we won’t have a revolution if we can’t even talk about race. Race Replays offers a rehearsal space for the honest conversations that lead to understanding and change.
Stop Kiss By Diana Son
Beloit College Theatre, 2015
Directed by John Kaufmann
Scenic and Lighting Desing: Chuck Drury
Costume Design: Sarah Holmes and Cecily Holtz
By Vaclav Havel
Beloit College Theatre, 2013
Directed by John Kaufmann
Scenic and Lighting Design: Chuck Drury
Costume Design: Donna Thalman
Beloit College Theatre 2014
Directed by John Kaufmann
Scenic and Lighting Desing: Chuck Drury
Costume Design: Donna Thalman
Beloit College Theatre, Februray 2013
Scenic and Lighting Design: Chuck Drury
Costume Design: Eva Herndon and Caitlyin De-Araujo
Featuring Anthony Bostler, Alice Gehrke, Miranda James, Simone Stadler, Phillip Timmons and Ben Vogt
For this production, I enlisted a trio of singers to adapt and arrange sea shanties for transitions between scenes. This live music also served as the sirens that beckoned Ellida to the sea.
MUSIC
By A.R. Gurney
Directed by John Kaufmann
Beloit College Theatre
Scenic and Lighting Design: Charles Drury
Costume Design: Donna Thalman
By Adam Syzmkowicz
Directed by John Kaufmann
Beloit College Theatre
Scenic Design by Katie McDermott
Lighting Design by Sarah Mikrut
Costume Design by Eva Herndon
Choreography by Marilu Wiesner
By Jean Giraudoux
Directed by John Kaufmann (Graduate Thesis Production)
University of Iowa Main Stage, 2010
Set Design: Sasha Olchefske
Costume Design: Cathy Parrott
Lighting Design: Ed McCarthy
Director/Adaptor: John Kaufmann
Assistant Director: Makaela Pollock
Production Manager: Brynn Hambly
Set Design: Jenny Anderson
Light Design: AJ Epstein
Costume Design: Mairi Chisolm
Marimba and Original Sound Design: Erin Jorgensen
Web Crowell: Props and Gizmos
Cast: Tim Barr, Chris Blancett, Khanh Doan, Cecelia Frye, Anna Henare, Heather Hughes, Josh Knisely, Shawn Law, Willie Levasseur, Jeanette Maus, Lantze Wagner, Terri Weagant
Preshow Sequence: With Antony and Cleopatra, I was interested in contrasting the cold, reasonable, masculine world of Rome with the warm, passionate, feminine world of Egypt. To emphasize this contrast, I wanted the worlds onstage simultaneously, with a threshold between the worlds. I always enjoyed when an actor would have to move through the threshold so we could see the physical and emotional transition in real time. The Preshow Sequence gives a nice introduction to these worlds. As the audience enters the theatre space, the actors play and improvise on stage without Shakespeare’s text. It was a warm up for the actors, and a chance for the audience to sense the worlds of the play. Above the action, Erin Jorgensen plays the marimba, gently vibrating the actors and audience members out of their mundane “pre-play” existence.
This short sequence also demonstrates the conflicting worlds of the play. Cleopatra lounges on her waterbed, playing with toy boats. This ripples into the “real” world when she convinces Antony to sail as well. I was interested in making the battles “real” and asked for a “battle machine” that the actors could genuinely struggle with. I wanted the winners to have a true physical advantage (4 tugging against 2, for example) rather than to see actors “faking” or throwing the fight. I wanted to keep the favored team honest and the handicapped team fighting for an upset. I think I went too far for this ideal. Web Crowell did make a beautiful “battle machine,” but when the actors really did put their heart and muscle into it, it sometimes broke (granted: spectacularly, wood-splittingly loudly - and expensively). In the end, we had to compromise a little, but the battle scenes still offered genuine struggle, and a ritual of conflict that “really happened.”
University of Iowa, 2008
Directed by John Kaufmann
Original Music by David DeVasto
In Line One, the actors speak only what they hear through the earpieces of their cellphones. Each show has a theme and an array of “outside voices” who are told to call in and respond thoughtfully to a question or prompt. Line One was developed in Seattle with Annex Theatre, and has also been performed at the Alley Cabaret in Iowa City, at the People's Improv Theatre in New York and by Waltzing Mechanics in Chicago (November -December 2014)
Line One in Performance (2004). This night’s theme is “Trial and Error.” This six-minute video shows how Pre-show music is created by actors responding to musicians calling in (using voice or instruments) from outside the theater. The first call is a 10 year old who was told to narrate his experience as he plays a video game at home. Then we follow Stephanie, who stays on the line with Mark as she is sent on a mission to the top of the Space Needle. At one point, she and her boyfriend (who surprised her with a ride back to the theater) are on the line together, and the conversation is recreated by two actors on stage.
Line One in Performance (2006) One of the goals of Line One was to expand the range of voices we hear on stage, even if they are outside voices “channeled” by the actors. For the “Welcome to my World” show, we heard from callers with mental and physical disabilities. In this four-minute clip, you’ll see Sam speaking the words of a quadriplegic man. The man was open, playful and seemed to enjoy having an audience. In the clip, he talks about the challenges of sex and dating when you can’t feel anything from the neck down.
Line One
Conceived and Directed by John Kaufmann
Stage and Call Management: Brynn Hambly
Design: Makaela Pollack
Featured Actors: Mark Boeker, Joseph Krebs, Desiree Prewitt, Stephanie Roberts, Roy Stanton, Jonah Von Spreecken, Cynthia Whalen, June Wang
By Sheela Kangal
Directed by John Kaufmann
University of Iowa New Play Festival, 2009
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Seattle Children's Theatre Summer Season
By Sean Grennan and Leah Okimoto
Riverside Theatre, Iowa City, 2009
Scenic Design: Scott Olinger
Costumes: Renee Bell
In Prompt Play, the audience creates the show. Performers for each short scene are drawn at random from willing attendees. Once on stage, performers merely follow simple theatrical prompts that are planted directly into their ears. Each actor is assigned a guardian angel for personal support and guidance. No rehearsal or memorization is required, and the floor is color-coded, making stage directions a breeze. Prompt Play is part lottery, part karaoke, part storytelling, part Kabuki with a little bit of Twister thrown in.
The main ingredient is the courageous audience, working together and taking risks to create an unforgettable evening. Prompt play began as a party game for my 40th birthday gathering, and has gone on to perform with Working Group Theatre in Iowa City and at Chicago's Strawdog Theatre.
The video is from a Prompt Play performance at Riverside Theatre in Iowa City. The performers you see were drawn randomly from audience members who had not rehearsed or heard the prompts before the performance. All their actions are motivated by prompts spoken into their earphones.
I created the script for Date of Birth using verbatim transcriptions of recordings made in the delivery room when my sister had her first baby. Niko was born in November of 2005 and three months later he was the subject of this Open Circle Theater production.
Conceived and Directed by John Kaufmann
Assistant Director: Ellie McKay
Set Design: Jenny Anderson
Light design: Jason Meininger
Sound Design: Larry A. Ryan
Costume Design: Mandy Mueller
Props: Allie Gerlach
Featured Actors: Aaron Allshouse, Mark Boeker, Rachel Hynes, Kate Kraay, Tina LaPadula, JenRenee Paulson, Mike Pham
This performance came out of a class that I co-taught with Amy Rider where students from different backgrounds got to know each other over time through written and spoken words. The resulting performance was created by students speaking each others' words and responding to live prompts. Actors also met for the first time on opening night. In the video, you might not notice that Claire is struggling to capture all of Jack’s rapid speech as she relays his story that she is hearing for the first time. Jack doesn’t have to speak as quickly as he “channels” Claire, but notice how they each take on the other’s rhythms and physicalities. This is happening without them having time to “think about” creating a character. One of the reasons I enjoy exploring this kind of work is that characterization happens quite organically. Claire and Jack are both strong actors, but I often find that "channeling" often brings out impressive, un-selfconscious work.
Selections of my solo show “linger,” from one of the last performances at the Speakeasy Backroom, before it burned down. This is a 7 minute section of the show recorded on August 11, 2000. I start with the song “Special Night,” discovering from the audience what makes this night special. Then I discuss the “linger life grid,” where we chart moments on the axes. Later we turn the charted moments into an original constellation, and draw a moral from its story. Each night of the show was different, based on the audience, the moments and the stories they came up with.
Stegosaurus by Andrew Saito, UI Theatre
Um, Like, America by Mary Hamilton, UI Theatre
The Duchess of Malfi, Open Circle Theatre, Seattle
The Collection by Harold Pinter, UI Theatre
