A proper peek at Pullins' Pico

Ian Thal playing the Sprite in a recent production of 'Pico.'
Photo courtesy Daniel Bourque.

Complicated world we live in. Most people aren't really happy until they get the whole story, but, in this sad era of diminished expectations, we're happy enough, or we'll settle for, a piece of the action. Because something's better than nothing, right? Because you can't always go whole hog. Which is what Ralph, the philosophy-reading, pig-in-a-blanket-on-a-stick-selling hero of "Plato on the Corn Dog" wants to do when he gets caught up in the say-anything-to-sell madness of a slick infomercial king in the new (sort-of) theater short from Port playwright Ron Pullins. And what is really interesting here is that this play, which the playwright is offering up, for free, to anyone who wants to participate artistically and vicariously in Occupy Whatever movement, and "Pico," which was just published by Steel Toe Review, were pulled, whole hog, from larger works — the former from "The Dollartorium," the playwright's funny take on the ugly side of the American dream and what it takes to sell it, and the latter from "Woman. Bicycle."

Pullins, who owns Focus Publishing, the Port publishing house specializing in classical Greek and Roman drama as well as deadly dry academic textbooks, describes "Pico" as "commedia dell’arte and a miracle play in a form Pinter might have imagined." Not bad. Guy ought to be a writer or something. But we see it more like Godot meets Kafka's K in a low-rent bar just down the hill from the Castle, called upon to perform a play no one in Moss's remembers, despite the fact that the little sprite, like Kafka's surveyor, is certain he is in the right place at the right time and ready to do the job they wanted him to do — even if no one else remembers engaging him.

It started out as a scene for "Woman. Bicycle,”a complicated play to summarize if you want to go beyond the playwright's dismissive "someone comes, something happens." Could be two strangers, a guy and a girl, collide while riding bicycles. Could be they’re out riding together and grabbed by a couple of rightish thugs who hassle them because they’re obviously of the wrong political persuasion. Lot of that going on these days. Or could be a guy trying to write a story and a woman who just wants to get him between the sheets. "Plato on the Corn Dog" drops its old-school 'tude, riffing on "The Cloud," Aristophanes’ spectacular hatchet job on the looking-very-familiar Greek intelligentsia at a time, like ours, when sophistry, not philosophy, ruled, taking aim at the insanity of our consumer, marketing and financial um ... culture?

The best thing about all this, at least for lazy theater-goers like me, is that you get to experience the stage without ever leaving the comfort of your computer. You can read "Pico" here and you can check in on the American dream with "Plato on the Corn Dog" here. Now, if only someone, somewhere, could do something so I wouldn't have to get off the couch to experience theater ...



 

Locals making short, bloody small screen debut

Oh, bloody hell, there they are again. Not in the lobby or in the shadows of a darkened theater, where you usually find them, but on the small screen, in a gory, gross-out horror flick. At least they will be next week. Granted, you don’t want to close your eyes during the feature presentation, even though you desperately want to close your bloody eyes, because, if you do, you could very well miss them. The actors, not your eyes. “I'm little more than a dot in a large, dark mob of hungry, hopping — yep, Chinese vampires hop — vampires with glowing red eyes," says the guy we usually call Port playwright Ron Pullins because we love alliteration. His wife and sometimes-writing partner, Leslie Powell, fares a little better, at least from a performance point of view. She plays a little old lady who is sweeping her doorstep and then, a couple of minutes later, all that remains of her is, um, entrails that are unceremoniously tossed out the door.  But at least she gets a speaking role, albeit brief.  She says "Hi, dear" to Frank, an assassin and the unfortunate fellow who tangles with the vampire, while she is sweeping the stairs. We get a second peek at her a little later in the film, in a montage, she flashes on the Powell and, um, her guts, "because sadly I've been eaten by the Vampire," she says. "Yes these guys eat you, blood isn't enough for them.") The film which will premier at 8 p.m. April 30 on what used to be WNDS. Remember the slogan? The winds of New England. Now it’s called MYTV. Used to be Channel 50, we're not sure what Comcast, that evil corporate giant, calls it. 

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Wheel Deal: What's it all about? Who knows?

The best advice for viewing Ron Pullins’ new play is don’t over-think it, just sit back and let it wash over you without getting caught up in the drama about what it’s all “about,” because there’s a lot going on in “Bicycle. Woman,” which gets its first spin around the literary block next week at the North Shore Readers Theater Collaborative. The full-length piece has three competing story lines, three possibilities about what is actually happening: Could be two strangers, a guy and a girl collide while riding bicycles. Or maybe they’re out riding together and grabbed by a couple of rightish thugs who hassle them because they’re obviously pinkos. Or maybe it’s just a guy trying to write a story and a woman who just wants to get him between the sheets. It’s conflates the political and psychological, it’s a medieval miracle play with a taste of commedia dell'arte, where “the ‘reality’ is floating somewhere between the competing story lines,” according to the playwright. He pauses. “You know,” he says. “I’m probably the worst person in the world to tell you what it’s about.”

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New play, old form for Pullins

From time to time I make a bit of noise about getting up on stage instead of just scribbling, complaining about what’s happening on it — you know, giving me a better perspective of what it’s all about and all that? So far, thankfully, nobody has ever called me on it because I’m sure I would faint. Or worse. Ron Pullins, on the other hand, is actually doing it, leaving the cheap seats and, gulp, crashing through the fourth wall. Granted, it will be a hometown crowd — friends, really — and he will have script in hand so, short of passing out, he should be fine. But, still, the Port playwright is actually doing it — treading the boards, making his acting debut in the North Shore Readers Theatre Collaborative production of his play “The Dollartorium.”

He’ll be playing “this guy, Ralph” — the lead, actually — a fellow with the American condition: He’s alive, but still not rich, even though he’s totally nose-to-the-grindstone, and it looks like he’s doomed to a life of class envy forever ... until he meets a television huckster who, for three easy payments of $29, will rock his world, unleashing the secrets of how to take control of his life, how to take control of the fortune he deserves. And, believe you me, the secret has very little to do with work. Because work is for chumps. The rich don’t work, right? They make money — and that’s what Ralph could do ... down at the Dollartorium. It’s a modern play dressed up in some very old theatrical clothes. The style and form comes from “The Clouds,” Aristophanies’ spectacular hatchet job on the Greek intelligentsia at a time, like ours, when sophistry, not philosophy, ruled — taking aim at old Socrates, specifically. “I think it was instrumental in getting him to drink the hemlock,” says Pullins, whose firm, Focus Publishing, specializes in classical Greek and Roman drama as well as textbooks.

The Merrimac Street resident, whose quirky 10-minute play “The Object,” about a strange and fascinating (and never specifically described) thing, was just staged last month at the Fudge Festival in Worcester, says “The Dollartorium” is the wildest thing he’s done since ”The Boss Is Dead,” his 2003 breakout play, which looked at the secret lumpen fantasy of finally settling scores with the big bossman. The play’s subtitle (“For those who have yet to cash on the American dream”) pretty much says it all. The play is “for all of us who are angry at these guys who are making millions of dollars for running companies into the ground,” says Pullins. “It comes out of that frustration and anger.” The play, which came out of the Playwrights Intensive series, will also be staged next month at the Whistler in the Dark play series in Boston.

And he’s leaving the security of his writer’s hideout because ...?

“Because I believe it’s important,” he says, “I think it’s important to know what’s going on besides sitting down and watching in the audience, or writing in some safe spot in your home. It’s easy to write words for people to say. It’s more difficult to be up there and actually say them. It’s a good place to see what the characters are like inside and out. I think it will be interesting to see what I learn.”

Joining Pullins on the Actors Studio stage will be Tracy Bickel, Mary Shapiro, Jennifer Wilson, Brad Ritchie and Kerry Zagarella. Suzanne Hitchcock Bryan directs.

And, no, the acting gig is not a zig in Pullins’ career trajectory.

“It’s one thing to get up on the stage in front of friends,” Pullins says, “Getting up there in front of strangers is something else entirely.”

JUST THE FACTS, MAN: North Shore Readers Theatre Collaborative will present a staged reading of Ron Pullins’ “The Dollartorium” at 10 a.m. April 10 at the Actors Studio, 50 Water St., the Tannery. Reservations recommended. Suggested donation is $7. For more information, call 978.465.1229 or log onto the website. The play will also be staged at 7:30 p.m. May 5 at Whistler in the Dark, at the Factory Theatre, 791 Tremont Street, Boston. For information, log onto www.whistlerinthedark.com.

Pullins: The sound, the fury, the war

Yeah, yeah. We all know theater is a collaborative venture, that productions change because outsiders can see something in the work that the playwright cannot because he is too close to it, that actors and directors can clarify the work by fumbling over it in rehearsal — and that, more often than not, the work is better because of the process. But, still, whether they will admit it or not, some playwrights, a sensitive breed, get the jitters as they pass off their "babies" to "outsiders." Not that Ron Pullins is admitting to any of this. The Newburyport playwright is a big believer in the process. But he did confess to a little separation anxiety about "Red Star," a short piece staged last month at the Playwright's Platform in Cambridge. Actually, the playwright said he was "curious" about how they would approach the piece, and that amounts to the same thing. Specifically, he was curious about how they would approach one of the characters because he drew it loosely, allowing the production team plenty of freedom to fiddle about — and because the character (or characters, depending on how you play it) is so unconventional.

Noises of War has the look and feel of a human prop, but is written as a character. It's a one-man war-time noise machine, but it can be played by two, three or more actors who provide special effects — bicycle wheels that sound like machine guns, a drum or tin that sounds like bombs exploding and so on. But the role can also be "played" with a light and soundboard on stage or a multimedia show. "There's no pretense that this is real," he writes in the stage direction. "It is a human imitation of war. The more animated and crazier, the better." But NOW, as the character's pals know him (and as Freudian a slip of an acronym as possible), is meant to be taken seriously. During the reading at the Playwrights Platform, a Boston-based developmental theater for new plays, kind of like the North Shore Readers Theater Collaborative, they played him for laughs. Which is one way of looking at it/him. The character, at first blush, does sound a little like a one-man band — fascinating to watch, but difficult to take seriously, at least at first. The problem is, "Red Star" is not about laughs. It's about people in the trenches, about people ill prepared for war being thrown into the middle of it — and being slaughtered.

"It didn't quite work," says Pullins. "They were really into it, and that was good, but they played it like war-gamers. It played against text. I think they misinterpreted it. But I liked their enthusiasm. It's a delicate line, separating the energy from comedy. It felt like it needed a human voice, not being a monster in the machine."

The play — and the character of NOW — gets a second spin on Feb. 20, when it is staged during the New England Russian Theater Festival. The four-day festival, which boasts 25 Russian-themed one-acts, will also include two full-length productions. Interestingly, the two full-lengths, which dig, TMZ-style, deep into the love lives of the Russian literati, were staged in Newburyport over the past two years — Ludmila Anselm's full-length "Chekhov's Last Love," which was produced last year at the North Shore Readers Theatre Collaborative, and Wendy Lement and Firouzeh Mostashari's "The Woman With the Red Kerchief," which Theater in the Open put on two years ago in Maudslay State Park.

The work was prompted by a Pullins family discussion about whether war is ever justified, with the idealistic "no-never" position being confronted, perhaps overwhelmed, with the grim reality of jackboots on mankind's collective throats, when it's a matter of survival, but it is informed by the work of Kazimiera Cottam, who has written and served as editor of several collections of essays and biographies about the role of Soviet women — as soldiers, partisans and leaders of urban resistance — during World War II, including "Women in War and Resistance: Selected Biographies" and "Defending Leningrad: Women Behind Enemy Lines," a collection of stories detailing the activities of Russian women soldiers in World War II. Focus Publishing, which Pullins owns and operates, brought out four titles by Cottam during the 1990s.

The play takes no overt position on the moral question, focusing, instead, on a bunker-eye view of the issue: As total war grinds the qualities we understand as human into dust, as the world shrinks to surviving the next few minutes, an ordinary shlump in the ditches is elevated into a hero — an ascension caught up in historic fact (and necessity) and, of course, political reality. NOW churns through it all. "The rest," Pullins says, "is just mud and dying.”

Pullins' next production will be "The Dollartorium," which will be get a staged reading May 5 at Whistler in the Dark, at The Factory Theatre in Boston. The play is a loose reinterpretation of Aristophanes' "Clouds," a Greek comedy that took aim at philosophers in general and Socrates in particular, only this time it's our hi-finance corporate cockroaches in the sights — a necessary adjustment, the author says, because "there's no compelling reason to make fun of philosophers any more since they have no impact on American society."

JUST THE FACTS, MAN: The New England Russian Theatre Festival runs Feb. 18 to 21 at the Boston Playwrights' Theatre, 949 Commonwealth Ave., Boston. The festival boasts 25 Russian-themed one-act plays and two full-length productions. It will also include interactive educational workshops in Russian-based acting techniques and playwriting. More than 100 international artists will be participating. Ron Pullin's "Red Star Rising" will be staged Feb. 20 and 21, during the short play series. Tickets for a half-day are $15 for adults, $12 seniors and students. All-day tickets are $25. A portion of the festival’s proceeds will be given to Wide Horizons For Children. For the complete schedule and ticket information, click here.

MORE, MORE, MORE: Check out a video for the Boston Russian Playwright Festival here.

Pullins 'Crossing' finish line with 'new' play

"Ice's Crossing": If the name seems familiar, that's because the play has already been around the production-process block over the past year or so, from the cold readings at various stages of development, at Writers and Actors Ink and at various table readings, to a test run at the North Shore Readers Theatre Collaborative, where it had a rehearsed reading — and its first critical response. So, is it fair to say that the new show by Newburyport playwright Ron Pullins, which will launch the Actors Studio's new Stage Three Workshop is, well, actually a new play?

He says yes: It is a new — and stronger— story, thanks to the long creative process. "It's changed quite a bit over the years," says Pullins, owner of Focus Publishing and author of "The Boss is Dead," a play that became a novel, and plays like "Enemy of the State" and Fringe Festival audience favorite "Movie Mogul," which he wrote with his wife, Leslie Powell. "I think it's a much better play now. It's more of a finished play now."

More of a finished play, not a finished play?

"I think I'm done with it," he says. "Hopefully I am, but you never really know until you see it up on stage, when the actors act and the director directs. You learn a lot about a play after the actors get a hold of them. They understand as much about it as I do, or more, when they get past their lines and have the play 'in their bodies,' as Marc puts it," he says, referring to Actors Studio owner Marc Clopton. "It's been a fascinating process."

Set in the Flint Hills part of Kansas, where Pullins grew up, "Ice's Crossing" focuses on a family in transition: The matriarch is nearing death and, no longer able to take care of herself, has to be moved into assisted living. Her family — two sons and their wives — are at loggerheads over her care. Not exactly a happy play, but one that resonates and generates conversations because it hits so close to home. "In a way it's affirming," he says. "It's about the process of letting go. It surprises me how many people who have heard it, or read from it, express how much they see of some of their own experiences in it – the passing of a relative, the struggle that sometimes ensues between family."

The show will be directed by Marc Clopton, assisted by Suzy Goodspeed and Leslie Powell. It will feature performances by Terry Blanchard, Teresa Donohoe, Tim Hiltabiddle, Mary Shapiro, Tom Kenison, Susan Hern and Sherry Bonder.

JUST THE FACTS, MAN: The Actors Studio will stage Ron Pullin's "Ice's Crossing" at Oct. 22 to 31. Shows are 7 p.m. Thursday and Sunday, 8 p.m. Friday and Saturday. Tickets are $15, $12 for students and seniors. Reservations are recommended. Call 978.465.1229. The Actors Studio is located in Mill #1, Suite 5, at Federal and Water streets. For more information about the play, click here.