The actress who plays Deerslayer, the talking rifle in The Whistler, happens to be Juilliard-trained cellist and composer Gerri Sutyak, who wrote and performed the score for the short film below. Her musical talent will figure prominently in my play as well.
The film Carl & Jim, by 12-year old scriptwriter Michael Wolfe. Check out the score.
And she can whistle loodles.
You can watch a clip of Gerri as Deerslayer in my pitch video.
Randy Wallace, a Duke alumnus and the screenwriter of such classics as Braveheart and We Were Soldiers, spoke at the divinity school last night. He was engaging though a little self-indulgent, like a man who’d had an extra glass of wine at dinner just beforehand. But I liked it that he thinks about his war stories in their mythic or deeply religious context, which explains in part why they are not much like antiwar movies and if anything may celebrate violence. It’s a very Christian perspective, actually. He said two things worth writing down, and I did:
Staging technologies can be integrated so as to seem, if not inevitable, at least natural. I think of the 2004 Danish movie Strings, performed by marionettes, as a particularly moving example. Well, last weekend I got to see Henry V (on Trapeze) at Burning Coal Theatre in Raleigh, NC.
To say that nothing really prepared me for it means that despite hearing about it ahead of time from artistic director Jerry Davis, and even after watching their video trailer, I assumed the trapeze would be a gimmick rather than an organic part of the production. Certainly including it in the title suggested that we were meant to come to some kind of Cirque du Soleil in which Shakespeare was likely to take a back seat; I was even afraid they would write some iambic pentameter of their own expressly alluding to the hardware.
Anyway, Director Steven Cole Hughes pulled this off in Raleigh pretty well. The five trapezes (what, in that little space?) are virtually the only set, and they become walls, battlements, thrones (of course), scaffolds, weapons, and I forget what all. They allow the actors to use the vertical space of the theater in a wholly different way–the highest bits being reserved for the moments of highest drama–and of course to move swiftly, capturing some of the rapid confusion of warfare; and to deploy their bodies in unexpected ways to disconcertingly good effect, as when characters are executed and dangle upside down.
Few lines are actually delivered upside down, but I rather like the idea.
To enjoy a tale of Eternity in the context of time, you have to let go of your attachment to narrative. Much of the heavily advertised new movie The Tree of Life struck me as a fun romp through a new age of computer graphics, something like the abstract expressionism of Fantasia on steroids.
Paul Dukas' music for this story from Fantasia was based on Goethe's 1797 poem Der Zauberlehrling. This is NOT abstract expressionism.