Anton's Well Theater Company

“We have to distrust each other. It’s our only defense against betrayal.” – Tennessee Williams (from “Camino Real”)

Here is a great theatre troupe I worked with for awhile...

A reporter confronts her discomfort putting sources in the hot seat “Interrogations: Pre-Election Coverage,” a trio of plays from theater company Performers Under Stress, has parallels to the presidential election — and journalism.

From that x:

Masterpieces of Japan

Minami-za Theater in Kyoto, by Asano Takeji, 1955

Here is the complete listing of directors and the times their five plays are presented in Zoom for the PCSF 2024 Short Play Festival. The length of the plays is about 10 minutes each. This is an hour well spent, and it is FREE. As an audience member on these dates, you will be asked to vote for the best of that day's selection of plays. I will send the Zoom links later in the day as I receive them. Please support these emerging and veteran artists.

Come be a voting audience member this Monday, 7/15, at 7pm PDT (10pm EDT/3am BST) and support our second round of incredible playwrights & actors from the Playwrights' Center of San Francisco who brought these short plays to life for the first time! All five plays of the evening are directed by me, and the link is below for a FREE ticket to check out Group 2. 🤙🏼

https://us02web.zoom.us/webinar/register/WN_yGj5IT3CQgyzlhKrMpjKOw #/registration

From the X:
dave ainsworth

Happy birthday to the great Czech born British playwright and screenwriter Tom Stoppard who was born Tomas Straussler on this day in 1937.

I directed five plays in this series, specifically Group 2, but you should watch all of them. On July 15, you will vote on the best of Group 2. I hope you will come. I will send a Zoom link in a week or so. Mark your calendars!

https://www.americantheatre.org/2024/04/11/henrik-heidi-anton-amy/

Henrik & Heidi & Anton & Amy Why and how Amy Herzog and Heidi Schreck took time from writing their own plays to adapt ‘An Enemy of the People’ and ‘Uncle Vanya,’ respectively, for Broadway.

Vera Wilhelmowna Rust (22 July 1940 – 3 April 2024), known as Vera Tschechowa, was the granddaughter of Michael Chekhov and the great-great niece of Anton Chekhov. She was a German-Russian actress and filmmaker.

Anton Chekhov (29 January 1860 - 15 July 1904)

https://www.atomic-ranch.com/modernist-index/saul-bass-mid-century-in-motion/

Saul Bass: Mid Century in Motion From key art to title sequences, American-born graphic artist and filmmaker Saul Bass is the godfather of motion design for cinema.

Brassaï, Diaghalev Dancer, Ballets Russes, 1930.

The poet is, etymologically, the maker. Like all makers, he requires a stock of raw materials — in his case, experience. Now experience is not a matter of having actually swum the Hellespont, or danced with the dervishes, or slept in a doss-house. It is a matter of sensibility and intuition, of seeing and hearing the significant things, of paying attention at the right moments, of understanding and co-ordinating. Experience is not what happens to a man; it is what a man does with what happens to him. It is a gift for dealing with the accidents of existence, not the accidents themselves. By a happy dispensation of nature, the poet generally possesses the gift of experience in conjunction with that of expression. What he says so well is therefore intrinsically of value.

—Aldous Huxley, Texts and Pretexts: An Anthology with Commentaries p 5 (1932)

[Robert Scott Horton]

I am honored to have worked with Joan Holden, a very forthright person, however briefly.

From The Paris Review...

POETRY
Anti-war Poem
Ted Berrigan

It’s New Year’s Eve, of 1968, & a time
for Resolution.

I don’t like Engelbert Humpeldink.

I love The Incredible String Band.

The War goes on
& war is S**t.

I’ll sing you a December song.

It’s 5 below zero in Iowa City tonight.

Hello from Artistic Director Robert Estes,

Well, this is our company’s second post in the last few days after many months of quiet. We seem to be pushing the rock once again, if ever so tentatively.

During the most artistically lonely days of the pandemic back in January, I began writing a new monologue (almost) every week.

Here’s background on one of my favorites—this monologue is particularly well-suited for sharing today, because:

Today is the 50th Anniversary of the November 24, 1971 hijacking of an airplane—and subsequent parachuting out of it with a two hundred thousand dollar ransom—by “Dan Cooper,” the man who’s true identity has never been discovered.

I love that even though he signed the ransom note “Dan Cooper,” something in the story myth required that one reporter make one mistake by wrongly referring to him as “D.B. Cooper,” and that misappellation born the legend that continues on even till today, “Who is D.B. Cooper?”

I also love the sublime appropriateness that spellcheck desperately wants me to change the word “misappellation” to “mid appellation.” Not this time, Satan Spellcheck!

But most of all, I love local actor Alan Coyne’s recording of the monologue I wrote from the point of view of whoever jumped out of the plane, or claimed to jump out of the plane.

Check it out! A.L. Coyne nails it!

"Bourbon and Coke," by Robert Estes "Bourbon and Coke," by Robert Estes (Quickfire Monologues, Week 31).Performed by Alan Coyne.

Hello Everyone,

We know it’s been a long time since you’ve heard from Anton’s Well, but we will be back in 2022!

It might be Crave by Sarah Kane, or something equally challenging that you’ll see at no other theater, we’re figuring it now.

It’s been tough, real tough, but being in a room together experiencing something that cannot be experienced other than live will happen.

More news soon!

A new company, ARRT Productions Collective, is presenting Nickel and Dimed, by Joan Holden to benefit Anton's Well Theatre Company. This live presentation's virtual platform will be in Zoom in conjunction with Broadway on Demand's ShowShare.

The goal is to help Anton's Well achieve independent nonprofit status. A Paypal link will be sent in the coming days for donating to the benefit. The artists have taken a lower honorarium so that Anton's Well can meet its goal. Your generosity as always is appreciated.

We’ll be watching this in slightly less than two hours! Register for free tickets. Observe four wonderful theater artists take a one hour first essai on a beautiful play.

TONIGHT AT 7PM: Join us for our Zoomlet of 'Perfect Numbers' by Diana Burbano, directed by Katja Rivera. Tonight's Zoomlet features actors Stacy Ross and Michelle Talgarow.

Find out how a woman without a home makes friends with a philosophical octopus on Venice Beach.

https://www.sfplayhouse.org/sfph/get-tickets/?page=event&eid=49531&edid=201204

Hey, we admit that we almost let it slip, today is the 161st birthday for our company’s namesake, Anton Chekhov!

10 pictures of young Chekhov, ranked by hotness. It’s Friday AND it’s Anton Chekhov’s birthday AND we’re in the middle of an endless pandemic so I’m going to rank the following images of young Chekhov according to their hotness. Because I am a se…

Wow, six years ago, something rich and strange began with our first ever production, OLD TIMES by Harold Pinter.

If you would have asked me then which plays we would have produced in the next six years, I would have first been surprised and not so secretly proud that we managed to produce plays for six years, and second, I would have said that for sure we would have produced American Buffalo, House of Blue Leaves, and Angels in America.

It turns out we produced none of those plays; although I’m still kind of disappointed that House of Blue Leaves has not seen a general revival as a response to the Trump catastrophe. I still think that better than any other contemporary play, Leaves xrays our national obsession with celebrity.

As for American Buffalo, I still treasure seeing Tony Amendola as Teach, almost forty years ago at the Berkeley Rep, but I moved on from that play on my own, even before Mamet self-destructed.

The funny thing about Angels is that when I thought seriously of staging it in 2015, a couple of theater friends said that it was dated. Ha. Yeah, with the election of Trump, the play turned out to be dated 2016.

Instead of citing those three plays, I could not possibly have answered the question of what we would produce with most of the plays we turned out producing, because on December 1, 2014, I did not know that This Wide Night or What Rhymes with America or dirty butterfly or most of our other plays even existed.

I discovered all of these plays as first part of an effort to read more plays by female playwrights, but then more specifically, the plays were selected because they were part of a larger play that we began to create.

It was local actor and director Norman Gee who came up with the idea of the larger play. He said that he liked the Anton's Well Theater Company’s individual productions he had seen, but that he also enjoyed that the individual plays were part of a larger play—that we we were producing plays that related to each other in both form and content.

I knew that as Anton’s Well was going from one play to another that I was discovering an internal aesthetic about the plays I was choosing. I became fascinated by how playwrights used language.

Whether it was Melissa James Gibson’s prose poem sans punctuation on the page or Philip Ridley’s overflowing pages long monologues filled with flights of horror-fancy or Sarah Kane’s ferociously pained pages of unreconcilable blank words, I found that each playwright seemed to use language in a way I will define today as sui generis.

By that I mean, their use of language has an indelible originality and force that seems to come from a deep internal place from each of them.

Well, I have to think on this more because I’m not using my own language very well to describe my appreciation of the use of language by playwrights.

It’s just that I have always thought of the words, of the use of language in plays, as like speed in the NFL. You can do so many things well in writing a play, but if you can’t use language in a striking way, it’s like not being able to run a 4.4 40—it’s going to be hard to cut it.

I know that if I read a play that has an intriguing theme or potentially fascinating characters, but the language does not have a drive or particularity, I just don’t find the play all that interesting.

Which I find fascinating because such a great modern playwright as Paula Vogel can say that to her the most important part of the play is structure—the words are less important.

So perhaps I’m wrong about the primacy of language. I realize that a play that has a powerful structure can definitely carry an audience along to a highly emotional resolution.

Still, I know that in the six years of programming plays, I have treasured working from play-to-play with the supple and subtle words of playwrights ranging from Chloë Moss to debbie tucker green.

I’ve found that the words of these playwrights have become their structure. The structure of green’s dirty butterfly is fragmentary just as her poetic words fragment her characters tense battle with each other.

Just as the structure of Caryl Churchill’s Escaped Alone depends on the collision of the fragmentary conversations versus the visionary poetic monologues. It’s language form versus language form in that achingly prescient play about the future that we now know is this very moment.

In producing these language plays in the last six years of moments, I know that I have been on journey that I never expected to take way back on December 1, 2014.

This past future that I could not know gives me hope for whatever beckons in the future future. Yes, the time ahead might bring terror, but it just might as well bring a new journey that I presently know nothing about.

Well, enough for any hardy reader who has made it this far along in this single take post today. I really just wrote these words in one flow. It’s funny to feel like after all of this I haven’t said what I need to say.

But then again, in living by Anne Bogart’s maxim that the artist’s duty is to articulate, I set down these words right now in hopes that they bring a new way forward—a future that I may only began to understand in six years, just as today I’m only beginning to articulate an understanding of the past six years.

The director’s note from our 2019 double bill of Caryl Churchill plays captures those plays now prescient take on our global and personal futures...

Hello from Artistic Director Robert Estes,

Yes, Anton’s Well and I have been out of touch for quite a while.

I hope it doesn’t seem thoughtless at this very strange time to reintroduce our company to you. When there are so many new daily COVID infections that this seems like the darkest hour, I wonder if we need to think about things like theater.

But I know that even in these dismal times, I need something to give me hope and joy for the future. Lately, I have been encouraged by the number of very promising vaccines being developed. I now believe there is a reasonable hope for a return to something approaching “normal” life in the not too distant future.

With this hope, it seems that the tide of my inspiration for producing plays is rising once again. I have to say that it has been at a great ebb.

Yet, just in the past few days, I’ve realized it’s time to begin dreaming of the future.

In this future, I don’t want you to think that we’re in danger of going out of business. Many other companies face that danger, but because we are so small, we will survive. Although it was painful to cancel our show in progress and our two following shows—when we cancelled, we also cancelled almost all of our expenses, so we will go on.

Still, we need to meet a different challenge. Our financial dilemma is that we need to raise the pay for our actors and creative crew. Part of this is due to the passage of the law AB5, which, although confusing and poorly written, has the worthy goal of giving lower paid workers a better shake. The law will require us either to treat our artists as volunteers (which we will not do) or to pay them at a higher scale than we presently do (which we would love to do).

One of the main reasons we started Anton’s Well was to act as a level between the unpaid or barely paid community theater and the better paid but mostly non-union theaters. We hoped to bridge the gap between those two levels, with the goal of developing Anton’s Well into the best paying theater possible.

But even more important than this original goal or the AB5 regulations, the primary reason we’re striving to provide better pay is that the local Bay Area artists desperately need the money. It’s just that simple.

So, I know that as art lovers, you will most likely soon get many appeals for the Giving Tuesday that happens in just a few days and and then you will receive many end-of-the-year appeals.

You might call this letter the Sneaky Saturday appeal. Maybe we can get your notice before the others!

Well, please know that your donation will go to Bay Area artists and the direct costs of producing our shows. We don’t have overhead—for that we do rely on our unpaid volunteers called me and others.

We have a proven track record of finding funky, beautifully site-specific spaces (like the church for the two Caryl Churchill plays where we had one play outside and then moved inside for the next play) that are significantly less expensive than traditional theater spaces. By keeping our rental costs down, we can pay our participating artists better.

We will continue in our mission of bringing to the Bay Area unusual, rarely seen, or never seen plays that feature an intense engagement with the human condition as expressed through deeply startling theatrical language. Our dozen Bay Area Premiere productions in just the past four years have featured the unique voices of playwrights ranging from debbie tucker green to Samuel Beckett.

Please consider helping us continue and support our artists by donating at the link below. Just as a measure, a donation of $75 will provide the pay for one actor for one performance. But any amount, lower or yes higher will help. Each time we receive a donation of any amount, we feel energized and our purpose recognized.

Thank you for reading. I know that there is a day coming when we will all once again be packed into a small place to hear the biggest stories ever told.

DONATE HERE: https://fundraising.fracturedatlas.org/anton-s-well-theater-company

Anton's Well Theater Company Immortal. Ephemeral. Immediate.

Due to the uncertainty over the COVID-19 virus and the resulting advisories issued from the city of Berkeley and Alameda County concerning the holding of public events, Anton’s Well Theater Company has decided to cancel the remaining run of its bill of three Samuel Beckett plays, A PIECE OF MONOLOGUE, EMBERS, and ALL THAT FALL.

The cancelled performances run from Thursday, March 12 through Saturday, March 14, and Thursday, March 19-Saturday, March 21 at the St. Alban’s Episcopal Church, 1501 Washington Avenue, Albany.

Future ticket holders will be contacted for full refunds.

Thank you to all of our supporters.