Click on Mr. Williams or even do The Rose Tattoo on the cake to buy your tix
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Tag: #maketheaterlive
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Sixty Seconds on RETROSPECTIVE
Here’s something that I learned over the years that used to be called ‘the elevator pitch’, the spiel for a product or in this case new 90 minute comedy, RETROSPECTIVE, delivered in under 1 minute. Did this one work? I’ll find out by how many tickets we sell. Oh BTW, the link for tix is below; message me for the discount code, or if you need a complimentary ticket. These 3 performances — August 13th (8PM), August 15th (5PM) and August 16th (2PM) are prelude to what we hope will be a longer run and we’re looking for backers or co-producing theaters. Feel free to apply https://broadwayboundtheatrefestival.ludus.com/index.php?show_id=200484720
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Jeremiah Alexander in RETROSPECTIVE Triumphs As Clint Belinsky, Accidental Artist
Jeremiah Alexander smiling because he knows how much audiences will love his portrayal of Clint Photo Bill Wadman For playwright, T.J. Elliott, and actor, Jeremiah Alexander, this collaboration stems from September of 1978. Alan Brody as the male leads in a regional production of George Bernard Shaw’s The Devil’s Disciple. First, they were fellow actors, then for a time roommates, and later, and always, friends as both moved to NYC to pursue careers in theater. They both studied with acting teacher legend Terry Schreiber and appeared on stages that happened to be in cellars, barrooms, lofts, and even occasionally a real theatre.
A pledge was made by T.J. once he turned to playwrighting in the early 1980s that one day he would work with Jeremiah and benefit from his chum’s comedic talent, irrepressible energy, and unique intuition. Necessarily working straight jobs and happily raising a family with wife and now Executive Producer, Marjorie Phillips, however, kept that rendezvous from happening until now, but the result is worth the wait. Jere enchants and entertains with the antics of Clint Belinsky, described in the script of RETROSPECTIVE as “late 60s, looks even younger, artist & enjoyer of life.” The last part is an understatement; Clint is a painter who admits, “Art was cool but some days I just heaved the paint up there and hoped for the best.” This so-called ‘seminal figure in the Soho crowd‘ concedes his “talent lay in a different direction” than his fellow painter and our protagonist, Rory McGrory (Mark Thomas McKenna), and apparently that direction took him into the arms of both Rory’s wife, Pippa LeFebvre (Adara Totino) and her best friend/his worst enemy, the ferocious critic, Z (Jasmine Dorothy Haefner). Rehearsals run long because we can’t stop laughing at Jere’s sparkling, loopy creation of this one of a kind character.
Jeremiah’s return to the stage comes after a long career in film, television, & commercials. Television credits include Mozart in the Jungle, Howl, All My Children, One Life to Live, & The Guiding Light. On film, Jere can be seen in Unfaithful, Inside Man, Goosed, & Half Baked. But where you really must see him to enjoy up close the laughter and charm he brings to his work is in RETROSPECTIVE. Get your tix today at this link or on TDF
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Z in RETROSPECTIVE Is Jasmine Dorothy Haefner; So Special, No One Else Would Do
Jasmine Dorothy Haefner Brings So Much To All She Does
What forces form a fine actor? Experience. Intelligence. Discipline. Feeling. All of these but also the skill and courage to make their own path through not just each work but through ‘the business’, and a capacity for reflecting on each moment in the career (which sometimes careens) and constantly learning. John Gielgud in his 1963 book Stage Directions captures the way this needs to play out:
“I think an actor has to find his own especial way of working, selecting his effects from what he has found out for himself in all kinds of different experiments at rehearsals and—experiments of movement, experiments of give and take with the other players—in order to gain the necessary flexibility to contribute to and fit in with the director’s intentions as far as possible.”
Jasmine Dorothy Haefner possesses all of these qualities, a judgment I can make with authority having cast her in three plays and directed her twice.
She was Candy, the MAGA Cuban-American in Grudges,
and Micky in The Oracle
She was a unique Hollywood force in Joe Queenan’s TOP HATE
And many different people in 2-Faces at Edinburgh Fringe
How did her ‘especial way of working’ emerge? As one observer put it, “After ten years in the entertainment industry, she’s done almost every job except light fire to the hoop the lion jumps through.” And I can add that neither the lion nor the fire would give her pause with the commitment she applies to everything she does. All that she’s learned, all the experimenting and discovery that she undertakes excitedly and assiduously combines with an innate sensitivity and creativity to make her so valuable especially in the creation of a new work particularly a comedy that dares to imagine an afterlife where a menage a trois — with a ‘plus one’ — tries to sort out who is still attached to whom so they can all get to next, whatever next is
In writing RETROSPECTIVE and imagining the character of Z, critic of…everything, having the voice of Jasmine in my head was a joyous inspiration. And now that our director, Gifford Elliott, is getting this play up on its feet her embodiment of this wickedly funny character has blossomed into even more than even I envisioned. That’s why you’ll regret it if you miss her performance as part of the Broadway Bound Theater Festival this August 13th (8PM), 15th (5PM with talkback) and 16th (2PM)
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Make Somebody See Something The Way You See It: Characters & Targets
This is a truth for me, but only ONE truth. HT https://substack.com/@juliavendrell for the image Talking to one of our actors during a rehearsal for RETROSPECTIVE (opening August 13th for just three performances at AMT Theatre 354 W. 45th St. in NYC, get Tix here), the topic of persuasion arose. My characters are ALWAYS persuading someone to ‘see something the way you see it’, to feel or act in a different way. This tendency in my characters may stem from my growing up around a table filled with meat, potatoes, and debate. As the youngest of five boys with a clever younger sister, contention and dissension over ‘what was what’ proved a daily part of the agenda. You protested your preferences about art (such as we experienced it), sports, books, school, politics, TV shows…everything. Entering the outside world, arguments not only failed to daunt me; they enlivened my spirit, a cause for both my marvelous wife’s forbearance and chagrin.
But theater is also a natural place for persuasion. Declan Donellan in his book The Actor and The Target makes the point that, “For the actor, all ‘doing’ has to be done to something. The actor can do nothing without the target.” Therefore, the playwright also has to understand what target he has given to the actor and how these various targets interact. Donellan makes the important point that, “the actor cannot act a verb without an object.… All an actor can play are verbs, but even more significantly, each of these verbs has to depend on a target. This target is a kind of object, either direct or indirect, a specific thing seen or sensed, and, to some degree, needed. What the target actually is will change from moment to moment. There is plenty of choice. But without the target the actor can do absolutely nothing at all, for the target is the source of all the actor’s life.” Didion’s verbs above include make, wrench, and trick, a nifty trio.
Target — ‘something aimed at’ — can show up many ways in a play, As Didion suggests, the target hostilely might be the site of a planned attack, that mind to be wrenched in a different direction, but it might also be lovingly the locus of an attempt at salvation or seduction, an entirely different sort of wrenching. Statements like Joan Didion’s have the shock of recognition for me: my characters frequently are trying to ‘wrench around someone’s mind’, but because of my Bronx/Jersey Irish Catholic influences they do so talking fast, smart-ass, but only sometimes hostile. The other times, they come off canny or cunning, articulate to the point of exasperation, which, of course, can make people laugh when they see themselves or their intimates/enemies in what transpires on stage. The fun flows from other characters also ‘targeting’ but in the opposite direction. Then we get what Peter Brook called “a duo creating a world together“, a world like our own with winds blowing every which way and no knowing whose cause (if any) will win.
Who is persuading whom? Pippa (Adara Totino) and Rory (Mark Thomas McKenna) gently wrenching each other’s mind Share this:
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Mark Thomas McKenna: The RORY in RETROSPECTIVE
“The play does not exist in the theater as a written text until it has been absorbed in the process of production. Drama is ‘translated’ or transformed into the person of the actor — “the body of the art of the theater”, as Stark Young put it.“
Harold Clurman, On Directing‘The body of the art of the theater‘: Watching Mark Thomas McKenna* in rehearsal for RETROSPECTIVE, this quote came to mind. These words suggest one of the most important truths for any playwright or director: it’s mostly about the actor in theater that matters, theatre that moves us. Actors may not be everything in theatre but they form the essence of what we want to see on stage. Alan Ayckbourn, one of our greatest living playwrights and the clearest explainer of playwrighting, agrees; “Theatre is not about the writing, it’s not about the directing. It is about that, but in the end it’s really about the actors and the audience and most audiences – aside from the cognoscenti who sit there being experts – come to watch a bit of acting.”
Mark as RORY with Adara Totino as PIPPA Mark brings to this work (with our three other stellar actors featured on this page) more than 35 years of experience acting, devising, teaching, producing, and presenting ensemble created work for the stage. He blends the mimodynamics of two years at Ecole Jacques Lecoq in Paris with improv training from Second City. He incorporates insights gained at HB Studios with the great Herbert Berghof right alongside the clowning technique gained from studying with the great vaudevillean Avner Eisenberg better known as Avner the Eccentric. The latter skill showed up big time in his portrayal of Don Quixote.
But fundamentally Mark brings himself to the play, a grand artist who never stops learning while sharing his talent. Clarity of utterance, agility of movement, depth of feeling, generosity of spirit, and quickness of thought characterize his work. Make sure you see him as RORY in one of our three performances in RETROSPECTIVE
Clockwise from Bottom Left: Jasmine Dorothy Haefner, Jeremiah Alexander, Mark Thomas McKenna, Adara Totino [Cast photos by Bill Wadman] 
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August 13th Is Opening Night of Retrospective: Do You Have Your Tickets?
Clockwise From Top Left: Adara Totino, Jeremiah Alexander, Jasmine Dorothy Haefner,
Mark Thomas McKenna
In mid-July, our cast gathered for their “etudes,” a time for the actors to dig into their characters. Edward Albee, one of the greatest English language playwrights once said that “Every good actor does two things: He does exactly what the author intended and he does it his own way.” Etudes are a way of actors figuring out what that way is. The actors with our director, Gifford Elliott, are shaping now during our last week of rehearsals what the world of this play will be with the text as a foundation. Here’s a look at their adventures:
The words of the play describe how famous painter, Rory McGrory, finding himself in a gallery with empty canvases puzzles over whether he is asleep or… in the afterlife? There, Rory encounters his first wife and two other frenemies from his past. This mischievous menage a trois claims they just want to help him get to next while he just wants to wake up. These fine actors create a world out of these words with work that start this week, which we will be documenting here.
Come enter that world August 13th (8PM), August 13th (5PM), August 13th (2PM). Tickets for our performances at AMT theater 354 West 45th Street in Manhattan as part of the Broadway Bound Theatre Festival are available at this link.
RETROSPECTIVE is our tenth production since slip-sliding back into theatre again in 2018, and with Gifford Elliott directing this marvelous cast we think it’s going to be our best yet. So, get your tickets today by clicking this link
Adara Totino 
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The Short & Sweet on our new play, RETROSPECTIVE
Sweet Spot: We — Knowledge Workings Theatre —would love to see you at one of the 3 performances of our new comedy by T.J. Elliott, RETROSPECTIVE, as part of the Broadway Bound Theatre Festival—Wednesday, August 13th at 8:00 PM, Friday, August 15th at 5:00 PM, and Saturday, August 16th at 2:00 PM. The August 15th performance features a talkback with director Gifford Elliott and cast members Mark Thomas McKenna, Adara Totino, Jasmine Dorothy Haefner, and Jeremiah Alexander.
Short Part #1: If you — like famous painter Rory McGrory — suddenly found yourself in a curious art gallery with nothing but empty frames only to be greeted by your dead ex-wife and two other old ‘frenemies’, would you think you were dreaming or were… you know.
That’s the quandary at the heart of RETROSPECTIVE where these past lives form a manic menage a trois plus one in this new comedy about art, attachments, and eternity.
Even Shorter Part #2: Buy tix here and feel free to forward, repost, and otherwise spread the word. Theater is nothing without an audience. Thank you!
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BIG NEWS: RETROSPECTIVE CHOSEN FOR BROADWAY BOUND FESTIVAL 2025
Yep! We are in the 2025 Broadway Bound Theatre Festival! They chose our play Retrospective out of hundreds of scripts.
Here’s a synopsis of our new work for those who were not at our January 16th reading:
Famous painter Rory McGrory thinks it must be a dream. Why else would he find himself transported to a large space filled with blank frames and his dead ex-wife, poet Pippa LeFebvre? As she engages him in conversations about the tumultuous end to their marriage and narrates the paintings of his career retrospective she claims hangs in those frames, he is bemused — until Pippa states that he is not asleep but dead. Dismay and denial deepen as further witnesses from his past appear attesting that he is now resident in the first stop of the afterlife, evidently a place where detaching from past resentments is a prerequisite to moving to ‘next’, whatever ‘next’ turns out to be. But who is still ‘malattached’ to whom — and why — becomes the question all members of this mixed-up merry ménage à quatre must try to solve.
BBTF “is a boutique festival of live theatre that focuses on developing playwrights into self–producers. BBTF has an unwavering commitment to professionally producing new works, working hands-on with playwrights to make producing their own work a fulfilling and successful experience. And presenting these works to a theatre-savvy community. Since our inception in 2016 in New York City, we’ve been devoted to the evolution of our artists and their work to create great theatrical experiences that continue to live long after their premieres. “
We are thrilled and grateful that they chose our play, which will have three performances:
- Wednesday, August 13 at 8 PM
- Friday, August 15 at 5 PM
- Saturday, August 16 at 2 PM
All performances are at AMT Theatre
located at
354 West 45th St., New York NY 10036Stay tuned!!!!
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Post-Grad Life Through a Self-Producing Lens
Our artistic director Gifford Elliott looks at recent writing that rang true to us about the state of theater making and the rewards of self-producing.
Recently, keeping in mind our interest in independent theater making, an article from American Theatre, Unfinished Business: What Theatre Schools Should Also Be Teaching by Rosie Brownlow-Calkin, caught our eye as well as a letter to the editor in response. We thought we’d share them with you, dear readers, since we know many of you take an interest in self-producing and the state of theater making at hand.
Brownlow-Calkin’s article takes a look at the corner that academic institutions has backed themselves into when preparing students for a ‘constantly changing industry.’ She asks what would be most helpful for students making the jump from school to career. As a holder of a BFA in acting, I particularly enjoyed the beginning allusion of a ‘professional preparedness’ talk to actors resembling a high school Sex-Ed talk. It took me back to my last year of school where some talks of the outside world felt more like, lovingly, a waiving of liability. There was much emphasis in the curriculum on a bottom line that your career “is what YOU make of it.
That was in 2015 and it saddened me a bit reading that not much has changed in the past decade. (Give the article a read to hear from recent grads and teachers who bring hope to the discussion but also harsh realities.) One suggestion in the article, strength in community, was an impetus to making this post as it overlaps with our writing about self-producing: Network to net resources: The Strength Of Weak Connections which is also Way #5 in our new book 13 Ways of Looking at Self-Producing.
A letter response from Scott Walters, Emeritus Professor of Drama at University of North Carolina Asheville expands on the article in a way that rang true to our collective experience as a theater company in the contemporary world of theater. His words are what my fellow grads and I have been shouting since we graduated:
The prescription—that students ought to be taught things like “how to shoot a self-tape or build a website” and how much rents are in NYC—fails to acknowledge that the system itself is dysfunctional and exploitative. Anyone who spends even a few minutes with the employment numbers published by Actors Equity should be deeply disturbed that more than half of Equity members don’t make a dime from working in theatre. And of those that do make any money, the average annual income is less than six months of rent. Saying “life in the business will be tough” isn’t just an understatement, it is malpractice.“
You can teach a theater artist as many tools as possible to operate within the current boundaries of the industry but teaching them the foundation blocks of self-producing and encouraging them to find their audience and community, wherever that may be, is imperative. Today, many of fellow graduates still working in the performing arts have relocated or found troupes outside of the bicoastal trappings of NY and LA.
If interested more in words and reflections on Self-Producing then we’d love for you to check out 13 Ways of Looking at Self-Producing. As a company that has put on our own shows, we’d love for anyone interested to learn from our successes (and mistakes).
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