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July 2005: Alcestis Collaborators

Theater Emory and Out of Hand Theater Co-Produce Ted Hughes’s Version of Euripides’ Alcestis

When Emory University’s Special Collections and Archives staff and members of the English department approached Theater Emory’s artistic producing director, Vincent Murphy, to produce a play based on a Ted Hughes piece, Murphy immediately thought of Hughes’s adaptation of the ancient Greek play Alcestis. “Alcestis jumped out because it has big emotions to it,” he says. “It’s a very big story of loss and redemption. Not only is this piece a very contemporary telling of an ancient story but it also allows audiences in a direct way to feel a sense of public grief together, and given what’s going on with us—the war and so on—people need to feel grief together. It allows us as a community to come together and feel what loss is.”

Alcestis, Theater Emory’s first play of the 2005-2006 season, will open the 5th International Ted Hughes Conference, "Fixed Stars Govern a Life,” October 5-7, 2005. The conference will take place in Emory’s Robert W. Woodruff Library. The play will be performed October 6-8 and 13-14, 2005 at 7:00 p.m. in the Dobbs University Center, Munroe Theater, and October 15, 2005 at 7:00 p.m. and October 16, 2005 at 2:00 p.m. at the Schwartz Center, Emerson Concert Hall.

Family ties, with undercurrents of loyalty and revenge, are also part of the underlying themes in the Theater Emory production of Alcestis. It is the story of a king, Admetos, who escapes death because his wife, Alcestis, agrees to die in his place. That’s the loyalty part. Playing the role of Pheres, Admetos’ father, is Murphy, in his first major acting role since 1988, and directing the play is Ariel de Man, 1998 Emory graduate and founding member of the Out of Hand Theater group—and Murphy’s daughter. That’s the revenge part. Rather, it could have been.

“There is a slight irony here,” says Murphy. “When my daughter first came to Emory, she was cast in a remarkable project, a Greek play. The opera director said she gave the best audition.” However, Murphy felt that although de Man’s audition was excellent, the role should go to a senior rather than a freshman and asked that his daughter be removed. “The irony is that, 12 years later, I had to go audition for her in order to get into this Greek production. She could have kicked me out in revenge.”

De Man says she is looking forward to directing Murphy, although she admits to some apprehension. “I’ve certainly never directed my father before,” she says. “I’m looking forward to it and I’m also a little bit intimidated. In school, I took directing from my father, and I’d never worked so hard before or after.”

Another Out of Hand member, Adam Fristoe, will play the part of the god Apollo, who grants Admetos the extension on his life. Alcestis will be played by Maia Knispel, also of Out of Hand Theater.

De Man explains that Theater Emory frequently works with guest artists, and approached Out of Hand to collaborate on Alcestis because they wanted to give the students the opportunity to work with former Emory theater students. “My colleague and co-founder, Maia Knispel, and I graduated at the same time from the Emory theater department,” says de Man, who had a double major in theater and French. “Then a couple of years later, in 2000, we started Out of Hand Theater.”

Alcestis is not the first collaboration between Theater Emory and Out of Hand Theater. In May 2002, the two companies co-produced 30 Below, which they billed as “a carefully marketed show for, by, and about a generation characterized by over stimulation, apathy, and susceptibility to commercialism.”

Although Alcestis was written in the fifth century B.C. — it is one of the earliest surviving works of the Greek playwright Euripides—Ted Hughes gave it a contemporary twist by using modern language and cultural references. “When most people hear ‘Greek play,’ they think ‘boring and hard to understand’,” says H. Bart McGeehon, technical director for Theater Emory. “This modern, poetic adaptation is so easily understood.”

McGeehon had previously worked on the 30 Below co-production, playing liaison between the two theater companies, which has made him the perfect choice for his current role as liaison, production manager, and set designer for Alcestis. He says that being responsible for the play’s set and properties design will be a challenge. “Because this adaptation will be staged not only in the Mary Gray Munroe Theater but also in the Emerson Concert Hall, the design has to be adaptable for both spaces.”

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About some of the Alcestis collaborators

VINCENT MURPHY
Associate professor and artistic producing director Vincent Murphy came to Emory in 1989, on the recommendation of Robert Brustein, a distinguished drama critic for The New Republic, founding director of the Yale Repertory and American Repertory theaters, and English professor at Harvard. Murphy had worked with Brustein when Murphy was an associate artist at the American Repertory Theater.

Murphy was the fifth artistic director in three years. “I came into a somewhat chaotic situation,” he laughs. It was only at the end of his second year here that he stopped introducing himself to other faculty by saying, “Hi, I’m Vinnie Murphy, and I’m still here.”

Sixteen years later, he is still here, and that has been a very good thing for Emory and the Atlanta community. He helped create the nationally recognized Playwriting Center at Emory, which has developed more than 150 new works and has hosted two Pulitzer prize-winning playwrights, Robert Schenkkan and Arthur Kopit, and a Nobel prize-winning playwright, Akinwande Oluwole (Wole) Soyinka. He also helped create the Elizabethan Black Rose Playhouse, modeled on original Elizabethan theaters. Murphy says that Theater Emory built the Black Rose Playhouse to stay up for only one semester but because it was so well-liked, they kept it for three-and-a-half years. The playhouse was featured on National Public Radio and in the New York Times.

Murphy recently announced that he will be stepping down as Theater Emory’s artistic producing director. “I would love to teach and direct,” he explains. “I’d like to act more. I’m also a playwright and want to have time to go back to that. And I have a book I want to finish called The Art of Literary Adaptation, which is about how to turn literature into plays.”

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ARIEL DE MAN
Not surprisingly, Ariel de Man has been around the theater all her life. “My earliest memories are of being in auditoriums and at rehearsals,” she says. Naturally, she resisted following in her father’s footsteps. “Of course I thought there was no way I would be in theater,” she laughs. “I would be a lawyer. Then I went to Emory and decided that I just had to do it.”

Even in high school, de Man could not keep away. Although she spent most of her high school years at Druid Hills High School, which did not have a theater department, she did participate in a statewide one-act competition. She also directed her first production when she spent a year attending Padeia, which does have a drama department.

De Man and Out of Hand Theater are traveling to New York next month to stage one of their original productions at the New York International Fringe Festival, a multi-arts festival with more than 200 companies from all over the world performing in more than 20 venues. HELP! is a spoof of a self-help seminar, with full audience participation. Out of Hand has produced it twice in Atlanta, once last fall and once in spring 2004.

From the start, Out of Hand Theater has received many awards and recognitions. Its inaugural production, Jean Cocteau’s Les Parents Terribles (Indiscretions), was named one of the best shows of 2001 by the Atlanta Journal-Constitution.

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H. BART MCGEEHON
H. Bart McGeehon has also been around the theater for as long as he can remember. “I’ve done everything from acting and costumes to directing and designing,” he says. A native of Dallas, Texas, he lived in New York City, where he did freelance stage management work. He moved to Atlanta from New York in 1997 to become the production manager at Actor’s Express Theatre Company.

McGeehon first worked with Theater Emory in 1999 as a union stage manager for their “Fools Fest” project. At the time, he was working at Actor's Express Theatre Company as the production manager/technical director. Theater Emory continued to ask him to work on projects as the stage manager. When a full-time position became available in 2000, “it just seemed like a natural fit. I have never regretted that decision,” he says.

As a technical director, McGeehon feels he gets the best of everything. “This job combines all the aspects of theater and keeps the job interesting, as there is never the same thing twice. Theater at its best is a collaborative art and as the technical director, I get to collaborate with artists from all different areas of theater.”

Outside of his full-time job at Emory, McGeehon works as a freelance designer and owns Outside the Box Productions, a theatrical design firm. Recently, he was the production stage manager and designer for the Fox Theatre's 75th anniversary celebration.

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