Trout Fishing in Livingston

Posted on September 14, 2014 by marcbeaudin

Trout Fishing in Livingston: A Theatrical Homage to the Writings of Richard Brautigan
adapted & directed by Marc Beaudin
The Caldera Theatre Company, September 2014
at Elk River Books in conjunction with The Last Best Fest
featuring
Bret Kinslow, Sherry Pikul, Gabriel Clark & William Hjortsberg
Choreographed by Sabrina Lee

Trout Poster

The Caldera Theatre Company presented Trout Fishing in Livingston: A Theatrical Homage to the Writings of Richard Brautigan as part of the Last Best Fest arts festival, Saturday, September 6 and Sunday, September 7, at Elk River Books/Wheatgrass Saloon, 120 N. Main Street in downtown Livingston.

Culled from the fiction and poetry of one of Livingston’s most legendary writers, the play presents excerpts adapted into a satiric and wild journey through Brautigan’s world. The production was adapted and directed by Marc Beaudin, artistic director of the Caldera Theatre Company (CTC), and features performances by Gabriel Clark, Bret Kinslow and Sherry Pikul. Interspersed throughout the play’s nine scenes will be short readings by Brautigan’s close friend and biographer William Hjortsberg, author of Jubilee Hitchiker: The Life and Times of Richard Brautigan.

The text for the production was adapted from Brautigan’s Trout Fishing in America, The Pill Versus the Springhill Mine Disaster, Revenge of the Lawn and The Edna Webster Collection of Undiscovered Writings.

Brautigan lived and wrote off and on in the Livingston area from the beginning of the 1970s until his death in 1984. His writings, which are darkly comical, highly imaginative and often bordering on the surreal, found form in numerous novels, short stories and poems, the most famous being Trout Fishing in America.

The CTC is a local, independent theatre company that seeks to create an environment for the exploration and development of the art of theatre, and to produce theatrical and other creative events that show a commitment to artistic quality and ingenuity. More information can be found at CalderaTheatre.com.

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Chekov’s Squirtgun

Posted on July 8, 2014 by marcbeaudin

Chekov’s Squirtgun featuring
The Proposal, On the Harmful Effects of Tobacco and The Bear by Anton Chekov
Blue Slipper Theatre, 2013
Directed & Designed by Marc Beaudin,
featuring
The Caldera Theatre Company
Bret Kinslow, Sherry Pikul & Aaron Schuerr

The Bear by Anton Chekhov. Direction, design and lighting by Marc Beaudin.


Director’s Note from the Program

“Chekhov wrote comedies?”

This was, almost universally, the response I got every time someone asked what play I was working on, and I said short comedies by Anton Chekhov. “Comedies? … Chekhov??”

Despite two of his best known plays, The Cherry Orchard and The Seagull, being labeled “comedy” by Chekhov himself, people insist on believing him to be a writer of serious, ponderous, high-brow tragic dramas. They’ve been taught (usually by serious, ponderous, high-brow tragic teachers and professors) that this is Literature by a great Dramatist that must be studied, analyzed, explicated – but never laughed at. And that’s the real tragedy because not only does the humor make his plays more enjoyable, it’s what makes them meaningful – it’s where their points are made. As usual, “the medium is the message.”

Chekhov’s characters are often tragic, but it is a tragedy of their own making, a tragedy that comes from their own egotism, greed, delusions or pettiness, and that’s where the humor resides. In the plays in this selection, there is no shortage of these qualities, though the characters themselves would describe them as “principle” and “loyalty.” And within the comedy of the characters’ self-inflicted tragedy, the plays (though really just simple farces or “vaudevilles” as Chekhov called them) become something more. They become filled with morality, humanity and commonality (for which of us haven’t, from time to time, created our own petty tragedies?).

They become something worthy of the serious, ponderous, artist that Chekhov also is.

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Birthday Poem, 2014

Posted on April 15, 2014 by marcbeaudin

One could do worse
than spend the day watching them:
not quite rock doves &
not quite pigeons–
call them Railroad Doves–
evolved on the lines
feeding with each passing grain train
but now the grain is gone
& it may be some genetic memory
that makes them cluster
on the piles of deathstone
filling the long line of the coal train
that cuts our town in half

The slap of their wings
like an eight of spades
in the spokes of a slow coasting bicycle

The wheeze of airbrakes powering
& the train begins its squealing departure
casting off the birds &
taking its poison dust
to the next town
The wind brings the stench of coal
I take it into my lungs–
knock a few seconds off
the end of my life–
breathe out & in again
then the air is torn by the thunder
of four back units – testimony
to the train’s length
& the climb it must make
to clear the pass

When it’s gone
the railroad doves gather & swirl
to a nearby rooftop to await the next train

Late tonight,
a dragon will swallow the moon
heedless of the greed
that swallows the world
one train at a time

One could do worse
than to watch the doves

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