Day: November 3, 2011

Categories
Truly Free Film

Come Hear Todd Solondz Discuss His Process This Sunday!

Sunday, November 6th at 4pm NYC

Todd Solondz will talk with playwright Thomas Bradshaw (the upcoming Burning at The New Group) about how to write about subjects that others won’t touch. As a writer and director, Todd Solondz is known for unflinching, darkly funny storytelling and graphic depictions of behaviors that somehow reveal the humanity beneath. Fellow New Jersey native Thomas Bradshaw, whose plays are similarly daring explorations, will discuss with Solondz his strategies for delving into the things no one wants to talk about.

To reserve your seats, please email seats@thenewgroup.org. Space is limited, so reservations are a must.

What is Dark Nights at The New Group?

Dark Nights at The New Group offers unique programming and enlightened conversation to complement and coincide with our company’s mainstage productions. In four to six events each season, Dark Nights seeks to create a forum for public conversation and dialogue between artists and audience, thereby enhancing the cultural landscape. Past events have featured luminaries such as F. Murray Abraham, Stephen Adly Guirgis, Eric Bogosian, Zoe Caldwell, David Henry Hwang, Tony Kushner, Martha Plimpton, Hal Prince and Wallace Shawn. Topics have ranged from gay adoption (in an event hosted by Rosie O’Donnell alongside our musical The Kid) to an evening highlighting Sam Shepard’s work (led by Ethan Hawke with music by the composers from A Lie of the Mind), to a panel on documentary theatre (featuring Marc Wolf performing Another American, his OBIE-winning play first produced at The New Group).

Todd Solondz has directed Welcome to the Dollhouse, Happiness, Palindromes , Storytelling, Life During Wartime, and the upcoming Dark Horse.

Thomas Bradshaw: recent plays include Mary (The Goodman Theater); The Bereaved (Partial Comfort Productions, and subsequently produced at The State Theater of Bielefeld in Germany); Southern Promises (P.S. 122); Dawn (The Flea Theater); Job (The Wilma). He is the recipient of a 2009 Guggenheim Fellowship, the 2010 Prince Charitable Trust Prize, and a 2011 New Voices New York Fellowship from the Lark Play Development Center. Prophet, Strom Thurmond Is Not A Racist, Cleansed, Purity, Dawn, and Southern Promises are all published by Samuel French, Inc. A German translation of Dawn was presented at Theater Bielefeld and the National Theatre of Mannheim in Germany. Bradshaw is an Assistant Professor in the MFA program at Northwestern University. He has been featured as one of Time Out New York’s ten playwrights to watch and Best Provocative Playwright by The Village Voice. He was the Playwright in Residence at The Soho Theatre in London.

Categories
Truly Free Film

Go See Tristan Patterson’s “Dragonslayer”

What are you doing this weekend? If you had any friends that came to Tuesday night’s HopeForFilm Screening at Goldcrest of Tristan Patterson’s SxSW Audience Award winning film DRAGONSLAYER, I am sure that’s what you’ll now be going to see, because the word was “that good”! When I put on a screening, I also write a letter letting my list know why I care about the film. This is that letter for Dragonslayer.

Dear Film Fans,

It’s hard to find much good with the speculative & irresponsible practices of our financial sector, but the devastation they’ve delivered is the quiet but extremely resonant backdrop for Tristan Patterson’s fascinating character study of a skater named Skeetch. A doc delivered with tremendous affection towards what might have been mistaken for human wasteland, Tristan finds the beauty in his focus akin to the glory Skeetch and his tribe find in the tracts of abandoned homes and pools that become both their playlands and sketchpads. Artists abound on all sides of the camera, painting on an incredibly intimate scale. This is documentary as portraiture, as true to its form as it is to its content.

Film, like life, could/should be ours to invent, but the outside pressures frequently push us in over-worn directions; Tristan and Skeetch resist those forces to forge a work and a character unique but emblematic of our times. Skeeth has a skating style of his own, launched with abandon, punctuated with enthusiasm, and dismissing injury or error as a long ago accepted given. His ramshackle heart is mined by Patterson as a golden ray in a world dominated by artifice and posture — and through that, I defy you to not end up wishing our film diet could be populated by other reciprocal minstrels and artists with the restraint, discipline, observation, and heart of Patterson. This may be his first film, but you know there’s more to come.

DRAGONSLAYER is a handmade antidote to the corporate embrace of skateboard culture. It is ode to individuality and a ballad to hard times. It is of no surprise that SXSW’s audience rallied around it, awarding it well-deserved honor, prestige, and cred, and we are delighted to welcome it into our home as well. DRAGONSLAYER may be close to number seventy in the long line of cinematic pleasures, Christine Vachon and her merry band of collaborators have delivered to this world — a remarkable act of commitment and fortitude in this enterprise that sometimes seems hellbent on driving out the last ounce of resistance to a corporate world of false dreams, promises, and opportunity. It seems remarkable that this is the first film of hers we’ve shown, but what could be a better way to start?

Hope to see you there,

Ted