Sports can create an instant bond between people. Whether it is the sharing of the field alongside teammates in glory or in losing, trusting a teammate to complete a play or the physicality and contact shared on a field, sports creates a unique connection. Theater, also, creates very special relationships with people. I, personally, have my most special and dearest friends from having worked with them in theater. For different reasons than sports, I feel, in theater, one must strip down their insecurities and completely trust the person next to them on stage, with more than a physical play or action but with themselves, with who they are. Now, hybridizing the two, as in “Maroons”, has created something truly memorable.

Our first rehearsal of Maroons consisted more of a football practice than a rehearsal, well, at least for the first hour or so. We started by tackling a “dummy” and lining up and running a few football plays. On another rehearsal we practiced outside. We ran football drills: hitting a football blocking sled, running football plays: running, kicking, and passing, and drew up actual football plays. Not only did this help us, as actors, to acquire the physicality of playing football to help us leverage that onto the stage, it also effectively built a team rapport.

Before every rehearsal / show we pass around the ball to one another as a warm up. This passing of the ball has become ritual. Feeling the football in your hands and throwing it across the stage has served more than a warm up but also as a union between us, a bond. Even though the separation is there, the ball acts as the connection, the act of starting an action and the other completing this action. This may be the importance of the nostalgia of playing catch with your dad at such a young age.

Backstage, most certainly, has a locker room feel before and after the show and in-between acts, much like before and after games and at a half time. On stage and off, I feel a strong solidarity with this group of guys. It is most effectively the combination of incorporating a sport and theater into one unique experience.

Every Thanksgiving morning I play a football with the same bunch of guys that we dub “The Turkey Bowl”. This tradition has been going on for the past several years. Most that play in this game I have not known from outside this game. Some I still don’t know there first name. We all show up, split teams and we play a game or two. There have been heightened words at times and frustration with one another at moments when playing. But the important thing is we all end the game thankful no one got injured and wishing everyone a Happy Thanksgiving. It is one of my favorite traditions, and yet, I find this peculiar as I don’t know some of these guys outside of this one game and I see most of them only at this one day of the year.

I feel this same camaraderie with the guys while working at Iron Age but rather on a much more meaningful level. We have transformed ourselves into football players and teammates on stage. But, more significantly, we have become teammates and friends off stage, which holds even more truth while on stage, for the action is already complete. Through the physicality and the contact we have created a unique bond with one another and through “Maroons” we have shared a true piece of who we are. Like what is aspired in acting, in football or any sport when under physical duress your mind shuts out the unnecessary thinking and you allow your body to react.

On that Thursday, we took my dad’s ashes to the cemetery and interred them at the plot held by my mother’s family. The small “urn,” really an Irish green marble box with his name inscribed on top, was placed in one of the empty spaces there. The tomb stone above the grave reads “Zummo,” my mother’s maiden name, and my father’s name is of course Doyle. We spent some time, as we stood around that grave waiting for the priest to arrive and say his service over the ashes, discussing how to put Dad’s name on the tombstone so he would have a specific marker as part of the larger memorial. Those minutes considering how to create a memorial, a place of permanent remembrance for my dad, stuck with me. The hundreds of people who came to his viewing and funeral, the kind letters and cards, the pictures we displayed, all acted as a memorial for Dad but at that final resting place, we were thinking of something more “monumental” and long lasting.

As we work on Maroons and now as have put the show into performance, I have noticed something about my relationship with this play, and ultimately may previous works.

Maroons is a monument to the members of the 1925 Pottsville Maroons. We have taken care to present them and honor their memory, even if all of those memories are not all positive. The play becomes a living breathing memorial to the work and actions of the people so long ago who played on that ill-starred team. It is not a “bio pic” or a documentary. It is not a PR piece. It is much more about the spirit, the “soul’ if you will, of the characters. Their lives through theatre, carving a wake in the stream of time extending to today.

It is a privilege to be able to bring these people back to life.

The impact of this have been exemplified throughout the run. During our visit to Pottsville, our Zacko got to meet the real Zacko’s grandson. He helped us see some costume errors but also began our understanding of the resonance that this play would have. The real thrill was when Coach Rauch’s daughter came to the show. As with any good script with good actors working with solid direction and research, Tony Giampetro plays Rauch in such a way that Rauch’s daughter thanked us for giving her a little more time with he departed father. These is no higher compliment that that and more so there is no higher honor than to give that little gift to someone who is full of love and loss. Filling that little space in her life was about as amazing as our work can be. What an experience to see you father brought back to life. When the Ernst family came to she show, Jack Ernst’s second wife was brought to tears by the relationship between Her dead husband and Charlie Berry on stage. Their frist boisterous meeting conjured a memory so strong, she sobbed even as the rest of the audience laughed at the humourous scene.

This memorial sensibility doesn’t even need to be the specifics of a single character or story. We are creating a monument to the coal miners of the period and of course the team of the Maroons.

We have felt this larger echo before when we presented THE SPEED OF DARKNESS, our first play at the Centre in 1996. The run of that show, about Viet Nam vets, included one performance where members of ROLLING THUNDER who were preparing for their trip to DC and the Viet Nam Memorial, attended. That night, the play became  a living echo of the very memorial they would be visiting. The tear in those burly bikers eyes showed the cathartic power that the memorial nature of theatre can provide. Bringing to life the emotions of those dead or lost brings a manifest presence into the theatrical space. Theater is like an invocation and resurrects the dead.

Bob Weick and I are friends with, or were  friends with Howard Zinn, through our work on Marx in Soho. For some long time, while Zinn was alive, we were doing the play to support Zinn’s ideas and help “CHANGE THE WORLD.” Now the voice of Zinn rings more potently in the work as the play is as much memorial to Zinn and it is treatise on the misconceptions and possibilities of communism and socialism. Each performance we are in a stance that honors the memory of our fallen comrade and makes a marker of his place in the world. We are not commemorating Marx but rather Zinn’s Marx and thus Zinn’s heart.

Even in the Interrogation of Nathan Hale, where the two characters from history and not treated as well as the one’s in Molumby’s Million or Maroons, there is a sense of monument to the ideas of those characters. The two person play by David Stanley Ford let’s Montressor and Hale walk the earth again and marks their place in our memories. We encounter their ideas, their weaknesses and we honor them through that human exploration.Theatre is monument. It is bigger than us. It can be more important than the personal, the internal; it can stand tall bringing back into our vision. Like a monument rising in the distance it summons the names, ideas and lives of those from the past. It need not give too much information but rather remind us of those who are gone. It places us in a continuum, and makes us larger than ourselves. It let’s us honor the dead, honor those left behind and introduce the lost to the uninitiated. It is an awe inspiring activity and one what brings depth to the Iron Age Theatre experience. It has inspired us to produce Citizen Paine, Empress of the Moon, The Life of John Henry, Red Emma, The Slave, Waiting for the Ship from Delos, Sky Girls, Cuckoo’s Nest, TERRA NOVA, Godot and The Rear Column and our first production TUNNEL. It is inspiring future work and we as a company are endeavoring to tell stories of our region, as we look at the names of the war dead on the wall of at Eastern State Penitentiary or read about Winfield Scott Hancock.

Every December Ray Saraceni, the author of Maroons, has a reading of James Joyce’s the Dead at his home. I have been attending for years with many Iron Age members as well as other friends of Ray. It is one of the highlights of my year. Each of us reads a few pages as we pass the text around the room, next year we hope, for the 100th anniversary, to do something more substantial and theatrical, but our regular procedure is quite mundane and communal. There are special segments each of us like to read. A favorite of mine is Gabriel’s speech, It is a beautiful piece of writing by Joyce.  When Gabriel conjures Michael Fury during his “toast,’ he unknowingly brings his wife’s old lover back into her mind and into her presence in a way that affects their relationship and their understanding of each other. Gabrielle resees himself, at a moment of the mirror and come to at least a temporal sense of self understanding. He sees his wife differently and judges the shallowness of his actions quite harshly in the shadow of poor Michael Fury. We want to be like Gabriel as he gives his speech and call the dead back through words and actions so that their bold lives may be examined, experienced and revived by all of our patrons. Ultimately so that we, and our audience, can come to a greater understanding of ourselves, or themselves, as we spend an evening honoring the dead.

With the owners of MAROONS Sports Bar

The Pottsville Maroons still live in the hearts and hopes of the people of Pottsville. To this day people in the community are passionate about getting back the stolen championship.

The residents of Pottsville that have made the trip to Norristown to see the show are truly interested and moved by the story as it plays out before them. Luke Moyer, who plays Doc, commented he has never performed for people that are so profoundly engaged in the story. He said he could feel their passion from the stage (and we hope they feel his, and ours, back).

We were honored this past week to have Coach Rauche’s daughter and grandson at a performance. She stayed after and told Tony (who plays Rauche) about her father and the effort to get the title back.

Ray spent considerable time in Pottsville researching the story and soaking up the atmosphere of the town. So much of the story and the play has a potent sense of place: the history of the coal industry, the geography of the town, the real people who populated the town.

When we decided to take on this show it seemed on natural we should try and do it in Pottsville, a task we are still working on.

We did have the opportunity to do a staged reading of the show in October. We wanted to get up there with the cast not only to let the people of the town hear the play, but to give the actors a sense of place as well. We left Norristown mid-morning for the 80 or so mile drive up. Car-pooling up the turnpike we watched the geography change – we drove into the steep, deeply folded hills that make up Pennsylvania’s coal country. The leaves had changed up there by then so the hills were ablaze with fall colors. The traffic dropped off and the communities became smaller – more like main street American towns rather than the suburban sprawl we live with outside of Philadelphia.

We were scheduled to do a staged reading at the Sovereign Majestic Theater (next door to what was Zacko’s sporting goods). We could see the looming stone prison where the Molly Maguires were hung. Up the hill was the Yuengling Brewery. Sharp Mountain rose up behind us. It was a beautiful fall day. We got to the theater and loaded our costumes and music stands in, then with a couple of hours before the show, we explored the town a bit (first having a fine late breakfast/early lunch at the diner next door – the very tasty chili covered/fried egg/hamburger isn’t to be missed!).

Markus Zanders, who plays Ernst in “Maroons,” spent several years in Pottsville as a kid and he told us tales of the town.

At 2 we did our reading for about 40 folks. The long, narrow theater (which over the years had been many things including a farmers market) is a lovely renovated space. The guys hit it hard and you could tell they were champing at the bit to get it up on its feet (we had finished blocking by that point). It was a treat to hear the show all the way through (we had been working in scenes and small chunks for weeks) and with a fired up cast and engaged audience. There were laughs at the funny parts, and gasps when the title was lost and warm applause after.

Bill Zacko (Joe Zackos son) and he came up and swore Dave Fiebert (who plays Zacko) was a dead ringer for his dad – the only difference being his dad wore a beat up old hat all the time (something we fixed as soon as we got back to Norristown!).

Many other folks had kind words for the production and a gentleman named John O’Hara (no relation to the John O’Hara in the play) said he was going to get on the phone and try and get the word out about the play.

We loaded up our stuff and then most of us headed down the street to the Maroons sports bar – a local shrine to the team (team jerseys, pictures and other memorabilia all over the walls) and a really fine bar. Bill Rahill, a mean judge of these things, said he could see himself spending a lot of time at that bar. I think most of the rest of us felt the same.

It was a fine end to a fine day.

Experiences like that are one of the hallmarks of an Iron Age – we strongly believe that it isn’t enough to understand a show; you have to feel it. Being able to go to the place where the story actually happened – walk the same streets, see the same sights, feel the vibe of the community and environment, gives the production juice it can’t have any other way.

It certainly isn’t possible with every show (alas!), but in many of our productions – from “Nathan Hale” at Fort Mifflin, to “Tunnel” at Eastern State, the place informs the work in mays that a deep and magical.

Hopefully we can bring the full production of “Maroons” back to Pottsville soon and really revel in the experience – ours and the people of Pottsville (past and present).

Christie in Love at The Centre Theater

I was sitting in the front room of the first floor of the Centre Theater’s building after a particularly wonderful rehearsal of Christie in Love and my three actors, Luke Moyer, Ray Saraceni and Adam Altman were participating in a discussion about the theatre. I had decided to run three shows in the Fall, the first at The Fringe, performed at Eastern State, The Second at The Philly Urban Theatre Festival and the Third as part of the regular Centre Theater season.

I was asked by the head of the Philly Cultural Alliance to consider running my Fringe show at The Centre Theater to help broaden the Fringe into the suburbs or at least show that the Centre was a viable venue for the Fringe.

I was not comfortable with moving the show out of the city, much of the reason I do these festivals is to have Iron Age Theatre performing in the city, but I decided to run one weekend of the first two shows at The Centre.

The conversation that night was revolving around the idea that our audiences in Norristown have been pretty weak over the past two years. Lower attendance caused by many obvious sources (a weak economy, the renovation and construction associated with the new garage in Norristown and the streetscaping, and the death of theatre companies in Philly) but there must be other causes…. Our discussion was focused on remedying the problem that is Iron Age Theatre. We are for the most part, the most respected company in Philly that almost no one has seen. So often I am greeted by theatre compatriots in town with great enthusiasm or my actors are greeted with warmth and acceptance by Philly companies but these people greeting them have never seen one of our productions.

I was expressing to Ray Saraceni about the difficulty of putting up the shows, knowing that few people would come and money would be tight. We sat considering options including moving more actively to Philly or Phoenixville, we talked about other goals.

I have spent so much time over the past two years struggling with the idea of going back into rehearsal or production without any hope of recognition, attendance or support. I ran a 5-week theatre festival last year almost single-handedly (22 productions of 11 different shows) in January and had ridiculously small houses, less than 10% of our capacity. I struggle with the idea of continuing on in the face of these financial and audience gaps.

As I saw with Ray, I expressed my need to make the art and that making theatre was almost a compulsion. We talked strategy and innovation, many of these ideas in those conversations are coming to light for Iron Age, as I will discuss in a later blog entry. But this blog is about Maroons and as I have been working on the play, I have seen that is it a story of Iron Age, of my company. That we are the rough necked coal crackers of Philly theatre. Rugged, unpolished, intense and raw. We are stylish and clever, we are driven and blunt.

In particular, I have become inspired by the activity of the last full scene of Maroons. The players are all sitting around the locker room being beaten badly by their opponent. They lose everything, their title, their team, their recognition; they are embarrassed by their play. They are broken up inside. At first they blame each other, and then they blame the system.  Latone says…”They beat us boys…They beat me…I ain’t never been beat before”. Then something magical happened, not triumphant and I won’t give away anything else about the play.., although you should stop reading because you might infer something from my next paragraph.

That something magical is so similar to Iron Age and our decisions, my decision, to continue working. I no longer am searching for audience, although I will take it and believe our work is healthy for audiences to encounter. I no longer want to blame Norristown, or the Arts Hill, or our lack of funds, other companies, or our personal struggles. I no longer want to blame the team at Iron Age or even myself. The situation is the situation we are in and we have a choice… play or go home, make art of run away, hail the taxi and go back to Pottsville or take the field and face the world.

And every time I start to dwell in that dark place where stopping the work and giving up seems the only reasonable option. I think about my teammates, Randy, the Wyoming Workhorse, Ray the Impassioned Intellectual, Bob the Conscientious Revolutionary, Rich the Committed Adventurer, Tony the Clear Heart, Chuck the Brooding Bruiser, Dave the Congenial Optimist, Luke the Ultrahonest Wunderkind, Adam the Transformation Man and my brother, Markus the Improvisational Imp, Steve the Stalwart Supporter, Rachel the Mirthful Metropolitan, Steph the Blossoming Beauty, …all of the rest, John, Chris,  Bill, Ed Doug…too numerous to mention (or too much for this blog)… and, of course, me the too serious curmudgeon… and I know I would give my left arm, my life in fact, to make the craft with these people without expectation of any reward.

Iron Age chooses to go back onto the field and play the rest of the minutes left in our careers. We choose to continue our work with the team we have learned to trust on whatever field we encounter. Not to be heroes, or gain recognition, or prove something to anyone but ourselves. We make art, we live in the making of good theatre and we will take whatever pounding comes our way, even if we are sometimes seen as dinosaurs by the rest of the community, even if our aesthetic is not in vogue, we will keep playing because that is what we do and we will be true to ourselves, each other and the work, the game of theatre.

From The Philadelphia Inquirer

From Stage Partners