Pssss-atikus.

We have found that some people have a little difficulty in pronouncing the name of our theater and multimedia company.

For the record, it's pronounced SIT-ih-kuss!



Thanks to our dear friends at Theater Workshop Nantucket for helping us out with this one.

The Cyber Room Table

By Chas LiBretto

It’s surreal to be organizing a play in Hollywood from a small beach house on Nantucket. For one, the weather here is really not at all like what one finds in Los Angeles in May (or nearly all the time). Here it isn’t yet the on-season, and there’s always a chill in the air, and at night the tree branches scratch the window panes through all the hours. The ocean here is rough and cold and surrounds us on all sides; even in this highly connected age, the isolation on an island is palpable, and it’s easy to see why people run here to escape the world. The palm trees that rocket from the sidewalks on Sunset Boulevard dwarf any of the salt-water choked scrub that inhabits the island, or the gnarled and ancient Elms that seem to burst from the cobblestones. And the dry, warm desert air of Los Angeles has nothing on the corrosive, moist, ocean breeze that rots and rusts everything it touches here.

But these are all surface-level observations that don’t much resemble what we’re after. Yes, one is isolated on Nantucket, and spends near-$200 and many hours to get across the Sound to Hyannis and to rent a car to Manhattan, but for a theater company that has-not-yet-staged-a-single-bit-of-action, obsessed by the internet as we are, the act of organizing a company, or producing a show from a dining room in a house off the 110 is not terribly different from doing so on Washaman Avenue.

When we’re not typing, bleary-eyed into our laptops, desperately booking theater space, or attempting to coordinate with actors and musicians, we’re off to work, performing in a production of Thornton Wilder’s Our Town in the basement of an elderly Methodist Church, at the top of Nantucket’s main street. It’s a show that seems to mean a lot to everyone who sees it here, and to the actors as well. Many reflect how life 110 years ago in fictional Grover’s Corners still resembles, at least at a cursory glance, what life in the off-season of Nantucket is like: a small, isolated (actually even more isolated, as its not just removed by dirt roads, but by an ocean divide created during the last ice age) New England town where everyone knows everyone else’s business and where most secrets aren’t kept for very long.

But at Psittacus, we’re interested in what being alive in the 21st century really means, and though in many ways, life in a small town pretty much looks the same in 1901 as it does in 2010, the interconnectivity of the internet-age makes us into a kind of global Grover’s Corners, with status updates and tweets keeping us all abreast on the mundane, the strange, and the spectacular goings-on of everyday life, much as gossip after choir practice would have done the same for a hundred years ago.

I didn’t expect to come back to Nantucket and yet, it feels appropriate to be doing new work here. I met my business partner while doing Shakespeare here a number of summers ago, and we spent the following years dancing around collaborations of a kind, until we stumbled upon the Psittacus idea in Los Angeles. And yet, here we are, back with old and new friends and realizing that 3,000 miles and an ocean isn’t very far when your friends and collaborators, on Nantucket and in LA, can communicate in an instant. So many artists spend their time analyzing the effect technology is having on society, but we’re interested in embracing it in practice, and finding out first hand what it says about who we were then, and who we are now. So when “A Tale Told By An Idiot” premiers at the Hollywood Fringe Festival, we’ll be streaming it live to the internet, so that our friends and family around the global village can see it in the comfort of their homes, and respond to it via chat or text, be there a palm tree outside the window, or the branch of an old elm.

Behind The Scenes of A TALE TOLD BY AN IDIOT

Psittacus Productions proudly welcomes you to the first video of our "Behind The Scenes" series!

As a part of our experiment in uniting the theatrical art form with the power and immediacy of the Internet and social networking, we will create a series of videos which take you step by step through the process of putting on our show, "A TALE TOLD BY AN IDIOT" at the first annual Hollywood Fringe Festival.

These videos will appear on YouTube, Facebook, Kickstarter, and here on our blog. The advantage of watching them here? We will also include rehearsal journals, photos, guest bloggers...and much more. Check back often!

This mad experiment will culminate in a real-time video stream of our production, live from the Lounge Theater at the Hollywood Fringe.

Video 1: Meet Daryl Crittenden! Originally from Alabama, Daryl has been a professional actor for 11 years - most recently as a regular on NBC's hit, "Heroes." Here he talks about meeting Psittacus co-founders Louis Butelli and Robert Richmond for the first time, and shares his impressions of the show before rehearsals begin on June 1st.

Watch, share, and enjoy. Much more to come!!

Tips for [creating theater]

A few months back, the Guardian published an article presenting a list of tips for writers from an astounding selection of authors. As one would expect, most of the tips are writer-specific, but many of them are good tips for artists-in-general, and some are simply good tips for life. We at Psittacus have culled the list down to what we feel are helpful lessons for theater artists starting a new company from the ground up.


If nobody will put your play on, put it on yourself.
- David Hare

Try to leave out the part that [viewers] tend to skip. Think of what you skip reading a novel: thick paragraphs of prose you can see have too many words in them.
- Elmore Leonard

Do back exercises. Pain is distracting.
- Margaret Atwood

Have regrets. They are fuel.
- Geoff Dyer

Do not place a photograph of your ­favourite author [or actor/director] on your desk, especially if the author [or actor/director] is one of the famous ones who committed suicide.
- Roddy Doyle

Have fun.
- Anne Enright

Don't take any shit if you can possibly help it.
- Richard Ford

Don't wait for inspiration. Discipline is the key.
- Esther Freud

Be without fear.
- A.L. Kennedy

Are you serious about this? Then get an accountant.
- Hilary Mantel

The prerequisite for me is to keep my well of ideas full. This means living as full and varied a life as possible, to have my antennae out all the time.
- Michael Morpurgo

Think big and stay particular.
- Andrew Motion

Keep a light, hopeful heart. But expect the worst.
- Joyce Carol Oates

Get lucky. Stay lucky.
- Ian Rankin

The nearest I have to a rule is a Post-it on the wall in front of my desk saying "Faire et se taire" (Flaubert), which I translate for myself as "Shut up and get on with it."
- Helen Smith

Tell the truth through whichever veil comes to hand – but tell it. Resign yourself to the lifelong sadness that comes from never ­being satisfied.
- Zadie Smith

Stop feeling sorry for yourself.
- Colm Tóibín

Turn up for work. Discipline allows creative freedom. No discipline equals no freedom.
- Jeanette Winterson

Ignore all proferred rules and create your own, suitable for what you want to say.
- Michael Moorcock

Join the adventure and donate today. Use the PayPal button on this page to make a secure, tax-deductible donation to Psittacus Productions.

What is Good is Given Back: The Gift-Giving Circle and What it Means for the Arts

By Chas LiBretto


“The Gift is to the giver, and comes back most to him—it cannot fail…”
- Walt Whitman

“The gift must always move.” If you’ve read Lewis Hyde’s incredible book "The Gift: Creativity and the Artist in the Modern World," you’ll be aware of this central, and oft-forgotten tenet of gift-giving and gift-receiving: that a gift in question cannot stand still. “As it is passed along,” he says “the gift may be given back to the original donor, but this is not essential. In fact, it is better if the gift is not returned but is given instead to some new, third party.”

This, of course, has major implications in the not-for-profit world. Legally, not-for-profits, even theater companies, are charities, and so what they create is in essence a gift to their communities. By its very nature, a non-profit takes the gifts it receives, monetary and otherwise, and then immediately puts those gifts to use and enacts its mission.

Hyde calls this the “labor of gratitude” and in a sense, it means “our gifts are not fully ours until they have been given away.” I bring this all up because, with your help, Psittacus Productions is poised to enact its mission and engage its community. Isolated academics like Harold Bloom believe the Western Canon ought to be locked away, and tell us that that the plays they’ve deemed canon-worthy should not be performed, and should be kept in dusty libraries for the perusal of scholars and scholars alone. Pioneers like the Public Theater’s Joseph Papp made it their mission to bring the Classics to the people in their purest form, but we at Psittacus are uncomfortable even with the idea of what “pure” means.

This is a down and dirty age, and we believe that the stories that have stuck with us all these many centuries are strong enough to survive experimentation. We believe it is our job to undo the “canonization” and make these stories as accessible to as large an audience as we can gather, be it by reinventing Shakespeare’s “Macbeth” as a comic book come to life, turning “Hamlet” into a police procedural, or creating a modern SF epic out of Goethe’s “Faust.” These are important stories that still say things about who We are, even in the 21st century.

When discussing cultural snobbery and elitism, I often return to Michael Moorcock, an English writer whose body of work has bounced from “genre” to “mainstream” throughout his entire career. In an interview, he states that he “writes for a reader like [himself]—who has read widely and has enjoyed a wide range of music and the other arts – but is part of a broad, common culture, not an isolated academic culture. There are…more of us than there are of them. More of us who read (or watch) Shakespeare one day and Theodore Sturgeon the next.”

Psittacus Productions feels the same way about theater audiences. Our gift, as it were, is to make the old stories entertaining and moving to as many people as we can find. We give this gift to our audience, be they the people who see us at the Hollywood Fringe Festival, or the students of high schools in East LA. Your gift will allow this to happen, and will give us all louder voices in the culture. We ask you to join us in this, the core commerce of art: the giving of gifts.

As a 501c3-pending organization, your gift is tax-deductible. Checks or money orders may be sent to:

PSITTACUS PRODUCTIONS, 237 S. Avenue 51, Los Angeles, CA 90042

Join us on an exciting adventure!!

Here at PSITTACUS PRODUCTIONS, we are working around the clock to pull together all of the logistics and details for our premier performance of "A TALE TOLD BY AN IDIOT" at the first annual Hollywood Fringe Festival.

The Festival is getting lots of buzz here in town, and is a great opportunity to share the company's work and reach out to audiences and students alike. Still, we can't do it without the support of our friends and fans.

We encourage you to consider a tax-deductible gift of your choosing. Donations of all sizes can help, and will be acknowledged in our program and on-line. We recently received a gift at the "Prodigy" level, and a pledge at the "Genius" level.

Don't let those generous donors stand alone! Join the adventure today.

Checks and money orders to PSITTACUS PRODUCTIONS may be sent to:

237 S. Avenue 51
Los Angeles, CA 90042


SUGGESTED DONOR LEVELS:

PUNDIT (Up to $25)
Grass-roots optimism and support; the lifeblood of the company.

SCHOLAR ($26 - $100)
Allows our online presence to exist, flourish, and grow.

PRODIGY ($101 - $500)
Enables a costume, set, or musical designer to plan for an excellent production.

PROFESSOR ($501 - $1000)
Provides the company with rehearsal space for one of our shows.

SAGE ($1001 - $2500)
Supports the leasing of performance space for one of our shows.

GENIUS ($2501 - $5000)
Enables the development and production of a brand new show.

MENTOR ($5001 - $10,000)
Sponsors an entire touring production; artists, travel, and accommodation.

MASTERMIND ($10,001+)
Big thinkers looking to the horizon; the future of the company.

Psittacus Productions is a 501c3-pending non-profit organization. All donations are tax-deductible. Please contact the company for further information.

PSITTACUS presents "A Tale Told By An Idiot"

@ the first annual Hollywood Fringe Festival

Inspired by William Shakespeare
Directed by Robert Richmond

The Lounge Theatre
6201 Santa Monica Blvd.
Los Angeles, CA 90038

Friday, June 18 @ 8pm
Saturday, June 19 @ 3pm and 8pm
Sunday, June 20 @ 3pm and 8pm

* * *

“Terrorists want a lot of people watching, not a lot of people dead…terrorism is theater.”
- Brian Michael Jenkins, Adviser to U.S. Dept. of Defense


PSITTACUS PRODUCTIONS is proud to present our premier production: “A TALE TOLD BY AN IDIOT” at the first annual Hollywood Fringe Festival.

MACBETH is the story of a man who murders his king and usurps the throne. For Elizabethan audiences, this would have been tragic, but not unfamiliar. Today, we would consider this an act of “terrorism.” A TALE TOLD BY AN IDIOT uses Shakespeare’s MACBETH to explore the notion of Terrorism as Performance, and to imagine the “stage fright” that might visit the terrorist as they plan their action. A TALE TOLD BY AN IDIOT brings to life the shattered mental state of a Terrorist on the eve of their Performance.

Shakespeare wrote MACBETH sometime between 1603 and 1611. Throughout the play are veiled references to The Gunpowder Plot, a 1605 attempt to blow up King James, his court, and Parliament. Guy Fawkes, the plot’s mastermind, spent the night before the attempted bombing in the cellars beneath Parliament, setting up explosives, and waiting to light the fuses that would end his life, along with those of his victims. In a sense, Guy Fawkes was the original suicide bomber.

Stylistically, this play is a comic book brought to life on stage. As the story unfolds, Macbeth/Fawkes himself is terrorized by floating daggers, women walking up walls, the graphic strangling of a child, and a demonic possession. Using fragments of the original text of MACBETH, A TALE TOLD BY AN IDIOT is both a meditation on terrorism and an experiment in the power of theater artists to electrify an empty space.

A TALE TOLD BY AN IDIOT uses bodies, music, and light to transport the audience to a world where dream-logic reigns, and one can no longer fully trust one’s own senses.


* * *

PSITTACUS PRODUCTIONS Mission Statement:
• Connect with our community and share our passion for the live, in-person experience unique to the theatrical art form by producing plays from the classical canon;
• Investigate the ways in which our perceptions of “The Classical” have been altered by living in the 21st century by producing new stage and multi-media works;
• Create a laboratory environment wherein we ask the question, “What Is a Classic?” and engage our community by conducting education and outreach activities.

PSITTACUS PRODUCTIONS is a 501c3-pending organization. All donations are tax-deductible, and will be acknowledged in company literature. Checks or money orders may be sent to:

PSITTACUS PRODUCTIONS
237 S. Avenue 51,
Los Angeles, CA 90042