Say Goodbye to the Age of Indifference...

We Have Arrived…

Sorry for the radio silence in the past weeks. With the holidays, the build, and tech, there’s been little time to blog about process. However, what I can say is this: We have, in my opinion, a great show. The cast has blown me away with their work, and so far the opening weekend was very successful. For now, I leave you with my director notes and the show website. All best to you in the New Year!

~Justin Gordon

http://www.picasso.engine57.com/

Director’s Notes, Picasso at the Lapin Agile.

“There are two doors…”

Well, at least there were in the audition room when we were casting this play. Literally, as you entered the room there were two doors, one immediately following the other. As a result, actor upon actor would inevitably collide with one of the doors on the way out of the casting room (though oddly enough, never on the way in…). So, what began as a catch phrase to departing actors in order to avoid yet another dual-door collision has since become, to me, the catch phrase for this play. After all, no matter how you look at life, there are always two doors (or more accurately two sides) presented to us on a daily basis. Some are cliché (Love and Hate), others mundane (Cream or Black); some even have deeper, more profound meanings (To be or not to be?). In the case of Picasso at the Lapin Agile, we are presented with Pablo Picasso and Albert Einstein set against one another at a time in which the world was ripe for artistic and scientific reinvention: the dawn of the Twentieth Century.

It seems fitting, then, to re-examine this play during a time when our own world is ripe for reinvention. Today, as in 1904, technology is advancing with unparalleled rapidity, scientific thought is reshaping our conceptual selves, and artistic achievement is reshaping the way in which the world is viewed. However, no matter what tomorrow’s freshest artistic eye will create, or what the sharpest scientific mind will unfurl, there is one common thread that joins art and science together in perfect alchemy—a commonality that Einstein and Picasso could both have agreed on: The creative act is nothing short of beautiful. Advances in today’s science may one day save countless lives that were previously considered lost; the next generation of artists may one day enable us to virtually feel as if we are standing inside a master’s painting—both beautiful scenarios; each beautiful to ponder, each eventually beautiful in their inevitable execution.

As you watch the production, I ask you to question nothing. However, when you leave, ponder the next steps in our scientific and cultural growth…after all, you may be the next to innovate the world as we know it. And once you have considered where we could be heading, feel free to say goodbye to the age of indifference…. and say hello to the world you wish to create. Just make sure you go through both doors in order to get there.

~Justin Gordon