SIGNATURE CINEMA
OCTOBER 7 SIGNATURE CINEMA
Betty Buckley on growing as an actor
through her role as Dixie Scott in
Tender Mercies, the 1974 film which
won Horton Foote the Academy
Award for Best Screenplay.
One of the creative highs of my life was
playing Dixie Scott. [Casting agent Fred
Roos] called and said, ‘‘I have a script. It’s
called Tender Mercies and it’s by the great
American playwright Horton Foote. They
need an actress who can sing country
western. I gave them one name…go get the
part.” When I read the script, I wept. It was
one of the most beautiful scripts I’d ever
read…This was my first opportunity to do
a part that required the skill set that I had
learned: very dramatic, intense, emotional,
psychological work. That was a tremendous gift in my life. I’d worked and worked
and worked. After all those years of intense
study and reading and trying to learn to be
better, I finally had the opportunity with
Horton Foote’s magnificent screenplay. It
was so beautiful. It remains, I think, one of
the great American films. It’s a classic.
PAGE
TO STAGE
AUGUST 28 PAGE TO STAGE
stop. reset. Projection Designer
Shawn Sagady on the challenge
of making memory into a visual
language.
This show has many languages to it.
There is the naturalistic element, where
we show the environment and the space
[through projections]. Then there’s the
[projected] text which we start the show
off with – that kind of constant language
through the show that is hinting at and
educating the audience to certain things
in [the character of] Ames’ mind.
The other big language in the show
is memory. How does memory live in
the future? That was one of the big
challenges... how do you show memory?
How do you explain to an audience that
they are looking at somebody’s memories? We very early on tried to establish
that language.
BACKSTAGE PASS
SEPTEMBER 18 BACKSTAGE PASS
Sound Designer Robert Kaplowitz on creating worlds through sound in stop. reset.,
and how music lives on as legacy.
The thing that really got me excited for this project is that [Director/Playwright Regina Taylor] is an
incredible and very talented writer, and incredibly smart. She’s always asking questions. What was exciting was this idea of how do we, together, start trying to answer some of those questions? One of the
things that she trusted both [Projection Designer] Shawn Sagady and me to do was to create a layer of
the world that is part of telling the story but is extra-textual, if that makes sense. Giving you information
that is not necessarily in the words that the characters say to each other. One of the reasons that we
ended up recording the scatting [in stop. reset.] was that it became very important to think about how
the presence of the voice may last beyond the presence of the body. That’s the essence of all recorded
music, but also the essence of all folk music – all music that is handed down orally. We create a tune or
a melody or a complicated symphony and that lives on well beyond our life. It lives on in people’s ears
and brains and in future performance.
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