POST SHOW MUSINGS

 

I wanted to share an amazing audience response from an actor named DC Wolfe who came to the show Saturday night with my good friend Weiko Lin (an incredible writer whose play, 100 Days, premiered at LOFT ensemble in February 2011).

For DC, this story hit close to home as well--he is Vietnamese, and one of the children who was airlifted from Saigon in 1975 on one of the Babylift flights. Only three years old at the time, DC was not actually an orphan--his mother was advised by U.S. Civilian Personnel that the easiest way to get her young son out of the country before the imminent communist invasion was to get him on one of the orphan rescue flights out. DC was not on the first outgoing flight that crashed, but he had friends who did leave on the first flight and survived the crash. It moved me deeply to find out he was in the audience--someone who was directly connected to the events and understands on a deep level my dad's connection to the fall of Saigon.

Like many actors, I'm self-centered. I often only think about myself--the need to tell my stories and share my art with the world. Why? So I feel valuable. So I can be seen and heard. But that's a recipe for disaster in the artist's world if left unchecked. I have to constantly remind myself it is not about me. This seems contradictory to my script; after all--I did write myself into it. And my inner critic constantly harps on me for it, astonished at my narcissism and berating me for not simply telling my dad's story. But a huge part of the story isn't simply the details of the events that transpired in Vietnam--it's the journey to find the courage to tell the story in the first place. It's the process of asking difficult questions like "where did I come from" and "why am I the way I am?" Having DC attend the show and speak to me afterward helped me remember that I'm not simply doing this to heal myself, or my dad. I'm doing this because countless people were affected by the Vietnam conflict, in many walks of life that often get overlooked, and the process of healing often starts with reminding yourself that you are connected to every single person on this planet. In every country, from every generation. Everyone's story is your story. By telling your own, you're telling someone else's. And most likely setting both of you free.

ON STAGE RANTINGS

Saturday Night's show -- 5.19.12

It’s hard to sit here and not wonder why there aren’t more people in the audience. Part of me is wickedly excited I get to complain about this here, knowing I’ll be posting this on The Last Day Blog. Another part of me hurts, because I wanted people to hear this story, and for whatever reason, we aren’t able to get the seats filled. I feel like I failed the theatre company. I feel like I failed the cast.  I know it’s hard to get people out to see a new play in Los Angeles. But I honestly thought it would be okay. I thought we’d have sold out houses and lines out the door. I thought a lot of things would happen in my life that didn’t end up happening, and I always think I’m going to get better at dealing with the disappointment, and instead, I’m painfully shocked into the submission of realizing I am not God, I cannot control anything outside of my own responses to things, and I am always going to have to deal with disappointment.

That being said, I think I’ve dealt with it pretty well by being immensely grateful to the people who have come to support this show. Letting go of resentment is a big part of growing up. Letting go of “the way things are supposed to be” is a big part of finding true peace and joy. Even if one person is sitting in the audience, that’s enough. Because opening your heart to even one person is a huge feat in itself. I’ve left many personal relationships because of my fear and unwillingness to truly open my heart, be vulnerable, and risk loss or disappointment.

All I can do is my best. To be open, to be willing, to be a channel for whatever divine thing is going to flow through me at any given moment, and trust that whatever it is, it’s serving the world.

PRESS | PUBLICITY

‘The Last Day’ Inspired by True Events
A play by Christina Joy Howard

‘The Last Day’ invites us into the creative journey of playwright Christina Joy Howard as she pens the last days of the fall of Saigon. The source material Howard uses to transform her work from paper to stage was acquired through 1975 audio recordings from her father, as well as hard-fought conversations with him about his personal experience of those final days.

Ms. Howard’s father, Bruce Howard, is a US civilian on assignment who meets his future wife, and Christina’s Mother, a young Vietnamese woman, a USA educated translator who has returned to Saigon to be with her family only to be caught up in the war. ‘The Last Day’ characters come alive as they are reveled in the recordings. The play digs deep into the Viet Nam Era and the evacuation of 40,000 people from Saigon back-up video projections, time captured sounds/music and dialog add an effective counterpoint to the live action.

The father-daughter relationship is important here too. Fathers who were steeped in 1950s male tradition are often annoyed by the directness of young women’s ambition and caught in the transition of young women with 1970s-1980s ambition and curiosity.

Noah Benjamin plays himself and Bruce Howard. Benjamin interacts with Howard as she struggles to write the play and imagines Benjamin playing her father. It works well.

‘The Last Day’ is presented by The Loft Ensemble a well oiled group, and versatile as they answer to each actor playing several roles Through May 27^th. 

The Loft Ensemble is located at 929 E. 2^nd St/Vignes 213-680-0392 LOFTensemble.com

Qathryn Brehm

ON STAGE RANTINGS

Each show night when the house opens and the audience enters to take their seats,  I am already onstage writing on my laptop while Noah and Matt are in place in the scene. Here are excerpts from what is stirring in my brain while the patrons mill about and I pretend I can't hear what they're saying. 

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SUNDAY'S SHOW - 5.13.12

I guess I just want to make an impact on the world around me. I know I’m here for a reason. I know I’m supposed to create art that heals people. But I’m scared. I’m scared to fuck this up. I’m scared to die without making my mark. I’m scared because I know I only have this one life, and only this much time to do something about it.

There’s a portal in my heart that’s opened. I’m listening to Coldplay’s “Warning Sign”. And the lyric is “And the truth is…I miss you.” And that is the truth. I miss my dad. I miss how he used to be. I miss how much we used to see each other. And I want this play to be special because he’s so special to me.

My dad saved my life. He kept me safe and he allowed me to be who I wanted to be. He was scary as hell sometimes. And he wasn’t always loving and emotionally available. But he was strong and he protected me and he was a good dad. And if I can do this for him, I will.

I know he’s lived a good life. I know he’s going to be okay.  I’m proud of him. And I want other people to be proud of him.

Sometimes you just have to let it all go.

So what am I supposed to do now? Maybe this play sucks. Maybe everyone’s just being nice to me. Not wanting to tell me what they really think? Maybe I’m just washed up and ready to surrender.

PRESS | PUBLICITY

It's so hard to get reviewers in to see shows -- with so much great theatre out there and newspaper staffing declining, we're grateful to have had the LA Weekly come out to review our show!




 

Christina Joy Howard and Noah Benjamin; 

photo by Chelsea Coleman

From the LA Weekly "GO!" Review by Pauline Adamek:

 

Inspired by her father's crucial but clandestine involvement in the U.S.' evacuation of Saigon as it was taken over by the Viet Cong (signaling the failure of the Vietnam War), a young woman struggles to capture accurately his personal story as well as bridge their emotional distance. Piecing together father Bruce Howard's fraught and patchy memoirs and audio recordings into a play, writer-actor Christina Joy Howard adopts an unusual approach by revealing the creative process to the audience. In addition to (scripted) conversations between her and the cast, we observe reality TV-style "video confessionals" while the actors rehearse. Christina plays herself (the writer) as well as her own mother in scenes that flashback to the '60s and later the fall of Saigon in 1975. Director Tiger Reel scores unhurried scene changes with a jukebox arrangement of mostly Brit-pop hits from the era, projecting snapshots of Christina's youthful parents and raw TV news footage on a massive and mobile screen. Unfortunately, the panic and desperation of the evacuation is vivid on newsreel but insufficiently present onstage. Despite overzealous character acting from some of the ensemble, the leads (Christina and Noah Benjamin, playing both himself and Bruce Howard) give excellent performances.

FROM THE LA STAGE SCENE BLOG

by Christina Joy Howard  |  May 2, 2012

Jessica Botello, Hollie Meyer, Edwin Garcia, Sean Durrie, Noah Benjamin, Jason Ryan Lovett, Matt McCroskey and T. Michael Woolsten in "The Last Day"; Photo by Adam Sheridan Taylor

The past year has been an incredible journey into the darkest parts of myself. Was I on a drinking spree? No. Moonlighting as a prostitute? Not this time.

I was writing a play.

If you had told me what it would feel like to actually sit down and commit to writing a play, I never would have done it. It was agony. I separated myself from my friends and family, gained 30 pounds, and stopped caring what anyone thought of me. I parked myself in front of a computer screen, my teeth clamping down on cigarette after cigarette, often to get up after two or three hours without having written a single word.

Christina Joy Howard; Photo by David Muller

Or I would pack up everything and head to Peet’s in Larchmont, where I’d stake out a spot by the window until my meter ran out. Then leave with nothing to show for it except caffeine jitters and a bad mood. This went on for what seemed like an eternity.

Quite honestly, I have no idea how I completed The Last Day. I prayed a lot. I cried a lot. I questioned every decision I’ve made in my entire life. And at the end of the day, I gritted my teeth and kept going.

When I was in high school, I got the idea to write a story about my father’s involvement with the 1975 Saigon evacuation. I’m now 31 years old, and as I realize how long I’ve held this story in my heart, aching to tell it, terrified to screw it up, I can’t help but once again break down in tears in front of this computer screen.

Now my beloved work is currently running downtown at LOFT ensemble, the theater company I started when I was 27 with a group of my friends whom I enjoyed working with at another theater company. We gained access to an incredible loft space in downtown LA, thanks to Bob and Sherry Jason of City Hearts: Kids Say “Yes” to the Arts, where I taught Shakespeare to kids in underprivileged areas. I moved into their performance studio, a 4000-square-foot dance/theater/multi-purpose playground where much magic has been created over the past five years.

This solid group of artists is the reason The Last Day is such a special play, beyond the obvious implications of taking on a project that is so personal to me and my family. Your family of origin can only take you so far–it’s the family you create when you leave home that often takes you the next leg of your journey, as you not only discover who you really are, but who your inner artist is.

Jessica Botello, Sean Durrie and Noah Benjamin; Photo by Chelsea Coleman

The small group of friends who came with me when I decided to start a company trusted me to train them in a method called Viewpoints, an acting and movement technique used by Steppenwolf in Chicago and SITI Company in Saratoga. It’s a training method based on being grounded in the present moment, using space and time to create dynamic visual pictures, and building a powerful trust and love for your ensemble. Viewpoints was a spiritual balm for my soul. You can feel that energy in every production LOFT ensemble presents.

The Last Day is about my father’s involvement in the 1975 Saigon evacuation, yes. But it’s also about friendship, failure, fear, tenacity, and persistence. In writing a play about my father, I had to search deeply to discover who he is — this man who raised me to keep pushing, no matter how dejected I feel. Just as he kept pushing himself in one of history’s most tragic and weary defeats — the loss of a country that so much energy and effort was invested in — only to look back and wonder why so much was wasted. It’s a deep wound that affected not only my father and my family, but affected our entire nation. My desire to bring his story to the public — a story that many people have never heard — has become a burning desire and fierce passion.

My primary resource was a collection of audio tapes my father made during his harrowing three-week assignment in Saigon during April of 1975. In addition to recordings he sent back to my Vietnamese mother (already safe in the U.S. during the evacuation), he also carried a tape recorder around his neck on April 29, anxious for instructions as to how to leave the city safely in light of the rapidly advancing North Vietnamese Army. He ended up riding a helicopter out of the city, part of an experience that was visually captured by the iconic image –  featured on the cover of Time Magazine — of a chopper landing on the roof of the American Embassy.

Christina Joy Howard and her father Bruce Howard; Photo by Todd Kellstein

His escape came after three weeks of working around the clock to remove more than 40,000 people from Saigon. I grew up listening to his story told from these tapes, marveling at his cool collected voice as he watches the mounting chaos in a city doomed for defeat. He could have lost his life, but instead he saved many, and featuring the actual audio footage in this production allows me to share my awe and respect for this man and what he did with anyone who will listen.

Love can heal and soothe, but it can also ignite a fire within you that forces seemingly immovable obstacles from your path and clears a space for others to find their own artistic power. LOFT ensemble is a safe haven I created so other artists could discover this power within themselves, and I’d like to open our doors to you and to share this magic with anyone following a dream that often feels just out of reach.

The Last Day, LOFT ensemble, 929 E 2nd St., Studio 105, downtown LA. Sat 8 pm, Sun 7 pm, through May 27.  Tickets: $20. www.LOFTensemble.com. 213-680-0392.