|
|
|
Fringe Festival Features a Familiar Director
June 17, 2010
by John Long
Among the many offerings of this year’s Fringe Festival — from July 23 to Aug. 1 — will be the Fishtank Performance Studio’s premiere of Stephen Dolginoff’s Thrill Me. Directed by Jeff Church and featuring musical director Daniel Doss, the musical stars Shea Coffman and Bryan LaFave as the two cold-blooded killers Leopold and Loeb, reportedly a couple, and their 1924 murder of 14-year-old Bobby Franks.
Leopold and Loeb were two young and wealthy Ivy League college students planning to get law degrees from the University of Chicago. They allegedly kidnapped and murdered Franks for ransom money. But the money may not have been the primary motive. It was reported that they murdered for the thrill of the kill or to try to get away with the perfect crime.
“In our production, the murder is not the climax of the play,” Church said. “I mean, the murder is done by Scene 3 or 4. It’s the relationship and the mistake they make at the crime scene and as the noose closes in on them, the police close in on them, their relationship and what happens to them is really the interesting part.”
The two were represented in court by the famous attorney Clarence Darrow, and the trial was a media sensation in the 1920s. It was referred to as the “Trial of the Century.” Darrow succeeded in avoiding the death penalty for his clients, and they were sentenced to life in prison.
“Leopold and Loeb’s story has appeared in films and in plays over this past century in various ways, the most famous probably being that they were the inspiration for Alfred Hitchcock’s film Rope,” Church said. “There was also a movie and a play called Compulsion and then there was an off-Broadway non-musical called Never the Sinner. But that’s only a few of the many.”
Although it was assumed that the couple was romantically involved, Church said, the subject of homosexuality was not easily discussed in the ’20s.
“They wouldn’t have used the word gay but clearly they strike a pact together that is clearly a gay relationship that kind of has S&M overtones. By that I mean there is definitely a dominant and a subordinate character, and the pact they strike is the one says ‘If you do this for me [crime spree"> then the other person will get the sexual gratification that the character wants.’ So that’s right up front. It’s like in Scene 2. That tortuous relationship between these two men is sort of the character foundation of the whole piece.”
“This play imagines conversation between these two, because no one was really privy to what they truly said to each other back then. … These were Phi Beta Kappa boys from a privileged Chicago background. They had been reading Nietzsche, and the one got it into his head that Nietzsche’s definition of Superman applied to them and parts of their behavior could be above the law.”
“It’s just a two-character play, which is an ideal fit for this little theater space we’re performing it in,” said Church.
“What a privilege,” he said, “to get to be in a small room hearing those voices with that great musical accompaniment by Daniel, who’s one of our city’s best.”
In the actors, Church said, “We have some great, amazing singers. Not only do I think the audiences will follow our two actors, Leopold and Loeb, in their kind of psychosexual relationship, but they are also going to have a feast for the ears, because it’s a very lush score, a really dense piano score backing these two kind of soaring vocals.”
Church, the Coterie’s producing artistic director, recently directed Pride & Joy and Other Plays under the auspices of Actors and Artists Against AIDS for Kansas City’s AIDS Service Foundation.
On June 22, he will open a musical called Lucky Duck at the Coterie by Henry Krieger, who is the composer of Dreamgirls, “one of our great gay musicals ever” Church said.
“It’s a new musical by him, and he will be in residence with us, along with Bill Russell. Bill Russell and Krieger wrote a Broadway play called Sideshow about sideshow freaks that got some Tony nominations. We’ve been working with them very closely.”
Church said that although the Coterie Theatre has featured theater for youth, they’re also doing more adult plays.
“Ron Megee is my associate artistic director when we do our Coterie at Night series. We did ‘The Breakfast Club’ and ‘Maul of the Dead’ and ‘Night of the Living Dead,’ and this fall we’re going to do ‘Sorority House of the Dead.’ You don’t have to have a kid to come to the Coterie anymore,” he said with a laugh.
Church has been at the Coterie for 19 years.
“It was founded in 1979 by two UMKC graduate students, and I got here in 1990,” he said. Before that, he was a playwright in residence for the Kennedy Center Theater for Young People and also taught at Duke Ellington School for the Arts in Washington. He has also directed in New York, Seattle and Denver, among other places
Church said he started a children’s theater in his hometown of La Junta, Colo., at age 15.
“I had some great parents. I started in theater when I was in high school with my own theater company, because I was like one of those entrepreneur types of teens. I remember reading in Time magazine that this review of Harvey Fierstein in Torch Song Trilogy, and I was so fascinated by what they said this show was about, in those three different stories that intertwined, and I felt like I just had to see it.
“So my parents said, ‘OK, you can go to New York.’ I went back to New York by myself — they let me go, and here I was a kid from Colorado in high school and I was going down to Greenwich Village to see Torch Song and in that same trip I saw Dreamgirls!”
Church said he has found Kansas City to be a great theater city. “I’ve loved the city and thought I would stay here maybe two or three, four years when I first got here and, you know, like many people, find Kansas City so easy to grow roots here without even realizing it. It’s so fantastic. Other cities larger than us have far smaller theater communities and they always have to go out of town for their casting. That is simply not the case here. We are very lucky to have all of these working artists.”
If You Go
Thrill Me has performances at 6:30 p.m. July 28, 8 p.m. July 29 and at 6:30 and 11 p.m. July 31. Tickets are $7, and Fringe Festival buttons are required for admittance. Fringe Festival buttons are $5. All performances are at the Fishtank Performance Studio, 1715 Wydandotte. Tickets are available at www.kcfringe.org. Additional performances of Thrill Me are scheduled for Aug. 5-8 and Aug. 12-15. All tickets for the August performances are $10.
|
|
|
|
