What next for Fermat’s?

No Regrets! Albert Camus and Edith Piaf was a great success with two full houses at Art Lit Lab.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Photo: Wikimedia Commons

 

Next up will be a documentary theater work about Irish revolutionary James Connolly – his life, times and the music that helped tell his story.  Spring 2025.

Thanks to those who came to our dramatic readings of Mother Courage Alone … next up will be a fall documentary work  entitled No Regrets – Albert Camus and Edith Piaf in the French Resistance.  It will be an evening of Piaf’s classic songs and Camus’ writing for the underground newspaper Combat.  Oct 26 and 27 at Art Lit Lab.

 

 

Thanks to all who came out Thursday April 27 at 8 PM for WE WILL NOT BE SILENT! Sophie Scholl and the White Rose at the Wisconsin Historical Society on library mall on the UW campus.  Our partners for this dramatic reading were the WHS, the UW Dept. of German/Nordic/Slavic + and the UW Center for Religious Studies and Global Citizenry.  Ulrich Rosenhagen, from the Center, will moderated the post show discussion.  Our readers were Maggie Schenk and Daniel Graupner with Dan Plane on cello.  Thanks to The August Derleth Society and the Wisconsin Idea Theatre for bringing in Audio for the Arts to video tape the reading and discussion … so we will have it up on the web in a few weeks.

In 1942 and ’43, a small group of students and one professor at the University of Munich clandestinely wrote, printed and distributed leaflets calling for the overthrow of Hitler and the Nazi regime.  They knew that, if caught, they would likely be executed.  As long as there have been universities and students, there has been dissent.  What would you do if faced with a society and government dedicated to unspeakable acts of cruelty and genocide?

 

Thanks to the 80+ people who filled all the seats for this dramatic reading.

Dear Theo: The Letters of Vincent van Gogh at Arts + Literature Laboratory on Thursday, April 13 at 7:30pm. Free admission of course.  This is part of World Premiere Wisconsin!

No artist is held in higher esteem than Vincent van Gogh. His paintings appear not only on museum walls, but on tee shirts, coffee mugs and posters around the world. But to know the paintings and drawings is to know only one aspect of his genius. He wrote an estimated 2000 letters in his short life, more than 600 to his brother Theo, an art dealer in Paris, who supported Vincent financially, and carefully preserved their correspondence. Many of them contained sketches as well. The letters document Vincent’s turbulent emotional life, his wide and deep reading, his artistic development. And his belief, despite a lack of commercial success, that he was in fact a great artist.

“You know the fireflies in Brazil that are so luminous that in the evening ladies stick them into their hair with pins. It’s very fine, fame, but see, it is to the artist what the hairpin is to those insects.” –Vincent van Gogh, Arles, 1888

Melvin Hinton will read the from the letters, Maggie Schenk will narrate, with violin music from Diana Wheeler and many, many images.

On April 1, singer/storyteller Tom Kastle reprised our Joe Hill – Alive as You and Me performance in Chicago at the Irish-American Heritage Center, co-sponsored by the Illinois Labor History Society.

WE WILL NOT BE SILENT! Sophie Scholl and the White Rose, Thursday April 27 at 8 PM at the Wisconsin Historical Society on the UW Library Mall.  Free as always.  Post show discussion led by Professor Ulrich Rosenhagen from the UW Center for Religion and Global Citzenry.

Our next new work of documentary theater will focus on Albert Camus and the French Resistance, especially his work as editor of the underground newspaper COMBAT.  This exists as only vapors in my head right now, but I intend it to appear late spring or summer.  And I want to return to a fully staged Brecht work this year … whew, lots to do.  Hope you will be in our audience in 2023.

Thanks to all of our many donors and to support from Madison Arts, the Wisconsin Arts Board and the National Endowment for the Arts.

Dulce et decorum est – How sweet and fitting it was to have our dramatic reading WE WILL NOT BE SILENT!  Sophie Scholl and the White Rose on November 11, Armistice Day.  For the ending of World War 1 on 11/11/1918 would lead to the false narrative of The Stab in the Back – the idea that Germany was not defeated on the battlefield, but rather betrayed by Jewish socialists and communists.  A young Austrian corporal in the German army named Adolph Hitler would ride that narrative to power in 1933, and very bad things would begin to happen very quickly.  We hope to record the reading with images and music and host it on our website.  Kudos to readers Maggie Schenk and Daniel Graupner and musician Daniel Plane, and much thanks to UW professors emeritus Marc Silberman and Hans Adler for guidance and for the post reading Q&A.

 

We had an overflow crowd for our Franz Kafka Evening – July 29 at 8 PM at ArtLitLab, 111 S. Livingston.  Maggie Schenk and Alex Hancock read Kafka parables and aphorisms, to the music of flutist Katelyn McClain.  Kafka scholar and UW-Madison Halls-Bascom Professor Emeritus Hans Adler will offered some post reading thoughts about the need for a new interpretation of this most difficult of authors.  If you missed the show, good news! – we will be recording it in early September and it should be up on our website later that month.

 

Joe Hill did return on July 23 at 7:30 PM at the Madison Labor Temple, 1602 South Park Street!  Tom Kastle sang Joe’s songs and told his story.  SCFL President Kevin Gundlach described some of the many active union drives happening right now in Madison, and Mariah Selene Clark, a UW ER nurse, related their struggle to get a union back (stripped in 2011 because of Act 10 – remember that?) and asked for everyone to pressure UW Hospital to grant nurses a union and a safe working environment.

 

Joe Hill did indeed come back – and 85 people crammed into the Dark Horse Artbar to see and hear singer/actor Tom Kastle conjure Joe’s spirit on April 7.  When the crowd spontaneously breaks into singing Solidarity Forever at the end of the show, you know it has been a good night.  So good that we are planning another evening with Joe and Tom for early summer.  And the Kafka is proceeding apace …  this painting of Joe is by the late Nancy Weinberg, permission to use it granted by her son Joe.

 

Spring of 2022 (yes it will really be spring at some arbitrary point in this long pandemic season) will bring two more works.  First up is an evening of Documentary Theater with IWW songwriter, poet and agitator Joe Hill.  This will be a music heavy show (lots of songs) and draw some links from the first two decades of the 19th century to today.  Singer/actor/tall ship captain Tom Kastle will tell Joe’s story and how his spirit lives on.  And then an evening with the very strange Franz Kafka and a reading of his puzzling and disconcerting Parables.  News on date and venue for the Kafka  will be forthcoming.

Joe Hill – Alive as You and Me. Thursday April 7, 7:30 PM at the Dark Horse ArtBar, 756 E. Washington.  Free admission as always!  Proof of vaccination required.  Funded in part with grants from the Wisconsin Arts Board, the National Endowment for the Arts, and the Madison Arts Commission.

 

She Fights for the Motherland: Rewriting the History of Soviet Women in World War II.  Samra Teferra as the voice of the author, and Mya Kahler and Maggie Schenk as the voices of the women soldiers, with Sam Olson on bass.  It was a terrific reading of the harrowing collection of memories of total war.   Thursday Oct 14 at 7 PM at the Central Madison Public Library.  UW-Madison History Professors Fran Hirsch and Kathryn Ciancia led the talk back.  A previously done audio recording is on this website under the Past Productions tab. Thanks to all who helped make this evening possible.

 

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Langston Hughes on Thursday, September 30 at the Crucible, and She Fights for the Motherland: Rewriting the History of Soviet Women in World War II on Thursday, October 14, 7 PM at the downtown Madison Public Library – both free as always.

The Langston Hughes show is supported in part by grants from the Madison Arts Commission and the Wisconsin Arts Board.

She Fights is made possible in part by a grant from Wisconsin Humanities and the Wisconsin Arts Board.

Funded in part by a grant from Wisconsin Humanities, with funds from the National Endowment for the Humanities. Wisconsin Humanities strengthens the roots of community life through educational and cultural programs that inspire civic participation and individual imagination.  Additional funds provided by the Wisconsin Arts Board with funding through the National Endowment for the Arts.

Any views, findings, conclusions or recommendations expressed in this project do not necessarily represent those of the National Endowment for the Humanities.

… and by the Madison Public Library and their Beyond the Page Program:

Thanks to all those who watched the amazing talents who conjured the soul of Nikki Giovanni in our live stream Rock Steady on April 8 – that video and She Fights for the Motherland are now on our website.  What next?  When live audiences are allowed we will do a live reading with music of She Fights for the Motherland, probably September or October.  And we are planning a Langston Hughes Evening for fall as well … and something Brechtian around the theme of struggle before the end of the 2021.  All shows will be announced via both email and Facebook.  You can get on our mailing list via this web site and by all means do “friend” and “follow” us on Facebook.

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Thursday April 8 @ 8 PM -free live stream from Audio for the Arts

How to watch:

If you have a Facebook account, go to the Fermat’s Last Theater page and click on Events

If you do NOT have a Facebook account, you can still watch by pasting this into your browser: facebook.com/FLTCo/live

or

You can bypass Facebook altogether and paste this into your browser:

Rock Steady: The Revolutionary Soul of Nikki Giovanni

Quanda Johnson, Melvin Hinton, Akiwele Burayidi, Ari Smith

Program

Part I – Introducing Nikki

My Poem (1968)

If (1971)

Ego Tripping [there may be a reason why] (1968)

Kidnap Poem (1970)

My House (1972)

Part II  – “Ain’t They Got No Shame?”

Gemini (1971) pp. 7-8

The Great Pax Whitie (1968)

Nikki-Rosa (1968)

Poem for Aretha (1968)

Part III – Requiem

Rosa Parks (2002)

The Funeral of Martin Luther King, Jr. (1968)

A Poem for the Assassination of Robert F. Kennedy (1983)

We Are Virginia Tech (2007)

Part IV – Revolutionary Thinking

Sky Diving (1983)

Raise Your Hand (2020)

Resignation (1983)

“Indulge” from Acolytes pp. 99-100

Revolutionary Dreams (2020)

Melvin Hinton shares an anecdote

Exit music – Rock Steady, Aretha Franklin

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She Fights for the Motherland: Rewriting the History of Soviet Women in World War II.  Originally set for April 2020, this dramatic reading of excerpts from Svetlana Alexievich’s book The Unwomanly Face of War will be recorded as audio with images in March 2021.  Thanks to the Wisconsin Humanities Council for helping fund this project, and the National Endowment for the Humanities and the State of Wisconsin.  When theater audiences return we will stage this as a live show – with help from our partners, The Beyond the Page Program of the Madison Public Library, UW History Profs Francine Hirsch and Kathryn Ciancia, and the Wisconsin Veterans Museum.

A look back …

Acting Un-American: HUAC and the Federal Theatre Project – an audio recording, November 2020

During the plague times, we went into the recording studio at Audio for the Arts and recreated our 2018 reading about Hallie Flanagan and the first and only national, publicly funded theater the country has ever known.  But congressmen on the lookout for communism in any nook and cranny of American life focused first on the arts – but before it was ended, the work of the Federal Theatre Project reached 25 million Americans.

Another Evening with James Baldwin, 8 PM, August 13, 2020

Our performers:

Quanda Johnson, Melvin Hinton, Akiwele Burayidi, Oliver Gomez

This live streamed event from Cafe Coda featured much more material than our first Baldwin evening – three songs, more prose & poetry, more dancing and music. And while COVID prevented us from having a live audience, we do have two videos – one of the whole program and one focusing on Duke Ellington’s tune Creole Love Call. Check out the page for that show and see how we conjured the much needed spirit of James Baldwin.

Theater in a time of two crises

Join us for this live stream, Thursday August 13 8 PM at Cafe Coda – facebook.com/CafeCodaMadison

Due to the COVID 19 crisis theater companies are unable to rehearse and perform their work in public because of the need for social distancing. Fermat’s has three works in different stages of preparation –a reprise of the James Baldwin evening, a reading entitled She Fights for the Motherland, about Soviet women soldiers in WW II, and a devised Brecht work centered around the theme of struggle. We are looking for ways to bring at least one of these to you via live streamed audio and video this summer.

The other crisis is more visible and more existential – the brutal killing of another Black man by a white police officer, watched by three other police officers. Protests began immediately and have, rightly, spread across the nation and the world. We stand in solidarity with those calling for justice, and demand that our elected and appointed officials, starting with President Trump, take immediate steps to address the racial injustice that pervades our society and stop the abuse of power by those who should be protecting us. We offer our condolences to the family of George Floyd and the too many other families who have lost loved ones because of the color of their skin.

We are citizens and artists and have thus a double duty to speak truth to power. This time feels different. Those who cannot lead should get out of the way. Those who would exploit this crisis for personal or political gain should be held accountable.

We are part of a coalition of Madison theater companies that is drafting a video expressing our outrage over police violence and listing the frontline organizations who are mobilizing demonstrations and need your support and donations. Here is that statement:

Black Lives Matter – A message from the Madison theater community:

We’re proud to be a member of this community of theaters in Madison, which came together to make this statement collectively. This is the first time that the Madison theater community has spoken as one voice, and it couldn’t be for a better purpose.

We encourage our audiences to consider donating to the organizations mentioned in the statement, as well as a few others:

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The two readings described below fell victim to the COVID-19 virus … we are planning on a live stream of Another Evening with James Baldwin August 13 at 7:30 – details will be on Facebook.  Because the Madison Public Library remains closed, we are hoping to do an audio recording (with images) of the She Fights for the Motherland.

IMPORTANT NOTICE:  As the UW-Madison and Madison Public Library will be closed, our  James Baldwin event on Monday April 6, and the reading She Fights for the Motherland at the Central Madison Public Library on April 29, are postponed – stay tuned for further news …

Follow us on Facebook for the latest news on Fermat’s work and plans.  Our goal is to present works in spring, summer and fall.  Typically the spring and fall shows will be in a workshop format, with (usually) the summer show being a fully staged work.

We will reprise an expanded version of our Nov 14, 2019 reading – this will be Another Evening with James Baldwin, Monday April 6, 7:30 PM in the Play Circle space in UW Memorial Union.  The same talented cast as last fall, but with more poetry, prose, singing, dancing and music.  Free as always – and there will be a post show discussion.  Join us!

On Wednesday, April 29 at 7:30 PM in Room 302 in the downtown Madison Central Public Library we will present a dramatic reading:  She Fights for the Motherland! – Rewriting the History of Soviet Women in World War II.  This will be excerpts from Svetlana Alexievich’s oral history, The Unwomanly Face of War.  Three readers, projections, music and Russian desserts, tea and coffee.  Free as always.  Co-sponsored by the Madison Public Library and the UW-Madison Department of History.  UW Professors Mary Lou Roberts and Francine Hirsch will speak after the reading and answer questions.

Looking back:

Our Nov. 14,  2019 An Evening with James Baldwin at the Urban League of Greater Madison was a great success – overflow crowd, terrific performances by readers Melvin Hinton, Quanda Johnson, dancer Akiwele Burayidi, and bassist Oliver Gomez.

A look back at our summer 2019 show – Anna Akhmatova and the Engineers of the Human Soul, a staged reading held August 2 & 3 at 7:30 PM at the Arts + Lit Lab, 2021 Winnebago.  The vastness of the literature about Akhmatova, one of the great poets of the twentieth century, and the history of the Soviet Union and the Great Terror of the 1930’s compelled us to start small – the story of how writers responded to Stalin’s edicts (it was Stalin who called writers the engineers of the human soul) is a complex one.  Some, like Gorky, accommodated themselves to the regime, others like Pasternak and Akhmatova were forbidden to publish and silenced, and some like Issac Babel were merely shot.  Built around Akhmatova’s poem Requiem, our three person cast – Brette Olpin as Anna, Mya Kahler as her friend Nadezhda Mandelstam and Ari Pollack as a variety of characters from Pasternak to Stalin – explored how artists respond to having their souls engineered by those possessing the power of life and death.  Thanks to all who joined us on beautiful summer evenings to plunge into the darkness of the Great Terror that possessed the Soviet Union in the 1930’s.

A look back at our February workshop:

April 14, 2019, saw a one evening co-production with Arts + Lit Lab – The Radical and Contentious Life of Simone Weil.  We had an abridged reading of Weil’s essay, The Iliad, or The Poem of Force, with music and dance, followed by a conversation about Weil led by Rita Mae Reese of A+LL and UW Professor of Jewish Studies Rachel Brenner.  Their contrasting essays are at the end of the Past Productions.

And our Brecht project will continue in the fall of 2019 … here is a look back at some of that work.

A Voice for the Voiceless – Poems, songs and scenes from the work of Bertolt Brecht

February 7 & 8, 2019 at 7:30 PM at the Arts + Lit Lab – a staged reading of Brecht’s work that highlighted his role as voice and advocate for those without power, money or status.  Singers/readers were Steffin Silvis, Jake Prine and Brette Olpin, and musicians Diana Wheeler and Angela McJunkin.  There were songs from Threepenny Opera, The Mother and Mother Courage and Her Children, poems from many periods of his life and live music to accompanied it all.  On Thursday February 7 twenty-five souls braved an ice storm to be in the audience and Friday’s show was standing room only.  Thank you to all who attended.

Singing in the Dark Times – The Many Trials of Bertolt Brecht

Fermat’s Last Theater Company’s Brecht Project staged a devised work centered around Brecht’s 1947 testimony before the House Un-American Activities Committee. Singing in the Dark Times – the Many Trials of Bertolt Brecht.  Performances were August 8/9/10 & 12, 2018 at the Arts + Literature Laboratory.  Friday August 10 was a full house and the Sunday August 12 matinee an overflow crowd. Thanks to all who attended.

Portraying Brecht was Isabel Karp; Greer Dubois and Maggie Schenk were ensemble members. Diana Wheeler played her violin and drum,  Maggie her flute and Greer her cello.  Music was adapted from Shostakovich String Quartets 7, 8 & 11.  Greer played the title role in Fermat’s Mother Courage Alone in fall 2017 and Maggie read the part of Hallie Flanagan, Director of the Federal Theatre Project, in Acting Un-American, our spring 2018 workshop. Direction was a collaborative effort.  Nearly 50 projected images accompanied the action on stage.  Brecht’s 1935 essay Five Difficulties in Writing the Truth formed a theme that events and people in the show were measured against.

Brecht’s poem, To Those Born Later, begins with this stanza:

Truly I live in dark times!

Frank speech is naïve. A smooth forehead

Suggests insensitivity. The man who laughs

Has simply not yet heard

The terrible news.

Brecht’s HUAC testimony marked a break in his life and work. The ten witnesses who appeared before him invoked their First Amendment right of free speech and chose not to answer the committee’s questions – they would be held in contempt of Congress for that act, were sent to prison and came to be called The Hollywood Ten. Brecht, as he so often did, chose a different path – his performance before HUAC (and it was very much a performance) was a mélange of forgetting, denial and confusion, all through the haze of a thick German accent and cigar smoke. But he said – accurately – that he was not and had never been a member of any communist party. And the next day flew to Paris under a different name and with a Czech passport.

The performance moved back and forth in time and captured the many dark times and the trials Brecht faced – from his flight from Hitler’s Germany in Feb 1933, to his struggles against those in the USSR who would condemn his work for its failure to conform to Socialist Realist doctrine, to the East Berlin Communist officials in the 1950’s who would see a dangerous strain of pacifism in Mother Courage and Her Children.

What is the duty of the artist to speak truth to power? Who will confront the dark times? At what cost? Mandelstam said that “Only in Russia is poetry respected – it gets people killed!” And so Stalin had him shot. We mined Brecht’s plays, poetry, notebooks and FBI files to stage a show that will addressed these questions – and with live music, as always. And each night featured a panel of scholars and activists to comment on the performance and engage the audience in discussion of this most relevant writer.

fermatstheatermadison@gmail.com

A Look Further Back:

Our minimalist production Mother Courage Alone in late September/early October 2017 was a great success and kudos to Greer DuBois as Mother Courage, Steffen Silvis as the Narrator and Diana Wheeler who provided the music on trumpet, violin and drum. The show was a linear retelling of Mother Courage and Her Children, looking retrospectively at events of the play, and with the Narrator commenting on and questioning the story Mother Courage tells.

“The law was made for one thing alone,for the exploitation of those who don’t understand it, or are prevented by naked misery from obeying it. And anyone who wants a crumb of this exploitation for himself must obey the law strictly.” ―Bertolt Brecht

Looking farther back, we want to give a very hearty thank you to the cast, crew, advisors, donors and audience members for a very successful summer 2016 staging of Kafka’s The Trial. Nearly 600 people saw our original adaptation of one of the world’s great and difficult novels and the feedback and evaluations were overwhelmingly positive.

The Trial was our most ambitious (and expensive) show to date and cause for both celebration and reflection. We at Fermat’s would like to do more adaptations and stage more than one show per year. What that means is scaling back the scope of what we do – more theater, less overhead/super-structure. More but smaller shows, more great acting, intense, focused and challenging work, creative use of lighting and music. It may mean smaller casts and simpler sets and new and unconventional venues.

So what’s in store for 2017 and 2018?  As noted above, we just staged Mother Courage Alone to much acclaim, and are discussing plans for our summer production. As all the Brecht work is still under copyright and we must negotiate with the Brecht estate for a performance license, things can get complicated but we are very excited by the project. In the longer term we’d like to keep this format – summer workshops/readings in fall and spring and a summer play.

Podcasts: there are a number of works – letters, short fiction, scenes, interviews – that would use one or two actors/readers and that we can record and add music tracks to and host on our web site. These are happening!

Socially relevant theater is what we do and we’re committed to that, and that also means keeping all of our shows free. That’s tough and means we have to expand our donor base and transition to a membership/patron model, much like public radio. Grant making agencies can be fickle, Kickstarter campaigns are tougher every year, and our expenses (venue costs, license fees, etc.) are likely to increase.