Horse opens
Nico on Jul 07 2006 at 6:14 am | Filed under: General Theatre, Productions
You Can Lead a Horse to Water opened last night. The audience was small but enthusiastic. What amazed me was that a cell phone went off in the house (an announcement wasn’t made at the beginning of the show) but nobody answered it, which blew my mind rather, but which suggested that the people who were at fault didn’t want to miss any of the play by answering.
Or maybe they were just too shame to make the move to turn it off.
Anyway. The run has begun! People may not have known what to make of the play — there hasn’t been something like it on stage for many years — but they seemed to be well into it.
Book now. If past experience is anything to go by, if you wait till the last week you may be disappointed. This weekend will get you the best seats, what with all the other Independence stuff going on.
Please give me some background info on the play “You can lead a horse to water”
Thanks
Diana
A Brief History of and Introduction to the Play
(adapted from the Director’s Notes for Grand Valley State University’s production of You Can Lead A Horse To Water (Michigan, November 2005))
by Philip A. Burrows, Director
My first memory of anything to do with You Can Lead A Horse To Water goes back to 1981. While directing two one-act Bahamian plays in Barbados at the Caribbean Festival of Arts (CARIFESTA), I received my first exposure to the work. One of those plays, Them, was by playwright Winston Saunders. He was continuing to re-write this work, even after performances had started, and the actors were going a little mad. We took a break one day and went to Farley Hill National Park where he produced, from a picnic bag, a children’s school exercise book. He then said to me that he was working on a new play and he read the first words that he had written, “We were born in a house which was seven by eleven, and the kitchen was the kitchen with the stove and the fridge, and the kitchen was the kitchen with the big iron bed.†I thought what he wrote was interesting but I had no idea where it would go from there. When we returned to Nassau we both got right to work on the first year of the Dundas Repertory Season. Winston was founder of the Season and Chairman of the Dundas Centre for the Performing Arts, and I was the Season’s Artistic Director.
It would not be until early in 1983 that Winston would approach me with a completed version of You Can Lead A Horse To Water. This time he presented me with a series of scenes that he called an “undoable workâ€, and asked me if I could make something out of it. We enlisted Cleophas Adderley to write music and rhythms for the scenes, and we began to workshop the play. The premiere performance took place as a part of the 1983 Dundas Repertory Season in Nassau. It was easy to tell even then that this work was something special, unlike anything that had been written by a Bahamian or produced in The Bahamas before. The play was a hit, so much so that there was demand for it to go on tour to the second city, Freeport. Later that year, the production opened in Freeport, where the late John Munnings, a Bahamian editor and publisher based in California, had an opportunity to see it. He was so impressed that he said that the work had to been seen abroad. His flagship publication, Junkanoo Magazine, was based in San Francisco, and he proceeded, with Winston’s blessing, to go and look for a theatre partner there.
The Eureka Theatre Company, at that time under the Artistic Direction of Tony Taccone (Berkeley Repertory Theatre) and with such prominent directors as Richard Syed (Seydways Acting Studios) and Oscar Eustis (Angels in America, Artistic Director, Public Theatre, NYC), decided to partner with Junkanoo Magazine to ensure that this work was produced. An American cast was auditioned. Winston worked with Oscar, who took on dramaturgical duties to streamline and rework the play. Cleophas worked with the cast on the music, while Richard and I co-directed the production. In 1984 the U.S. premiere of You Can Lead A Horse To Water opened to positive reviews at the Julian Theatre in San Francisco, and ran for a six-week limited engagement.
The revised version was produced in Nassau in 1988, again to critical acclaim and sold out houses. In 1991, when The Bahamas was invited to participate in the Edinburgh Festival Fringe, Horse was revived for that purpose. A majority of the 1988 cast travelled with the production to Britain, where once again the play was well received, and where it flirted with the possibility of a West End engagement — an engagement, sadly, that did not materialize.
In 2005, I was contacted by Grand Valley State University, Michigan, and was invited to be a Guest Director for the Diversity Programme. The first play that came to mind was You Can Lead A Horse To Water. There was one major challenge — the vast majority of the acting students at the University were White Americans who had limited exposure to Caribbean cultures. After much thought and some debate, we agreed that Horse would be cast colour-blind. Although Bahamian in its rhythms and music, the theme of the work is universal, and the style draws upon Classical Greek tragedy. Auditions were held in September 2005, and a cast that was one-third Black and Hispanic and two-thirds White was selected. Rehearsals began in October 2005, and the play opened in November, with the playwright in attendance. Such was the success of the colour-blind casting that Winston admitted afterward that he was so caught up in the power of the production that he did not notice the skin colour of the actors. Horse was also adjudicated as part of the Season, and received high acclaim.