Mark Jackson Production Photos

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Wallflower

Produced by San Francisco State University, October 2011.
Conceived & Directed by Mark Jackson.
Created & Performed by the cast.
Scenery Collin Mischke. Costumes Ashley Rogers. Lights Desireé Carrillo. Sound Teddy Hulsker.

It's a daring thing to do what makes us feel most vulnerable. I thought making a piece about that with young actors might be interesting. Wallflower was about shyness, fear, and the desire to put ourselves out there. It felt right that the piece express itself physically more than verbally, since feelings often belie the limits of language. Somehow the classic American high school dance seemed a good venue. We’ve all been there – or not, knowing we weren’t while everyone else was. And somehow the forest into which Shakespeare’s Midsummer lovers run also seemed right – a dark, magical, sometimes freeing, sometimes scary, inevitably transformative place where dream and reality blur. People go to both these places to escape, get lost, get found, take a risk, and hopefully to succeed. People go to these places to go for it – whatever or whomever “it” is that compels them to dare step up to the edge of that grassy cliff at the borderline of their comfort zone. Over that edge and below lies possibility – maybe doom, maybe flight. Creating Wallflower felt the same. It ended up flying pretty well, I thought.

Photos Benjamin Privitt.

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Metamorphosis

Produced by Aurora Theater Company, June 2011.
Adapted from Kafka by David Farr and Gísli Örn Gardarsson. Directed by Mark Jackson.
Scenery Nina Ball. Costumes Christine Crook. Lights Clyde Sheets. Sound Matt Stines.

When I began working on Farr and Gardarsson’s excellent stage adaptation of Kafka’s famous story, I knew I liked it. It was funny, scary and very theatrical. I didn’t anticipate how deeply the piece would eventually move me. Kafka’s young traveling salesman, Gregor Samsa, who wakes up to find himself transformed into a hideous vermin and his family in shock, is a potent metaphor that triggers the imaginations of people around the world. Depending on your time and place, Gregor could be your gay kid, Jewish kid, communist or atheist kid. He could have some embarrassing disease. Anything that disrupts the accepted order. I set the production in the American 1950s, when a lot of deeply rooted fear and paranoia was barely contained under the cover of insistently happy appearances. What moves me most about the piece is the harrowing transformation of Gregor’s sister, Grete, who grows from compassionate young girl to ferociously self-concerned young woman. Her loss of empathy, and that under her charismatic leadership the entire Samsa family eventually succeeds in shoehorning their story into a happy ending, is to my mind the ultimate tragedy of the piece.

Photos David Allen.

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The Companion Piece

Produced by Z Space, Jan/Feb 2011.
Conceived by Beth Wilmurt. Directed by Mark Jackson
Scenery and costumes Nina Ball. Lights Gabe Maxson. Sound Jake Rodriguez.
Video footage from the production is available here.

The Companion Piece was born of Beth Wilmurt’s interest in the hard life of American vaudeville performers and a book, A General Theory of Love, about the biological need we have to be near other people. These sources sparked an idea for a new piece about a performing Duo struggling and failing to make an act, and a Headliner who has long since perfected his own solo act. The show explored themes of identity, success, and the attempt to make things work in art and life. After initial workshops in Berlin and San Francisco, we set to work in earnest in December 2010 at Z Space’s new home, Theater Artaud. We began with the set, costumes, props, actors and designers on the Artaud stage, but no script or story. Seven weeks later we had a show. The Companion Piece was a difficult show to describe in words, and much easier to point to. The project was among the most demanding, exhausting, exciting and rewarding experiences I’ve had. When one colleague asked me if I’d go through it again, the answer was easy. Yes.

Photos Pak Han and James Faerron.

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Mary Stuart

Produced by Shotgun Players, Oct/Nov 2010.
Adapted from Schiller and directed by Mark Jackson.
Scenery Nina Ball. Costumes Christine Crook. Lights Jacob Petrie and Joan Arhelger. Sound David Graves.

Though I cut quite a lot, I found that indeed nothing needed to be added to Schiller’s text to make it “relevant to today.” It already is. The designers, actors and I created a recognizably contemporary stage world in order to get the obvious out of the way and put the focus on the characters, their actions, debates and conflicts. I love the messy psychology Schiller granted all his characters, how they contradict themselves and do battle with their moral conundrums. I’m also fascinated by the collision of times, places and cultures to be found in a contemporary American production of a 200-year-old German play based on 400-year-old British history. Schiller captured something internationally and eternally human when, through Mary Stuart, he posed an important question that it seems every generation of every culture must answer. What do we do when our system of justice, our sense of morality, and our own personal desires don’t meet eye to eye?

Photos Benjamin Privitt.

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Juliet

Produced by San Francisco State University, March 2010.
Conceived & Directed by Mark Jackson.
Created and performed by Arisa Bega, Charlotte Gulezian, Meredith Eden Mitchell, Frannie Morrison, Megan Trout, Mai Kou Vang and Dara Yazdani.
Scenery Hannah Murray. Costumes Miriam Lewis. Lights Clyde Sheets. Sound Matt Stines.

JULIET, a choreographic-theater take on Shakespeare’s Romeo & Juliet, used Juliet’s emotional arc, rather than her plot, as its basic structure. As with any newly devised piece, I wasn’t sure at first what exactly JULIET would be. In the end, we’d created a new work about love, but not the cliché romantic love most readily associated with Shakespeare’s play. JULIET was a sometimes punishingly physical work about compassion, honesty, trust and daring – those deeper aspects of love that are ultimately Shakespeare’s subject. This was my third production at SF State, and I must say that the work I’ve done in collaboration with the students there is easily among the most compelling I’ve been lucky to be involved with. The frustration is that university productions have short performance runs and aren’t generally regarded seriously by the wider community of professional artists, critics and audiences. I am glad to say this basic trend shifted a bit with JULIET. Audiences embraced the production fully, and, in addition to being written up by a handful of enthusiastic Bay Area critics, the project even found itself featured in the New York Times.

Photos Claire Rice and Benjamin Privitt.

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Faust Pt1

Produced by Shotgun Players, May/June 2009.
Adapted from Goethe by Mark Jackson.
Directed by Kevin Clarke and Mark Jackson.
Scenery Nina Ball. Costumes Kevin Clarke. Lights Joan Arhelger. Sound Matt Stines.

I wrote a quite different adaptation of Faust back in 1992 as a college class project. Though I never did anything with it, this early attempt planted a fertile seed, and in 2007 the time seemed right to give it another go. I saw in our shifting world Goethe’s theme of the struggle between desire and responsibility, and his important question as to how deeply we are willing to consider the ways in which our personal actions impact the world outside ourselves. The only thing I salvaged from my 1992 script was the notion to pare Goethe’s sprawling epic down to the triangle between Faust, Mephistopheles and Gretchen, and to bring onstage the character of Gretchen’s mother. Though not at all true to the letter of Goethe, I was keen to remain faithful to his impulse. Goethe created a brilliant conundrum of a play, full of contradictions and tantalizingly loose threads, as well as a brash mix of theatrical styles. It really is the sort of thing that requires an audience to complete it. So, when after one early performance a group of four who had remained in their seats discussing the work flagged me down wanting to talk more about it, I suspected we’d done right by ol’ Goethe and our audience, both. That this sort of thing continued throughout the run confirmed that indeed we had.

Photos Benjamin Privitt.

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Miss Julie

Produced by Aurora Theatre Company, April 2009.
Written by August Strindberg, in a version by Helen Cooper.
Directed by Mark Jackson.
Scenery Giulio Cesare Perrone. Costumes Fumiko Bielefeldt. Lights Heather Basarab. Music David Graves.

We might like to pretend that we have moved beyond the gender and class politics of Miss Julie, but sadly we have not. That the Aurora production extended its run is evidence that people still feel a need to grapple with Strindberg’s “dated” masterpiece. Despite Strindberg’s own famous preface in which he tried to situate the play firmly within the genre of Naturalism, by today’s standards Miss Julie feels much more impressionist and even expressionist. The designers and I leaned into this, and the actors and I tried to create a dance of desire with staging that was precise and choreographic without pointing at itself. We played with the power of stillness, silence and duration in order to deal with Strindberg’s explosive subtext. It was quite a challenge and on some nights it worked better than others. But overall, audiences seemed to enjoy witnessing three people go at each other like vicious cats and dogs. That’s entertainment!

Photos David Allen.

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Macbeth

Produced by Shotgun Players, December 2008.
Written by William Shakespeare.
Directed by Mark Jackson.
Scenery Nina Ball. Costumes Valera Coble. Lights Jon Tracy. Sound Sara Huddleston.

I've always felt Macbeth to be a galloping, fun, scary, sometimes disturbing thriller that’s also smart and well worth arguing over. The play is about a marriage that unravels after a moral line is knowingly crossed. That marriage unraveling is also a nation unraveling. The ambition that fuels the momentum of this strikes me as a young impulse in perpetual motion forward and up. So I cast the leads young and asked the designers to create a fashion-conscious, energetic atmosphere for the play’s many acts of bloody ambition. Audiences were keen to witness such acts, and the production sold out from beginning to end – despite the efforts of a few critics who predictably condemned it for not conforming to their preconceptions of the somber, grey-hued “Scottish play.” If there is a curse on the play, it is the curse of expectations. It’s impossible for any single production of Shakespeare’s awkward masterpiece to please everyone. But I think we managed to fashion a good rollercoaster, and I was very proud of it. People argued over it, to be sure. But ain’t that what good art is for?

Photos Benjamin Privitt and Jessica Palopoli.

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Machinal

Produced by San Francisco State University, October 2008.
Written by Sophie Treadwell.
Directed by Mark Jackson.
Scenery Elena Childs. Costumes Courtney Flores. Lights Jacqueline Steager. Sound Matt Stines.

If we were to have a conversation about a time when a society was anxious about escalating economic pressures, dizzying accelerations in technology and mounting moral conundrums, and when sensationalist tabloids and legitimate journalism seemed to meld in their reportage of it all, would we be talking about America in 1928 or 2008? Eighty years after its premiere, Sophie Treadwell’s snappy, scary, funny, at times disturbing Jazz Age play still smacks of the present moment. Directing it felt like working on a brand new, contemporary play. I realized that ultimately the play is about a feeling, a society’s growing anxiety in an abrasive time of change. The cast, designers and crew of this University production succeeded in conveying that feeling with uncommon power and finesse. Their work was as good as anything going in the professional realm, and I count the experience among the most significant for me as a director.

Photos Benjamin Privitt.

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Don Juan

Produced by San Francisco State University, March 2008.
Written and directed by Mark Jackson.
Scenery Nina Ball. Costumes Heather Goodman. Lighting Andrea Schwartz. Sound Jake Rodriguez.

This adaptation of Don Juan was originally developed in an eight-week workshop co-produced by Art Street Theatre and EXIT Theatre in 2003. We worked with costumes, props, scenery, and lighting to develop the material prior to my formally writing the script, which draws on both the Moliere and Pushkin renditions of the legend. The result is a dark, comedic, and decidedly theatrical perspective of Don Juan fitted to our age – an age in which seduction and hypocrisy collaborate to get under our skins, sell us their ideologies, and take from us what they like. The student actors and designers who worked on the SFSU production embraced this difficult material enthusiastically, delivering one of the more visceral, haunting and theatrically exciting productions I’ve been lucky to take part in.

Photos Benjamin Privitt and Claire Rice

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Yes, Yes to Moscow

Co-production with Deutsches Theater Berlin and San Francisco International Arts Festival,
with support from Mime Centrum Berlin and the Alexander von Humboldt Stiftung.
Berlin premiere October 2007. San Francisco premiere May 2008.
Directed by Mark Jackson and Sommer Ulrickson.
Created and performed by Mark Jackson, Tilla Kratochwil, Sommer Ulrickson, and Beth Wilmurt.
Design: Alexander Polzin and Suna Elbasi. Costumes: Ute Grenz.

Yes, Yes to Moscow is a choreographic adaptation of Chekhov’s Three Sisters. The piece imagines that the title’s siblings have finally made their coveted return to Moscow. But, since their lives have been entirely defined by their desire to go to Moscow, now that they have arrived their purpose is lost. They go into shock, retreating to their former selves, longing for the Moscow of their imaginations. Pent up in a kind of abstract holding cell, they are studied by a man at a desk who feeds them stage directions and lines from the male characters of their play, slowly prodding them to face their new reality. The piece was our way of asking questions about the expectations we have regarding happiness in the complex, very international contemporary world. We also wanted to see if Chekhov could dance. Turns out he can.

Photos Iko Freese and Lena Böhm.

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American $uicide

Produced by Z Space and Encore Theatre Company, February 2007.
Written and Directed by Mark Jackson.
Scenery James Faerron. Costumes Raquel Barreto. Lighting Chris Studley. Sound Sara Huddleston.

American $uicide was an updated, Americanized riff on the basic premise of Nikolai Erdman’s 1928 Soviet satire, The Suicide. Dealing with contemporary themes of celebrity, media, capitalism, pop culture, greed, and our shared responsibility for the global impact of these things, American $uicide evolved in style from bright screwball comedy at the top of the show to a darker expressionism by the end – a progression not unlike, it often seems, the evolving history of the American Dream

Photos Clayton Lord.

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The Forest War

Produced by Shotgun Players, December 2006.
Written and directed by Mark Jackson.
Scenery Melpomene Katakolos. Costumes Valera Coble. Lighting Heather Basarab.

The Forest War was an opportunity to make "total theater," in which the actors, text, staging, live music, and design work together with greater equality. It’s an ancient idea that’s gotten far away from our modern, Western theater. Using the Suzuki method of actor training as an engine, we experimented with a variety of Asian theater forms to create a hybrid theatrical language. Our production drew on Japanese, Chinese, Korean, and Indian influences, as well as Brecht, Shakespeare, Manga comics and Kurosawa films, to create the invented ancient kingdom that is the subject of the play.

Photos Mark Jackson and Benjamin Privitt.

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Salome

Produced by Aurora Theatre Company, September 2006.
Written by Oscar Wilde.
Directed by Mark Jackson.
Scenery Mikiko Uesugi. Costumes Callie Floor. Lights Chris Studley. Sound Jake Rodriguez.

Directing Wilde’s Salome for the Aurora was a chance to further develop what I’d tried with the play in 1996. This new production was darker, more nuanced, and I think more true to Wilde’s colorful, gorgeously grotesque writing. Taking Salome’s famous dance as the central event, the entire production was a choreography of extreme language, gesture, and emotion designed to express the tragic pretension that poisons those who populate the spiritually bankrupt palace of the Tetrarch Herod.

Photos by David Allen.

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The Caucasian Chalk Circle

Produced by the American Conservatory Theater MFA Program at Zeum Theater, October 2005.
Written by Bertolt Brecht.
Directed by Mark Jackson.
Scenery Melpomene Katakolos. Costumes Callie Floor. Lights Chris Studley.

With Chalk Circle I wasn’t interested in either imitating or rejecting Brecht. My intent with this production was to allow what Brecht had written to speak for itself as directly as possible, rather than soaking it with interpretation, and to follow the maxim Brecht hung above his desk: “Simpler, and with more laughter.”

Photos by Chris Studley and Melpomene Katakolos.

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The Death of Meyerhold

Produced by Shotgun Players, December 2003.
Written, directed, and set designed by Mark Jackson.
Costumes Valera Coble. Lights Rob Anderson. Sound Jake Rodriguez.

With this production I wanted to explore Meyerhold’s conception of the Grotesque, and to create a purposeful blend of Stanislavskian and Meyerholdian techniques. More than that, I wanted to tell the man’s incredible story, which is also the story of his art and of early Soviet Russia.

Photos by Mark Jackson

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Io Princess of Argos

Produced by Art Street Theatre, March 2001.
Book, lyrics, scenery, costumes, and directed by Mark Jackson.
Music and lyrics by Marci Karr.
Lights Jason Ries. Sound Jake Rodriguez.

I wanted to make an ancient Greek cabaret musical. Simple as that. One critic complained that Marci (the composer) and I couldn’t decide whether we wanted to make an edgy Kurt Weill musical or a Disney cartoon. He didn’t get it. We wanted both. Other people got it, however, and it was revived a year later by Encore Theater Company.

Photos by Mark Jackson

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I am Hamlet

Produced by Art Street Theatre, March 2002.
Written by Mark Jackson.
Performed by Mark Jackson and Temple Crocker.
Directed by Kevin Clarke.
Lights Jason Ries. Sound Jake Rodriguez.

Since I don’t go out on auditions much, the chances of my ever playing Hamlet were pretty slim. So I figured I’d produce it myself. But I didn’t want to have to finance a large cast production. So I cast myself in a script I wrote that had Hamlet performing Hamlet all by himself – until Ophelia comes in at the end.

Photos by Kevin Clarke.

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The Lost Plays of Jacques du Bon Temps

Produced by EXIT Theater, June 2000.
Directed by Mark Jackson.
Created and performed by Rob Bean, Gillian Brecker, Gillian Chadsey, Kevin Clarke, Mark Jackson, Chris Kuckenbaker, and Beth Wilmurt.
Lights Jason Ries. Sound Jake Rodriguez.

The commission from EXIT Theatre was for a new Absurdist piece. Rob Bean had found these two short scripts in an antiquarian bookstore in Seattle. They were written in French in 1935 by a guy named “Jacques du Bon Temps.” The scripts were bundled with some letters of his addressed to Antonin Artaud, and an old postcard written by an American and sent from Paris to New York that read: “Father. Have seen a theatrical by one Jacques du Bon Temps. Life is changed forever. Will not be returning to New York. Andre.” So we translated the scripts and put them on. …This is all a lie, of course. But it’s what we told our audiences we’d done. Some caught on, but others walked away having seen a newly discovered, pre-Absurdist play. For us, Jacques was a way of asking what Absurdism, a genre of the post-WWII Cold War era, still had to say about life in the year 2000. I liked Beth’s brother’s summary of it the best: “You dramatized all the crap that’s in my head.”

Photos by Kathryn Clark.

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