"It half started as a joke," says Blue Hour co-director Taylor Shann. "I was planning on doing Mamet's Lakeboat... And I was already planning on doing several Mamet scenes," added co-director Marc Frost. "We started talking _ thinking about what it would be like to do an evening of Mamet." continues Frost. And as a result, Frost and Shann's collaboration Blue Hour was born.
Tonight, students will have the opportunity to partake in the unique artistic experience that is Blue Hour. The show is ten scenes by contemporary American playwright David Mamet laced with three musical interludes. They are brought together in one evening of performance to represent, as explained by Frost, "the modern American city from sundown to sunrise."
More significantly, the performance is "a case-study in Mamet-speak," Frost explained. "Mamet hears dialogue and listens to the way people talk. He finds the rhythmic poetry inherent in everyday language."
Blue Hour is "poetic, but not in the traditional sense of poetry. The show captures twelve human moments," Shann said. It asks the audience to seek their own personal connection to the work.
The Blue Hour is unique in it combines scene with music and centers them around a particular theme. Shann and Frost believe this is the first time that such an undertaking has taken place at Tufts.
The scenes and monologues which comprise Blue Hour were originally published in the Mamet compilation Goldberg Street. These scenes were individually written, independent of any unified work. "They were really just written to pass the time," Frost said. "It's not even sure whether they were ever intended to be performed or not."
In addition to the concept, the writing style makes the play unique.
"There's so much more going on in these scenes then it first seems," actor Jeff Brea said. "All of my lines are no more than five or six words each _ but there's so much in the lines besides words."
"The dialogue is very conversational. Mamet's writing really makes you listen," actor Graham Outerbridge said.
The performance is highly personal in its nature, as it asks both the actors and the audience to bring themselves and their experiences to the characters and the scenes. "We want people to walk away saying, 'Yeah, that's happened to me before.' or 'I know someone who has done that.' The audience should be able to relate to the scenes," Shann said.
The fast pace of the scenes which make the themes difficult to catch individually, but as whole, they disseminate a united message, according to Frost. "There are definitely some big morality issues and questions that the audience will be able to relate to and think about on their way home," he said.
With its unique structural format and its collaborative roots, BlueHour is sure to be an intense and introspective evening of performance and theater study.
'Blue Hour' runs Tuesday night, Nov. 19 at 7 and 9 p.m. in the Balch Arena Theatre. Tickets are free.
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