Awards, Nominations and Notoriety

Reviews

CAST Lawrence Greg Gondek Joanna Christa Kimlicko Jones So. Greg Gondek came to me and said that he wanted me to act in this play that he’d been wanting to do for years. Read it (Lanford Wilson’s Home Free!) thought it was really interesting, excited to work with Greg again, love Lanford Wilson’s work, and so I said…”great!” So, we talked about it, and decided that we would also co-direct it…just the two of us acting, and also co-directing. I had never done anything like that before…except in scene work in college. I soon discovered that co-directing a show is much more of a challenge! Anyway, Greg came to the table with lots of passion for the project because it had been his baby for a while, and I felt that I really needed to dive in quick. After we were in rehearsals for about a week, and were having problems with the cutting…I think I said jokingly…”why don’t we just turn it into a dance?” We talked about it, and that’s actually what we ended up doing. It really was a happy accident. We kept some text, but turned about 80% of it into movement. We wrote an outline of the story, decided on what text to keep, and then rehearsed how we might dance the story. The process was difficult and challenging. Lots of disagreements…Greg seeing it one way, me seeing it another. It was hard to know sometimes what was working and what wasn’t without a big mirror, or a video camera (now that I think of it, that’s what we should have done…duh. I don’t think we had the resources, though) But…in the end, the audience response was way better than I could have anticipated. The final product was short, and concise with lots of interesting images filled by Lanford Wilson’s fascinating characters. It was simple in appearance, but full of layers. Unfortunately, we didn’t get a full run of Home Free! because we performed it for MoMFest….only two performances with the festival, but Ken Webster was awesome and invited us to do it again one night after his show. I wish we’d had a chance for more people to see it and let it grow. It’s now a funky little challenging piece of theatre in my memory. — Christa Kimlicko Jones

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