Kickstarter

WHAT: The Tony-Award-winning play God of Carnage, by playwright Yasmina Reza, follows two married couples as they seek to mediate a playground dispute between their two school-aged children. What starts out civilly soon descends into name-calling, accusations, marital strife, physical violence and well - some vomit. Booze, cell phones, apple-pear cobbler, tulips, art books and hamsters were never this much fun!  Children may misbehave, but their parents are usually much, much worse. (If you want a better sense, rent the Roman Polanski film Carnage, with Jodie Foster, John C. Reilly, Kate Winslet and Christoph Walz.)

WHO: Well, the project was my brainchild and I'll be directing, but I have an amazing team around me.  My four actors (two of them married in real life!) are a fantastic group with Steppenwolf Theater, Eastman School of Music, Off-Broadway and published playwright credentials among them.  We have a team of designers (costume, scenic, lighting and sound) who are creating a wonderful home environment for us to basically trash every night - and then do it again. (And the props guy has to figure out how to make a character barf onstage each show.)  Not to mention a stage crew who gets to clean up afterwards.  And we're performing in the Fry Theater of the Canton Players Guild, a fantastic 150-seater set up as a thrust with the audience on 3 sides.  All of these folks are professionals who have agreed to take about 40% of their usual fee to make this happen.

WHEN: We start rehearsing the end of September and the show opens on October 26th.

THE MONEY: will go toward set and props, lighting and sound equipment, costumes, greatly reduced actor and designer salaries, printing of tickets, posters, programs and postcards, ads and billboards, royalties, scripts, concessions, materials for vomit (yes, this is true - will cost about $500 just to make enough for all of the performances), and anything else that springs up. Seat of the Pants exists as a theater company without a permanent space, without a permanent staff and without the regular overhead that many theatres grapple with, so that we can raise funds on a per-show basis and put on excellent theater at a fraction of the cost.