Busy Spring

It's been so long since I've blogged that I've forgotten how!
Now I've retrieved my password I'll do some catching up. I'm in a period of intense production activity, acting and directing in a number of short term projects of co-operative Festival-type presentations that add up to constant busy-ness. I haven't the attention span for serious writing, so it seems a good time to make a record of what I've been up to -- starting with the things that are about to happen, and then going back to fill in the ones recently completed. For instance, April 19 & 20th I was performing Martha Mitchell at the West End Theatre in NYC!

Photos from Martha Mitchell in NYC

Wonderful final matinee!  A final party with friends, and then back to Boston on the bus.....

Joan Faber, June Lewin, and Geralyn Horton after rehearsal in the Graycliff Music Room, then on to NYC!

You won't believe the stories I've got to tell you! -- Martha

testimonial for Martha

Just saw Geralyn Horton in the one-woman show MARTHA MITCHELL - IN MOSTLY
HER OWN WORDS by Rosanna Yamagiwa Alfaro (who is a member, just not a
lister). Geralyn was, as expected, radiant. A delight. I didn't know she
could sing too. Beautiful voice soared in the baptistry stage space of the
86th Street Theatre. I wouldn't change a word of the 50-minute show. Pretty
darn good-sized audience too (not easy to get on a beautiful spring
afternoon in NYC).   

- Robin

Info re: Martha in NYC

This sent out by June  April 14th

We are bringing the Boston production of MARTHA MITCHELL by Rosanna Alfaro to New York next weekend!  This is NOT the most recent version of MM's story (written by someone else and produced, with Annette Miller, at Shakespeare & CO. last summer).  This is a one-woman play with music, featuring Geralyn Horton (I directed), which we originally produced in Boston & took to the Edinburgh Festival Fringe in 1989!  We took it out of mothballs a couple of years ago when it was clear the wire-tapping and other excesses of the Watergate years were being re-played, and we've been going strong ever since. We'll appear for 2 performances under the umbrella of Six Figures Theatre Company, in their Artists of Tomorrow Festival.  Sat. 4/19 at 8 pm and Sun. 4/20 at 3 pm at the West End Theatre, 263 West 86th St. 
I'd be grateful if you'd circulate this to the Bostonians-in-NY gang, who might be willing to come and support a few old friends & colleagues.  Also, this company seems like a lively group, and it might be a good contact.
Hope you're doing well; haven't been in touch in some time.  Theatre in Boston is alive and very well just now. I went to the IRNEs last night and was excited at how vibrant and diverse the quality of the work is.  The Cyclorama, which as you know is huge, was packed, and clearly there was a lot to celebrate!!!

2008 Future Fest -- NYC

April 13th announcement:

I will be performing Rosanna Yamagiwa Alfaro's solo musical "Martha Mitchell" as the opening show in the Artists of Tomorrow 2008 FutureFest series presented by Six Figures Theatre Co.  at the West End Theatre, 263 West 86th Street NYC at 8 pm on Saturday April 19th and 3 pm  Sunday April 20th.  Martha's director, June Lewin, musical director/pianist Joan Faber, and Stage Mgr/Tech director Jeff Brewer are taking the bus to the Big Apple too.  If anyone  has friends in NYC they can recommend it to, we'd be grateful.  I know it's an honor to be invited, but it'd also be nice to have an audience!

Here's the Six Figures web site     

The Smarttix  blurb for the NYC "Martha"   

Martha Mitchell Musical's own web site  is  

I also have a little Podcast re: the NYC gig at   G.L.Horton's Stage Page Pod Cast

REPLY to email:  Dear Geralyn I wish I knew someone in NYC, but I don't. However I wish you the very best and wish you could do it here in Boston. Martha was a very funny, exciting, bright, independent and out spoken women and I'm sorry to say women of a younger age probably don't know who she is or realize her connection in part to the downfall of the second Nixon White House via the Watergate Connection and her charming husband Attorney General, John Mitchell.  If I remember correctly still a little mystery surrounding her passing. Break a leg Kid. Have fun I know you'll knock em dead. They could not have a better opening. I send prayers for a full house. Blessings Peg H 

Martha in the news! (re: TPM's Marshall)

But I don't know who wrote this-- it was a quote within a quote which I clipped, but them I went back to find the author to attribute, the comment had dropped off the blog somehow or I forgot where'd I'd found it.

Perhaps someone will inform me re: the author of this pithy Martha Mitchell reference:

..bloggers will realize how reckless their actions have been and will learn some valuable lessons from this episode. They need to learn how journalism really works and to understand what drives modern journalism you have to go all the way back to the Watergate scandal, which many bloggers are too young to remember.

After Richard Nixon was forced to resign the presidency because of the Watergate scandal, he told David Frost in an interview, "If it hadn't been for Martha Mitchell, there'd have been no Watergate." Martha Mitchell was the wife of Nixon's Attorney General John Mitchell. Before the Watergate scandal broke, she began calling reporters late at night and telling them that her husband was engaged in illegal activities. Reporters, of course, didn't believe anything she said and tried to help her by telling her husband what she was doing. He had her locked away and leaked a story to the press that she had a "drinking problem." The character of Martha Logan in the television series 24 is based on her so you can see why no one believed her and why she was so dangerous.

Although some blame for Watergate must also go to Mark Felt, the disgruntled FBI employee who has since been revealed as Woodward and Bernstein's source Deep Throat, it was Mitchell's indiscretions that first put the poisonous idea in the heads of reporters that our own government can't be trusted, which ultimately weakened our country. Just as people working for Gonzalez tried to stop U.S. attorneys from talking to reporters by threatening to release damaging information about them, John Mitchell tried to stop The Washington Post from writing about Watergate by warning, "[Post Publisher] Katie Graham's gonna get her tit caught in a big fat wringer if that's published."

Regrettably, The Washington Post went ahead with the story anyway. In the wake of Watergate laws were passed limiting what the government could do. Because of these laws government officials were barred from using all of the resources necessary to protect our country. So Mitchell was partly responsible not only for damaging the credibility and the power of the U.S. government for years to come but possibly even 9/11. It has taken years of painstaking work by the Bush Administration to restore some of the credibility and power the government lost after Watergate through laws like the Patriot Act. If one delusional, alcoholic woman, who just happened to be right in this one instance, can do so much damage despite the concerted effort of many reporters not to believe her, think what damage an army of Martha Mitchells could do. To journalists that's what bloggers are--an army of Martha Mitchells.

The idea of an army of Martha Mitchells is terrifying to reporters. Sure, Josh Marshall and other bloggers happened to be right on this one story, just as Martha Mitchell turned out to be correct despite the fact that she was a delusional drunken gossip. But that shouldn't tempt the Jay Carneys of the world to pick up the phone the next time one of these Martha Mitchells calls and tries to put subversive ideas in their heads. I think Carney and other reporters realize the damage Watergate did to this country and they are trying to undo it by returning journalism back to where it was before Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein ruined it. Unfortunately, there is an army of Martha Mitchells out there constantly ringing up journalists in the middle of the night, waking them up when they are trying to sleep.

Solo Shows

I perform a solo show written by Rosanna Alfaro-- Martha Mitchell: somebody book me, please!-- and I've written a couple (one on commission, Unbinding Our Lives, about Chinese-American immigrant women, which I enjoyed researching and writing very much; and one about a teen who loves Shakespeare). But I, too, dislike them, and as much as I love to perform, I can't bring myself to construct one for my actor self. What I love most about theatre is the unique and godlike ability it provides the spectator to understand the communal implications of an action instantly and intimately; to be in everybody's shoes at the same time. I love to watch the faces and bodies of the actors in the scene who aren't talking. I swear that (if they are really acting) they communicate telepathically! Unlike life, where one's attention is drawn by one's own interest, or by the loudest or most powerful person in the room, good theatre creates empathy that encompasses everything on stage, and by implication everything in life. It frees us from the prison of our own egos. Too often, the solo show traps us in somebody else's ego-- the author's, the character's, or the virtuoso performer's.

On Oct 12, 2006,A wrote:
solo performers are kind of the elite special forces of the theatrical army.
They bravely step out in front of an audience, look them in the eye and say, "It's just me, nobody else, and I am going to hold your attention for next hour or so."

Yeah. I run into people like that all the time in real life-- and run away as soon as I can.