Latest news with #experimentalTheater
New York Times
19-06-2025
- Entertainment
- New York Times
My Spooky Sleepover With Helena Bonham Carter
Felix Barrett, the artistic director of Punchdrunk, a premier experimental theater company, has often been asked to name his favorite show. This is a lot like asking a parent to choose a favorite child. But Barrett has always had a ready answer: 'Viola's Room.' Didn't see 'Viola's Room'? You are in good and ample company. In the fall of 2000, Barrett, a recent college graduate, staged a version of 'Viola's Room,' then called 'The Moon Slave,' at various locations around Exeter, England. Audience members arrived, one by one, at an otherwise empty theater and were then whisked away to a 13-acre overgrown walled garden. The journey culminated with 200 scarecrows and a marine flare that required clearance from the coast guard. The show ran for one night and could accommodate only four spectators. 'It was the most beautiful, intimate Fabergé egg of a show,' Barrett said, on a video call from Shanghai. He has always longed to revisit it. Now he has. A reconceived 'Viola's Room' began performances on Tuesday at the Shed. The acreage is smaller, there are no scarecrows. But for a company that has become synonymous with large-scale masked extravaganzas ('Sleep No More,' which ended a 14-year Manhattan run in January, was the most celebrated), making a hushed, actorless work for just a handful of audience members to experience at any one time is an audacious choice. Like the early mask shows, it announces and refines a new form of immersive theater. 'It's all about trying to do things that our audiences aren't expecting,' Barrett said. 'Push the form, pull the rug, find further ways to seduce and lose audiences in these fever dreams.' Want all of The Times? Subscribe.
CNN
19-05-2025
- Entertainment
- CNN
Shia LaBeouf's acting school is the subject of an intense documentary
Shia LaBeouf has often found himself at the center of controversy. A new documentary that recently premiered ay the Cannes Film Festival has the actor right back there. Leo Lewis O'Neil's documentary 'Slauson Rec,' which explores the experimental theater company LaBeouf launched in Los Angeles in 2018, sparked some 30 audience members to walk out of the screening at Cannes, according to Variety. The footage reportedly shows the volatile actor reacting with aggression and sometimes violence towards some of the participants who joined the company, organized out of the Slauson Recreation Center in Los Angeles. 'I've done a lot of coming to terms with the failure that was my life, and the plastic foundation I had,' Variety reports LaBeouf as saying in a present day interview in the first few moments of the film. 'I left a lot of people in the wake of my personality defects.' He reportedly 'instigates' a fist fight with a company member named Zeke, who runs afoul of LaBeouf after booking a role on a Netflix project and quits 45 days into rehearsals at the theater company. Another interaction with Zeke reportedly shows LaBeouf going off on the young man the actor dubbed 'James Dean.' 'I don't give a f**k what you say to me… You've got it better than I ever had it,' Variety quotes LaBeouf as saying in doc. 'What the f**k is the attitude problem? I'm giving you everything I have, so stop f**ing with me.' LaBeouf is also shown firing a women named Sarah who had remained with the troupe, despite her mother being ill in the hospital. The actor lets her go after her mother dies and two weeks before the play she had a part in was scheduled to open. O'Neil told Vanity Fair he initially showed up as one of hundreds of people who came to participate in the theater company before it was whittled down to about 80 or so members. He said LaBeouf saw that he had a camera and encouraged him to film what was happening. 'He was putting his belief in me and giving me an opportunity,' O'Neil told the publication. 'I had never done something like that before.' A representative for LaBeouf directed CNN to the statement he provided to Vanity Fair, in which he expressed his support for the release of the documentary. 'I gave Leo (Lewis O'Neil, 'Slauson Rec' director) this camera and encouraged him to share his vision and his personal experience without edit. I am aware of the doc and fully support the release of the film,' he said in the statement last month. 'While my teaching methods may be unconventional for some, I am proud of the incredible accomplishments that these kids achieved. Together we turned a drama class into an acting company. I wish only good things for Leo and everyone who was part of The Slauson Rec Company.' CNN's Alli Rosenbloom contributed to this story
