Dick Scanlan is the co-writer and director of “Mark Twain Shouldn’t Say Such Things” which is a part of the fourth annual Solo Flights Festival by Theatre Aspen. It is the lone play showing at the Wheeler Opera House with performances Friday at 7 p.m. and Sunday at 4 p.m.
Last night, the fourth annual Solo Flights Festival kicked off with performances of “Ghost Tour” and “The Goldsmith.”
Solo Flights, produced by Theatre Aspen, is dedicated to helping one-person shows get off the ground and is the only festival of its kind in the world. There are six plays in this year’s event which runs through Sunday. All performances are at the Hurst Theatre except “Mark Twain Shouldn’t Say Such Things,” which plays at the Wheeler Opera House.
Tickets are available at theatreaspen.org. Theatre Aspen is offering “Pay What You Can” matinees starting at just $10 with performances at both the Hurst Theatre and the historic Wheeler Opera House.
In 2022, Theatre Aspen created the Solo Flights Project Advancement Fund, which provides $10,000 grants to two chosen festival works to support future development.
“The event was created to fill a void,” producing director of Theatre Aspen Jed Bernstein told the Aspen Daily News at last year’s event. “There were no major festivals focused on the development of one-person shows — a part of the theater genre that has been growing very rapidly. Any theater worth its salt needs to be a contributor to the development of new work and we think that Theatre Aspen can make a big contribution to the art form by concentrating in this area.”
The way the festival works is each play cannot have been performed before in front of a paying audience. After the play is performed, a talk-back session is held between the attendees and the creators who then assimilate the feedback and work it into their second performance two days after the play premiered.
“The Goldsmith” was written by and stars Broadway actress Sharone Sayegh. It was directed by Zachary Prince.
The play is based on Sayegh’s real-life journey. The story is told throughthe jewelry that has passed down through her family across borders, cultures and generations. “The Goldsmith” will play again on Thursday at 7 p.m.
“Ghost Tour” was written by Gordon Greenberg, directed by Stephen Brackett and stars Adam Kantor. Itis about a sardonic out-of-work actor who returns to his Florida hometown to host a haunted theatre tour, only to be haunted by his own past. The next performance of “Ghost Town” is Thursday at 4 p.m.
“Mourning Songs” was written by and stars Ryan Langer and is co-directed by Gregg Wiggans and Jack Cumming III. Itis about an aspiring musical theater composer, played by Ryan Langer, who is on the verge of giving up until an unexpected tragedy triggers a creative spark that has the potential to turn his career around. It plays tonight at 7 p.m. and again on Saturday at 4 p.m.
“The Vampire” was written by and stars Alec Silberblatt. It is directed by Paul Edwards. The play concerns a lonely and lost young man, seduced by wealth, purpose and friendship, who finds himself in the company of a vampire. He must choose whether to embrace the violence and chaos it brings or vanquish the foe and protect those he loves most. “The Vampire” plays tonight at 4 p.m. and Saturday at 7 p.m.
“Mommy: A One-Woman Cho” is written by and stars genre defying actress Margaret Cho. It is directed by Seonjae Kim and features additional material by Leah Nanako Winkler. In the show,Cho takes on the persona she has embodied in her comedy throughout her career: her own mother. “Mommy” takes the audience on a journey through her Korean American immigrant experience. Cho will present her piece Friday at 4 p.m. and Sunday at 7 p.m.
Marc Kudisch plays both Mark Twain and the writer George Cable in the one man show “Mark Twain Shouldn’t Say Such Things” which is a part of the fourth annual Solo Flights Festival. The play takes place at the Wheeler Opera House with performances Friday at 7 p.m. and Sunday at 4 p.m.
The final piece on the program is “Mark Twain Shouldn’t Say Such Things,” which was written by Dick Scanlan and Marc Kudisch. Kudisch stars in the piece while Scanlan directs. The play will be performed Friday at 7 p.m. Sunday at 4 p.m. at the Wheeler Opera House.
The Mark Twain that most audiences are familiar with is an older version, when he was well established as one of the greatest American authors and the most celebrated social commentator of the latter half of the 19th century.
Hal Holbrook’s one man show “Mark Twain Tonight!” first premiered in 1956 and portrayed Twain as a writer and a person, which reinvigorated the author’s legacy. It was performed on Broadway and on television over the next 20 years. A few years ago, Kudisch was approached about reviving Holbrook’s show.
“When I was approached with redoing Holbrook’s ‘Mark Twain Tonight’ I said, ‘Hal Holbrook was a genius, he did it. He reinvigorated our idea of Mark Twain’s writing and his physical person,’ but I was not interested in doing what someone had already done,” Kudisch said. “I wanted to find a moment in Twain’s life when he was younger and not quite the icon he became. I honed in on this moment when he was on tour in 1884-85 as he was trying to get ‘Huck Finn’ published.”
Kudisch teamed up with his longtime friend Dick Scanlan, who co-wrote the book and was the lyricist of the 2002 musical “Thoroughly Modern Millie,” which Kudisch had played the lead in. “Millie” won the Tony for best musical and Kudisch won best performance by an actor in a musical.
“I was very wary because I didn’t know a lot about Mark Twain,” Scanlan said. “What I did know is that he was very careful and deliberate with his persona. He was one of the first celebrities. Those kinds of people, they can be hard to research. I was interested in finding humanity in Twain. But I am so fond of Marc that I wanted to do it and collaborate with him.”
In the play, Twain is touring on a train promoting his new novel “Adventures of Huckleberry Finn.” Twain is accompanied on the tour by a surprisingly progressive southern writer named George Cable.
“Twain” is set in the heart of Reconstruction when it was quite apparent that the Emancipation Proclamation was a failure that was not addressing the plight of American blacks for whom it was designed to help.
Twain was an outspoken opponent of slavery and society’s post-war failures to address how black were treated. Twain filtered his view of race through satire.
“Twain articulated any controversial view as satire so he could disavow it later if he wanted,” Kudisch said. “Through satire he could dig into a deeper conversation and he could always back off later and say, ‘that was said in fun.’ Cable was completely earnest in his opinions which were surprisingly progressive seeing he was a former Confederate soldier from the south.”
Twain and Cable became quite close and when Cable left the tour, Twain found himself vulnerable. “He was a little bit broken,” Scanlan said. “Twain has never been presented that way. We all have moments where we’re broken and vulnerable and it was interesting to create that with Twain and we have a great actor who can pull that off.”
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