Ryan Tramonte is the General Manager of French Art Network and Rue Royale Art Partners of New Orleans. With galleries in Carmel by the Sea, California; Santa Fe, New Mexico; New Orleans and Key West, Florida; the company’s family of galleries represents 54 artists from across the globe. With his office in the center of the French Quarter at 541 Royal Street, Ryan has managed to surround himself with some of the most beautiful aspects of New Orleans, its artists. Artists mold the way we think and live on a daily basis, they are one of society’s most prized possessions. Ryan, himself works in all mediums, but centers his work on painting and collage.
WHAT: Winners of Le Chat Noir's seventh annual New Plays Festival, directed by Carl Walker.
WRITERS: Pat Bourgeois, Jason Cutler, Andrew Farrier, Bud Faust, Mindy Mayer, Gabrielle Reisman, Bradley Troll, RJ Tsarov, Jamie Wax and Mary Louise Wilson.
WITH: Vernel Bagneris, Alex Lemonier, Leslie Limberg, Jamie Montelepre, Clare Moncrief, Angela Papale, T. Joe Seibert, Carol Sutton and Jamie Wax.
WHERE: Le Chat Noir, 715 St. Charles Ave.
WHEN: Performances Fridays and Saturdays at 8 p.m. and Sundays at 6 p.m. through Nov. 23.
TICKETS: $25; includes $5 bar credit. Limited number of N.O. Fringe Festival passes accepted.
CALL: 504.581.5812; www.cabaretlechatnoir.com.
Our town: Taking the temperature of New Orleans, Le Chat Noir festival offers 10 views of the crazily courageous way we live now
Attending rehearsals of Le Chat Noir's Seventh annual New Plays Festival is like eavesdropping on the voices of New Orleans.
You hear 10 wildly different plays, filtered through the sensibilities of nine distinctive actors and a director who has spent much of his creative life finding new theater work, shaping it and shepherding it to the stage.
"I didn't quite know what we had here," director Carl Walker said of "...in other words, New Orleans," which opened Friday night at Le Chat. "When we started work on it, I saw it as an evening of stories, an anthology, told in different styles: some satirical, some natural, some taking great flights of fancy.
"If a theme has emerged, I think it's that we live differently than any other people in the world. Maybe we always have, but we certainly do now. Everyone knows that the storm and flood laid bare a lot of problems, but now there's the feeling that this may have been better for us than we knew.
"We have learned the limitations of progress, how long it will take, that we have to be a little more pragmatic about it all. But we're dealing with it. "It's like putting on a play, in that there is always a lot of work to be done, but you try to enjoy the work while you're doing it."
A lot these voices are asking questions.
-- "What did I do?" wonders one of Gabrielle Reisman's characters at a bus stop. "What did I not do?" And then, noting the passage of three years: "Where here have I been all this time?"
-- "What is it with you people and food?" asks Bud Faust's crass outsider. "Why don't you put down the fork and pick up a weed-whacker?"
-- "Where are we going?" asks one of Mary Louise Wilson's chronically forgetful women. "I haven't a clue." One thing she does know, though: "I can't go on without my water bottle!"
--People evacuate, but a Hispanic woman says, "I don't leave. Others leave. I stay." Playwright Bradley Troll hadn't written the character as Hispanic. Walker and actress Clare Moncrief made her so during rehearsal. In the same play, "Contraflow," Walker asked actress Leslie Limberg to try a German accent. She did and both women got big laughs from fellow cast members.
"There's real life in it now," Walker announced. "And many cultures," Moncrief observed.
The playwrights vary from 22-year-old Andrew Farrier, a recent Tulane University graduate, to 75-year-old Mary Louise Wilson, the New Orleans-born, Tony Award-winning Broadway star. Farrier attended rehearsals, ready and willing to cut (the plays average 10 to 15 minutes) or add new lines. "The cuts hurt," Farrier said, "but hey, whatever makes it work."
Farrier's play, "Good Children," involves Alex Lemonier as a kid who's just caught a freight train into town, Carol Sutton as a woman about to jump one out to flee a hurricane, and Angela Papale as an ambitious crawfish -- that's right, a crawfish -- who comes to New Orleans seeking her fortune and decides to stay to establish a new order "for the oppressed creatures of the city." "Consider the imagination on this child," Walker whispered, referring to Farrier.
The conduit to Wilson was her sister, Taffy Maginnis, who acted in the second of Walker's four editions of "Native Tongues," which Wilson saw. A writer as well as an actress, Wilson collaborated on the script of her acclaimed, award-winning show "Full Gallop," in which she played fashion maven Diana Vreeland. "I've been writing for years," she said in a phone interview from New York, "all kinds of little pieces. A couple have been collected in anthologies and the rest are all over my house. I've got enough for an evening if I could find them all. The New Yorker published a piece I wrote eight years ago, a memoir about living in Greenwich Village."
Her Le Chat one-act, "Lost," depicts two women so forgetful, they can barely get out of their apartment, much less into a car for what turns out to be a memorable ride. "That's based on actual experience," Wilson said, "my own. I spend all my time looking for my glasses, my keys, my purse. It's one thing to walk into the kitchen and forget why you're there. It's another to forget who you are."
Among Wilson's current projects is working with young people at The 52nd Street Project.
"We're getting kids to write plays," she said. "Right now, I'm in a play written by a 14-year-old in which I play a 13-year-old. I love it, it's acting without any pressure and we're encouraging young talent."
Le Chat owner Barbara Motley, who started the festival, agrees. "I'm a great believer in original work," Motley said. "The really important theater cities are the ones that create new work; there can't be enough of it. "Reading the scripts that are submitted every year is a real learning experience. You find out what's going on in the collective mind of the city."
This year, 24 writers submitted scripts, all of which had to do with contemporary New Orleans. They were juried by three different groups, all of whom were writers, producers and directors who had worked at Le Chat. This number included Motley, Walker, executive stage manager Su Gonczy, and Pat Bourgeois and Gabrielle Reisman, this festival's artistic directors. As such, they have plays in the festival, too.
Reisman's, "Walking Backwards," involves three young adults with romantic and property problems talking at a bus stop. Walker divided the piece in two and it now bookends the show. Bourgeois, noted for her quirky comedies, has written "Only in New Orleans," in which a woman with a Saints-obsessed husband gets some unexpected help "from beyond."
Inadvertent themes seem to arise from the work -- people reaching out to each other, hand-in-hand exits, the crazy kind of courage it takes to live here. "And Carl is so meticulous and adventurous in the way he matches playwrights up with actors and actors with actors," Motley said.
Vernel Bagneris, the creator of "One Mo' Time," who rarely appears locally in anything other than his own work, is teamed in two pieces with Jamie Wax, the Baton Rouge playwright-actor who created "Goin' to Jackson." "Carl called me up and said, 'How'd you like to do a couple of short plays and work with Carol Sutton?'" Bagneris said, "and I said, 'I can do that.' Then the piece Carol and I were going to do got cut for time reasons. But Carol's here and I'm working with Jamie in two very different pieces, one touching and the other funny."
For Wax, being partnered with Bagneris is an event. "My neighbor's brother was in 'One Mo' Time,'" Wax said, "and Vernel was the first person from Louisiana that I ever heard of who wrote a play, had a success with it in New Orleans, took it to New York and then all over the world."
Sutton and Moncrief, longtime admirers of each other's work, never acted together before now. They are sharing the stage in Wilson's comedy. "And I met Mary Louise Wilson in New York when I was doing 'Jellyroll,'" Bagneris said. "She just walked up to me on the street and said, 'I'm Mary Louise Wilson and I'm from New Orleans, too.' New Orleans people are like that."
Among the younger contingent of actors is T. Joe Seibert, who delivers a broken speech of Reisman's with words that stay with you:
"This place ... it's a heart, it's pulsing and singing .... Other places aren't anywhere close ... "It's a double-edged sword, tragedy in hand with comedy. Everything in hand with everything."
Theater writer David Cuthbert can be reached at
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or 504.826.3468.
Ryan Tramonte is the General Manager of French Art Network and Rue Royale Art Partners of New Orleans. With galleries in Carmel by the Sea, California; Santa Fe, New Mexico; New Orleans and Key West, Florida; the company’s family of galleries represents 54 artists from across the globe. With his office in the center of the French Quarter at 541 Royal Street, Ryan has managed to surround himself with some of the most beautiful aspects of New Orleans, its artists. Artists mold the way we think and live on a daily basis, they are one of society’s most prized possessions. Ryan, himself works in all mediums, but centers his work on painting and collage.