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A play for Libertarians to attend???

City Council Meeting’ at ASU Gammage

  A play for Libertarians to attend???

Look I am an uncultured slob who thumbs his nose at plays and other high society nonsense. But back in the days when Arizona Governor Ev Mecham got impeached, recalled and indited I did attend a play about the Mecham years which was put on in Downtown Tempe on Mill Avenue.

For an uncultured slob I loved the play and laughed my ass off.

This play is about government and who knows it might be as good.

Source

2/16: ‘City Council Meeting’ at ASU Gammage

In "City Council Meeting," playwright Aaron Landsman turns real-life politics into a experimental theater in which the audience performs the play.

Courtesy of Aaron Landsman

When: 7 p.m. Saturday, Feb. 16.

Where: ASU Gammage, Mill Avenue and Apache Boulevard, Tempe.

Admission: $25.

Details: 480-965-3434, asugammage.com.

By Kerry Lengel The Republic | azcentral.com Mon Feb 11, 2013 4:21 PM

If “City Council Meeting” doesn’t sound like the sexiest title for a play, theatrical experimentalist Aaron Landsman completely understands. He didn’t expect to find drama in local politics either.

“I was in Portland, Oregon, pitching a project and got dragged to a city council meeting,” the Illinois-based performer and writer says. “The person who dragged me there said, ‘It’s going to be a hot meeting, it’s about zoning.’ And to me ‘hot’ and ‘zoning’ are not words I would put together in the same sentence.”

At first the meeting was as dull as he’d imagined. But then a city resident stepped up to the mike to give a profanity-laced rant about conditions in his neighborhood, and he had a few props he’d picked up off the street with him: an empty crack vial, a dirty diaper and a used condom. An indignant council member told him he had just created a public health hazard. The man replied, “You’ve just made my point for me.”

“I thought, ‘This is theater. It’s a performance,’” Landsman says.

After 18 months of visiting council meetings in cities from coast to coast, including Tempe, he had enough material for a play, which he describes as a piece “about the poetry in bureaucracy, the architecture of power and the comedy of procedure.”

“City Council Meeting” premiered in November in Houston, and on Saturday, Feb. 16, it comes to ASU Gammage in Tempe. Performances are also planned in New York and San Francisco.

The added twist: The audience performs the show.

First, attendees will watch an orientation video, then they will choose whether they want to portray council members or citizens giving testimony, or whether they just want to observe. Professional actors will be on hand to assist.

The agenda items are drawn from actual council meetings in various cities. Landsman was especially interested in how seemingly mundane issues can serve as stand-ins for more important ones. In Tempe, for example, a discussion about “the aesthetics of ficus trees” turned out to relate to the issue of how to handle panhandlers on Mill Avenue.

When he first started researching city councils, Landsman didn’t expect to create a work of participatory theater. Instead, he envisioned professional actors re-creating some of the wackier moments from the meetings he attended.

“I realized that was an ironic distance that I didn’t want to have,” he says. “I wanted to challenge myself not to do that....

“It’s somewhere between experimental theater and social practice.”

Reach the reporter at kerry.lengel@arizonarepublic.com or 602-444-4896.

 
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stinking title