"THE KILLING" by WILLIAM INGE: WHAT THEY SAY

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photo: Richard Termine for The New York Times

J.J. Kandel and Neal Huff in “The Killing” by William Inge.
Directed by José Angel Santana

The New York Times

“A Death Request . . .

After watching ‘The Killing’ by William Inge, it’s best to take a slow, quiet walk home. This is a play that benefits from reflection, a story that sticks in the mind and demands further thought, no matter how dark those thoughts may be.

. . . ‘The Killing.’

In the play Mac (Neal Huff) brings Huey (J. J. Kandel) home after the two meet in a bar. Within a few minutes Mac reveals that he wants Huey to kill him, ending a life of deep despair. Knowing that Inge struggled with depression and committed suicide adds an even stronger undercurrent to Mac’s plea, and that awareness, combined with the tension of whether the request will be carried out, leads to a play that is both bleak and riveting.

José Angel Santana’s direction is wisely restrained, and the two actors deliver truly heartbreaking performances. ‘The Killing,’ a superb piece of theater, is given an intelligent production here. It’s a story of loneliness and great pain, one that explores the saddest parts of the soul.” – The New York Times, Ken Jaworowski, August 8, 2009.

THEATERMANIA

“William Inge's never-before-produced one-act "The Killing" . . . Jose Angel Santana's perfectly modulated production keeps the action grounded. He elicits nuanced performances from his two actors, with Huff exuding a quiet desperation and Kandel speaking in slow, measured tones that give weight to the crucial choice his character must eventually make.” – Theatermania, Dan Bacalzo, August 6, 2009, New York.

nytheater.com

“Jose Angel Santana makes a fine New York directorial debut with a revival of William Inge's The Killing. Through the use of pauses and awkward silences, Santana furthers the psychological drama the playwright so aptly captured in his words.” – nytheater.com Jo Ann Rosen, August 4, 2009.

BackStage.com

“Huff, Kandel, and director José Angel Santana give these lonely souls an aching presence. . . . . "The Killing" is chiefly valuable as a new addition to the canon of one of America's underappreciated playwrights, but the performances make it worth seeing.” - BackStage.com, David Sheward, August 7, 2009.

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photo: Richard Termine for The New York Times

Neal Huff, left, and J. J. Kandel in “The Killing” by William Inge

New York Post

“A recently exhumed William Inge play . . .

‘The Killing’-- about a despondent, religious man who asks a young drifter to murder him -- is hardly first-rate Inge. Still, it's a fascinating rediscovery that's only now receiving its world premiere.

Staged with real tension by Jose Angel Santana and superbly acted by Neal Huff and J.J. Kandel, it also has an eerie resonance today, decades after Inge, a closeted homosexual, committed suicide." – New York Post, Frank Scheck, August 11, 2009.

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Scenic Design by Maruti Evans

Lighting & Sound America

"The Summer Shorts series of one-acts is generally a showcase for new work, but, this year, the buzz is all about "The Killing," by William Inge -- who died in 1973.

'The Killing' is one of a couple of dozen Inge plays that have recently come to light, and it's a much darker work than such signature pieces as Picnic or Bus Stop. Mac, a middle-aged loner, has brought back Huey, a near-total stranger, to his apartment, ostensibly for an evening of whiskey and conversation. The situation looks, for all the world, like a gay pickup -- that's what Huey thinks he's in for -- but Mac has another plan: He wants Huey to kill him.

As Mac tells his stunned companion, he can't stand another day of loneliness, but his religious scruples prevent him from pulling the trigger. Huey balks, but, over the course of 20 minutes or so, Mac quietly and devastatingly makes his case.

'The Killing' . . . offers a fascinating inside view of the demons that tormented this fine writer. (Inge was deeply closeted, self-loathing, and addicted to the bottle; he ultimately committed suicide.) Under Jose Angel Santana's highly controlled direction, the piece achieves an intensity that's far beyond anything in the rest of the series; he gets especially fine work from Neal Huff, who vividly captures the way Mac's soul has been corroded by lsolitude. J. J. Kandel isn't quite old (or working-class) enough as Huey, but he partners well with Huff. 'The Killing' makes one eager to see what other works Inge had filed away." -- Don Barbaur, 11 August, 2009.

Smith & Krouse

"['The Killing'] . . . is a long-lost play by William Inge . . . wherein a lonely man brings a guy he picked up in a bar back to his room late one night. What at first appears to be a gay pick-up play turns dark when we learn that this lonely man is terminally depressed . . . this takes on heartbreaking poignancy . . . it’s a gem of a one act play, beautifully acted by Neal Huff and J.J. Kandel." - August 13, 2009 Lawrence Harbison, smithandkraus.com

BroadwayWorld.com

"'The Killing' by William Inge - a premiere performance of a lost play by a renowned writer. It was directed by José Angel Santana, and starred Neal Huff and J.J. Kandel . . . Both actors are fantastic, and certainly do justice to this neglected play by a master of the stage." Friday, August 14, 2009; Posted: 10:08 AM - by Duncan Pflaster

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Show Business

"Inge’s terse, poetic dialogue evokes an eerie 20th-century night-world populated by rugged individualists. Under José Angel Santana’s direction, Kandel and Huff neatly embody their archetypal characters in a fitting tribute to a bygone style of American playwriting." - Ethan Kanfer, Auguest 14, 2009

Theater Scene.net

"William Inge’s “The Killing,” recently discovered, has the best pedigree. This unknown play by the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Picnic, Bus Stop and Come Back, Little Sheba may be the most autobiographical play that Inge ever wrote. . .“The Killing” brings two middle-aged strangers together. Mac (Neal Huff) has brought Huey (Kandel) home for a drink after meeting in a bar, but his real motive is that he has an unusual request: he wants Huey to put him out of his misery by shooting him . . . Jose Angel Santana has staged the play with great sensitivity . . ." Victor Gluck, Theater Scene.net., August 16, 2009.

Variety

"The Summer Shorts series . . . have a forgotten gem . . . William Inge's horrifying "The Killing," a terrific one-act, never before performed, about an unnamed man (Neal Huff) and the guy he picks up in a bar (J.J. Kandel) for reasons that aren't clear until well into the play. The setup is vaguely reminiscent of an Alfred Hitchcock scenario and gets an appropriately noirish staging from helmer Jose Angel Santana . . . it's nice to see work that occasionally pushes the shortform boundaries (especially "The Killing")." - Sam Thielman, Variety., August 17, 2009

The Epoch Times

"'The Killing' . . . casts a dark and mysterious note. One man (Neal Huff) invites a younger man (J.J. Kandel) to his furnished room. The purpose of the invitation is not known at first. The two chat . . . What is desired is something so unique, so startling, that I won’t disclose it.

Suffice it to say that the play has tremendous tension; the actors compel our attention. José Angel Santana has directed with sensitivity and verve." - Diana Barth, The Epoch Times., August 23, 2009.

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"The play's the thing wherein I'll catch the conscience of the king."

INDEPENDENT FILMMAKERS DISTRIBUTE ON THEIR OWN: NY TIMES

Brent J. Craig/VH1 and Abramorama

Steve Ludlow in “Anvil! The Story of Anvil.” Its director, Sacha Gervasi, took out a second mortgage to pay for the documentary.

INDEPENDENT FILMMAKERS DISTRIBUTE ON THEIR OWN

August 13, 2009
By MICHAEL CIEPLY

LOS ANGELES — Quentin Tarantino never had to go through this.

When “The Age of Stupid,” a climate change movie, “opens” across the United States in September, it will play on some 400 screens in a one-night event, with a video performance by Thom Yorke of Radiohead, all paid for by the filmmakers themselves and their backers. In Britain, meanwhile, the film has been showing via an Internet service that lets anyone pay to license a copy, set up a screening and keep the profit.

The glory days of independent film, when hot young directors like Steven Soderbergh and Mr. Tarantino had studio executives tangled in fierce bidding wars at Sundance and other celebrity-studded festivals, are now barely a speck in the rearview mirror. And something new, something much odder, has taken their place.

Here is how it used to work: aspiring filmmakers playing the cool auteur in hopes of attracting the eye of a Hollywood power broker.

Here is the new way: filmmakers doing it themselves — paying for their own distribution, marketing films through social networking sites and Twitter blasts, putting their work up free on the Web to build a reputation, cozying up to concierges at luxury hotels in film festival cities to get them to whisper into the right ears.

The economic slowdown and tight credit have squeezed the entertainment industry along with everybody else, resulting in significantly fewer big-studio films in the pipeline and an even tougher road for smaller-budget independent projects. Independent distribution companies are much less likely to pull out the checkbook while many of the big studios have all but gotten out of the indie film business.

“It’s not like the audience for these movies has completely disappeared,” said Cynthia Swartz, a partner in the publicity company 42 West, which has been supplementing its mainstream business by helping filmmakers find ways to connect with an audience. “It’s just a matter of finding them.”

Sometimes, the odd approach actually works.

“Anvil! The Story of Anvil,” a documentary about a Canadian metal band, turned into the do-it-yourself equivalent of a smash hit when it stretched a three-screen opening in April into a four-month run, still under way, on more than 150 screens around the country.

“I paid for everything, I took a second mortgage on my house,” said Sacha Gervasi, the film’s director.

Mr. Gervasi, whose studio writing credits include “The Terminal,” directed by Steven Spielberg, nearly three years ago, began filming “Anvil!” with his own money in hopes of attracting a conventional distributor. The movie played well at Sundance in 2008, but offers were low.

So Mr. Gervasi put up more money — his total cost was in “the upper hundred thousands,” he said — to distribute the film through a company called Abramorama, while selling the DVD and television rights to VH1.

The aging rockers of Anvil have shown up at theaters to play for audiences. Famous fans like Courtney Love were soon chattering online about the film. And an army of “virtual street teamers” — Internet advocates who flood social networks with admiring comments, sometimes for a fee, sometimes not — were recruited by a Web consultant, Sarah Lewitinn, who usually works the music scene.

The idea behind this sort of guerrilla release is to accumulate just enough at the box office to prime the pump for DVD sales and return the filmmaker’s investment, maybe even with a little profit. “Anvil!” has earned roughly $1 million worldwide at the box office so far, its producer, Rebecca Yeldham, said.

Finding even relatively small amounts of money to make and market a film is, of course, no small trick. “The Age of Stupid” raised a production budget of about £450,000 (about $748,000) from 228 shareholders, and is soliciting a bit more to continue its release, Franny Armstrong, its director, said.

“Money has simply vanished,” said Mark Urman, an independent-film veteran, speaking of the financial drought that has pushed producers and directors into shouldering risks that only a few years ago were carried by a more robust field of distributors.

Many of those distributors have either disappeared or severely tightened their operations, including Warner Independent Pictures, Picturehouse, New Line Cinema, Miramax, the Weinstein Company, Paramount Classics and its successor, Paramount Vantage.

Typically, the distributors have paid money upfront for rights to release films. That helped the producers recover what they had already spent on production, but it often left the distributor with most or all of the profit.

Mr. Urman’s own position as president for distribution at Senator Entertainment evaporated this year when financing fell through for a slate of films. So he started a new company, Paladin, to support filmmakers willing to finance their own releases.

In September, Paladin is expected to help the filmmaker Steve Jacobs and his fellow producers release “Disgrace,” a drama with John Malkovich that is based on a novel by the Nobel laureate J. M. Coetzee.

The film won a critics prize at the Toronto International Film Festival last year, but no attractive distribution offers. One key to releasing it without a Miramax, said Mr. Urman, is to minimize expensive advertising in newspapers or on television and play directly to a friendly audience — in this case through extensive promotional tie-ins with Mr. Coetzee’s publishers.

“Everyone still dreams there’s going to be a conventional sale to a major studio,” said Kevin Iwashina, once an independent-film specialist with the Creative Artists Agency and now a partner at IP Advisors, a film sales and finance consulting company. But, he said, smart producers and directors are figuring out how to tap the value in projects on their own.

Some big companies will still be on the hunt in Toronto this year, where the annual festival is scheduled to begin Sept. 10.

“We’ll be there in full force,” said Nancy Utley, a president of Fox Searchlight Pictures, which last year acquired rights to “Slumdog Millionaire” and “The Wrestler,” both screened in Toronto.

“It’s a great opportunity for us,” said Robert G. Friedman, a chairman of Summit Entertainment, which acquired “The Hurt Locker,” directed by Kathryn Bigelow. The film was offered in Toronto last year and has already been mentioned widely as an Oscar contender.

But some filmmakers and producers pointed toward the festival have already started working for themselves, rather than waiting for the few remaining, and ever fussier, buyers to swoop in.

In fact, the next-wave Tarantinos are in Canada already — coddling not prospective buyers, but concierges, who just might steer people to promotional parties and screenings.

“These guys have figured it out,” Barry Avrich, a member of the festival’s governing board, said of the do-it-yourself crowd. “They’re into all the cool hotels, to get the concierges thinking about them.”

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"The play's the thing wherein I'll catch the conscience of the king."

THE KILLING BY WILLIAM INGE - NEW YORK TIMES THEATER REVIEW

Richard Termine for The New York Times

Neal Huff, left, and J. J. Kandel in “The Killing” by William Inge.

August 8, 2009

THEATER REVIEW | SUMMER SHORTS 3

A Death Requested, and Other Tales

By KEN JAWOROWSKI

After watching “The Killing” by William Inge, it’s best to take a slow, quiet walk home. This is a play that benefits from reflection, a story that sticks in the mind and demands further thought, no matter how dark those thoughts may be.

The play, which languished among a stash of Inge’s unproduced works at a college library, is making its premiere in Series B of Summer Shorts 3, a program that, on the whole, acquits itself better than Series A, with which it runs in repertory at 59E59 Theaters.

The first piece, Carole Real’s “Don’t Say Another Word,” stays true to its title, jumping into a couple’s droll conversation just as the going gets good, and leaving as soon as the jokes run dry. Straightforward and enjoyable, it’s a smart way to begin a collection of one-acts.

“The Sin Eater” by Keith Reddin, however, is imprudent on every level. A modern retelling of “Electra,” it is misguided in concept (the original is too wide-ranging to be raced through in a brief time) and execution (the clichéd dialogue is delivered in a mishmash of styles).

A sharper use of the short form can be found in “If I Had,” Roger Hedden’s tale of two landscapers, one of whom longs to inflict harm on a rich client. The play delivers quite a bit: a little risk, a couple of laughs and an idea or two to consider. While it’s not a flawless work, its efforts are certainly worthwhile.

Then comes “The Killing.”

In the play Mac (Neal Huff) brings Huey (J. J. Kandel) home after the two meet in a bar. Within a few minutes Mac reveals that he wants Huey to kill him, ending a life of deep despair. Knowing that Inge struggled with depression and committed suicide adds an even stronger undercurrent to Mac’s plea, and that awareness, combined with the tension of whether the request will be carried out, leads to a play that is both bleak and riveting.

José Angel Santana’s direction is wisely restrained, and the two actors deliver truly heartbreaking performances. “The Killing,” a superb piece of theater, is given an intelligent production here. It’s a story of loneliness and great pain, one that explores the saddest parts of the soul.

Series B of Summer Shorts 3 is in repertory through Aug. 27 at 59E59 Theaters, 59 East 59th Street, Manhattan; (212) 279-4200, 59e59.org

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"The play's the thing wherein I'll catch the conscience of the king."

ON "THE KILLING" BY WILLIAM INGE

Richard Termine for The New York Times

J. J. Kandel, left, and Neal Huff in “The Killing,” a rediscovered Inge one-act that is part of the Summer Shorts festival at 59E59 Theaters.

The New York Times
August 6, 2009

Out of Kansas, Into the World: A Trove of Inge Plays

By DAVID BELCHER

In a small Kansas town that inspired some of William Inge’s most melancholy characters, about two dozen never-before-performed plays are poised to become the found treasures of his collected works. These plays were not hidden in the proverbial cedar chest in a dusty farmhouse but languishing in a college library in obscurity and solitude, like a tragic Inge heroine.

One of them, “The Killing,” is part of the Summer Shorts festival at 59E59 Theaters in Manhattan. This story about a man so terrified of committing suicide that he asks another man to kill him has parallels to Inge’s life. He killed himself in 1973 after struggling for years with depression and alcoholism.

Pain permeates most of Inge’s work. His major plays, “Come Back, Little Sheba,” “Picnic,” “Bus Stop” and “The Dark at the Top of the Stairs,” portray rural Americans struggling with sexual repression (he was gay), alcoholism, small-town gossip and religiosity.

These issues haunted Inge most of his adult life, said Peter Ellenstein, artistic director of the William Inge Center for the Arts in Independence, Kan., Inge’s hometown. Inge, who won the Pulitzer Prize for “Picnic” in 1953 and an Academy Award for writing the 1961 film “Splendor in the Grass,” sought approval from townsfolk who often scorned him for being a homosexual.

“The Killing,” which runs through Aug. 27, is the second rediscovered Inge play to receive its world premiere in New York this year. The Flea Theater in SoHo staged a reading of the three-act “Off the Main Road” on May 11 with Sigourney Weaver, Jay O. Sanders and Frances Sternhagen. The Flea is considering staging a full production of it or another unperformed play by Inge this fall.

These two works are among about 25 — an exact count is still being determined, since some of the plays may be incomplete — stored in the library at Independence Community College, which houses a collection of Inge’s writings, as well as artwork he collected. The plays have been available for researchers to read on site but, in order to preserve them, were not to be copied or checked out of the library. It was a case of manuscripts hiding in plain sight.

“There’s often a disconnect between the caretakers of a collection and the arts organizations that might want them,” said Marcel LaFlamme, curator of the collection and the college’s library director. “Curators have been trained to put the preservation of the artifact first, but within the last 20 years there’s been more of a focus on access, mostly because of digitization.”

Beyond Inge’s hometown few knew these plays existed. Many of the works, including “The Killing,” were written after his naturalistic style of characterization became passé.

“Inge has been called the American Chekhov because on the surface you have mundane conversation about the smallness of people’s lives, but the characters go very deep,” Mr. Ellenstein said. “I think for many years in the flash and bang of new types of theater and sparkling dialogue, the richness and the fabric of his writing got lost.”

Mr. Ellenstein and his colleagues at the center decided last year to petition the Inge estate to allow these plays to be disseminated. With approval from Inge’s heirs, they approached International Creative Management, the literary agency that represents Inge’s estate, about doing an anthology. This collaboration led to a more elaborate idea.

“I was so thrilled about this, but I thought many of these, especially the one-acts, might be ignored in a catalog,” said Buddy Thomas, an agent at ICM. “I thought we should get them out there to theaters because we’ve always felt that he doesn’t get the modern attention that Tennessee Williams and Arthur Miller get.”

The William Inge Theater Festival in Independence, a four-day celebration of his works held annually since 1982, staged six of the plays in April and published them in the anthology “A Complex Evening: Six Short Plays by William Inge.” Mr. Ellenstein said the works ranged from Pinteresque minimalism to a comedy “that could have been written by Christopher Durang.” After Inge’s last Broadway play, “Where’s Daddy?,” flopped in 1966, he turned to different forms of writing, experimenting with the one-act, then in vogue, Mr. Ellenstein said.

At the Summer Shorts festival “The Killing” joins one-acts by contemporary playwrights, including Neil LaBute and Carole Real. In Inge’s play two men enter an apartment with unclear motives; then one begs to be killed.

While working on the play the director, José Angel Santana, said he found an unanticipated connection. “One of the big influences after I decided to direct it was the death of Michael Jackson, a man who was truly lonely and who needed relief from that,” Mr. Santana said, adding that this made the play more timely for him. “The pain of isolation is so great that he asks for relief.”

That pain feels biographical: “The Killing” depicts a possible gay sexual encounter and a plea for death from a character too afraid to kill himself.

Independence, Kan., has not always celebrated Inge, one of its own, Mr. LaFlamme said. But as times have changed, so has his local legacy and popularity.

“There was resistance in the community at one time even to archive his works,” Mr. La-Flamme said. “Gay and closeted was a dark secret once upon a time. The town now seems to feel like, ‘This is our native son, even if he was different.’ ”

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"The play's the thing wherein I'll catch the conscience of the king."