Laura Lamanksy (Founder/Executive Producer/Director)

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bobrauschenbergamerica

August 2008

The cast of bobrauschenbergamerica.

Kyle Pieczynski as The Chicken does the chicken dance.

Laura Lamansky

Founder/Executive Producer/Director

Laura is a junior at the University of Southern California in Los Angeles.  She founded Silver Sparrow Productions in March of 2008. She has directed the past two SSP shows, bobrauschenbergamerica and Under Construction. Also she is the Executive Producer for The Painter's Tail, an animated short by Jacob Veldhuizen, in association with Field House Films. This project will be sent to various film festivals around the nation.

She is on USC’s Dean’s List for her academic work within her major (Theatre, with a concentration on directing/producing) and her minor (TV/Film Production).  Laura started her USC career as the Dance Captain for the mainstage musical, USC’s largest and longest running show of the season, Carousel.  This honor as a freshman allowed Laura to work with the School of Theatre’s Artistic Director, Associate Dean Jack Rowe, who directed Carousel.  This relationship with Rowe progressed, as he became her academic advisor for her directed research for SSP’s upcoming production, Under Construction by Charles L. Mee.  She has been involved with various USC productions from acting to assistant stage manager to master electrician. 

However, Laura’s theatrical career started in Wausau, WI.  She began dancing at the Central Wisconsin School of Ballet at age three, and completed 15 years of ballet training.  Laura was a member of Wausau Dance Theatre since its founding ten years ago.  She has danced such roles as Clara in The Nutcracker (2003 and 2006), The Mad Hatter in Alice in Wonderland and Puss ‘n Boots in Sleeping Beauty and has toured in Germany.  She has worked with such narrators as Tony Randall, Henry Winkler, and Danny Glover as soloists and semi-soloists in Carnival of the Animals.  And most recently, Laura was the adminstrative assistant for Elliot Gould's appearance in Carnival of the Animals. Laura made her directorial debut with No Exit, an existential drama by Jean-Paul Sartre in the 2007 East End Players’ One Act Plays.  This existential project was tied to her completion of the International Baccalaureate Programme, which resulted in a diploma from Geneva, Switzerland.  Laura was a recipient of WCT’s S.T.A.R. Scholarship, the Jerome Hartwig Theatre Scholarship, and the International Baccalaureate Diploma Candidate Scholarship, among many other awards and honors.

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Charles L. Mee

Playwright

Mee has written bobrauschenbergamerica, Wintertime, Belle Époque, Vienna: Lusthaus, Snow in June, A Perfect Wedding, Limonade Tous Les Jours, Under Construction and a number of other plays in addition to his work inspired by Greek plays: Big Love, True Love, Orestes 2.0, Trojan Women A Love Story and others.  His plays have been performed at the Brooklyn Academy of Music, American Repertory Theatre, New York Theatre Workshop, the Public Theatre, Lincoln Center, the Humana Festival, Steppenwolf, and other places in the United States as well as in Berlin, Paris, Amsterdam, Brussels, Vienna, Istanbul and elsewhere.  His complete works are available on the internet at www.charlesmee.org.  His work is made possible by the support of Jeanne Donovan Fisher and Richard B. Fisher. 

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what chuck likes:

My own work begins with the belief that human beings are, as Aristotle said, social creatures—that we are the product not just of psychology, but also of history and of culture, that we often express our histories and cultures in ways even we are not conscious of, that the culture speaks through us, grabs us and throws us to the ground, cries out, silences us.

I don't write "political plays" in the usual sense of the term; but I write out of the belief that we are creatures of our history and culture and gender and politics—that our beings and actions arise from that complex of influences and forces and motivations, that our lives are more rich and complex than can be reduced to a single source of human motivation. 



So I try in my work to get past traditional forms of psychological realism, to bring into the frame of the plays material from history, philosophy, insanity, inattention, distractedness, judicial theory, sudden violent passion, lyricism, the National Enquirer, nostalgia, longing, aspiration, literary criticism, anguish, confusion, inability. 



I like plays that are not too neat, too finished, too presentable. My plays are broken, jagged, filled with sharp edges, filled with things that take sudden turns, careen into each other, smash up, veer off in sickening turns. That feels good to me. It feels like my life. It feels like the world.

And then I like to put this—with some sense of struggle remaining—into a classical form, a Greek form, or a beautiful dance theatre piece, or some other effort at civilization.