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SHERRI ALLEN
NEWS
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BIO | NEWS | RESUME | DIRECTING | TEACHING | REGIONAL THEATRE | SAN DIEGO THEATRE | SHAKESPEARE | TYA | COLLEGE THEATRE | MISCELLANEOUS | TELEVISION | REVIEWS | DEMO VIDEOS | HEADSHOTS | CONTACT
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UPCOMING
RECENT & PAST NEWS
 SAN DIEGO READER La Jolla Playhouse Teaching Artist Sherri Allen is quoted in THE SAN DIEGO READER cover
story entitled "Stay Awake for the Ten O'Clock Show." (Click image to read the full story.)
[Excerpt from
San Diego Reader cover story refers to 33 Variations, written and directed by Moises Kaufman, at La
Jolla Playhouse] After the play, as my wife and I wandered out through the lobby toward the evening dark, a woman draped
in swaths of black fabric called out, “There will be a postshow outside in five minutes!” About six people gathered
to see what was what. When the woman — La Jolla Playhouse teaching artist Sherri Allen — emerged
to join us, she began running down a list of questions and making notes of our answers. An example: “What did you think the play was about?” Person A: “Finding the transcendent virtue in everyday things —
Beethoven in the beer-hall waltz, and the mother and her daughter, who is content to be ordinary.” Allen ran down the list, her pen twitching away over the clipboard. “Were there any particular scenes
that will stay with you? Were there any points that weren’t clear? What did you think of the nudity? What was done particularly
well?” Then she asked for general feedback. Person B: “I thought the first act was very slow — it didn’t
go from emotional beat to emotional beat. Instead, it went from intellectual point to intellectual point.” And so on. Toward the end, Allen pulled back the curtain a bit: “The play, from the playwright’s
point of view, is about obsession. Beethoven’s obsession with the waltz, and Katherine’s obsession with finding
out why he was obsessed with it — it’s her life’s work. The daughter is the metaphor for the secondhand
waltz. Katherine’s daughter does not meet her expectations because Katherine knows what she wants and is very driven.
She’s devoted her whole life to one thing, and her daughter wants to try out different things.” Person B: “But the mother is not obsessed with the daughter.” Allen: “No, she’s obsessed with her own life’s work
— she neglects her daughter.” Person B: “How does one illuminate the other if she’s not
obsessed with her daughter?” Woman: “The daughter craves the mother’s approval. She
feels she’s never met her mother’s expectations.” Person A: “Beethoven is obsessed with the minor work. But Mom is
not obsessed with the parallel minor work, which is the daughter. That’s why Person B is saying that the one doesn’t
illuminate the other, because Beethoven is obsessed with the waltz, but Mom is obsessed with Beethoven.” Person B: “If Mom was obsessed with making the daughter into what
she wanted the daughter to be, maybe we would be able to make that emotional connection between the two more easily.” Woman: “That’s interesting. No one I know of has made
that observation. I’m sure that will be very fascinating to the dramaturge and to the playwright himself.” “The audience feedback always got back to me,” says Kaufman. “Those were my questions.
I put it all in my head. When you begin to hear over and over that something is fantastic, you know that that part is working
really well. When you hear over and over that there is confusion around a character, you had better look at that character.
It’s not that specific comments made a difference, but I read and studied everything. The whole ending of the play changed
between the second and third preview in La Jolla. That was based on feedback from both the audience and the collaborators.”
The audience joins in the creation of narrative; the art becomes the starting point for a kind of conversation.
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