Fish Men Actor Talks About Chess Hustlers

Chess blog for latest chess news and chess trivia (c) Alexandra Kosteniuk, 2012

Hi everyone,

Remember the recent post we put up about a nice presentation - Fish Men? 

Fish Men Chess Play - Humour, Pathos, and Super Story!

Here is an interview with its protagonist and his take on the chess hustlers of Washington Park!
 

In “Fish Men,” the second of three world premieres at the Goodman produced in partnership with the Latino troupe TeatroVista, by Teatro resident playwright (and US Chess Federation Grand Master) Candido Tirado, Cantor plays Stuart, a successful real-estate broker who considers himself part of the scene at the park.

Though the chess hustlers consider him just another “fish” or mark, one of the two meanings of the show’s title, along with a reference to mythical figures from the Mayan Book of the Dead, who come down to Earth to redeem and/or punish the wicked.

Preceding the action of the play, which unfolds in real time on a set recreating the gaming tables in Washington Square, the chess hustlers have savagely fleeced a sucker who was unstable enough to allow himself to be taken for everything he owns — and Stuart, as self-appointed moral arbiter, takes them to task. Soon after, a young half-Mayan named Rey Reyes (Raul Castillo) arrives. A survivor of genocide in Guatemala, he seems at first to be just another fish but eventually reveals a vengeful agenda of his own.

Who’s on top

“One of the themes in the play is a set of concentric circles, micro to macro, about the way exploitation and brutality and domination plays out in the world,” said Cantor, an Evanston resident and assistant professor of acting at Northwestern University. “The most micro is the game of chess itself, which can be very aggressive. Then you have the community in the park, with its dominators and dominated. Then you have political domination, all the way up to using genocide to oppress a population.”

The play also concerns itself, he said, with revealing the motivations driving
the various characters,
from the chess hustlers, to the guys hanging out in the park like his character (“after all my sanctimoniousness, it’s revealed that I’m a bit of a slumlord”), to a World War II Holocaust survivor (Howard Witt), who has taken an oath never to play chess again, for mysterious reasons, and who forms an attachment to the young Guatemalan survivor.

If none of that sounds like a laugh riot, “Fish Men” may surprise you, according to Cantor.

“It might sound grim, but it’s also very funny,” he said. “There’s a lively, free-spirited, humorous street culture among the hustlers that’s really enjoyable. Tough things are going on in the play, but it’s fun and colorful and kind of hilarious at the same time.”

Read the full interview here.

From Alexandra Kosteniuk's
www.chessblog.com
Also see her personal blog at
www.chessqueen.com

Theatre, love and chess - the great combination!

Chess blog for latest chess news and chess trivia (c) Alexandra Kosteniuk, 2012

Hi everyone,

There is another play that revolves around chess and love.

Fijian boy meets English girl over a game of chess and begin an unlikely love affair.

 

Artistic director Nina Nawalowalo's parents' first meeting in Wellington in the 1950s is the premise for The Conch theatre company's new play Masi.

Her father was a Fijian high chief from the island of Kadavu and her mother the daughter of Cambridge-educated public schoolmasters.

The pair met at the Wellington Chess Club and their young romance was captured in photographs by then budding photographer Ans Westra – her mother's flatmate.

"It was quite unusual in the 1950s, a Pacific Island man marrying an English woman. Also the story is very elemental, because a lot of New Zealanders' parents or grandparents came from somewhere else. So it's a meeting of different cultures in that way."

A story close to her heart, Nawalowalo has been developing the play for several years. Her father has since died and her mother has been battling dementia.

"When one loses their parents, these memories which are linked to something in the past become so important. It's something everybody goes through, losing things in that way."

Read the full story here.

From Alexandra Kosteniuk's
www.chessblog.com
Also see her personal blog at
www.chessqueen.com

Understanding chess game of life!

Chess blog for latest chess news and chess trivia (c) Alexandra Kosteniuk, 2011


Hello everyone,


Here is a very interesting play - all about understanding life through chess!

In 'Beautiful Problems', actors become chess pieces, which serves as a reminder that in life, the next move is ours to make.

The play 'Beautiful Problems' is by Vancouver playwright Andrew Laurenson who started to learn chess as a way to understand an increasingly complex world. He never got any good at it. But the skills he did glean helped him get a better grasp on a rapidly changing society, and now he wants to take you inside that game in a play titled 'Beautiful Problems'.

"We've actually tried to make the play not really about chess, we're trying to use it more as inspiration for competition, complexity and our relationship to technology is part of it as well. Really complexity and competition are the two main themes," says Laurenson, artistic director of Radix Theatre, which is staging the play.

'Beautiful Problem's follows one man's personal journey into learning what it means to take responsibility for his life. The story is inspired by one of the most famous chess games of all time: The 1997 Man versus Machine showdown in which Garry Kasparov, thought by many to be the best chess player in history, lost a match to Deep Blue, an IBM supercomputer. It was considered a watershed moment in technological advancement, the humiliating defeat spelling doom for mankind. But the more Laurenson thought about it, the more he realized the Kasparov match -and his own games -weren't so much a competition against machine, but a showdown against man and beyond that, himself.

"It was as if Garry was playing several other people at the same time through this program called Deep Blue so it became man vs. man. But beyond that it became man vs. himself because Garry fell into some sort of paranoid thinking, he became bitter, he also became tired and distracted. He became his own enemy in the end because he made these really basic mistakes and he was not able to play what he was capable of."

That realization was instructive to Laurenson's own personal journey and became the topic of exploration for Beautiful Problems, which is largely autobiographical.

"You can view the piece as entering into the main character, his name is Andrew, entering into his mind and all his thinking about the situation that he's in as a modern human being in a North American society. And it's his thinking brought to life and it's brought to life through different characters," explains actor Lesley Ewen, one of four main actors in the play.

In part of the play, the actors become chess pieces in Andrew's world. It's a reminder that in the game of life, even one that's increasingly dependent on technology, the next move is still ours to make.

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From Alexandra Kosteniuk's

www.chessblog.com

Also see her personal blog at

www.chessqueen.com