Cyberducks Well-Incubated at the Ontological Village Voice Friday, May 8th 2009 "Clementine and the Cyber Ducks" at the Ontological's "Incubator" series Flannel, bodices, huge cell phones, and pick-axes are the rage in Clementine and the Cyber Ducks, a jaunty steampunk mashup of 1840s gold rush and 1990s dot-com boom, staged as part of the Ontological-Hysteric Theater’s Incubator program. Clementine (Emily Perkins), doomed heroine of that sad-sad song, moves to California with her protective father (Ben Beckley) and falls in love with a prospector of the digital sort (Edward Bauer)—a web-startup hopeful clad in baggy-jeaned nerd splendor. Three Pinteresque ducks, beaks hilariously fashioned from plastic visors, wander around menacing people with ominously delivered financial advice…and groping them. The pre-9/11 nostalgia is fleeting, however, for soon Clementine’s sister (Cara Francis), 19th-century pioneer stock to the core, comes kicking her way into the proceedings with a shotgun slung over her shoulder. She’s bitter at having been ditched back in the Southeast. Temporal disorientation is complete as Clementine’s boyfriend digs the newcomer’s “hearty,” practical sensibility and tries to enlist her in his venture. Thankfully, playwright Krista Knight, director Jess Chayes, and the Assembly theater ensemble have complete faith in every aspect of their wacked-out concept—their comedy stems from the organic merger of the bizarre elements on stage, not self-conscious jokes about the anachronism of it all. The play’s main problem is its brevity: clocking in at 1 hour and 15 minutes, it feels truncated, and the ending is abrupt. It could’ve used another twist or two. But like a speculative bubble, Cyber Ducks’s manic-absurd energy might be too hard to sustain for long. Details: Clementine and the Cyber Ducks By Krista Knight Ontological-Hysteric Theater 212-941-8911, through May 9   After the Goldrush By somepursuit Friday, May 8th 2009 Hey all! Just a really quick blast since I’m on borrowed time (ie, pay-to-compute). I just stepped out of the Ontological-Hysteric Theater at St. Mark’s Church in the East Village where I saw the play “Clementine and the Cyber Ducks”. It was presented by a group called The Assembly (once known as The American Story Project) and written by Krista Knight, a colleague of mine from the Performance Studies program. It was a breath of fresh air to see this type of production in a downtown theater. The writing reminded me a bit of Sarah Ruhl’s “Eurydice” (and maybe it’s because both Ms. Knight and Ms. Ruhl are Brown educated playwrights) meeting up and shaking hands with The Debate Society, with a bit of ensemble-like performing without any sense of self-important posturing that often can be found in NYC experimental theater. It was really a treat and I loved the ending. Moral of the story is a sweeter, less gruesome/less violent one than say the film “There Will Be Blood”, but they have similar sentiments towards America’s gold/dot-com/financial rush history. Scam artists are a dime a dozen in California in both 1849 and 1994. America’s beloved “entrepreneur” God (think anyone who has “made it”) is just possibly another crook who actually didn’t get caught with his pants down. Oh, and our heroine Clementine’s fate? (does she “make it”? does she strike it rich?)…well it’s precarious. Go see it soon before it’s gone!   A Fresh-Penned Crop MFA Playwrights Show Off Two Weeks' Worth of Crisp and Satiating Ink By Leila Haghighat In a whirl of imaginative performances over a two-week span, the Baldwin New Play Festival is a purely student-run production. The on-campus series features full-length plays and staged readings from students in the MFA Playwriting Program, a synergistic effort of the entire UCSD Theatre and Dance Department.  During the week leading up to showtime, the student playwrights and directors were caught in a final frenzy of production meetings and rehearsals. They come from all disciplines — from neuroscience to engineering and classical singing — but what unites them is a mutual appreciation for the visceral gusto of live theater. As “Clementine” playwright Krista Knight puts it: “When something is cool onstage it hits you in the gut. I don’t get that very often when I go to the movies. I don’t get that very often when I go to the theater, but when I do? Man. When it’s good, it’s good.” Krista Knight is never short of words — they adorn her hands like temporary tattoos, decorate her fridge and animate the to-do list of her personalized Google start page. “It’s like I’m expecting to be called up for script duty at any minute and need to be armed with play ideas at the ready,” Knight says. In a testament to her fascination with language, “Clementine and the Cyber Ducks” dabbles with the lyrics of its namesake. Revamping the practically canonized western folk ballad, “Clementine” welds the mid-1800s gold rush with 1990s Silicon Valley. But despite its dark examination of the American frontier’s transformation, the play maintains a buoyant spirit — in the frivolity of its bar fights, loose women and steam-punk chorus of deviant ducks. Main character Brian, a young computer programmer, opens the play with a recount of last night’s bar-scapade: He met a girl, Clementine — straight from 1849. With her crippled father in tow, Clementine has traveled out west to strike it rich, only to discover it a contemporary dot-com bubble. The ensuing romance between Brian and Clementine careens into a modern day, get-rich-quick scheme: to start up an Internet search engine. But to fund the operation, Clementine and Brian get into the bad habit of wrenching money from the helpless geezer.  In this vaudevillian Greek tragedy, the juxtaposition of time periods hints more profoundly at the similarities that interested its playwright from the start. “The song ‘Clementine’ has always struck me because of the disparity between this upbeat melody and the song’s internal narrative about this girl’s drowning,” Knight said. And it’s this kind of unexpected cohesion that defines Krista’s playwriting career. As an undergraduate at Brown University, she studied neuroscience, motivated by the “precise ways of describing the known world.” When asked about leaping across disciplines, she says, with the sophistication of a well-versed playwright, “What drew me to playwriting was the opportunity to use those same parameters, to create unique worlds. Every time I create a play, I create a world.” Read full article. Pat Launer: Spotlight on Theater, ‘Glass Menagerie’ By Pat Launer, SDNN “Clementine and the Cyber Ducks” has the most humor of the pieces, but it contains a dark underbelly, too. Set simultaneously in the present and past, Krista Knight’s cyber comedy takes off from the American western folk ballad, written in the 1880s, about the daughter of a “49er” (a miner in the 1849 California Gold Rush). He lost another Clementine (his wife) and then loses the younger incarnation, this time in a drowning accident. In some versions of the song (lyrics and alternate verses are handed out at the performance), the grieving father “kissed her little sister” and forgot his Clementine. There is a sister in Knight’s play, and she plays second fiddle to the darling Clementine, who steals from her father (the heirloom silver tea set) which she gives to her new boyfriend, a guy from the 21st century who’s planning to sink the money into Internet software schemes. And where do the ducks come in? Actually, they’re in the old song: “Drove she ducklings to the water/ Ev’ry morning just at nine.” Here, the ducks give her (bad) financial advice, and drive her into the water. Patté Award-winning director Adam Arian gives the piece the perfect comic spin, and makes the duck trio hilarious. Cate Campbell, a first year MFA student in acting, is delectable as Clementine, and as her wheelchair-bound father, the ever-stalwart Joel Gelman (graduating this month) strikes just the right note. First-year students Zachary Harrison and Anne Stella are energetic and engaging as the nearly-thwarted boyfriend and sister. It’s all kind of wacky, and lots of fun (when you’re not thinking about the darker elements about over-protective parents, jealous sibs, scheming investors and nefarious advisers). Read full article. Ducks are aware of the Web THE SHOW: Creating her own fairy tale, UCSD first-year MFA playwright Krista Knight wrote Clementine and the Cyber Ducks, directed by second-year MFA student Adam Arian and produced during the Department of Drama’s annual Baldwin New Play Festival. Most of the actors are current UCSD MFA students. THE STORY takes its inspiration from the text of Henry Randall Waite’s 1887 Gold Rush song, “Oh, My Darling Clementine,” which concerns a “miner forty niner and his daughter Clementine.” Clementine drowns in the river to which she drives the ducks each morning. Question: Who’s driving whom? Knight’s Clementine is a headstrong girl who lives in two centuries (TIME). In the first, she dwells, grudging and repressed, with her grieving, widowed father, Clive, the 49er; and in the second, or at least influenced by the second, she moves more free-spiritedly and inquisitively, as she interacts with Brian, whom she met in cyberspace. That phenomenon is never explained. It just is. Brian, who doesn’t seem stressed by the time warp, is teaching Clementine “web,” Clem tells dad when he asks. One supposes that web = ducks, as in feet; and hence, the trio of wacky ducks Knight weaves into the play as commentators and singers who belt and quack uproariously and gratingly. They would be downright annoying if they weren’t so daffy. Brian, a bit of a snake-oil salesman no matter where in time he is, needs venture capital to fund his web ideas, so Clementine filches dear old dad’s silver tea service, which Brian (the name apparently was unknown in 1887, so she pronounces it Bri-Anne) promptly hocks. He then gambles the capital away, hoping to create more capital. A subplot concerns the arrival of Clementine’s sister, the prim Regina. After a great deal of century hopping, the Ducks prove more nasty than cute and actually bring about Clementine’s death. Evidently she is lost and gone forever. THE PERFORMERS are Cate Campbell as Clementine; 2009 MFA graduate Joel J. Gelman as Clive; Zachary Harrison as Brian; Anne Stella as Regina; and Naquiya Ebrihim, Shamira Turner and Kathryn Willert as the Ducks. THE PRODUCTION is cleverly designed by David F. Weiner, who has worked with La Jolla Playhouse, San Diego Rep, Mo’olelo, Diversionary and Sledghammer, among others. THE LOCATION: The Arthur Wagner Theatre, UCSD, seen Saturday afternoon, April 25. NOTE: No obvious moral, just a clever premise, possibly still percolating, and as it stands a lot of fun. Quack. End of story. Look for more from this young playwright. Read full article.   BANGOR FESTIVAL FEATURES PLAY ABOUT EVOLUTION An orange rolls across the stage. So begins Apricot Supernovas by playwright Krista Knight, in which an obese boy constructs a model of the cosmos made of fruit. Asked why he chose fruit as his medium, the fat character - played by a thin actor - tells his babysitter, "It decays." With productions at Goshen College in 2007 and in Seattle's "Live Girls! Quickies Short Play Festival" in May 2008, Apricot Supernovas has already entered the canon of new American plays. It's one of 14 scripts listed on the resume of young, New-York based playwright Krista Knight....READ MORE Artscene Local playwright's work open Bus Barn Festival When Krista Knight moved from her Portola Valley home to Brown University in 2002, it was to study neuroscience. But somewhere along the way, she decided to dramatically alter her aproach for life...READ MORE Anaerobic Respiration Reviewed by Akia Squitieri Anaerobic Respiration opens with Pegan leading you through her step aerobics class, and then onward through her controlled but spiraling downward life...READ MORE "Three Chairs, Two Cubes" equals five standouts at PW By Danielle Cerny What happens when you give Brown students three chairs, two cubes and a pen?Apparently, you get an eclectic festival of original short plays...READ MORE