Last Life is the fightsical from Timothy Haskell (creator of Road House: The Stage Play) and Eric Sanders (The Wendigo), and stars Taimak (of the legendary fight film The Last Dragon).  The title is proving to be about as accurate a title as “Cher’s Final Farewell Tour” because this show has been revived more times than Britany Spear’s reputation  – and I couldn’t be happier for the whole creative team.

I was able to catch this show back in December when it played its completely sold-out run at the Brick Theatre’s Fight Fest (it went on to be one of the show that was extended) and it now returns for two weeks only at the Ohio Theatre  beginning March 4th.   Once again, I just have to mention how I was truly blown away by every aspect of this show … not only the flawless execution of the fight combat but just the remarkably unique development of every element.

Maggie McDonald and Jo-Anne Lee (photo by Ariella Goldstein)

See what other critics are saying: “If only theater producers intent on turning Broadway into a showcase for recycled movie ideas would have the nerve to hire director Timothy Haskell” –Village Voice “A deconstructed theatrical imagining of the action thriller in its purest form.  The glorious fighting and violence packs this fierce and beautiful production.” – InDigestmag.com “An R-Rated thrill.  Like watching ‘Kill Bill’ only live!” – iDanz Critix Corner On a side note, as Antonio reported recently, the Ohio Theatre will sadly be closing soon and New York City  will be losing one of its beloved theatre spaces.  But before it closes its doors the Ohio will ring with the smacks, punches and thwacks of Last Life, and I can’t imagine a finer salute.  So please, do yourself a favor and go see a terrfic show and pay tribute to this fine old landmark.  Doing so gives  the phrase “Last Life” a whole meta meaning … which I think is something that makes Timothy Haskell and Eric Sanders smile.  Or, knowing them … makes them roundhouse kick someone.  (Duck!)

Ohio Theatre (66 Wooster Street located between Spring and Broome) beginning March 4th and ending the 14th running Thursdays – Saturdays at 8 pm and Sundays at 7 pm. Tickets ($18) may be purchased online at www.smarttix.com or by calling 212.868.4444.  For more information please go to www.lastlifetheplay.com

Related Posts:

• Fight Fest: Wham, Bam, Thank You “Last Life”
• “Last Life” Gets In Two More Shots
• An Interview With Fight Fest Curator Timothy Haskell
• A Creation Story: An Interview With Eric Sanders And Dave Nuss – The Team Behind “Original Innocence”
• Creation Mythology, Rock Opera, BYOB – Just Another Night For Eric Sanders

So excited to report that if you didn’t get a chance to see Last Life you now have 2 more chances since the show has been extended! Make sure to get to one of the last 2 performances of this outrageous, strange, wonderful show!

Last Life
Presented by Big Time Action Theatre
Fight Directed by Rod Kinter
Directed by Timothy Haskell

In a borderless, burnt out world the few remaining inhabitants are at the end of a long, indefinable war. The survivors, not knowing what they are even fighting for, vow to destroy each other and wrest control for what remains. The new fightsical from the creator of Road House: The Stage Play starring Taimak (of the legendary fight film, The Last Dragon).

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Related Posts:

• An Interview With Fight Fest Curator Timothy Haskell
• Last Life Just Won’t Die – And That’s A Good Thing
• Fight Fest: Wham, Bam, Thank You “Last Life”
• VCR Love – Where Do You Go When You’re Alone?
• Wing-Man Soars (Amuse Bouche – NY Clown Theatre Festival)

I’ve been a fan of Eric Sanders’ ever since I interviewed him last year and then reviewed his staging of the classic horror story The Wendigo.  And while that first show certainly gave me a taste for how great his talents are, I was very excited about getting the chance to see Last Life - one of his original works.  Chatting with Timothy Haskell recently about Fight Fest only made me more eager to see not just a play, but an amalgam of story and combat, something they christened “the fightsical”.

Everything leading up to Last Life did not prepare me for what I actually experienced that night in the theatre; and while there are a lot of things one could say about the show, very little would do it justice.

Last Life is unlike any show I’ve ever seen. The concept itself is rather straightforward and, in fact, not completely unique.  The storyline is vague but clearly post-apocalyptic, and while the plot eventually emerges, it does so slowly, and not without a great deal of speculation between scenes (Who is that?  What exactly did that mean?  How are all these people connected?).  Watching Last Life is like being presented with one of those dot-to-dot coloring books you had as a kid, the one with about 100 dots so you can’t define the image at all as you look at the page.  And even the first few pencil strokes don’t make much sense.  But slowly, as you make those connections and those dots merge into something solid, the story of the picture comes forward and the image lets you know what it is.  At that moment you can’t wait to keep scanning the page for dot 101, 102, 103, because you know that soon you’ll know EVERYTHING.  And that’s how I felt at about scene 5 of Last Life. The lone threads begin to weave a story and I was slowly reeled in until it all makes a crazy kind of sense.

Last Life begins with a litany of verbal violence as Taimak Guarriello pounds through a gruesome list of torture … brutal without brutality, setting the scene for us.  Wherever this place is, it’s remote.  And it’s different.  And something’s turned people into violent kill-or-be-killed fighting machines.  Even among sisters (as we see later) there is little room for love but a lot of room for fighting.

Each fight in Last Life is approached … meaning it does not happen organically in the middle of a sentence, but rather it is stepped into by the characters who stand facing each other in grim determination before leaping into exciting, balletic and heart-stoppingly choreographed fights.  They slap, tug, pull, drag, trip each other, spin, lunge forward, swing wide, grunt and sweat.  They use fists, legs, ropes and – in one fearsome scene – knives.  From where I was sitting, these were REAL KNIVES.  Wieled by women.  I was never so proud of my gender, and so pleased with a playwright and a director.  Thanks Eric and Timothy … and thanks fight director Rod Kinter – for putting the shiny sharp objects into the hands of women.  And the rope too, for that matter.

Beyond the obvious staging it takes to get 2 people locked in mortal combat, there is another hint of something unnameable here.  While each Kinter-directed fight is happening the real is obviously real … but the fake is intentionally fake, and therefore more truthful.  For instance, while some punches obviously connect, when they do not the “thump” of supposed flesh on flesh is handled by Tim Haskell who stand to the right and strikes a melon with a satisfying whack.  Instead of blood pellets being hidden among clothing and popped at the right moments blood is exaggeratedly painted on, and the dyed liquid is left to fall and splatter at will.   When the characters cease their battle, the mess is then mopped away but the stained clothes remain.  As the show progresses the simple pants and shirts become human spin art.  It’s not so much comical as it is funny.  And I think the audience laughs in appreciation of the fact that no one involved with Last Life is trying to make you think something occurred when it actually didn’t.  It’s a sly wink to all that’s come before it, and we’re in on the joke.

To explain too much of the plot would be to give too much away, so I will only say that the ensemble does an amazing job, not just with the fight routines, but with truly pulling you into this world co-conceived by Eric Sanders and Timothy Haskell and Rod Kinter.  Taimak Guarriello, Aaron Haskell, Soomi Kim, Jo-Anne Lee, Maggie MacDonald, and Alyxx Wilson all invite you into this unique existence, and in the end when the last man is left standing the ramifications of what’s been going on this whole time provides a satisfying conclusion.  One more show to go … see it while you still can.  You’ll never see theatre combat the same again.

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Related Posts:

• Last Life Just Won’t Die – And That’s A Good Thing
• “Last Life” Gets In Two More Shots
• An Interview With Fight Fest Curator Timothy Haskell
• A Creation Story: An Interview With Eric Sanders And Dave Nuss – The Team Behind “Original Innocence”
• Creation Mythology, Rock Opera, BYOB – Just Another Night For Eric Sanders

Life isn’t all fun and games – every now and then you’ve gotta take a swing at someone … even if it’s only in your mind.  And face it, once you’re off the playground, it usually is all in your mind.  (Take THAT Mister Tourist with your 3 kids and your huge knapsack blocking the subway door!  YES, you CAN transfer for the #2 train at 14th. Now quit asking everyone and get outta my way!)  So what’s a gal to do?  Sure, you can go lose yourself in a movie with a multi-million dollar budget, but when you know all that punching and kicking and brawling is probably being handled by stunt doubles who know how to play to the right camera angles, it’s hard to really feel that emotional satisfaction.  You want to put yourself in a story where you can not only imagine yourself as the hero, sucker punching and bitch slapping your way through Act One, but where you can actually see guys falling to the ground and feel the vibration of it in your seat.  You want to go to a festival that fills the pow-wham-socko void that I know I’ve been feeling.

Well, you’re not the only one.  The Brick Theater, Inc. in association with Art Meets Commerce has heard your silent plea and starting December 1st they will be presenting Fight Fest – a rock ‘em sock ‘em good time that, in some opinions, gives this cheery holiday season exactly what it needs – a place where you can vicariously shake out that punch that’s been rolling up your fist all day.

I got a few minutes from Timothy Haskell — curator of the Festival as well as director of Last Life (which was written by Eric Sanders who gave me a scary good time last winter at The Wendigo).  You may have seen Timothy’s name plastered all over those Nightmare: Vampires posters this past Halloween season.

I couldn’t wait to ask Timothy some questions about what Fight Fest was all about … but first …

KTL: First of all, I just have to tell you that during the last few months, that poster for Nightmare Haunted House scared the hell out of me.  Before we get into Fight Fest, can you tell me a little bit about that project?

TH: Nightmare just completed its sixth year. It started in the LES in 2003 at CSV [The Clemente Soto Vélez Cultural & Educational Center] on Suffolk Street. This past season it moved to NOHO at 623 Broadway.  It is a big, theatrical, truly scary Halloween attraction.  40,000 people walked through it this past season.  Every year it is themed differently, this year it was Nightmare Vampires, next year will be Nightmare Superstitions.  It started off as a very small, very theatrical spook house that ran for only 7 days.  It has become increasingly popular and now runs for 37 days from the end of September through the first week of November.  The sets, props and special effects are much more lavish now, but the spirit of it is the same.

KTL: Fight Fest – what a great idea for a festival.  In the past year I’ve gotten a lot of head-shots in the press kits and actors are always featuring “stage combat” prominently on their resumes.  It’s to the point where I look for it first, now —  or when I see 2 people sparring I always think “ahh … Stage Combat”.  Is that what Fight Fest is celebrating?  Or is it really something else totally?

TH: People are incorporating stage combat into their productions more and more now because it adds a level of excitement to the theatre that audiences are craving.  I have always said that most people would rather spend their money on a bad action movie then a good play, so bringing some of those populist ideas to such an intimate setting brings in a  whole new audience that gets excited by such things.  It has become very important for actors to have these skills whether it be for the movies or for the stage, but the fight directors have been largely unrecognized.  These productions don’t exist without them.  This festival in many ways is a celebration of this new, electric, populist theatre that people are very excited about, as well as an opportunity to acknowledge all of the brilliant fight directors who are the driving forces behind them.  I know with my production, the very clever Rod Kinter offers so much more than kicks and punches to  a bunch of fights.  He is telling a story.  Sometimes with humor or sadness, or what have you but it is always incredibly visceral. I couldn’t do it without him, nor could any of these other productions without their fight directors.

KTL: You’re not only the curator of the Festival, but you’re directing one of the productions as well – Last Life (written by Eric Sanders).  So, chicken and egg style – which came first?  Did you want to do the show and then realized you could build a festival around shows like this one?  Or did you decide on the festival and then find Last Life just happen to fit the bill?

TH: Michael Gardner and I have been discussing doing a festival of this nature for a couple of years now. Along with the great folks at Vampire Cowboys we finally said “we are going to do this” and we did.  I decided I wanted to help mount a festival first, but that doesn’t mean that my idea for Last Life didn’t predate it.  I had this show in my head for awhile, but not necessarily to be done in some festival that i was going to produce.  It seemed like the right time to do it, of course, so here it is.

KTL: How hard has it been pulling double duty as curator as well as director?  It sounds like you’d never sleep while getting this all together.

TH: To be honest, this has been a slow burn.  Helping get the word out and building the audience for the fest has been more time consuming as of late of course, but the curating happened at the beginning of the summer, so it has never been too overwhelming.  I am very happy with the shows we have selected and perhaps the most overwhelming thing will be seeing them all because I absolutely plan on doing that.

KTL: Last Life is billed as a “Fightsical”.  First of all – LOVE that.  Just the word alone send rapid fire images through my brain – starting with the rumble in West Side Story.  So one has to ask – is a fightsical a fighting musical?

TH: It’s funny because I coined the phrase a number of years ago when I did Road House.  In fact David Cote from Time Out NY helped me narrow it down (I think I was also thinking brawlpera or brawlsical). at the time no one had really attempted to do a  production with quite so much fighting in it.  There were plays with battles, always have been, but none where the m/o of the production was fisticuffs.  Road House had so many fights in it that it felt like they were cropping up every 5 minutes or so, breaking the dialogue, bridging scenes and characters in very much the same way musical numbers do in a musical.  But in this there is no singing or dancing to be had.  Just bloody noses and broken bones.

Timothy Haskell and Taimak Guarriello (Photo by Ariella Goldstein)

KTL:  Ahhh.  I see.  Well, when you put it that way, it really makes sense.  So, this fightsical, Last Life,  features Taimak of “The Last Dragon”.  You’ve worked with him on Road House. Did that make him your natural number one choice as fightsical go-to guy?

TH: Not necessarily. I have done several shows since then, most recently with The Jaded Assassin which holds the record for the amount of fight choreography in it (over 50 minutes), but he was just right for this role.  He is very good in these parts, excellent actually, so in that sense I always consider him, but he still has to be right for the part and for his role in Last Life he absolutely is.

KTL: Do you think you’ve hit the wall with the “fightsical” concept … or do you have other mashups inside you that you’re just waiting for the right moment to unleash?

TH: Every time I do one it is completely different.  I am always exploring a different way to tell the story.  This time the style is very real.  This isn’t as much of a comedy as some of the plays I have done in the past.  I am also working with an incredible playwright in Eric Sanders who totally gets what I am trying to do here. This one is brutal and visceral and in-your-face.  We have challenged ourselves to create the realist fights seen on stage, nothing sensationalized.  I think it will prove to be quite shocking. People are ok with cartoonish fighting, and that is what I have mostly done until now, but this is truth in fighting.  No one wins a fight in this play who couldn’t win it in real life and we use that vocabulary to inform the moves.  I don’t always do fight plays. The last play I did was a two-fister, a very serious drama called Stitching. My next play will not be a fight play, either, but even within that genre there are an infinite number of possibilities.

KTL: Last Question – Bonus Round.  It’s an open question – you can tell me anything you want to tell me.  It can be more about Last Life, something about the Festival in general, or you can take this moment to plug your next project or your favorite cause.  The mic is all yours —

TH: I am working on a one-person show called Sex You (I’m Gonna) starring Nathan Phillips opening in January at Norwood.  Come and check it out if you want to see a play I direct with no fighting. But it is still brutal (brutally funny :-))

KTL: Well, I know what a busy man you are, so I really appreciate you giving us a little background on Fight Fest and Last Life.  Thanks for taking some time to answer my questions and good luck with the Festival!

For anyone interested in more information, we’ll be reviewing some of the Fight Fest shows (including Last Life) but you can find out more by checking out the official website for dates and show times.

Related Posts:

• “Last Life” Gets In Two More Shots
• Last Life Just Won’t Die – And That’s A Good Thing
• Fight Fest: Wham, Bam, Thank You “Last Life”
• Ye Elizabeths – 5 Things To Know About The Show Before You Go (2012 Planet Connections Festivity)
• VCR Love – Where Do You Go When You’re Alone?