Haddon Givens Kime <<<<Original Music and Sound Design for Jasper Lake by John Kuntz

Original Music and Sound Design for

presents

Jasper Lake
by John Kuntz

DIRECTED by
Douglas Mercer

Workshop Premiere
October 7th - 17th, 2004

Kennedy Center ACTF performaces
March 21-21, 2005

SET DESIGN	.....	Eric Allgeier
LIGHTING DESIGN	.....	Eric Larson
COSTUME DESIGN	.....	Carlos Romay
ORIGINAL MUSIC and SOUND DESIGN	.....	Haddon Kime

CAST
Sarah Abrams, Eric Gould, Amanda Sywak, Edouard Tournier, Sharon Mason, Bill Molnar, Jennifer Burke, and William Gardiner.

Listening Station

MP3 - (coming soon)

Sound Advice

After working with Johnny Kuntz (the actor) as Scapin, I jumped at the chance to work with John Kuntz (the playwright.) at Boston Playwrights Theater.

I caught this production in an early incarnation at the Fringe festival in NYC. I had this in mind going into this production. It turned out to be a mistake to do this. Even though both shows shared the same director, the addition of two characters and a complete recasting changed the show so much that when I finally made it to the run through before tech I realized that I had to completely re-concieve my approach to this show. Where the NYC cast had played the universe of Jasper Lake as more of a cerebreal and emotional place we all go to at times in the depths of our souls, the Boston cast played it as more of a physical place you can get to off of Route 3A.

Stripping it down turned out to be just the thing to do.

After Scapin and Approaching Moomtaj, I am also at the moment a bit caught up in "the more layers the better" mentality that can really skew the vision of a score at times. Sometimes it's really NOT necessary to score a scene with anything more than a piano. It's just enough. There's also the emotion that comes with something that's really that naked. Same with the sound design. When I caught the FringeNYC production I found the plays opening sound effect, someone being strangled and drowned, to be missing something. So I asked my lovely fiancee Katie to do me a favor, and splash around in our bathtub, choking and gagging on the water as best she could. Yes, she really loves me. I ended up with a great female drowning effect when I layered the best of Katie's performaces with some deep underwater guggling and some various splashes and waves, oh yeah and a few female screams played in reverse.

This ended up being too much. Far too much. The director had me strip it down to just Katie, and turn it up. It worked great.

Lessons learned...for now.

KENNEDY CENTER 2005
This show went on to win Johnny a bunch of awards at the Kennedy Center college theater festival. They flew us all down there to do a remount, and it went off without a hitch. I love Boston Playwrights Theater!

Reviews

Floating Anxiety
John Kuntz's beckoning Jasper Lake
BY CAROLYN CLAY

...New York based director Douglas Mercer helms an at once formal and surreal staging that, abetted by Haddon Kime's sound design, maintains the uncomfortable feeling of the play even when Jennifer Burke's Deb is behaving like a mad cheerleader in a morgue. Although funny, this cartoon bull with a china collection is overwritten and overplayed given the enigmatic oddness of what else is in the water. Because Jasper Lake has been entered in the Kennedy Center American College Theater Festival (Kuntz is a master's candidate in BU's graduate playwriting program as well as a Huntington Playwriting Fellow), the piece had to be cast with non-Equity actors. They acquit themselves well, especially BU senior acting major Amanda Sywak, who as Jennifer mixes ache into pert arbitrariness as surely as her precocious character might concoct a cocktail.

Read the rest of this review HERE

Through A Pond Darkly
Reviewed by Beverly Creasey

John "Ingmar Bergman" Kuntz has written a murky mystery about a lake which inspires the worst in human behavior. JASPER LAKE may look like paradise to an outsider but, like Peyton Place just up the road a piece, it would seem to provoke murder, incest, suicide, adultery and racism. Everything but the kitchen sink pops up in Kuntzís tragi-comic (not enough of the comic for my taste) slice of affluent Americana.

I stand corrected. The kitchen sink stands center stage: Actually, it's a gleaming porcelain tub in Eric Allgeirís spare set. The creepy goings-on are intriguing but I wasnít sure who murdered whom or even if there was a murder. I even assumed (incorrectly?) that the teenage girl in the tub was the grownup with slashed wrists. Maybe it's a memory play and everyone is already dead, a la George Romero. Maybe Kuntz wants to keep us in the dark.

Douglas Mercer's cast keeps the mystery afloat, with standout performances from Amanda Sywak and Eduoard Tournier as the troubled teens and from Eric Gould as the hilarious hitchhiker Sarah Abrams adopts as a soulmate. Haddon Kime's gushes, gurgles and gasps gave me the chills and Kuntz's sadistic view of lake shore living will have me thinking twice about where to vacation next summer.