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COMPANIES
In the spring of 1996 three Tucson ladies, actress Laura Ann Herman, costume designer Juli Golder and all-around mom, Jane Bousel, united to form a new local theater company, the non-profit, classics oriented group which would come to be known as Quicksilver Productions, Inc. Things did not get off to a smooth start, but by summer of 1997 the troupe was planning to launch its first production, debuting on the Tucson art scene with a new rendition of Aristophane's Lysistrata, which was to be adapted and directed by Mrs. Bousel's younger son, Stuart, who had just finished his freshman year at Reed College. An English major with a yen for Greek mythology, he got the job after submitting a flier design that Ms. Herman found both classy and eye-catching. Sadly this was, however, the last point on which Mr. Bousel and Ms. Herman agreed, and as the play began its crawl towards opening night one artistic disagreement after another emerged between the two. Ironically, the final straw came back to the flier, on which Stuart wanted to list the names of the twenty cast members and Laura did not. Unbeknownst to her, the flier went to print, advertising began and reservations started to pour in. Laura demanded Stuart's departure from the helm of the show, but the cast wouldn't have it, and so it was Ms. Herman who moved on. The show opened to a full house and played, often with standing room only, for the rest of its two-week run to good reviews and general acclaim. The Arizona Daily Star even went so far as to call it "engagingly sexy" and thus Quicksilver Productions, Inc. was born. |
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The years of 1997-1998 proved to be the most active year in the company's existence. Lysistrata was followed by productions of Edward Albee's The Zoo Story and Christopher Durang's Mrs. Sorken and Wanda's Visit, all three directed by Robert Encila. Jasmine Koh, an actress who had appeared in a supporting role in Lysistrata, replaced Laura Ann Herman as the third board member of Quicksilver Productions, Inc., and that winter made her directing debut with the mystery-comedy The Butler Did It! This was followed by a faithful rendering of the George Bernard Shaw classic, Arms and the Man, directed by Debra Billman Weitzel. Reviews continued to be generally positive, with The Zoo Story garnering more accolades from The Arizona Daily Star and Arms and the Man receiving fine notices from The Tucson Weekly, particularly for the performances of DaleAnn Winnie and Dean Hepker, both of whom were to star in the next Bousel adapted and directed production, Aeschylus' Oresteia.
 Returning with another year of college under his belt, and an ever-growing love of Greek mythology, Stuart adapted the lengthy trilogy (Agamemnon, The Libation Bearers, The Furies) into a two-act ensemble piece. Armed with 22 actors and a whole lot of left over tunics from Lysistrata, Stuart brought the show to the Tucson Center for the Performing Arts, the first Quicksilver show to be produced in the converted cathedral, all the previous ones having been done at the Cabaret Theater in the Temple of Music & Art. Despite protests that a show of this nature would never go over in a popular theater venue (and a mediocre review in the Tucson Citizen), Oresteia was a certified success, outselling all previous Quicksilver shows (with the exception of Lysistrata) and receiving excellent reviews from both the Tucson Weekly and the  Arizona Daily Star, as well as landing Stuart an interview on KXCI radio and a ten minute documentary segment on "Arizona Illustrated". It is also where the name for Horror Unspeakable Productions was born, from the frequently misspoken line "I see before me unspeakable horror", pronounced as "horror unspeakable" by Alba Jaramillo, playing the prophetess Cassandra. Intense and heart-breaking, Ms. Jaramillo's performance was regarded as a highlight of the night (even by the one critic who didn't really like the show), despite the continuously garbled line. Stuart jokingly told a friend at the time, "You know, if I ever have my own production company, we'll be Horror Unspeakable Productions, because the whole point is that we'll do everything right, but go about it the wrong way." A few months later, it came to pass.
In January of 1999, Quicksilver produced a collection of original short plays under the collective title I Laughed, I Cried, I Shot the Person Next to Me. Horror Unspeakable Productions co-produced. With a cast of fifteen, the show was the brainchild of a late summer planning session between Stuart and three of his Oresteia cast members, Chris McCaleb, Anne Heintz and Werner James, and board-member/actress Jasmine Koh. All five wrote and directed their own portions of the evening's entertainment and a total of thirteen mini-plays were performed that night, including Werner James' monologue piece, Man Sitting By The Phone. The role of the man was played by Chris McCaleb, who later turned the play into a short film, The Trouble With Women, which he both directed and starred in. Stuart and Chris would later work together on another short film, Insomnia, which would feature Amanda Karam, another Quicksilver actress who made her debut with I Laughed, I Cried, I Shot the Person Next to Me.
 In the summer of 1999 Stuart and Quicksilver tackled yet another massive epic, Goethe's three hour dramatic poem, Faust Part One, translated by the American poet C.F. MacIntyre. Three acts, with over fifty speaking roles divided among twenty actors, the show was performed in full period costume (courtesy of Juli Golder) on a predominantly blank set accented with beautiful, color drenched lighting by Christine Hawkins. The actors doubled as scenery, playing everything from objects of furniture to the trees of a forest or the moving hedges of a garden maze. Though it received mediocre reviews, mostly objecting to the play's length more than its actual production values or the solid acting of its cast, the show still managed to attract reasonably sized crowds and make a small profit, and for a long time Stuart considered it his personal artistic high point- something he did for himself, more than for an audience, and among the most visually stunning examples of staging he was ever to produce.
January of 2000 saw the first full production of a full length play by Stuart Bousel and was also what he believed, at the time, to be his last show with Quicksilver Productions, Inc: The Exiled. Playing for a single weekend at the Tucson Center for the Performing Arts, which interestingly enough would be shut down a mere six months later for structural damage, The Exiled was largely ignored by the media of Tucson but proved that good fliers and a strong reputation could none-the-less fill a house. All three nights of the show were well attended and audiences were not just interested, but ecstatic. They were also, largely, noticeably younger than they had ever been before- a college crowd now showing up en-masse in a way they previously hadn't, and responding in a way that appealed to Stuart's progressively modern-oriented aesthetic. The days of Greek Mythology were over and so, for a time, was his association with Quicksilver Productions, Inc.
 The company didn't vanish. That summer they returned under Stuart's sister, Robin Bousel, who had been acting in Quicksilver Productions since The Butler Did It! She made her directorial debut with the Kaufman & Hart classic, You Can't Take It With You, and followed it up with another Durang play, 'Denity Crisis, which was paired with William Saroyan's Hello Out There!, directed by Dawn Acuna, and Moliere's The Forced Marriage, directed by long-time Quicksilver actor, stage manager and techie, Joshua Galyen.
 Spring of 2001 began with a long running (and favorably reviewed) production of the Charles Busch comedy, Psycho Beach Party, directed by Valerie Baugh, and summer of 2001 saw Robin directing A Midsummer Night's Dream. Both plays featured Stuart Bousel in supporting roles, but he didn't return full force to Quicksilver as a director until January of 2002, with a condensed, beautifully costumed rendering of Cornielle's Le Cid that sold out even the standing room for all three nights of its brief run. That spring he returned with yet one more epic, Nobel Prize winning poet Derek Walcott's stage adaptation of Homer's The Odyssey.
 Combining the best of the old days with his current aesthetic, The Odyssey ended up being a blend of classical theater and modern drama, with a dash of musical added by recording artist Namoli Brennet, under the name Brendan Kearney, who played and sang the role of the narrator as well as writting the music for ten songs composed of Walcott's lyrics, in addition to incidental music for the production. The sixteen member cast was, with the exception of Kearney, all between the ages of 21 and 26, and the central concept of the show was one of an imagined world or storytelling and make-believe, where a Cyclops could be represented by a melon stolen from a picnic, or mermaids by stuffed fish wielded by dancing girls in body stockings.  The costumes borrowed from every time period, ancient Greece to modern day fashions, with Telemachus in a pea coat and Penelope's hair in corn-rows. The set was composed of intentionally theatrical furniture painted in blues, golds and reds and adorned with sea-shells and pente stones. Though the show received no critical attention (it was competing with the traveling company of The Phantom of the Opera, as well as local productions of Two Gentleman of Verona, The Laramie Project and CVR), it managed to attract a sizeable following for the entirety of its two week run, and the box office broke even on what ultimately proved to be the most elaborate show Quicksilver would ever produce, though not its most expensive (that dubious honor is held by Arms and the Man). The show ran in spite of blackouts that occurred halfway through its first two performances (on both nights they finished the show using only the work lights), and ultimately, despite numerous technical problems, emerged as Stuart's favorite creation to date. Like Faust, it became about the art, in the end. And like Faust it still managed to find an audience.
 There was one more Quicksilver production after The Odyssey- this one written by Stuart and directed by Robin, the only example of the siblings collaborating outside of the traditional actor/director relationship. An early piece of Stuart's juvenilia, called A Random Act of Creation, it finished up in August of 2002. Shortly afterwards, the Bousel family (who had been the hub of Quicksilver from beginning to end), pulled up roots from Tucson and spread out across America. The age of Quicksilver Productions, Inc. was ended.
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