New Play Blog

Inside Rehearsal: "The Wrestling Patient" - part 4

photo: Will Lyman (Spier), Anne Gottlieb (Etty), wrestling

posted by Kirk Lynn -

I’ve been thinking a lot today about the relationship between certainty and responsibility.

The responsibility of each member of the cast and crew shifts as we become more certain about what the play is.

My responsibility is waning:

There was a time when I was trying to imagine the entire play as a talkback with the audience.  The audience would enter the theatre and we would ask them if they had any questions about Etty Hillesum.  If someone did, we would perform the scene which we thought best answered the question.

Then there was a time when I was trying to frame the play as a vaudeville sketch, like the performances that took place at the cabaret inside Westerbork.  The idea was, as the play made its way forward through the story, the audience would come to realize the context of the performance—and the play and the audience would meet when Etty, herself, arrived at the cabaret in Westerbork.

There was a time when I was trying to imagine the play as the story of all the people who were impacted by Etty.  The people to whom she gave hope, the survivors who knew her.  This version of the play is turning into its own project entitled “the Gingerbread Man.”  It takes as its starting point people like Osias Korman.  Osias new Etty in Westerbork and after the war helped reunite Jewish children and their families.  The children often had no idea they were Jewish or that they had another family.  It’s going to be produced at the University of Texas next year.  Katie’s directing.

In those times when there was the greatest uncertainty about the play, my responsibility was the greatest.  Most of the designers had no responsibility in those times.  This was years ago; they probably weren’t even hired.  Most of the actors had very little responsibility.  We held readings and we learned a great deal from the actors, but I don’t think they felt a lot of pressure.

Now things are different.  The increase in certainty creates new responsibilities.

The designers have to turn the script into a world.  They have to build things.  It takes me five minutes to write a description of a tree on the stage.  It takes me thirty seconds to cut it.  It takes hours of planning and organizing and building for the designers to make it happen.  Their responsibility is likely at its peak right now.  They are creating and visioning and telling me what isn’t going to work and how to improve the descriptions and hints that live in the script. 

The actors are also getting more responsibility.  They have to turn lines into characters.  They have to memorize and explore.  They have to learn blocking and fight choreography (there is, of course, wrestling in the The Wrestling Patient).  And their responsibility will carry on beyond my own.  The actors are the ambassadors between the play and the audience.  Once the play is running, I think the actors hold the majority of the responsibility.

And The Wrestling Patient is a collaboration, that means some of the responsibilities are shared.  The conceiver of the entire project, Anne Gottlieb, and the director, Katie Pearl, have helped me shoulder the writer’s responsibilities in ways I can’t repay.  They have written some and helped shape outlines, and meticulously noted draft after draft.  I have no interest in or capacity for acting along with them or directing.  So the responsibilities for the collaboration are shifting, too.  Anne Gottlieb and Katie Pearl have had a more constant level of responsibility than almost anyone else.

And then there’s stage management.  Victoria Coady and Jessica Stansfield.  Stage Managers, once they are hired, have the same amount of responsibility regardless of the amount of certainty as far as I can tell.  If we can’t decide whether she’s holding a handkerchief or a scarf, stage management has to have both available.  Once we decide, stage management needs to know when it comes on, where it lives before and after, and they need to make sure it gets there every night.

Inside Rehearsal: "The Wrestling Patient" - part 3

photo of Kirk Lynn (tired playwright) and Jessica Stansfield, Assistant Stage Manager

posted by Kirk Lynn -

I love to cut.

When we started the week the script was 226 pages and it ran about 3 hours with an intermission. We want it to be about 200 pages and run 2:30 with an intermission.

In two days I have cut about eight pages and it seems like nobody likes it. I cut everybody’s favorite line.

But it makes sense. If these early run-thrus are a time for actors and directors to rehearse their understanding of the script, then changes and cuts disrupt that nascent understanding.

And forget the non-fictional people in a room. Imagine how the characters feel. They only have 226 pages of life. If you want to cut away an eight of that, that hurts… I am 36 years old, if someone cut out an eighth of my life that would be 4.5 years… I don’t want to give that up…

Here are some of my favorite lines we’ve cut this week:

Holland is a good place to live.
Where else could I have met
so many remarkable Dutchmen and women?

I’m not a lumberjack, Etty.
I’m not here to take anything from you.

We can’t let our love become
some sort of ransom note:
I must have this and this,
or else I refuse to go on!

I also searched the script for every utterance of the phrase, “I’m sorry.” I had to cut sixteen of twenty!

Inside Rehearsal: "The Wrestling Patient" - part 2

photo of Anne Gottlieb (Etty), Will Lyman (Spier), Katie Pearl (Director)

posted by Kirk Lynn -

Rehearsal is the process by which playwrights make themselves less and less useful to their plays.

It happens through words.  The actors and directors ask questions.  But more importantly, the company rehearses its understanding of the script.

We had a great full day of rehearsal yesterday.  Katie Pearl led everyone through the first act, inviting the actors to experiment with the scenes.  Anne Gottlieb and Will Lyman discovered some nice moments around the palm reading.  Will plays Julius Spier, a Jungian Analyst and Palm-reader who becomes a teacher to Etty Hillesum.  Spier helps Etty experience this radical awakening in her soul—just as World War II comes to destroy life in Amsterdam as she knows it.  Because this is the early days of psychiatry, the palm-reading seems like almost a kind of marketing or packaging for these really new ideas about the psyche.  And palm-reading is really sexy.  Try it on someone.  Give me your hand.  I’m going to trace this line.  This is the line of the heart.  Yowza!

Anne also discovered something beautiful about Etty’s state of mind at the beginning of the play.  Before Etty meets Spier, she’s desperate to find a new way to live and if she can’t she’s ready to kill herself.  It’s in this state that The Wrecking Ball, played by Will McGarrahan, shows up, to offer Etty a choice.  Katie, Anne and Will worked this scene over pretty hard.  We tried screaming.  Throwing books.  Taking pills.  Smoking cigarettes.  (It looked like a short history of my twenties.)

We ended the night with some really tough work between Etty and her mother Riva, played by Marya Lowry.  Riva came to Amsterdam because she was fleeing the pogroms in Russia.  When the Germans start taking over Amsterdam, Riva has a real sense of how dangerous this all is.  As a consequence, Riva is really tough on her daughter.  She doesn’t think all this psychiatry and palm-reading is such a good idea.  The actors and Katie had questions about the script but the progress was made through getting the scene up on its feet and wrestling with it.

I feel like I learned today that sometimes I can be most helpful as a playwright by quietly allowing a director like Katie Pearl and actors like Anne Gottlieb, Marya Lowry, Will Lyman, and Will McGarrahan to make the script their own.  They did some really great work.  If you ever get a chance to watch Katie or Anne or any of these actors rehearse—jump at it, it’s a useful way to study a script.

Inside Rehearsal: "The Wrestling Patient"

"The Wrestling Patient" by Kirk Lynn in collaboration with Anne Gottlieb and Katie Pearl is a finalist in the Outstanding New American Play category.  It will have its world premiere March 27 - April 11, 2009 at SpeakEasy Stage Company (Boston, MA) in a co-production with Boston Playwrights’ Theatre and FortyMagnolias Productions.

posted by Kirk Lynn -

One of my favorite moments of the first rehearsals is looking at the model.  The set for the Wrestling Patient is designed by Richard Chambers.  It’s beautiful and we were all excited about it.  Of course, there are all sorts of caveats and discussions going on—that’s not quite the color—what will it look like under the lights?—etc.  But the basic gift of a model is to make its ideas available for the company’s consideration.  You may not be able to tell, but the set is established on top of a reverse rake—the idea is to shift the audience’s perspective and give the actors just a little resistance with which to work.  Some of the platforms and the steps are removable so we can take the set apart and scatter it around, to allow the feeling that the whole world is falling apart as the war advances.  And the color treatment, whatever it will be, is intended to allow the set to disappear in the right light and really give the costumes and the actors a chance to stand out.  It’s a generous set that lives up to the textual demands of representing Amsterdam, the Nazi transit camp at Westerbork, and, more or less, the inside of Etty Hillesum’s mind—while at the same time giving the focus over to the actors and the action.

I think there should be more dioramas in our lives.  Wouldn’t it be fun to show up for a job interview with a little model of the office and a little doll representing you and you could show your boss-to-be what your 30 years at the corporation would be like?  Or to bring a diorama along for a first date and show what’s going to happen over the course of the evening.  I think it would be great if the playwright could come into the first day of rehearsal with a tiny little postage stamp-sized script with only enough room on each page to print, “sad” or “happy” and then talk the company through the basic concept of what the play is going to be like when the real thing is built.

Of course, the first rehearsal draft of the script is a model.  The play will be radically different from the way we conceive of it now.  We have to carry our caveats and discussions about the characters and the action through the rehearsal process.  And in the specific case of the Wrestling Patient, we have to cut about 30 minutes off the length, and sharpen the story up a little.  The script is a model—but it gets fully built and then we work on full size parts and pieces.  We cut them back.  We remove some.  We change the color of some scenes without changing any of the structure.  There’s a lot of work to be done.  That’s why I have to stop blogging and start playwriting.  So I can begin remodeling the script…

photo: Paul Daigneault of SpeakEasy Stage Company, Elise Manning of Forty Magnolias, Chip Schoonmaker the costume designer in the background, and Kirk Lynn.

photo: Katie Pearl, the director

Here's a short documentary tracing Etty’s footsteps in Europe and the process of developing this play--

New Play Developers and Critics

by David Dower

The Denver Post critic John Moore seems to have been surprised and stung by the panel discussion at Denver's New Play Summit.

Are you?

Workshop Video: "Pastures of Heaven" from Cal Shakes / Octavio Solis

posted by the Distinguished New Play Development Project "Pastures of Heaven":

Click here for the WORKSHOP VIDEO

In December, actors from Cal Shakes and Word for Word gathered in our West Berkeley rehearsal hall to mount four of the stories Octavio Solis is adapting from John Steinbeck's "The Pastures of Heaven", developed under the auspices of our New Works/New Communities program, and currently slated to premiere during our 2010 Main Stage season.

Finalist: Aaron Jefferis / The Old Globe Theatre's KINGDOM

"Kingdom" from Aaron Jefferis / The Old Globe Theatre (San Diego, CA) is a Distinguished New Play Development Project Finalist.  Performances are happening right now through February 22. Click here for the Old Globe's site.

Here's a video trailer about the project --

And this is what it's about: "Kingdom" fuses hip-hop and rock music to create a truly original score that chronicles the lives of Andres and Juan, two inner city friends who join the Latin King and Queen Nation searching for honor, power and respect. When tragedy upends their lives, the struggle for leadership of the Nation tears the two friends apart with devastating results. Inspired by true stories of gang culture, "Kingdom" is a groundbreaking new musical that gives audiences a unique view into the world of two young men caught in a cycle of violence—helping to understand their lives, their hopes, their struggles, and the choices they make.
Christian Amaraut “Male Ensemble,” Cedric Leiba, Jr. as “Juan” and Kyle Beltran as “Andres” in The Old Globe’s production of KINGDOM, book and lyrics by Aaron Jafferis, music by Ian Williams, directed by Ron Daniels, playing at Lincoln High February 14 – February 15 and in the Old Globe Theatre February 19 – February 22; photo by Craig Schwartz.

Interview: Polly Carl of The Playwrights' Center

Here is the first in a series of interviews that will be devoted to people involved in the new play development sector. First up: Polly Carl, Producing Artistic Director of The Playwrights' Center in Minneapolis, MN

Vijay Mathew: What is the artistic process of The Playwrights' Center?

Polly Carl: The majority of the writers that we work with come to us through submission processes and through a panel process, adjudicated by some of the top artistic minds in the field. So the playwrights that we work with through our fellowships and through our core writer program are all playwrights who are being identified in the field as people with varying levels of promise and expertise. Some are emerging, some are experienced; we are not just a home for emerging writers but certainly we work a lot with emerging writers.

We try to bring an aesthetic diversity and a diversity of writers to our programming. But it’s a panel process that identifies the writers that we work with and a panel that selects writers who either have great experience or show a lot of promise. I think the key to understanding our process is to understand that our process is really always driven by the playwright. The number of playwrights that we work with in any given year is around fifty--between our core writer program and our fellowships--which means we usually have fifty different kinds of development workshops. Our process is both tested and flexible.

Sometimes a play has a fairly standard development process. If the writer has a play, the writer suggests a director they want to work with, chooses a dramaturg they want to work with, and we fly people in, we house them, we pay every artist that comes in, and we usually offer somewhere between fifteen and thirty hours of workshop time. We now emphasize that designers come in early to the process, so that writers can realize elements like sound and lights as early as possible to understand the entire world of the play and not just the language.

A Must-See from the Playwrights' Center, MN

Wow... The Playwrights' Center in Minneapolis has an incredible online presence in service to playwrights and new play development both locally and nationally. We highly recommend that you poke around their site, and if you're a playwright become a member and get involved asap -- it's a national clearinghouse of opportunity.  As you'll see from previous posts, The Playwrights' Center was involved in a recent development step for Aditi Kapil / The Lark Play Development Center's "Agnes Under the Big Top" which is one of the selections for the Distinguished New Play Development Project category. 

Here's an excerpt from The Playwrights' Center's beautifully designed strategic plan which is actually available as a set of printed 'playing cards'.  What a great way to make the mission concrete and authentic for the organization and the artists it serves. Click on the image for the full set.

Finalist Playwright: Christina Anderson on INKED BABY

posted by Christian Anderson whose "Inked Baby" at Playwrights Horizons (NYC) is a finalist project in the Outstanding New American Play category. The World Premiere production starts March 5 and runs through April 5, 2009. Here's her bio: CHRISTINA ANDERSON was born and raised in Kansas City, Kansas. Her work has appeared at Ars Nova, Mark Taper Forum, The Coterie Theater, Rites and Reason, The Public Theater, Horizon Theater, and the Playwrights' Center. Awards and honors include a Susan Smith Blackburn nomination (2007), Lorraine Hansberry Award (American College Theater Festival 2004), Van Lier Playwriting Fellowship (New Dramatists 2005-06), Wasserstein Prize nomination (Dramatists Guild 2006), and Lucille Lortel Fellowship (Brown University 2007). American Theater magazine selected Christina as one of fifteen up-and-coming artists "whose work will be transforming America's stages for decades to come."

I started writing short plays (I use that term loosely) when I was fifteen. Twice a month I attended a playwriting workshop for high school students. I fell in love with spoken word and performed what I wrote. Performing language and text taught me how to hear the musicality within/between/around words. I took those language lessons and segued to writing “traditional” plays as an undergrad at Brown University. My attempts were rooted in Aristotle’s elements. I was devoted to learning the rules of storytelling, playwriting. I wrote plays, hoping to get it right—not entirely sure what “it” was or when “it” might be “right.” My senior year, I took Paula Vogel’s workshop, which challenged me to mix, break, investigate, interpret the rules, the elements. I didn’t know how to do it, but I was excited by the possibilities. A few years later, in the fall of 2007, I returned to Brown for my M.F.A. in playwriting. It was there that I started the first draft of Inked Baby.

This play grew out of a single intention:  write with unbridled control. My goal seemed like an oxymoron, but it felt right. I decided to seek heightened theatrical elements that could live in a naturalistic play world. For me, that meant creating a stylized dramatic structure while maintaining fully developed characters. Gloria, Greer, and Lena’s desires, flaws, wants, and conflicts anchor the play, allowing for what I hoped to be an acceptance of (and belief in?) the unfamiliar.

My thematic focus started with a general interest in “the body” and “the land.” As a Black female playwright most of my dramatic questions spring from Black culture, so I specified an interest in “the Black body.” My early stages of research dug up the term “environmental racism.” Generally speaking, it identifies communities of color that suffer from high levels of pollution. The reasons why have been linked to financial, political, and social restraints. (For example, polluting industries intentionally siting land that is occupied by nearby communities of color. The aforementioned reasons could apply to this instance.) The information I gathered held a wealth of dramatic questions: how does history, legacy manifest through the body? What happens when the places we live, work, love hurt us? How would we mend ourselves?

With these questions in mind, I came up with the story:

A husband and wife, Greer and Gloria, approach her baby sister, Lena, to carry a child for them. Gloria has miscarried twice. Holding deep distrust for “artificial” methods that have failed them, they return to a natural method—Greer and Lena have sex. Lena’s pregnancy serves as the play’s timer. This tension is overshadowed when the land and the body collide. Gloria, Greer, and Lena struggle to stay connected to themselves and each other as everything changes.

Answering the questions “what changes?” and “how?” spoke to the environmental element I wrote into the play. It also spoke to the push-and-pull movement in the piece. I intentionally pulled characters from one situation and placed them in another; each situation called for a choice to be made that further complicated the journey.

Considering my background as a writer, working on Inked Baby held a few (un)familiar challenges for me. I sought a style beyond the Aristotelian structure I worked with in college. I wanted to keep the musicality of language. I wanted to pursue a heightened theatricality. And I wanted to tell a good story.

About a year before I started this play, I was living in NYC doing temp work. Long hours in offices pressured me to change my situation. I decided to push aside doubt and fear and fully commit to writing. I spent a lot of time trying to find a better phrase than “commit to my writing” which seemed to diminish what felt like a powerful and exciting new chapter. A few months before I started graduate school, before I started writing this play, I discovered a way to say it:  ten years from now, I’d rather have coffee with the woman who tried to make it as a playwright; a writer, rather than the woman who didn’t.

Inked Baby is the first offspring (no pun intended) of the woman who tried.

Rude Mechanicals: the inside scoop

posted by Lana Lesley of the Rude Mechanicals for their Distinguished New Play Development project: "I've Never Been So Happy"

Here is what I think is the smartest summation of the December workshop ever:

"BEST INVESTIGATION OF THE WEST: The Rude Mechs' funny, well-informed multimedia performance was a refreshingly queer interrogation of the West. Moreover, "I've Never Been So Happy" felt like a Brechtian extravaganza for art and theater geeks, evoking everything from WOW Café camp to Bruce Nauman's post-minimal studio practice to Kara Walker's silhouettes and shadow puppets." - Claire Ruud, ...might be good (Fluent-Collaborative's contemporary arts e-journal Best of 2008)

Here is a very very distilled version of our live video broadcast discussion on January 24 (that we didn't get to archive for you all) - 

Also -- we've pretty much spent the development money on our December workshop. It looks as though we will not move forward with a September workshop as we don't think we can raise the funds for that as well as a premiere - it's a really really expensive project (!) for us anyway and, the touring dates for "Method Gun" are still unclear. So, just to keep you in the loop, we are in search of funding or a commission to continue the work and will keep you updated as we progress.

From the December Workshop we enjoyed working on each element independently — music, projection, dance, singing, etc — and then working to combine all those elements together. 

Sitting around the fire before and after the show each night during the December workshop has us dreaming of the story of Jeremy and his Mother being sung outside around a campfire with lots of beautiful strings.  In order to maintain the intimacy of that experience, not all audience members would watch it at once.  Instead they would cycle through as the performance would repeat. 

We discussed the possibility of performing "I've Never Been So Happy" at a ghost town — the booths set up in the various abandoned buildings.  The audience could come out for an afternoon or a large portion of an evening.  They could experience the story in several sittings and at different locations.  They could visit booths, eat BBQ, and hang out between the acts.  Another possibility is to turn the additional warehouse space at the Off Center into a ghost town before it is renovated. 

In future productions, the booths that were in the Off Center during the December Workshop could move out and be located in the public sphere — in empty retail stores, on the web, in galleries, and reclaimed and repurposed public spaces.  New booths can move in and occupy the theatre to perhaps later spin out and also have a life of their own. 

We would like to tie the booths into the story more.  Similarly, we should deliver more pay-off for the audience considering how much they become a part of our world.  Some ideas we had were:  Having a moment of "mob rule" — have the entire audience make an important decision together, like deciding the fate of a character; make the audience catch a character that is running away; or have the audience make a choice at the beginning of the evening (i.e. Truth or Beauty) that dictates something big at the end. 

We had lots of ideas for the projection screens. Make them bigger — nine times bigger and the projectionists on scaffolding behind a twenty-foot tall screen.  With nine projector stations one gigantic combined image could be made or nine individual images.  Or images could move across the entire surface from projector to projector.  How can we use practical surfaces? Can the actors manipulate the projections?  We want more interplay between the live actors and the puppetry.  We want multiple projection stations and multiple projection surfaces.  We don't want to get away from the low-fi DIY aesthetic. 

We are interested in the different creative teams working off of one another more.  Rather than everything being in service to the music and the book, we could alter the music to accommodate a really cool projection moment. 

For our June workshop with the University of Texas, we plan on doing what we are calling "Operation Search Operation."  This includes scenes five and six and then part of the story that has yet to be written wherein Jeremy and the Dachshunds go in search of Annabellee.

Live Broadcast Interview: Andrea Lepcio & Synchronicity at 1:30pm EST

On Wed, February 4th at 1:30pm EST, we're continuing our conversation with Andrea Lepcio who has just arrived in Atlanta, GA at Synchronicity Performance Group for the opening of her play "Looking for the Pony" - which is the second half of a rolling premiere with Vital Theatre Company, NY.  Rachel May, Producing Artistic Director of Synchronicity and Lisa Rothe, Director will be joining Andrea to discuss the development of the play.

You can view our archived broadcasts, including Andrea's interview last week at Vital Theatre, on the video page of the NEA New Play Development Program website.

This interview is open and participatory, so join in and type your questions through the chat window below when they're on the air.

If you can't see this from your mobile device, click here.  For iphone users, install the free ustream viewer download and then go to this page

Octavio Solis / Cal Shakes' "Pastures of Heaven" Work Sample Video

We can't resist showing you the work sample California Shakespeare and Octavio Solis sent in with their application to the Distinguished New Play Development Project category.  Octavio Solis introduces the project, describes the development process with footage of the real locations and people that will help inform the adaption, and then shows the unique artistic process of the Word for Word Performing Arts Company that will be involved in developing the play.

Video here

photo: Octavio Solis at the first
workshop of The Steinbeck Project

Panelists' Shout-Outs: Playwrights and Human History

posted by Olga Sanchez, panelist for the Distinguished New Play Development Project category, Artistic Director for Miracle Theatre Group, Portland, OR.

Shout out to the playwrights who rise above complacency, who find, investigate, transform and re-create unforgettable events in human history and force us to look at them so that we might see who we truly are, and of what we’re capable.

It’s been several months since we sat around the table and reviewed thick binders full of applications from playwrights and their collaborating theatres all across the country.  As anyone who’s sat on selection panels knows these can be mind-boggling experiences, with so many plots and plans to consider, how would I keep things straight in my mind? And yet, even having only read synopsis of the plays, at best an early excerpt of a draft, many of their ideas captured my imagination and have held on tight.

Among the proposed plays that struck me deeply were those that referred to historic events I’d never known:  the Dutch tulip craze of the 17th century (Tulipomania by Michael Hollinger & Michael Ogborn);  the life of a musicologist Harry Everett Smith who chronicled 20th century US folk music in order to demonstrate his theories of interconnectedness among seemingly disparate concepts (Harry Smith’s America by Carlos Murrillo); an 8-minute speech given by Robert F. Kennedy that quelled outrage on the night of the assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. (April 4, 1968, by James Still); and the story of an African princess who was brought to the court of Queen Victoria of England and learned to negotiate the contradictions of her new life (Victoria’s Sarah, by Lydia R. Diamond).

There were such a great variety of stories to consider, reflecting the remotest corners of contemporary Maine (Last Gas by John Cariani), a native community on Long Island (HAKAME by Robert Wilson), China’s new capitalism (Concrete by Kenneth Lin), Toulouse Lautrec’s Paris (Avril by Alicia Adams, Keythe Farley, Ken Roht and more), and the Gold Rush of California (Murieta by Oliver Mayer).  The passion of the writers for their subjects was almost palpable, a sense that they were on a clear, direct mission to unearth a truth about the human condition no matter where or when it occurred, and to place it on a US stage for us to witness.

Most of these plays existed as rough drafts or notes when I first read about them in October.  I wish them grace and inspiration as they grow.  A shout out to the theatres that take these new works under their wing, that invite their audiences or go beyond their audiences into their larger community, or provide time and space or whatever else is needed (actors, director, dramaturg, maybe?) to help the playwrights meet their play.

I am grateful for this encounter with these inspiring inspired minds and their plans, and hope to see these works in the flesh!