New Play Blog

Inside the Playwright: Aditi Kapil prepping a reading

Photo: Cirkus Arena, Sofia, Bulgaria, 2005- the circus visit that inspired the character of Shipkov... the blurry animals on the right are ostriches

posted by Aditi Kapil, playwright of "Agnes Under the Big Top", a Distinguished New Play Development Project

Prepping for reading at InterAct Theatre in Philadephia

This evening I'm meeting with designers to brainstorm around the world of the play, the reading is tomorrow. But at the moment I'm sitting in InterAct's upstairs offices, contemplating my circus metaphor, which is in crisis. The theater cat is staring at me. It's hot. Maybe just compared to Minneapolis.
I've been looking at circus posters, and stumbled across Yeats' "The Circus Animals' Desertion", there's something there, particularly in the last stanza.

III.
A mound of refuse, or the sweepings of the street,
Old kettles, old bottles, and a broken can,
Old iron, old bones, old rags, the raving slut
Who keeps the till. Now that my ladder's gone,
I must lie down where all the ladders start
In the foul rag and bone shop of the heart.

Feels like he's talking to me, to my process as well as possibly the play.
My brain is resisting right now, but maybe the metaphor lies more in the circus as a whole than in what goes on inside it. Maybe the finale is not the end of the act, but the act of departing the circus, or the circus departing you. I don't know if that works. Need to shake everything off and read the play again.

Podcast: Rude Mechanicals - "I've Never Been So Happy"

Click here to listen to the podcast. This is from Stage Directions Magazine on theatreface.com.  "I've Never Been So Happy" by the Rude Mechanicals in Austin, TX is a Distinguished New Play Development Project and has its next development workshop in June at the University of Texas.

Dedicated to my sister(s)

posted by Tarell Alvin McCraney, playwright of The Brother/Sister Plays, an Outstanding New American Play selection which runs April 24 -June 21.  Reposted from the McCarter Theatre blog.

I’ve not been sleeping, again, and when sleeping dreaming.

It always happens when working In the Red and Brown Water because somehow we’ve worked to keep the piece in the formation in which it came: dream like sad and sweet, powerful and delicate. I must tell you I am aware of how exhausting it can be to hold that world up, to live in it, to explore it. One must open the door to it and hold it up and walk around in it. Its kind of like being a little kid who throws up a great sheet into the air, then runs underneath it to see who else is underneath and continues to hold it up tarp like with one hand so you can see find your way through. I am sure that didn’t make much sense. But what doesn’t make sense are the feelings that this play draws up.
Ton upon tons of complicated questions the play asks in direct and indirect ways.

It is no secret that I wrote this play for my sister (s). I have one biological sister, the youngest in my immediate family. A strong and courageous woman who has in her mere 21 years in this world seen some dark days. And the other sister, my mother. Who passed away from AIDS-related complications in 2003. And as heartbreaking and sometimes devastating the process of my mother’s death was, sometimes I cannot get over the even more sometimes heartbreaking and uplifting life of my sister.

As a young girl she was there when my mother became most ill and took over as woman of the house. She worked her way through High School keeping grades and life up as my mother’s health fell deeper into non-repair and my younger brother ran in and out of trouble along with the health of her stepfather also falling apart. Two ill parents, a brother who was in trouble with the law, another who was miles away in school, for of all things the theater, and here is this… this baby trying to grow into a woman in a world that has been scientifically proven to be harshest to women but women of color even more. So what does she do? She holds on. She holds her head up; she remains faithful in the Lord above and keeps her nose to the grind. My mother died and she put the funeral together, respectable simple and silent she was… Her stepfather, the only man she knew as father died, and she respected his wishes and carried out his will. She then went to college and paid the bills by working. I helped her out when I can/could but still she did it by herself, does it by herself. She makes it to her last year in College about to graduate and she gets into a car accident, she hits another car. The woman in the car is pregnant. And because of the stress of the accident, not the impact, the woman in the car loses her child.

I am so sorry for the loss and so is my sister. She is devastated she calls me and says as a woman she doesn’t know how to feel about this terrible accident. She wasn’t drinking, she doesn’t do drugs, she just lost control of her car on a turn, and an accident she had made another woman lose her child. She tells me she will have to live with that. I am floored at her honesty and bravery for saying this. She calls me later that week and says she’s being arrested by the police in her hometown. She tells me they are attempting to charge her with feticide. I drop to the ground and cry. I cannot believe the heavens can be this hard on one soul. Is’t possible! But my sister is strong and faithful… she keeps her head to the sky and her feet on the ground. I go down to bail her out of jail. She’s obviously shaken but not bowed. The court won’t drop the charges and in fact place my sister on house arrest and a bracelet around her ankle, like the rapper TI who was found with machine guns, a court believed my sister needed to be tracked. Myself, members of my sister’s Church and her pastor, plead with her attorney to let the judge know that my sister is within months of graduating school and if she stops now she may never be able to rectify and finish. They concede and allow her for 4 months to only go to school, work and church while she awaits this trial that the court still is planning. My sister, God in Heaven, she says good! This will keep me focused on the most important things. INCREDIBLE. I watch as the world hands her the sourest lemons instead of gold and somehow, sometimes with no sugar and little water I watch her make lemonade.

My sister turns 22 on May 5, three days after she graduates from Fort Valley University in GA and 4 days after the play that I wrote and dedicated to her opens in Princeton, NJ.  And though I love the play and want to be there for opening… I’ve got to go down to Georgia not just to see graduation but also to say hello to the woman who inspires me to be better everyday.

So in rehearsal sometimes it is hard to sit in rehearsal and not think about how unfair these situations seem. And how I’ve watched this little gap- toothed-girl put on her work boots, put on her high heart and love still, live still, in times when I wanna fall and catch a knee she’s standing strong forging ahead. A hero. She is. And I say to all of us, if not for my sister, the many sisters who don’t make it to graduation, those who can’t quite and for those who do, our exhaustion and exploration is the best thank you and ‘we hear you’ and ‘we love you’ … that we can give… that I can give.

So I say to you today and the next time and the next: Here is IN THE RED AND BROWN WATER Dedicated to my sister (s).

Video: Discussion & Reading of "Agnes Under the Big Top"

posted by Aditi Kapil

Her project with the Lark Play Development Center is one of the selections for the Distinguished New Play Development Project category. Development steps also include Mixed Blood Theatre, InterAct Theatre, The Playwrights’ Center, and the Rhodopi International Theater Collective. The premiere will be at Mixed Blood Theatre, MN in 2010.

These clips are from the Feb 2009 reading and discussion at The Playwrights' Center, MN of an early draft of "Agnes Under the Big Top". Clips 1 and 2 are the discussion.  Clips 3-7 are the reading.

Read her "After the Workshop" posting about what she thought of this development step.

Is "Regional" A Pejorative Term?

by David Dower

I was struck by this post at Off-Stage Right, another interesting contribution to the spreading discussion about "putting the regional in regional theater" that I was noting earlier.

Jodi takes issue with the use of the term "regional" at all, feeling it diminshes the theaters so labeled. It implies, she reasons, that there is a "center" and then there are "regions". There are several long quotes from Guthrie Artistic Director Joe Dowling in the post in which he expresses a similar sentiment.

Having lived and worked my entire career in regional theater, I don't think I have really understood the term this way. I've definitely experienced the "outsider" sense in my dealings with the New York marketplace, even with the New York regionals. But I hadn't thought the term itself was denigrating. I just thought it was rooted in the New-York-Centricity of that famous New Yorker cover. In which it is clear there are actually no regions. Just New York sandwiched between two oceans.

For me the term doesn't so much assume or require there to be a center.  If we were talking about satellite theaters, I'd be more convinced there's an implied center of greater importance than its off-shoots. Think of regions more like segments of the brain, "regions" of the brain, and you're closer to the way I have always felt about the term. It takes all of these regions, healthy, communicating well, firing on all cylinders to reach the full capacity of the human body.

I think what people are reacting to, fundamentally, in this call to re-regionalize the regional theater, is a sense that many regional theaters, those which established the movement and those which followed to sustain and build on it, have somehow become more satellites than regions. That they are, as Jodi implies and many others assert directly, now orbiting the New York marketplace like moons, reflecting its heat but generating none of their own. I hear from artists, ensembles, and small producers all over the country (including that micro-region: Manhattan) that they feel we're in a period where, to paraphrase one of the responders at the Humana Convening, "we're shipping the same ten plays around the country and every theater's season looks more alike than distinct."  This sentiment is particularly acute among new play practitioners, whether playwrights, play labs, ensembles, or new play producers.

What The Heck is Going On In There?

by David Dower

There's a sudden and dramatic spike in readership owing to the various threads of conversation on this blog and the confluence of interest in some of the projects we are tracking. I wanted to welcome new readers and give a quick recap of the organizing principle of this whole program.

Arena Stage is hosting the NEA's New Play Development Program, a relatively recent leadership initiative created by the Endowment to foster the development of new work and the advancement of the environment for new plays and playwrights across the nation.  We were selected as the hosts, through an open RFP process, back at the end of 2007. We developed an application process, modeled on the NEA panel process, that ended in the selection of two OUTSTANDING NEW AMERICAN PLAYS (each headed into their world premiere productions this spring) and five DISTINGUISHED NEW PLAY DEVELOPMENT PROJECTS (each in the early stages of their development at the time of the application deadlines).  These categories were set out in the original RFP. The panels, feeling somewhat overwhelmed by the number of interesting application in each category, chose to also name a group of Finalists in each. So, in total, we are tracking 18 projects from around the country.  Dig around the blog and on the website and you'll find plenty of info on them.  Keep coming back and you'll watch them roll out into the world.

As a complement to the selection process, as hosts of the NPDP we committed to fostering an "appreciative inquiry into the field of new play development" for the Endowment. This blog is one of the primary vehicles for meeting that responsibility.  So you'll find, interspersed with rehearsal journals and video excerpts of the developing projects, pieces that are intended to inform or invite discussion about the field in general. I am drawing on an 8-month field survey I did, with the support of the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, focused on the "Gates of Opportunity" for emerging voices and new works nationwide.  I will continue to pull sections of the report from that study onto the blog for general discussion. We are also both participating in and hosting a series of convenings around specific topics in the field which will be reported here from time to time.  (A complementary blog that is more focused on the day to day behind the scenes at Arena also contains reflections on these gatherings when they are produced in-house: blog.arenastage.org)

Still to come is the public launch of another aspect of our "appreciative inquiry".  We're working with an Emmy-winning documentary filmmaker to document the rehearsal and development processes of the seven selected projects. He's bopping around the country with a film crew talking with the playwrights, producers, and collaborating artists.  He's capturing aspects of development, production, and the private aspirations of the participants as they make their way through the process described in their proposals.  All of this footage will become part of an accessible archive of this first round of the NPDP.  It is also everyone's hope that he will be able to create an hour-long documentary film for airing on public television to broaden the accessibility and visibility of the program to communities and individuals nationally.  We are also working to make it the cornerstone of an educational toolkit to be distributed to high schools and colleges around the country to show the next generation how plays are made in America today.

The round culminates in a reading Festival, here at Arena, of all seven projects. That will take place in our new home in the Fall of 2010.

So, welcome. Read on. Leave your own contributions. And bear in mind you are looking at the tip of the iceblog.

Yeah. I actually wrote that. Stick with it. You'll get used to it...

Putting the Regional in Regional Theater

by David Dower

The phrase "putting the 'regional' in Regional Theater" is starting to crop up with increasing frequency in discussions about the future of the regional theater movement. (Is it a movement? Is it an industry? Is it a field?) There are a number of examples on display right now, in print and on stage, where the major regional theaters are tapping the vibrancy of their own yards to both engage their communities and refresh the sense of purpose that drove the founders of the movement to build these institutions in the first place.

This is on my mind, well- in truth all the time (makes me a lot of fun a parties, let me tell ya...), but specifically coming out of the weekend at the Humana Festival. Here's a quick tour of some of the ways that this return to local roots is cropping up around the country.  Add your shout out if I've skipped someone important to you!

First, there were the examples on stage there: Naomi Wallace's Hard Weather Boating Party and the Wendell Berry piece created by Marc Masterson and Adrien Alice Hensel (the Artistic Director and the Director of New Play Development at the host theater).  Wallace, a Kentucky native now an ex-pat in England, dove into the stories of the Rubbertown neighborhood of urban Louisville for her play-- one of the finalists for Outstanding New American Play in the NEA NPDP inaugural round.  Berry is also a Kentucky voice, and his agrarian contrarian poetry provides the text and focuses the piece on his native landscape.  Two contrasting views of the region that is home to this regional theater.

Threaded between and around my viewing of these productions was the conversation, both facilitated and free-form (over the bar, on the sidewalk, in the elevators at the hotel), which was peppered with reactions to Liz Engelman's "think globally, produce locally" comment and Michael John Garces' discussion of the Cornerstone purpose and process.

Cornerstone, another Finalist in the Distinguished Development category of the NPDP with it's Naomi Iizuka project in the Justice Cycle, is living this regional focus on a micro-level. The stories told, the people who tell them, and the people who see them are all from the neighborhood. Companies like Campo Santo in San Francisco and Milagro in Portland are working in very different ways toward a similarly specific and localized regional purpose. Companies like these are scattered all over the country, and as much as we moan in the field about the Regional Theater having become as preoccupied with the New York market as the system it was built to replace, they stand as proud and stubborn refutation of the sweeping generalization. More than exceptions that prove the rule, they are the exceptions that call me to think more deeply about these questions of purpose, alignment, abundance and infrastructure.

Interview: Wendy C. Goldberg of the O'Neill National Playwrights Conference

Here is the third in a series of interviews that will be devoted to people involved in the new play development sector. On Deck: Wendy C. Goldberg, Artistic Director of The Eugene O'Neill National Playwrights Conference, Waterford, CT. 

Vijay Mathew: What is the purpose of the National Playwrights Conference?

Wendy C. Goldberg: Here's what we've defined as our core values:
-To support playwrights in their artistic process.
-To provide an artistic home for generations of playwrights.
-To maintain an open submission policy in our on going effort to identify new storytellers.
-To provide playwrights support in all areas of the theatrical medium: professional actors, directors, dramaturgs and designers.
-To help move plays into the theatrical canon by identifying opportunities for future productions and publication.
-To educate the next generation of theater artists by creating opportunities within our organization for internship and mentorship.

For one month, Conference participants representing a wide range of experience -- from playwrights working on a first play to Broadway veterans -- are teamed with emerging and seasoned directors and actors from on and off-Broadway and regional theaters to engage in a six-day-a-week process of rehearsals and two script-in-hand readings of their play. The Conference also serves as a retreat for writers in residence working independently on special projects, and all participants have access to discussions with special guests. Past speakers have included playwrights Edward Albee, Sarah Ruhl, Romulus Linney and Paula Vogel, and John Patrick Shanley.

Vijay Mathew: How are the playwrights chosen to participate? How is the selection process designed?

Humana Convening: Part 4 The Fungible Language

by David Dower

So, owing to the compressed nature of the agenda in the convening at the Humana Festival I presented a somewhat incoherent (to my ears, at any rate) summation of a key finding in the field research I did around the infrastructure for new work and new voices around the country. It left some people scratching their heads. "What's the big deal about the language?" "What's the cost of being imprecise with our own terms?"

Here's the full section, as edited by the wonderful Ben Pesner, who is everywhere in this work and much appreciated for it.  I offer it here so people can wrestle with it from the full picture. And I want to invite wrestling.

Humana Convening Pt. 3 - Wrestling with Diversity

by David Dower

One of the most challenging discussions that arose in the New Play Development Convening over the weekend at the Humana Festival (thanks to the sponsorship of the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation) revolved around questions of diversity in the field.

First, there was the question of diversity as it pertains to race and cultural perspectives. Playwright Lydia Diamond, in responding to the Friday presentations by me, Todd London and Victoria Bailey, rather wearily and yet powerfully took up the charge of reminding the group that the question of racial equality was far from settled.  "You have only to look around the room to know that we still have a lot of work to do." And on every level she was right.  The room was overwhelmingly white.  Those faces of color that gave it dimension at all were disproportionately artists, as distinct from institutional leaders-- many specifically invited to address the diversity quotient. And the question of the current conditions for cultural diversity seems amplified in the "Obama Era" when so many people seem prepared to say "Well, we did it.  Diversity accomplished." A post-racial world? Just like that? Was it really that simple?

Humana Convening Pt. 2: Locally Grown

by David Dower

Again, a reminder that the Convening that took place over the weekend at the Humana Festival will be discussed in detail in other forums in the not so distance future. I'm working my way through a smaller set of notes on discussions that were sparked by that convening but took place in the halls or at the bar.  (Lots of them took place at the bar, but what's a Festival without festivities?) Part 2 will be coming shortly. I'm getting clearances from the people directly quoted first.

One of the things that got a lot of conversation was an observation by Liz Engelman that there might be something about a healthy new works ecology that could be learned from the Local Food Movement. This is the movement of the past several decades that's focused people on eating local, in season, foods as a way to promote healthier eating, local economies, and sustainable practices related to agriculture.  And it tastes better! She had a great phrase about bananas and potassium and looking for options for getting potassium from local ingredients rather than shipping bananas all over the country.  And when she said it, it was really clear how it applied to plays and playwrights and sustainable communities of artists making work.  Wish I'd written it down.  Maybe Liz will write us, cause it was smart.

Meanwhile...

14 Short Videos about Tarell McCraney and "The Brother/Sister Plays"

You can follow the shows on the the McCarter blog and on the "Brother/Sister Plays" website.  "Marcus; or the Secret of Sweet" - part of the trilogy which opens May 14 - was selected as one of the Outstanding New American Plays for this round of the program.

Humana Convening Pt. 1- Is There a Chiropractor in the House?

by David Dower

I'm not sure how many posts there are going to be on this topic.  Could be the header here will prove to be misleading and I'll never get to Part 2.  But let's start here and see what happens.

The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation sponsored a convening at the Humana Festival this year, with dozens of people from around the new play sector.  The first part took place Friday morning.  A second, abbreviated (rushed?) session was held this morning.

Providing the focus for this convening were two presentations of large-sample studies conducted over the past few years into the health and challenges in the new play world.  The first was the TDF study, conducted by Todd London and Victoria Bailey, into Playwrights Lives.  They'll be publishing this data soon and it will no doubt spark a great deal of discussion and debate, judging by the reactions of the room this weekend. It was a huge study with some startling (disturbing, even) results.

The second was the first public presentation of the report I turned in at the end of my eight months on the road, interviewing artists and organizations in communities with vibrant new works ecologies.  I've written some about this study here already, so if you're just coming into it, search around. Again, I get the sense that there will be a lot of discussion and debate about the ideas and findings in my report. Ben Pesner and I are working on an extended summary for public consumption-- the actual report was 100 pages and never intended for publication.  It was a final report to Mellon following the investigation they supported through a remarkable, and for me life-changing grant in 2006.

Emotions, for me, of having put this work out to my colleagues here in Louisville run the gamut of relief, distress, and apprehension. I mostly feel like I spent years building a soccer ball and carrying it around with me everywhere and only this weekend have I had the chance to roll it out onto the grass for people to kick around with me.

One of the things I spend a lot of time on in my report is the "fungibility of our language".  Basically, it boils down to a finding that the field of new plays is a overrun by a blizzard of buzzwords without precise meanings or applications, and the resulting "new play speak" is bewildering to artists and emerging organizations around the country. I'll excerpt this section in a later post so people can dig into it in detail. But if you think about how many different processes are labeled "development", or "workshop", or "residency" you're getting a toe into this water. Bigger concepts have more troubling consequences in their fuzzy meanings, in the view of the hundreds of people I spoke to during my investigaton. So many organizations describe themselves, for example, as "artist-focused" that there's no way to actually ascribe meaning or value to the term, and artists are wondering why it is, then, that they so often feel unseen, alien, or in the way when they are invited in. And the king of the imprecise buzzwords: "emerging".  How would you define what constitutes an "emerging "artist or organization? When do they start emerging?  When do they stop?  Where are they when they've emerged?

Again, I'll post the full section when we're done with the edit, and this will all have more context for you.

But it is ironic to me that, in the course of this presentation, I seem to have inadvertently introduced another one.  And one with the potential to have equally powerful unintended consequences in terms of creating confusion.

It comes from a concept that I've been working for some time and only recently started trying to find the language for talking about publicly.  You see, I believe, based on my research, my direct experience of the field, and on the view of the field afforded us from the vantage point of this NEA NPDP program, that we are living in an era of abundance in the new play sector. Yet we continue to talk about it as a time of scarcity. I believe that this sense of scarcity comes from an ineffecient alignment of resources in the sector.  By resources I mean money, people, programs, and opportunities-- there are significant investments made in this sector by the philanthropic community, there are more playwrights and other generative artists at work in the nation than ever, there are training programs, play labs, producers of every scale taking on new work, and effective approaches to developing audiences and opportunities all over the country.

So, what I am coming to understand is that the problem is not a resource problem, but a failure to align the existing resources effectively on behalf of advancing plays, artists, the field and the form. We feel like we are still in a time of scarcity because we are not in alignment around the abundance, not capturing its full potential. I said this out loud. "Alignment" immediately became a buzzword, with people heating up rapidly around "it's a good thing" and "it's a terrible thing" and overnight turning it into a new entry in the fungible dictionary of 'new play speak'.

Yikes!

So, here's a place for you to weigh in, to help me find the langage or a precise definition of this concept. 

I was asked "are you saying there's some model or structure that equals 'alignment'?" No. I think what I mean is something more like a 'core value' of alignment, or an 'intention' (thank you Michael Garces for that word).  I was asked "do you mean to say that we should just all align our organizations and take aesthetics out of it?" No. Part of an alignment around abundance is connecting the dots, I think-- and where there are empathies and shared aesthetic sensibilities between artists, play labs, producers, and foundations they could capture abundance by working consciously, collaboratively, around how to get the most effective outcomes (artistic, professional, community, commercial, even...) for everyone committed to this aesthetic terrain most efficiently. I was asked "do you mean 'alignment' like what my car mechanic does?" I don't. I mean alignment like an actor or dancer or yoga instructor or chiropractor seeks-- alignment as something that releases a greater flow of energy and uses the right muscles for the right things, aligned along a spine with integrity and flexibility, creating powerful bodies with minimum strain.

I'll keep working on it.  Meanwhile if you have ideas, bring 'em on. If we can find a way to capture the inherent capacity of this moment of abundance, we will have made a significant contribution to our form, to our communities, and to the next generation of artists and audiences.  Or that's the theory, at any rate.

Interview: Quiara Hudes, playwright of "26 Miles"

"26 Miles" by Quiara Hudes is a finalist for the Outstanding New American Play and is currently having its world premiere at Alliance Theatre, Atlanta, GA through April 12.  Dramaturg Celise Kalke of Alliance conducts the following interview:

26 Miles begins and ends in Paoli, a suburb of Philadelphia.  Is that where you are from?

I am from Philadelphia.  I grew up in West Philly, but the entire city and region had a profound impact on why I write.  It's a city full of neighborhoods, each with a distinct flavor.  The Italian Market, Chinatown, North Philly--these are all neighborhoods I frequented, each one full of stories.  In each neighborhood, you'd find completely different produce at the corner stores depending on the enthic makeup of that area.  I love that.

You have lived in both Philadelphia and New York.  As a writer, which city fuels you most?

I can't choose one.  New York is where I saw the art that influenced my life growing up.  I saw Baryshnikov dance solo--in silence--for an entire program.  I saw Sarafina! and I saw Etta James in a smoky bar. All when I was a kid.  So I had to write, I had to be part of that. But what I write about, that is Philadelphia.  For my next play, I begin interviewing people in Philadelphia in a matter of weeks.

You have spent the last 3 years largely working on the hit Broadway musical IN THE HEIGHTS.  How does it feel to be back in the rehearsal room working on a play?

Wonderful!  It's a completely different experience.  More focused and quieter.  Almost like meditation.  There is only one rehearsal room so you have an overview of the entire experience.  With Heights we had three rehearsal rooms going at all times.  The musicals and the plays are very good balancers of each other.

How does it feel to have been nominated for both a Tony and a Pulitzer so relatively early in your career?

It makes me feel like I better keep writing, and I better make every detail count.

In both plays of your done at the Alliance, Elliot and 26 Miles, family and family background play an important role in the dramaturgy of the play. Do you draw on your own family experiences as you write?

Family is the reason I picked up a pen to write in the first place.  I had never heard stories like those my family told.  And they felt important to me.  Our country's culture is part of our history, and I thought, if I can add some of these stories to our country's cultural landscape, then hey, I've added a slightly new sliver to history.  It sounds lofty, but I mean it only in a very immediate sense.  My aunt Ginny was a huge inspiration to me.  I named a character after her in Elliot, A Soldier's Fugue.  Recently she passed away at the age of 59. I feel that her story lives on.

Creating the Soundscape of "The Wrestling Patient"

posted by Ben Emerson, sound designer for "The Wrestling Patient". ("The Wrestling Patient" by Kirk Lynn in collaboration with Anne Gottlieb and Katie Pearl is a finalist for Outstanding New American Play.  It's currently having its world premiere through April 11, 2009 at SpeakEasy Stage Company (Boston, MA) in a co-production with Boston Playwrights’ Theatre and FortyMagnolias Productions.)

1. Wolf Whistle.  In Westerbork, the train is a major sonic element.
One of the family members refers to it sounding like a wolf, so I
decided to let us hear that.

2. Granulations.  These are a couple of percussive sounds treated with a
process known as granulation, in which the sound is broken up into
grains, less than a thousandth of a second long, and then treated.  This
sound is a basic underscore for letter writing scenes between Etty, in
Westerbork, and her brother Jaap, in Amsterdam. 

Having a few minutes at my tech table for the Huntington Theatre's Miracle at Naples, I have  moment to reflect on what has been one of the  longest and most involved design processes of my 25 years (The Wrestling Patient).

Vice!

posted by Sarah Wansley, Directing/Producing Intern at McCarter Theatre, from the blog

The day many McCarter community members have long awaited has finally come: Tarell has moved to Nassau Street and rehearsals are underway for the world premiere of his The Brother/Sister Plays. The first few days in the rehearsal process has been, admittedly, a little overwhelming. We started out the first day of rehearsal with a business meeting run by our Resident Stage Manager, Cheryl Mintz. As Cheryl went over the usual information: schedule, contact sheet, Equity guidelines, it quickly became clear that this process is like no other that the cast or artistic team has experienced. With three shows opening in repertory under the direction of two different directors, the schedule for the next few months is daunting to say the least. By the time In the Red and Brown Water opens, we will already be starting technical rehearsal for Brothers Size and Marcus, so the actors will be rehearsing 2 plays during the day and performing a third at night - and all this without understudies!

We were all a bit dazed by the end of the meeting, but after a read-through of In the Red and Brown Water, Tina Landau, the director, decided to jump right in. Tina talked about how the most important part of In the Red and Brown Water for her is truly creating an ensemble. In this non-traditional piece, all of the actors play a pantheon of gods (derived from the Yoruba spiritual tradition) who weave in and out of the story they are telling together. In order to start building that feeling of a community of storytellers and create a common vocabulary, Tina launched the actors into an intense introduction to Viewpoints, a technique for movement and improvisation Tina developed along with director and mentor Anne Bogart. Originally based on a set of “viewpoints” choreographers use in creating a dance, the training Tina works with separates movement into 10 distinct qualities (eg. tempo, direction, shape, etc.). Taking the simple movement of running, for example, one can play with extremes of tempo: how does running look, for example, if one goes very very fast? And if one goes as slow as it is possible to go and still call it movement? Within the tempos one can also vary the size and fluidity of the run. It is fascinating how the different “runs” tells an entirely different story.

The “Sisters” Size

posted by Anthony Sanford, Jr., Directing/Producing Intern at McCarter Theatre, from the blog.

As part of the rehearsal process, The Brothers Size became “The Sisters Size,” just for a day. Robert (the director) asked three of the actresses from our nine-player ensemble to assume roles of the male actors. Although some of them had not read the play, it was amazing to see the actresses quickly discern who their characters were. It was intriguing to watch these ladies, who had not seen the men in action, make some of the same artistic choices the actors had made in rehearsal. Tarell has often said that the text will guide, it does.