Turning the corner and staying open

This past Friday evening the project that I have worked on for the past six weeks finally came to fruition with a successful opening night performance to a very receptive audience.  Anyone who creates something and then presents it to the public, regardless of format or discipline, knows that the opening/launch can be terrifying.  In the past I’ve always found myself wringing my proverbial apron, unable to let go of the project, and wanting to run out of the theatre as the performance unfolded.  This time, I feel like I turned a corner in my practice as a director, and I learned to just trust the work that I’ve done, and more importantly, to trust the other people that I’ve made the work with:  the actors and the production team.  As a result, I found myself sitting in my assigned seat at 7:45pm, ready to experience the work, and feeling much calmer than I’ve ever felt before, a feeling that continued throughout the entire performance.  I actually enjoyed myself!

It’s a lesson that’s hard to learn, but one that makes a lot of sense.  The act of sharing any piece of art with an audience is dangerous and uncertain for the creators.  It requires a giant leap of faith that the audience members will engage with the piece and invest the energy to make meaning for themselves about what is being presented.  While I try to be as clear as I possibly can be in my art making, I’ve slowly come to realize that my vocabulary for making meaning won’t always match with every audience member’s vocabulary.  Which means that not everyone will like the work that I choose to present.  This used to bother me a lot, because I desperately wanted to be affirmed for the work that I was making, but I’ve come to accept that my job is to make the work that starts the dialogue, not to judge it or force people to like it.  Martha Graham sums it up quite well in the following quotation about art making:

“It is not your business to determine how good it is, nor how valuable, nor how it compares with other expressions.  It is your business to keep it yours clearly and directly, to stay open and aware to the urges that motivate you.  Keep the channel open.”

Devising an original framework play

In working on Plays from the Provincetown Players, the company has spent ample time in a devising process to create the framework play that holds the three shorter one-act plays.  As described in last week’s post, five NYU students break into a fictional construction site of the Provincetown Playhouse.  Throughout the devising process, we’ve had to consider who these students are and come up with reasons why they might be there.  I wanted the situation to feel as realistic as possible, so I’ve relied on the assistance of our dramaturg, Jenni Werner, the assistant director, Sarah Misch, and our cast members to provide input and guide the process.

Jenni and I discussed the danger of given circumstances that would not be believable, so I turned to one of our cast members, Tyler Grimes, for his assistance.  Tyler is a known movie aficionado, with an IMDB-like brain, and I thought that he might be able to provide some valuable insight into our “adventure.”  I asked him to consider some of his favorite adventure story scenarios, and here’s a bit of what Tyler had to say:

"You asked me why people go on adventures. I’ve been wracking my mind, watching movies, trying to figure out various concepts. I have thought of a few, there certainly are more, but if you like one of these let me know and I can do more research."

Reasons:

Perhaps one or two of our characters have a recently deceased relative who somehow was involved with our theater and they are bringing his ashes to rest here. (Perhaps not that extreme but I think you see the point.)

To sabotage. Perhaps a character or two doesn’t want this theater here anymore, but when they find the “box” they are persuaded.

The classic, “running from the police so let’s hide anywhere” scenario. Basically stumbling upon the theater and having to stay to avoid the police (or something similar).

Treasure! Build up some folklore about the place and have our characters come looking for the “Provincetown Millions” or something a lot less corny.

The antithesis of the sabotage would be a group just trying to preserve the place. Perhaps they’ve traveled a long distance to get here and want to just hole up there so they can’t demolish the place.

Tyler also provided us with some stock character types that might populate whatever “adventure” we decided to use:

The hero/heroine: brave, sometimes reluctant leader of a group.

The brain: able to answer any question or solve any puzzle fast. Usually has a lot of information handy at all times. Sometimes wears glasses.

The skeptic: often questions everything. Not always the most fun in the group.

The joker: just there to lighten the mood. More recently the joker becomes a sentimental character with the audience, and they expect an “emotional” moment from them. Thanks, Judd Apatow.

The muscle: simply there to bust things open.

The love interest: there to make our hero/heroine doubt themselves.

The person there by mistake: arguably my favorite. Someone who just fell in with the crowd at the last minute.

The dead body: sometimes characters on an adventure will come across a dead body (more often than not just the skeleton), and it lets them know that they are now going farther than anyone else has.  Sometimes maybe they’ll carry the bones around with them.

These are just a few, obviously, and while they seem uninteresting on their own, the best use of these is when they are combined. The joker/skeptic is a great combination for example. When they combine, they sometimes negate their “downsides.” Ultimately, however, the most interesting group dynamic could come from the actors themselves.

Thinking of different types of characters that I always find interesting when groups are gathered, my first thought goes to how to create tension within the group. Siblings can sometimes cause this. Brother/Sister, Brother/Brother, Sister/Sister. Anytime that dynamic is present in a group, especially a group of adventurers, tension can arise. Arguments can occur, the need to protect one another (especially in a scary, new place)… all of these can be useful.
Tyler’s input on this proved to be very helpful for Jenni and I when we sat down to begin the preliminary outline for the adventure in the Provincetown construction site.  We generated several possibilities and then entered the rehearsal process on January 17 with some ways to “prime the creative writing pump.”

After an initial read through of each of the three one-acts, Tyler introduced his research.  We all went home to sleep on it and came back the next day, ready to create.

Our first step was to identify the five characters that would populate the adventure.  Identifying them actually meant creating them, literally “from scratch.”  Jenni and I had selected possible archetypes for each of the actors based on the roles that they would play in the three one-act plays, and then I set to work on a character devising process pulled from playwriting workshops that I’ve had with Pearl Cleage and C. Denby Swanson and from Sande Shurin’s book, Transformational Acting.  Each actor received a large piece of post-it paper and a marker, and I asked them to complete the following tasks and answer the following questions (thanks to stage manager Talia Krispel for capturing these prompts):

Write down ideas that are becoming clear to you within the framework of this piece – things you’ve already verbalized about your character that you know.

Think about how you want this person to be different from  – how do you want them to be different, how do you know they’re different?

Think about attributes about yourself that you want to bring into this character – what about you do you want to play within this character? Can be physical, emotional, mental, etc.

What is the character’s favorite color?

Favorite food?

Drink of choice? (alcoholic optional)

Relationship status?

What do you know about family background, history?

Why is this student at NYU – what is the character studying?

Where will the character be and what would the character like to be doing in 10 years?

What is the character’s greatest dream?  Worst nightmare?

Political affiliation?

Age of character? (17-22 age span)

Where does the character come from?  Where is home?

What is the character’s secret that no one else knows? (Generated by a different actor after reading the other answers above.)

Read the secret that NO ONE knows – then write down a secret that the character has told to one other person.

Give the character a name.

After the exercise, each actor was asked to introduce her/his character to the other members of the company, and out of these introductions, relationships emerged and the beginning of the adventure presented itself.  Each actor typed up her/his notes that night and sent them to me, and I’ve been using them throughout the devising process as a way to justify character choices and provide a foundation for the narrative throughline of the framing play.  Improvisations have been key to this process as well, and the use of audio recordings, transcriptions, and frantic notetaking during the individual improvs have all been invaluable methods for honing each character’s voice.

Stay tuned for a future blog post that will provide information about how we are using primary and secondary source materials to give voice to our three playwrights: Edna St. Vincent Millay, Eugene O’Neill, and Susan Glaspell.  In the meantime, click on the image below to see the show poster, designed by Chris Cantley of Cantley Art+Design.

Working at the Provincetown Playhouse

I currently have the distinct pleasure and privilege of working in the newly renovated Provincetown Playhouse at 133 Macdougal Street in Manhattan. The theatre has often been referred to as the birthplace of modern American drama because it housed productions of plays written and produced by the Provincetown Players, an early 20th century experimental theatre group that included Eugene O’Neill, George Cram Cook, and Susan Glaspell, among others. The group worked in this Greenwich Village site from 1918 to 1929, creating an innovative and influential American theatrical aesthetic.

NYU’s recent renovation and reconfiguration of the theatre was completed in August 2010, and I am now directing a production of three one-act plays from the original Provincetown Players. Our rehearsals for the project started this week, and the newly renovated space has embraced the company and our work with open arms. We are working with three plays: Aria da Capo by the poet Edna St. Vincent Millay, Fog, an early play by Eugene O’Neill, and Trifles, by Susan Glaspell, one of the founding members of the Provincetown Players. The company is also creating original scripted material that will frame the performances of these plays and address why it’s important for them to be remounted almost 100 years after they were written.

The last three days have consisted of read-throughs of the scripts and digging through historical source material, as I’m invested in telling the stories of the playhouse and these playwrights in and around their plays. The actors are making significant contributions to the development of this framework text through written and physical improvisations. We’ve discovered exciting relationships within the framework script, while also making some connections to the history of the space and to the playwrights themselves. For me personally, it has been a great experience to get to know these three playwrights on a more intimate level, as the research has uncovered elements of their personal lives that aren’t necessarily clear from simply reading their plays. Some examples:

- In his play Fog, Eugene O’Neill writes a character who reveals that he has contemplated suicide. He wrote the play in 1914, two years after his own suicide attempt. The parallels between his character and his own experience are striking and revealing.

- Susan Glaspell based her play Trifles on an actual murder case in Iowa that she covered as a news reporter for a local paper. However, upon further research into Glaspell’s work as a reporter, we’ve uncovered some remarkable messages that she conveyed to female readers through her writings when covering the society news for the paper.

- Edna St. Vincent Millay, one of the great female poets of the early 20th century, received her middle name from St. Vincent’s Hospital in New York City. Just prior to her birth, Millay’s uncle was rescued from the hold of a ship after being trapped inside of it for many days. He was discovered when the ship landed in NYC and taken to St. Vincent’s for treatment and recovery. Millay’s family honored the hospital’s work by including its name in her assigned birth name.

While these pieces of specific trivia are helping the company to hone in on the playwrights and their plays, what’s really magical is that the Provincetown Playhouse itself is giving us such support. Even though it is reconfigured and looking very different than it did when O’Neill, Glaspell, and Millay were working there, I definitely feel the presence of the playwrights and their influence each time we have worked over the past week. When NYU announced its plans to renovate and rebuild the theatre, many people expressed anger and concern over the plan because NYU was not preserving the “original playhouse.” As a historian, I can understand the urge to preserve elements of the past, lest we forget their importance. However, too rigid a grasp on the past can keep us stuck in the past as well. History is documented to remind us, not to hold us back. Having taught in this new space all last semester and now rehearsing in it, I can say with confidence that the new space has not lost the power of its ancestor. The true legacy of the Provincetown Playhouse is that it provided a physical structure that protected and cultivated new, experimental voices, ushering in the beginning of a truly American theatrical aesthetic. Even though its architecture has changed, that change is for the better, as the new Provincetown Playhouse can more adequately respond to the needs of contemporary theatre artists making new plays and mounting productions of classics. We feel its support as we work, and we look forward to audiences feeling the same.

The performance run of Plays from the Provincetown Players will be February 25-March 6. Follow our Twitter thread at #ptownplays, as members of the company tweet on a regular basis about the rehearsal process leading up to the opening. And stay tuned for more posts from me about the creative process.