Pretentious or just long-winded...You decide!

I was asked to answer some interview questions for the Bellevue Community College school newspaper about our show 7 Minutes to Midnight.

In an effort for clarity I of course went for length instead...The reporter wisely broke up my interveiw and edited it down for print.

The chair of BCC said it sounded smart. I thought it might be prententious.

But hey, you decide for yourself with this unedited version!

How does this type of play differ from the plays BCC usually produces? From other plays you've written?

Most of the plays BCC has done are either well-regarded classics or important contemporary plays by modern writers. They’ve done Chekhov or Wilde or Sondheim musicals in addition to newer works like Steven Dietz. They have a track record, not necessarily at BCC, but nationally or internationally. In a way, they’ve been “road tested”.

When you’re working on a new play, whether it is a traditional process (which I’ll briefly explain) or more alternative, that luxury of the road test is not there. In some ways, this makes for a wonderful range of choices and that pioneer spirit of “no one has ever done this before”! On the other hand, you can also get daunted on whether or not it can be done, or done well, for that same reason.

Most of my plays I’ve written in the past, like Obscura or Burning Botticelli, have been developed in a traditional process, generally used in regional theaters and on Broadway. The process is like handing off a baton in a relay race…It starts with a playwright who plans and writes everything down, usually alone. Eventually there is only so much work you can do by your self and its ready for production (even though it may need some amount of rewrites). The script is then like that baton, handed off to a producer and/or director to get a production started. The baton is again handed off to designers, then to the actors culminating in a final performance where the baton is handed to the audience. Again, there may be some rewrites but generally you go into the first rehearsal with a solid script that has been worked out ahead of time (story, characters, dialogue all in good shape).

In this kind of traditional process, the text is usually the primary element, although not always. The other aspects of performance like sound, image and movement become secondary. With a play like Importance of Being Earnest where the text is not just stylistic of that period, but also witty, you want the text to primary.

But with alternative methods of theatre-making, of which there are several terms—like “devising”, “ensemble-based” or “physical theatre”, the text becomes equal with other elements of the performance such as movement, music, sound, and light. Even the idea of having some clear storyline can become less important. The form becomes open and more collaborative. it’s more difficult to create this kind of theater alone as a playwright. You need to work directly with the actors, to see their bodies moving in space and to let the actors experiment with images and sound. Many shows can fall under this category of “devised”, the most popular being The Tectonic Theater’s The Laramie Project or Mary Zimmerman’s Metamorphoses, but it also can describe many others.

Although I as director and conceiver still lead the rehearsals, it’s more like I’m guiding them down a path. I bring in story ideas, text, research and assign tasks based on that. But anyone in the cast can bring in their own research or text and we can experiment in rehearsal to see how, or if, it might fit. In this sense, using the relay race as a metaphor, the baton is not passed off, but passed back and forth, or shared between two people…at different moments the creation is happening over and over again in each rehearsal. Sometimes the audience even becomes part of that creation process.

Devising a show takes a lot of time and energy, from me and from the actors. I’ve been doing a lot of planning and gathering of ideas, images and text for a long time before even bringing the actors on board. We actually started preliminary rehearsals at the beginning of summer. We’ve spend a lot of time discussing the ideas, characters and stories, as well as doing ensemble-building exercises and games. As I add more ensemble members, I’ll have something resembling a script on paper, but even that will be shaped by the ensemble as we work and re-work the performance. It’s a lot of work but at the end of the process you have something that is truly unique to those actors in this space and time.


How are the students responding to being "builders"?

I think they have embraced the work quite well. Although I taught a lab class in the Spring, this is my first opportunity to direct at BCC and I don’t have a great familiarity with the students. The first stages of rehearsal have been us getting to know each other and building trust. Trust and creating a safe place to play is vital to this kind of work, as it is with any theatrical production. But I’ve given them some big challenges and they are engaging with the movement exercises as well as with the ideas and the material.

A lot of times in theater we get so product-oriented. This kind of work, the journey and process of discovery in rehearsals is equally, if not more important than opening night. We’re learning about ourselves as artists as well as learning about important events in U.S. and world history and how it affects us now. It’s an interesting thing to be given the freedom to explore deep issues of a personal and global nature. Every day I ask them to be creative in new ways and nudging actors out of comfort zones can be really scary, no matter your experience level. Even seasoned actors find this difficult. My hope is that their connection to the work will be more personal because they own the gestures, or they brought in a piece of text or song lyric that resonated for them.

Why is the Science Dept. involved in "building" the play?

I don’t know that I’d say they’re involved in the “building” of the play but we want their help as we create it—we’re not scientists, obviously. So we’d like to get their help with research on the subject matter of the play. We hope to get some professors to drop into rehearsals to explain some concepts.

One of the main questions the piece grapples with is what is the scientists’ responsibility towards humankind? This is tied directly to the real-life creation of the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists and The Doomsday Clock.

Basically, the Bulletin was established in 1947 by a group of scientists, most of whom worked on the Manhattan Project, and they wanted to advocate to the world that this could literally be humanity’s downfall. And they knew that others besides the U.S. would gain this knowledge and power and essentially predicted the cold war. Never before had so many people in the world been so ignorant of something that affected the entire planet. The average U.S. citizen didn’t know how destructive the bomb was, how it worked, how dangerous radiation could be, and most importantly, they had no idea how many bombs the U.S. was building or that they were going on with the next step of building the hydrogen bomb. They created the Doomsday Clock that same year as an arbitrary way of gauging how close we were to destroying ourselves. In 1947 it was set to 7 minutes to midnight (hence the title of our show). It’s moved twenty times in the past sixty years and now stands at 5 minutes. They’ve said we’re at a second nuclear age, similar to the late 1940s and we have 27,000 nuclear warheads on this planet. But how many people pay any attention to that fact and how do we even comprehend it?

So this play will jump around a bit in time and space, asking questions about what it means for us now in 2008? What was the journey of the scientists who went from trying to end a war with their invention to watching the horrors of Hiroshima and Nagasaki? And how do you resolve that in yourself? How can the actions of one person affect the world?

I know this sounds like it will be this depressing story of war and destruction, but ultimately we’re trying to find the opposite of that. We want to know; Can we hope for peace?

Speaking of Ensembles...

Renowned ensemble-based theatre artists, Hand2Mouth Theatre will be in Seattle this weekend for Bumbershoot, doing their new site-specific performance, Project X:You Are Here.

Here's how they describe it:
Project X: You Are Here is a performance installation investigating the human desire to live longer, to live life to the fullest, and to leave a legacy. It is a collective time capsule and a live event created especially for Bumbershoot 2008 to capture and record the life experiences of Festival attendees. Audience members are active participants who can contribute their own experience, memory, and energy to the installation, facilitating the evolution and growth of Project X. The project is centered at Ground Control, a research hub and interactive museum from which satellites - small, mobile performance units - radiate around the grounds and offer attendees a chance to take part in the project; their contributions are then brought back to be displayed at Ground Control.

Could be interesting...

Getting Lost

[Photo from Painted Snake in a Painted Chair, Talking Band Theatre, La Mama Theatre 2003]

Music is a very important, integral part of the work—we view it as one of the “voices”, including the visual imagery, text, etc. A number of members in the company have musical backgrounds, particularly Ellen and I. She studied flute, piano, and composition. I play clarinet. The music is played live by the performers. From the beginning the company was exploring poetry. We got right away into the music of language, and were really interested in the crossover between language and music. Music is part of the texture of the piece.

I’m interested in that bridge between science and arts…there was a time when the science and arts did not have a separation. Galileo and Kepler both wrote about music as well as science. It was all seen as part of the pursuit of natural laws.

(From my interview with Paul Zimet, Talking Band Theatre—and formerly worked with Chaikin in the Open Theater)

Okay, so what is “devising” theatre?

Or physical theater, aka ensemble-based work or shall we say, experimental theatre?

How does someone like Mary Zimmerman make Metamorphoses or Anne Bogart make bobrauschenbergamerica? How does Ping Chong create Blind Ness, or Moises Kaufman make The Laramie Project?

Here's some rudimentary thoughts on the subject.

A lot of people have been asking about my show in the fall, 7 MINUTES TO MIDNIGHT, and I always stumble slightly when I describe the process behind it…It’s a show about the Doomsday Clock, I say…

"The what?"

It’s an arbitrary clock created by a group of atomic scientists in 1947 to gauge how close the world is to blowing itself up with atomic bombs (aka Doomsday). Every year they meet deciding how many minutes closer or further we are from annihilation. It was set at 7 minutes to midnight in 1947 and has moved several times since then. Right now we’re at 5 minutes to midnight.

It's also about the Nevada testing site, which I used to drive past many times a year when I drove from Vegas to Reno...And what the desert literally and figuratively means...


"But what’s it about?"

It’s about scientists responsibility to mankind…or about how one person’s action’s affect the world…

"No, what’s the story?"

Ah, see the linear story does not quite exist yet…There is a story there, of scientists building a bomb, winning a war, realizing what they’ve done when the bomb is dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the government lying to the American people, the Cold War, etc. That's the literal linear history that can be explored.

There is also embedded in our show the story of Kronos (or Saturn) who devours his children for fear of being usurped.

Perhaps you know the infamous Goya painting?

I don’t know why, I just think this idea/image is pertinent.

There are also some folk/country songs and songs of the era of the late 1940s.

None of it may connect to each other. At least, overtly.

This show may be like a pastiche--mixing of performance styles.

But the truth is, I'm not sure what the show will actually become. We have yet to start building it. Unlike plays written solely by me, I have no pre-conceived or detailed notion of how the end product will look. I have some ideas, of course, but nothing fixed. The core members of the ensemble are still doing research. We’re still talking about the ideas we want to explore. We haven’t even start playing in the rehearsal room to create the characters.

But let’s back up a bit.

The traditional process of making a play (ie playwriting) usually begins with a solitary playwright, sitting alone at his/her desk, writing down the basic plot and characters. He/she describes the setting, time and place, writes the action and dialogue. This can take anywhere from a few weeks to a few years. Then the script is rewritten again and again before getting a reading or a staged reading and then a production. Sometimes it goes straight from initial draft to opening night, but that’s rare. In essence, the script is handed off to a director and actors after the playwright has been grappling with it for whatever length of time. In any original production, though, usually the playwright is still working with that director and actor to polish and perfect the script as much as possible before that first time the audience experiences it.

This type of process is primarily text-centered. The script and the words on the page became the most important element.

Most of my plays have been written this way, including my latest, THE ALBATROSS, which is very traditional playwriting with a linear storyline. The most anti-traditional play I've written, BURNING BOTTICELLI, is more epic in form and non-linear and tosses around a lot of ideas, but it was also built primarily by me at my desk--though rewritten extensively with the NYC cast I had at the time.

In “devising”, the script is created primarily in rehearsal. The script consists of not just the spoken word, which is important, but also physical movements, songs, images, and/or video. In this case, the body can be text. The focus is more on the actor/audience relationships. It can be experimental because the main idea behind this kind of theater is to question the idea of theater—to ask why this structure, why this form, why these words, what happens when we do this, etc?

The idea for the play can begin with one person, such as the “conceiver” or director (suck as Anne Bogart or Mary Zimmerman), or it can be a joint project initiated by a group (such as the Open Theater or Theatre de Complicite). But usually, there is someone who takes some form of lead, even in the most autonomous working ensemble. Someone has to start making decisions of what to leave in and take out before performing for an audience.

In my case, the central ideas and questions are coming from me and ultimately will be shaped by my lens. But I will not be writing this play alone like I usually do, which is quite welcome. Instead, I bring in these thoughts, images, props, songs, text, whatever and mix it up, like making a stew.

We play. In the playing we create. Just like kids playing in a sandbox, really.

When I first met with my core ensemble, I laid out a very simple map in these terms, that our process would have three phases:

Phase 1: Collecting (Research, questions, brainstorming)
Phase 2: Testing
Phase 3: Shaping

We begin with questions and these questions will lead us to gathering notes, text, images, sounds, music, and whatever else might stimulate our imaginations and thoughts centered around those questions.

In the rehearsal room, we take what we have learned and share with the rest of the ensemble. We play with them dramatically, with exercises, with character studies, improvising and trying out some of our ideas.

In the shaping phase, we start pulling the show together and making the difficult decisions about what we are trying to say or do with the audience. This could also be called the “whittling away” phase.

In some respects, this process is not so dissimilar from traditional theater. It's pretty evident that each playwright has their own distinctive process (Albee writes a play vastly different than Churchill). So then its also clear that each "devisor" of theatre has their own process, as well.

But it's writing. As a group. Collaboratively. Writing theatre. Sometimes writing "on your feet", sometimes collecting text, sometimes originating text.

Now, those three phases makes it all sound very systematic, but the truth is, it won’t be. These phases will all blend into each other. We’ll still be gathering notes in the testing phase, still be testing some things in the shaping phase, etc. And as with charting any course via any roadmap, there will be detours and side roads, distractions and perhaps a flat tire. We will lose our way. There will be times when we will be speeding right along at 65 mph and other times when its only 15 mph. It is the nature of the process.

But as Chaikin says:

We must be able to go somewhere else—where, we don’t know. The danger here is that we will get lost…Plan on it. Count on it.

Thinking about the ensemble

What does it mean to create an ensemble?

The word “ensemble” gets tossed around a lot these days, whether its theater, dance, music, the circus, vaudeville, or whatever…It’s a word that is watered down, misconstrued, misused and abused to a point where you think just about anyone and everyone is making an ensemble or creating ensemble-based pieces.

To confuse matters, many theater companies even have that word in their name. I worked at Ensemble Studio Theater in New York City …in fact, just google that word and you might find a lot of theaters calling themselves “ensemble” this or “ensemble” that…It seems anyone can lay claim to it.

Well, yes, but aren’t they an ensemble? I mean, if I cast a production of Hamlet, aren’t all those actors working together in a collaborative way? Haven’t they formed as a group to work harmoniously together to create a work of art?

Sure, but…

Okay, etymologically, it’s just French for “the same together” and then somewhere around a hundred years ago it started being used for musical groups and then became an adjective to describe a particular way of being—as in ensemble acting, defined by merriam-webster as “emphasizing the roles of all performers as a whole rather than a star performance”.

Ah, there might lie the difference…between ensemble as a group of artists to a way of working...

As a director casting Hamlet, I’m going to want a specific Hamlet for my vision of that well-defined play—this is why we go see Ralph Fiennes or Liev Schreiber or Kevin Kline’s Hamlet. It is a star vehicle. Sure, the rest of the actors are just as important and there have been some great ensemble-based Shakespeare pieces (ala Peter Brook) but mostly, that is a play about that central character with others revolving around him. Many plays are like that. This is a simplistic way of looking at it, but bear with me for the illustration of the point.

I’ve been re-reading my Joseph Chaikin book THE PRESENCE OF THE ACTOR and he understands the ensemble to have two principles:

“The first is empathy: one actor, instead of necessarily competing with another, instead of trying to take attention away from him would instead support the other…There comes a point when you no longer know exactly which actor is in support and which actor initiated the action; they are simply together.

“The other has to do with rhythm, with dynamics, and with a kind of sensitivity which could be rhythmically self-expressed…”

He then goes on to talk about a singular person’s inner rhythm, going on all the time, which adds a certain energy to the room and sometimes these rhythms are in battle with each other, contrary to what is being said. It’s this dynamic and idea of rhythms which fueled much of Chaikin’s work with the Open Theater.

It’s also important to note that many ensemble-based works were focused on physical theatre, rather than text-based theater. The truth is, the elements of theatre become an ensemble, working as a harmonious whole—text, movement, music, design—all having equal importance. It creates a multi-layered experience.

The problem I’ve seen with some ensembles, especially as they form theater companies is a limited view of the ensemble. They see only the acting ensemble as an ensemble, rather than viewing the director, playwright, designers, dramaturg, and stage manager as integral parts of the collaborative process.

One can even extend the idea of the ensemble to include the audience as well as the theatre-makers (as Grotowski did…).

Few ever do this.

The reason is simple: we like the comfort of the fourth wall. It protects us and keeps us safe.

Chaikin also said that we should never be too comfortable as we make our art, always pushing ourselves…This is why he concocted so many exercises during rehearsals, exercises that he used and discarded like paper plates.

Constantly forcing yourself out of the comfort zone and creating new ways of surprise is one reason why few people actually make ensembles and/or do physical-based theatre work. The work requires more time and energy and we live in a country that is very much about “get it up fast” and is concentrated on the end product of the opening night performance. Also, simply making traditional theater is hard enough as it is, why add to to it?

Ensemble-based work is usually more focused on the process, the experiential aspects of theatre-making, not the end product. Most producers are not down with that, which is why you don’t see it much in regional theaters like at Seattle Rep. Sure, you will get the rare mainstream success like Metamorphosis on Broadway, but this is the exception to the rule. Ensemble-making usually happens in alternative circles, those with little or no money (like the downtown or lower east side of NYC). The positive is that these forms of theatre-making are very conducive to those alternative groups who are usually the disempowered ones in the economic/social spheres of the city.

But I think I’ll write more later in this blog about my thoughts on physical theater (what Joane Schirle of Dell’Arte calls “total theatre”) and “devising” theater, another catch-all phrase getting close to distortion by its usage, since there are so many different types of companies and methodologies behind devising (Mary Zimmerman, Ann Bogart, Ping Chong, Richard Foreman, Theatre de Complicite, Soujourner, etc.).

As I delve into the beginnings of building my ensemble for 7 MINUTES TO MIDNIGHT and the many thoughts I have about what theatre is for me, what we’re making and why…It is no surprise that I am filled with a little bit of fear of what lies ahead, but only in the sense of adventure…as if I’m getting into my car and heading across country without any map, just knowing the general direction.