Born to die

Ah, now that Vi is back in rehearsals full time again, it looks like we'll have a steady stream of rehearsal photos.  Good. We played with some really fun/sick lazzi today: 

• Lazzo of Sicilian mourning (which I made Liza do 5 times.  She thinks I was trying to explore different "variations."  Nope.  Just damn funny.  Wanted more more more.)
• Lazzo of the "Oriental" Seance
• Lazzo of the Spirit Possession
  
• Lazzo of death by consumption  (picture above.  Alexia's long sinewy limbs and dancerly control, not to mention her wide eyes, transform these classic death scenes from great drama into campy high art.)
  
• Lazzo of death by smothering
• Lazzo of death by poisoning
• Lazzo of a toddler's death
• Lazzo of the Dance of the Seven Veils (picture below.  Rainbow, who has never seen the classic burlesque Dance of the Seven veils was asked to improvise one.  I could have laughed my way through at least another 20 veils)
  

After rehearsal (and an exciting design meeting), Kiran and I devised a system to rank our lazzi (and their accompanying texts) in terms of their wrongness.  Now, those of you who have followed Stolen Chair's work over the past 6 years perhaps know that Kiran and I have a special affection for the wrong.  We like to break rules.  Is this iconoclasm for its own sake?  Maybe.  But what's so bad about that?  When you smash all the statues in the temple you find out what, if anything, is still worth having faith in.  And honestly, if these (metaphorical) statues were really meant to be invulnerable, a couple of kooky artists couldn't shatter them so easily.   

So, in an attempt to wrest our humanity and subjectivity from the monolithic pages of On Death and Dying, from the late-Victorian discomfort with corporeality, and perhaps worst of all, from the Judeo-Christian (and later Cartesian) soul-body schisms, we're trying to push past our own comfort zones and...well...do the "unthinkable" around, to, and with "dead" bodies (which, of course, are fully alive actors performing deadness: more on "dead drag" in a future post).   

And how does this have any more artistic merit than dead baby jokes?  Well, if you have any tolerance for dead baby jokes (God bless them!), I imagine it's rare that you are actually visualizing a real baby (let alone one that you have known, loved, etc) being processed in blenders, falling out of trees, getting fetal alcohol syndrome, etc.  Completely disconnected from any social realities (our real fears of infant mortality, for example), these jokes titillate on a purely intellectual level with a baby-shaped-symbol serving as a placeholder for all of the grotesque abuse.  We laugh at the transgression because we are smart enough to know that it is transgression.  The dead baby jokes point to the taboo and let us share a laugh at its expense, somehow reaffirming the taboo's validity in the process.  Yes yes, it is wrong to put babies in blenders or to even think about doing that.  

Something about theatricalizing these taboos, though, is able to make the transgression seem more real.  The human body, live on stage in front of you: you can't replace that with a baby-shaped-symbol.  This is why the dead baby scene in the Scottish play can be so very chilling; we have been asked to accept this baby (or rag doll or bunraku puppet or whatever) as a real baby and suddenly it becomes very hard to laugh at the unspeakable violence done to it.  But maybe, just maybe, if you repeat that scene a few dozen times or score it with "Hit me, baby, one more time," you can pull it just far enough into the realm of the ridiculous that it not only still possesses its visceral wrongness but also gives us the distance to examine that viscera and say: why do I instinctively react this way? To paraphrase James Kincaid in Child Loving, visceral reactions love to masquerade as untutored, universal, and otherwise bio-evolutionary-psychological "reals."  More often that not, however, these so-called "pure" reactions are as socially constructed as contemporary norms of beauty.  Now, that said, humans are social creatures who spend their days processing the world through social constructs so we're certainly not suggesting that anything we ever do on stage is intended to lead people to negate the belief systems that structure these responses.  I guess we just think that we'll all be a lot healthier if we are reminded and reminded often that (most) taboos are as variable as our weather has been this fall.  

Died laughing

Cheeks.  Still.  Hurting.  From.  Tuesday's.  Rehearsal.

In rehearsal it is often hard to tell if something is absolutely rib-bruisingly hysterical because you have a) discovered a comic moment so pure and undeniable that all audience members will be helpless to escape its contagion or b) found something that will be funny to you and only you because you know the actors very well and/or you are filling in necessary contextual blanks that actually allow the gag to make sense.

Honestly: either way, I left Tuesday's rehearsal feeling like the luckiest guy in the world.  I was actually paid (very little, it's true, but still...) to laugh so hard that internal damage was more than likely.

Though these might be famous last words, I think we may have actually tip-toed up to a workable process for Theatre Is Dead.  In the past, with the notable exception of The Man Who Laughs (which had no spoken text and was therefore immune to this particular issue), we've struggled to find theatrically viable ways to introduce text into the process.  Right now, scene fragments are trickling in as fast as Kiran can write them, and it was important to me that, as we experimented with her text in rehearsal, we didn't lose the commedia-esque stylization and physical comedy vocabulary we have been exploring in November.  Usually, we spend a few weeks exploring style-work, add the text in, get paralyzed by psychological analysis of the scripts, and wait for weeks before actors can actually feel enough ownership to begin exploring the scenes in their bodies again.  This is no good.  There has to be a way to explore style, character, relationships, physical space, and text together without one getting compromised.  

I'm hoping that the solution lies in rethinking what the "unit" of work is.  In prior shows, when rehearsing a scene, we might work page by page, or french scene by french scene, or by clusters of beats.  We may start by staging that unit silently, finding strong actions to communicate the character's objectives.  Problem #1 is that these actions are often quite "psychological;" they express the character's mental state but don't necessarily mesh well with the style in which we eventually intend to play.  Eventually, we'll layer the text in and on comes problem #2 when the physical actions dull and the actors become statues with scripts in hand.  

So, to avoid both problems we've changed the way we draft a scene's realization.  Instead of breaking scenes down arbitrarily or by psychological "units," we've tried breaking down in chunks more appropriate to the performance style.  As a vaudeville of sorts, the smallest unit of rehearsable action in Theatre Is Dead is an "act" (Not as in, "Act 1: Scene 3" but as in a "magic act").  Instead of viewing an entire scene as an "act" unto itself, we're breaking it up into many different smaller "acts" which we are, in the tradition of commedia dell'arte, calling "lazzi."  So in Tuesday's rehearsal we rehearsed "Lazzo of the Jacket," in which Dave's character tries to switch jackets with a corpse.  Before we even showed him the text of the scene in which this lazzo would appear, Dave improvised the given circumstances of the bit.  Because it was broken down as an "act," and not a "unit" of psychological thought, the same stylistic rules applied: exaggerated physicality, complicity with the audience, clown logic, etc.  

What Dave created through his improvisation was directly usable in the scene itself once we added text.  The action doesn't "mickey-mouse" the text because, unlike the actions that usually emerge from our silent scenework, it was not created to reveal hidden subtext; Dave's "Lazzo of the Jacket" was created specifically to amuse the audience.  In this model it is up to playwright, dramaturg, and director to lead the actor to lazzi that will, when complemented with text, create complexity (or at least, excess), character, and humorous juxtaposition.  

I guess the simple moral from all of this is: each aesthetic demands a drafting style befitting its ends.  You can't create a sculpture if you start with brush and palette.  Further, the tools you'll eventually use to shape the marble or clay or chickenwire or whatever will determine not only the final aesthetics but how those aesthetics affect the receiver of the work.  If you're hunting for new aesthetics and new responses, sometimes you need to invent (or repurpose) new tools, new materials.

Who knows if the seeds of these thoughts will be of any use to us in future projects.  Life in the lab is always interesting: experimental drug X may work on patient Y but not on patient Z.  But something will work for patient Z; you just need the time and the resources to figure out what that might be...

New show, new process

As with each new Stolen Chair collective creation, Theatre Is Dead and So Are You, presents us with a radically new rehearsal challenge, one which our past productions have prepared us for only insofar as they have helped us build a language to talk about what's working and what's not. Stepping into the lab today with Stolen Chair veterans Alexia, Liza, David, Emily, and Kiran, all I really knew with any conviction was that I wanted to push our characterizations to stylized grotesques and I wanted to use elements of Commedia dell'Arte to test and develop bits that will eventually become "acts" in our vaudevillian funeral.

I've been working with Alexia and David for more than 4 years now and Liza for over 2.  Cackled my ass off though as they surprised me again and again and again today.  We spent the first half of rehearsal attacking character from a few different angles: from prose descriptions, from photographs, outside-in, inside-out, upside-down and everything in between.  Tried to capture it all on video but they had the nerve to let their impulses take them out of frame.  How dare they!

After lunch (during which I decided that my clothes just didn't have enough black bean sauce on them), we came back to lazzi and concetti, some fun throwbacks to my Commedia training.  What's pretty funny here, though, is that I think this developmental process will more closely mirror Commedia training than our masked Commedia dell'Artemisia.  As of this moment, I imagine most of the elements that will eventually find their way into the script and onto the stage at the Connelly this January will begin their lives as improvised Commedia-esque scenarios.  While Stolen Chair actors have always collaborated intensely on the playwriting and directing processes of our productions, offering compositions to create plots, physical worlds, kinesthetic dynamics and more, Kiran has never had the opportunity to script with quite so much support from improvising performers and the only other project on which I've been able to cull my staging from moments of actorly inspiration has been Kinderspiel.  

Theatre is dead.  Long live theatre.

The busiest weekend of Stolen Chair's life...or one of them

Whoah. I am astonished I've survived to write this. This weekend (by which I only mean Saturday and Sunday) featured 2 marathon rehearsals of the swashbuckler culminating in a semi-staged reading (for which nearly 25 people showed up: surprising, since we were expecting 3), a podcast for nytheatre.com I moderated about indie theatre fundraising (posting later this week), a decorating party for our fundraiser (less than a week away! visit www.partylikepirates.com and buy your tickets now!), and our quarterly board meeting.

Here's what John Clancy over at Scrappy Jack's had to say about last night's reading. (He even manages to plug like mad for our party. Oh, John, how we do love thee!)

Saw the first reading of the first part of Stolen Chair's latest last night, working title The Tragic Swashbuckler. Going to be great. Part three of their Cinetheatre Tetralogy, this time it's Errol Flynn meets Sophocles. So fucking funny and smart. Everyone needs to go to their big Pirate Party this weekend, Saturday the 2nd at the Underwater Lounge out in Dumbo. Nancy and I will be out on Long Island, partying like respectable people, but the rest of you can party like pirates. Live swordfighting, a Delphic oracle, DJs, all like that. Info and tickets at www.partylikepirates.com.

So, yeah, the reading went pretty well (I will post a pic as soon as we get them downloaded); we never know what to expect with these things. It was great to hear people laughing at the reading. Sure, we camped up some material that might be a little more earnest in production, but I think a lot of laughs showed that people were on board with this crazy concept. Still working out the kinks with the tragic chorus but I feel like that's a pretty universal struggle for all playwrights and directors dealing with that trope.

Mission for the next few days is to turn our working title into a title that works...

8 weeks of tech rehearsals

So, to give you some light reading material while you BUY YOUR TICKETS to Kinderspiel, I thought I would muse a little bit about what's going on in our final stages of rehearsal (we open Thursday, people!).

After what was positively the most pleasant cue-to-cue we've ever had (after what has easily been the most challenging rehearsal process we've ever had), Emily had this simple but brilliant realization:

In the lead-up to the past nine shows which have, as Jimmy Comtois says, since gone to the great production in the sky, we spent almost all of our last 20 hours of rehearsal dealing with tech issues, principally trying to figure out the most artful and least stupid ways of transitioning from scene to scene, a task made especially arduous by our CineTheatre projects, which usually have short scenes alternating between quite a few different locations, each with their own set. This time around, our evil-genius-set-designer-David has surpassed his genius if not his evil in providing us with a devilishly organic set which requires no interscene physical transformations (which is not to say his last 4 sets weren't brilliant cuz...um...they frickin' are!). What this means, however, is that we've spent every rehearsal since day one working out how the stage action itself can creatively transform the set over the course of a given scene. So, essentially, we've had about eight weeks of the logistically maddening what-goes-where-wait-when-was-that-supposed-to-be-preset rehearsals as we've simultaneously tried to develop a new work (with an original script) from the ground up.

The good news: instead of spending each minute up until opening night's curtain trying to work out how to cover the sound of dropping venetian blinds with a trumpet riff, we get to spend these last few hours delving even deeper (does anyone ever use the word "delve" for anything but that cliche?) into understanding the play's rhythms. And this is good.

Rehearsal in the morning tomorrow. An excerpt of the play performed at the Fourth Arts Block Festival in the afternoon. Rehearsal all day Sunday. A little brush-up on Tuesday and then we'll see some of you for Thursday's opening night.

Oh, and by the by, if you or someone you know is an artist (of any breed) whose work draws inspiration from the aesthetic, politics, or literature of 1920s Berlin, please let me know as we'll be kicking off our interview series next week.

Our "Music" Rehearsal

For those of you who needed a good reason to GO AND BUY YOUR TICKETS for the Pretentious Festival appearance of Commedia dell'Artemisia, look no further than the exquisitely awful cell-phone video shot by evil genius set-designer/performer David Bengali at our "music" rehearsal:



Hey, David, do you have a version of that with sound?

Kinderspiel's Dramatis Personae

Down below are the characters we explored on Saturday's rehearsal as we tested out the konceit detailed in Kinderspiel Korrections: Part 2. We used the "dropping-in" exercise I picked up from Larry Sacharow in 2001 to find the characters' physicalities and then the ensemble created a very long but very brilliant composition which staged how these characters might deal with the 4 tropes of child's play that I wrote about on Friday. Finally, the ensemble spent some time trying to stage Kiran's very first zygotic stab at the play's language, a fabulously demented mix of English words following German grammatical rules, German/English hybrid words, and nonsense words made out of strange English or German compounds. You can read a little bit of this in the excerpt section of Kinderspiel's finally posted show page on stolenchair.org. And while you're navigating away from the site, feel free to take a gander at the production's webpage placeholder at www.kinderspiel.us. (I know, I know, we couldn't get dot-com...)

If you've navigated back to blog (or never left at all), I hereby present to you, in no particular order, the possible dramatis personae for Kinderspiel:

"Anita" played by Alexia Vernon


"Max" played by Cameron J. Oro


"Heinrich" played by Sam Dingman


"Anna" played by Elisa Matula


"Sylvia" played by Liza Wade White


(You might have recognized some of the above pix. They are all photos or paintings of famous writers, painters, and performers from 1920s Berlin.)

Kinderspiel Korrections: Part 1

So, we spent about 3 weeks toying with a concept for Kinderspiel that just doesn't look like it will either a) actually address the questions we want to address or b) actually be possible to do.

Fortunately, we learned a lot in those 3 weeks of experiments. It can be awfully frustrating for all parties involved to flail about in unknown territory only to come to the conclusion that nothing has been concluded. But such is the valiant and commendable mission of a laboratory theatre company! The alternative is what? We would only do plays that were already written or develop ideas that we were 100% certain we could pull off. Where would the fun be in that?

As it stands now, Kinderspiel PR reads: "Set in the demimonde of Weimar Berlin, one cabaret offers access to the ultimate taboo: watching adults play as children. Stolen Chair presents the world's greatest children's story, told exclusively for an adult audience. After all, why should childhood be wasted on the young?"

In our rehearsal experiments, we had been interpreting "play as children" to mean "play-acting as children." Putting aside for the moment whether or not the nature of our ensemble's play-acting was or was not faithful to actual child's-play, this interpretation forcibly skews the play too far towards the Dionysian on Nietzsche's artistic spectrum (Um...can you tell I've been spending too long doing PR for Stolen Chair's gig at the Pretentious Festival?). While about 8 years ago, in the thick of my Grotowski-worship, I would have bribed, maimed, and killed for the opportunity to direct a paratheatrical experiment, Stolen Chair's whole formula is based on reinvigorating classical (or classic) structures. We make perversely-conceived and aesthetically-preposterous well-made plays. And...we tell stories! Good stories. We just couldn't find the Apollonian structures necessary to keep the play-acting component and find opportunities to forge those into a well-made play and a good story.

The chief problem play-acting poses is that it fully negates character; part of play-acting means so fully committing to the spirit of the moment that the social clues that reveal character just disappear. And it's reductive: while there's room therein for wild creativity, the plot tropes it seems to force (Grotowski similarly noticed that in his early paratheatre experiments, most of the improvisations revolved around certain banalities like pseudo-tribal conflict and group celebration) won't give us the opportunity to explore the questions which originally gave rise to this piece.

But, where does that leave us? Ah, well that's part two, coming to an RSS-feed near you in about 3 hours...

Brick-o-lage

Kiran, Cam, Liza, Emily, and I crouched down and crawled through the Brick's adorably lilliputian entrance for the first time today. The space is like an airier, brick-ier Red Room, with a layout that all the Chairs are really familiar with, narrow and deep. It was nice directing in the space and all of the Brick associates we met were really welcoming.

Tonight was a very special rehearsal: our first time actually digging into the moments that we've spent the past month creating. For those of you who haven't been in a rehearsal with us, we have an interesting 2-phase "blocking" process. Phase 1 happens in a frenzy, with what seems like 5 dozen people shouting out ideas simultaneously until the entire play is staged before any of us has anything even resembling a handle on the play's characters or important themes. This phase of the process can be very jarring for actors who like to cook up their characters slowly, especially when they don't know that Phase 2 will follow shortly thereafter.

Phase 2: we spend the rest of the rehearsal process refining/undoing our hastily staged moments so that can actually live in the same performative world and support character throughlines. This phase of the process can also be very frustrating for actors, especially those who wrote down the blocking for Phase 1 in pen :).

What I love about working with this company is by the time we're half-way through phase 2, I start to get existentially depressed as I watch rehearsal and see only brilliance on stage, no longer remembering an ounce of how I may once have contributed to said magic. I mean it: I actually enjoy wallowing in that deep despair because it's a testament to just how much of a big messy collaboration our work always is.

And now we just have to write the damn ending...

"Put that in your blog and smoke it"

This posting's title is courtesy of Layna Fisher, Tuzia in our remount of Commedia dell'Artemisia. We are about 2/3 of the way done restaging the rewrites (with a recast ensemble) and I am having the time of my life working on this (and I hope the rest of the creative team is too). I spend most of each rehearsal laughing mine arse off, yet somehow we're right on schedule. I'm more than a little bit sad that we're only going to have three chances to share this.

Back when we first tossed up the possibility of remounting this show, I asked Emily (resident dramaturg) if it was an "immature" work. Not "immature" as in poop jokes and rubber chickens (alas, we haven't found a way to work either of these into Stolen Chair's ouevre), but "immature" insofar as it was something we developed before all of the growth that the company had in 2005 and 2006 (which was, in a sense, first catalyzed by the Stampede Festival performance of Commedia dell'Artemisia).

As we've rehearsed it over the past month, I've rediscovered a certain sharpness in it that really hasn't been in any of our pieces since. While I've blown out my vocal chords debating the "meaning" of most of our pieces, these meta-conversations about Commedia seem so much more loaded. Perhaps because this is one of the few projects on which we've worked that actually has the potential to raise controversy and ruffle the feathers of even the most liberal of audiences. It's a comedy about rape, a raucous and ribald farce about sexual violation, with a little torture thrown in for good measure (Hey, Kiran, you should make sure to work in some of the 24-backlash popularization of torture stuff into the last scene, huh?). And the rape we're satirizing is the actual historical forceful defloration of the Italian painter Artemisia Gentileschi. Delicate stuff, and we're not exactly "tip-toeing on egg shells" around it. We are trying, however, to be even more faithful to the story's original details, perhaps only because the truth, in this case, is far sicker (and, truth be told, far more comical) than any fiction we could invent.

Ultimately, the piece is a diatribe against those who attempt to universalize the subjectivity of human experience: those who look at Artemisia's "rape" and process it with the same context that it would have in our contemporary society, those who actually believe there is any throughline in the history of marriage (one besides the historical subjugation of women, of course), those who believe that great art has always been driven by personal demons, those who eschew responsibility for their ideologies by hiding behind a wall of tradition that is as variable as the Billboard music chart.

Diatribes aside, it also has more slapstick than any piece I've ever had the pleasure of directing. Prat falls, slaps, and kicks in the groin galore. Who could ask for anything more? (Hey, that was almost a couplet! Watch out, Kiran!)

There are only two NYC performances (and each house size is only about 50!) so buy your tickets now, and don't forget to support the rest of our friends at the Pretentious festival!!!

99 bottles of beer on the blog

Yep. We're up to post 99. You're all invited to celebrate #100 with us as we commemorate the momentous occasion by proceeding with business as usual...

Now to turn this into a real post:

After last week's scheduling snafu, we finally had our first post-retreat rehearsal for Kinderspiel today. Here's what we learned:

• Our threshold for boredom is extremely high. I was worried that in the work we were doing, we would be challenged to give ourselves permission to push past the place when repeated tasks, games, and play grow dull, but I just don't think we're ever going to get bored.
  
• 15 minutes of improvised play can be easily repeated. I gave a simple scenario to be explored. 5 actors would pretend to be asleep. I would tap 2 while their eyes were closed. When I clapped my hands, they were all to wake-up. The tapped actors would playact as giants and the other 3 as kids. I just let the improv roll for 15 minutes on camera. Afterwards, we talked about the inner logic that people were using to explain their role in the playworld and we collaboratively narrated the improv as a Grimm's fairy tale; it was no more or less absurd than any of those tales. I asked them to repeat the improv without losing the sense of spontaneity and discovery, and it ran 14 minutes and 40 seconds...the only thing that really distinguishes the two improvs on tape is that I stupidly tried to zoom in and frame shots in #2, basically meaning I lost most of the action.
  
• You can't MC unless you know your audience. Intuitive though it may seem to be, it did not occur to us that it would be difficult Alexia to experiment with the role of master conferencier without giving her any background on the fictional audience to which she was pandering.
• In developmental work, failed exercises are just as useful as successful ones. Like any other laboratory group, sometimes we put an idea out there that falls so miserably flat that we just mop it under the risers and pretend it never happened. In Kinderspiel, however, these exercises are just as important to the feedback loop, and today, one of my (overly ambitious and complicated) activities flopped but nevertheless yielded some of the day's most productive advances.

After the day's highs and lows, we headed over to Sympathy for the Kettle to guzzle some tea and sort out how we should proceed. The current formula:

1. Videotaped improvisation of a simple scenario (i.e. 2 giants and 3 kids wake up in the same space)
2. Group discussion of the improv's kids-logic and literary tropes
3. Before the next rehearsal, Kiran prepares a draft of the improv, rewriting it to reference said tropes more clearly, weave into societal analogues, metaphors, and morals, and add narration for the MC.
   
4. Try to fuse the original improv with the new text without losing the spirit of spontaneity.
   
5. Create an embarrassing video montage and post it on youtube (Optional)
   

At some point in the not too distant future, we're also going to need to begin kinderspieling as Weimar characters instead of as ourselves. We'll probably have the actors research photos and histories to develop a character and then see how these characters can play together.

Assuming that the final "product" for which we're shooting will be a sort of neverending story in which characters, props, and space continually transform to become new characters, props, and space, we need to explore what happens to the kinderspielers when they are not actively involved in the moment's play. Do they sit down and play cards and drink beer? Do they break-off into smaller groups and parallel play until their play intersects with the narrative again? I think we'll actually have to kind of reverse-engineer this: for the time being we'll just have people leave the stage and then, once we figure out how they'll need to reintegrate into the narrative, we'll find something for them to do onstage that can develop into the role they will need to serve in the story.

Simple, right? We'll see how this all goes...

The mean bone in our body

A few weeks ago, Kiran and I got quite a thrill listening to the new cast (featuring Stolen Chair's evil genius* set designer David Bengali, Stage Kiss's Layna Fisher, and SCTC resident actors Cameron Oro and Liza Wade White) read through Commedia dell'Artemisia for the first time. It's fast, it's funny, and it's filled with vitriol, like the sort they used to fling at those medieval-soldier-types as they tried to scale the castle's keep. As cynical as KMLYMI was, we have never since created anything that is as downright mean as Commedia... And I don't mean "mean-spirited" or "negative," I mean "ruthlessly and unapologetically nasty."

But it's funny. And it's really delightful. And it's mean-ingful.

As we've begun to rehearse the piece, it's been a treat allowing ourselves to forget the production's last incarnation and build the new production from the ground up, allowing the new performers to fully own these characters. The only moment that I would have been tempted to keep, I had to reimagine anyway, as Cameron doesn't quite have the circus-chops to do the front flip that Jon Campbell used to do just before the rape scene...oh, and speaking of rape scene: this sweet and innocent li'l comedy of ours actually has the stage direction "He rapes her."

The piece is rather magical insofar as it pretty much stages itself. Once an ensemble can get used to sharing the mask with the audience and figures out how to clearly demarcate each state change (similar to beat changes, except each one is played to 11, as they say in Spinal Tap, and they happen in rapid succession and seemingly without internal motivation), moments seem to flow logically from each other.

While we certainly had comic bits and business in the Stampede Fest version of the piece in early 2005, Jon Campbell and I (who had trained in classical improvised commedia) were disappointed that we didn't let any extended lazzi develop. While in lots of places, these lazzi would conflict with the timing of Kiran's couplets, I'm really eager to find at least 3 or 4 places where we can just run free of the text for a few minutes. That said, I know that can't happen until we have total security in the skeleton of the piece, something we were never able to achieve in the compressed developmental process for version 1.0.

Kiran's actually setting out to tinker with the script a bit for version 2.0, but it's certainly not going to be anything close to the overhaul that happened between Stages Kiss 2003 and Stage Kiss 2006 (which, as those who caught both know: had NOTHING in common!). She's probably just going to punch up some of the less punchy lines and maybe add a little bit more interaction between Tuzia (Artemisia's neighbor/surrogate mother) and Orazio (Artemisia's dad) and/or Tuzia and Tassi (Artemisia's tutor/rapist). We're tossing around the idea of reworking the ending so that the double-casting (the actress who plays Artemisia also plays the judge) can be a product of the plotting itself, but we still need to let that idea incubate a bit more before it hatches...

Can't wait until next rehearsal on Thursday...it's ladies night: just Liza and Layna. :)

*David is not, in fact, evil. But he is, in fact, a genius. I'm not kidding. And even if he wasn't a genius (which he is), he looks enough like a genius to pass as one.

Child's play is hard work!

Kiran and I are here in Stolen Chair's Parisian HQ and I finally have a few moments to catch up on our retreat from the first weekend in March. This retreat was perhaps our most challenging to date, and overall, felt much more like Stage Kiss than either of the CineTheatre projects (Kill Me Like You Mean It and The Man Who Laughs) insofar as our primary challenge was the invention of a performance style (in Stage Kiss we tried to marry Ludlam-esque camp with the Elizabethan boy-actor tradition) whereas in both CineTheatre retreats, we only had to translate a style from film to theatre (silent film and film noir, respectively). Since Stage Kiss, however, was adapted (very loosely) from a text by John Lyly (Gallathea), we at least had a very solid understanding of plot and character.

What did we start with this weekend? Big dreams and a box of props. We knew we wanted to play with the conventions of Weimar Cabaret, the plots of Grimm's fairytales, and the theatrical concept of "age-drag" (the idea that age, like gender, can be performed against biological "realities," and that this performance can range from "passing" to parody). One weekend proved only enough time just barely to begin exploring the latter. Thank goodness we have over 6 more months to cook this one up.

I think that with each successive retreat, we've begun the collaborative process with fewer conceptual elements pre-determined, allowing ourselves to discover these on our feet. And this is good. Very good. It allows us to collectively craft a production that is well-suited to the specific creative team we've assembled. But it's not expedient and it certainly can lead one to bang one's head frequently on any nearby walls. Actually, if the past 5 years are any indication, the number of times I've banged my head on walls at a given retreat is directly proportional to the eventual artistic success of the production.

So, head-banging aside, what did we learn on this retreat? In no particular order:

1. Our entire creative team has a really clear idea (whether each collaborator realizes it or not) of how children behave (and think!) at a variety of developmental stages. If we continue to explore this direction, we'll reinforce these instincts with some observation (trips to the playground!) and try to dig up some more video footage and reading.
   
2. Our entire cast is capable of creating compelling and believable characters that are under the age of 10. Some of our actors are more natural fits for specific age brackets within that range.
   
3. It is disappointingly natural to watch an adult actor performing as a young child. There is no tension, no cognitive dissonance, no general creepiness in the image. I was really hoping there would be. I think costuming and make-up can help bring this quality out if we do want to pursue it.
   
4. On the other hand, when we set-up scenarios to allow for the actors to cut loose and play as young children might (without actually performing as young children), there was a real edge present in watching adults genuinely play. It is transgressive. Revolutionary, even. It might be one of the last taboos left in our culture. If we're clever, we'll find a way for the audience to vicariously (or actually?) enjoy this transgression throughout our performance.
   
5. It is really interesting to watch (an adult performer playing) a young child impersonate older characters. It has brilliant satirical potential insofar as it disarms as it mocks.
6. And speaking of mocking, the work with Lecoq's concept of the bouffon was informative but might be a dead-end for us if we try to deal with it head-on. I think we'll be much more successful adapting some of the techniques of buffonery in our exploration of child's play than we will be in the conscious construction of bouffon characters.
   
7. We must beware of "school play syndrome." This syndrome pops up when children are performing material handed down to them by adults and/or when audiences are led to respond to the humor inherent in children doing things "badly" (because of lack of motor-skills or cognition). Our project needs to avoid taking advantage of the comedy of children failing to measure up to adult standards, and instead try to find the comic delight of children doing what children do best when left to their own devices (and this includes the violence and sexuality that we often diminish/ignore in child's play).
   
8. Though both will be useful for our purposes, role-playing is different than play-acting. Role-playing still retains a sort of meta-level understanding of rules; in fact, role-playing never seems to become "unruly," except when arguments arise between the role-players as to what the rules actually are or should be. Role-playing often originates from simulation of the adult world and as such can provide telling commentary on the adult world (see item #5) but does not seem to provide an opportunity for the sort of committed play that is in our culture, solely available to the 10 and under set (see item #4). Play-acting is liberatory, its rules evolve, shift, and change at it proceeds (therefore making it more collaborative), and requires total commitment in order to be sustained. In our experiments with play-acting, language was an intrusion, forcing the metalevel back and killing the sense of play.
9. Our conceit of having adult actors portraying adults who portray child cabaret performers who perform their cabaret act will fall primarily on playwriting, dramaturgy, direction, and design. It is not possible to convey this layering without giving a lot of thoughts to these elements. The difficulty of communicating age-drag was surprising when compared to our gender-drag explorations in the Stage Kiss retreat; I think the instinct in the audience member is to suspend disbelief and flatten disparate elements in age drag, whereas a multiplicity of genders can exist simultaneously for an audience. I think, therefore, we will have to think about how a progression of elements can reveal the total drag-picture, as opposed to letting a single picture tell it all.
10. It is difficult to tell exactly how "age drag" differs from gender drag and how it is the same. For instance, I think we are much more willing to see gender as performative/culturally mediated. Age, on the other hand, seems to be biologically "real," and not at all performative. That said, if you ask someone in the mid-twenties to perform as a middle-aged person, they can do it. Is this because the body of a middle-aged person moves inherently? Maybe. But there's no doubt that a 25 year old and a 50 year old also choose to present themselves differently, and that includes the use of their bodies. But what about the difference between a 5 year old and a 25 year old? Surely the 5 year old isn't making (conscious or unconscious) performative choices; he is simply moving and acting the only way he can, based on biological and psychological development. Or is there some element of performance here, too? Does a 5 year old use her body differently from a 25 year old simply because she must, or also because she can?
    
11. In telling fairy tales, we either need to make up our own from very recognizable fairy tale motifs or let the child-characters pervert recognizable fairy tales to the degree that they almost become new fairy tales.

Okay, that's all for now. Hopefully, in the next couple of days I'll be posting some revelatory thoughts on how to integrate fairy tales and Weimar Cabaret into this already heady mix. While wandering around the International Theatre and Film Bookstore in Amsterdam on Saturday (do we even have such a store in NYC?), I found a book/cd set called Cabaret Berlin published by earbooks.net. Ordered it from Amazon and it will be waiting for me when we return to the other side of the Atlantic.

Mr. John Clancy praises KILL ME...

Warm words from one of my favorite directors and playwrights, John Clancy, Obie award-winner and co-founder of FringeNYC:

"Brilliant, beautiful writing, smart, inventive directing and every performance spot-on. Shows what you can do when you spend serious time on the work."

Find out what others are saying at killmelikeyoumeanit.com.

The urge to dramaturge

Saturday's rehearsal was funny.

One would think that after developing this project (Kill Me Like You Mean It) over the course of 5 months, with a director, playwright, dramaturg, 3 designers, and 5 performers combing over all 17 drafts of the script, one of us would have noticed that the climax of the play was more or less unstage-able. Somehow, it took actually seeing the guns in the actors' hands to realize that there were some pretty significant dramaturgical issues with the scene. And since I'm nearly certain that Emily Otto is the best production dramaturg who has ever helped birth a new work, it's just a symptom of how incredibly complicated it is to make a structurally coherent noir (one element of noir which we consciously decided not to emulate was the Big Sleep-style labyrinthine plot in which the mystery is actually so difficult to follow that it becomes dull).

So, with 3 actors on stage and a director, playwright, and dramaturg sitting in the house, we had to collectively bail out the sinking scene. First the actors and I tried to find a physical solution to the problem. That just created more problems and all of a sudden we found we had even more we needed to explain away. But luckily, since the playwright was in the room, we were able, right there in the moment, to see if a few script changes could make the scene work. And then, since the dramaturg was sitting right next to the playwright, we were able to get confirmation from her that the line changes and subsequent directorial choices were structurally sound and stylistically consistent with the rest of the play.

Though it certainly wasn't one of those happy-go-lucky-kumbaya-collective-creation-lovefests that our company is wont to have, it was one of the clearest reminders for me (in recent memory) why we've chosen to work the way we have. I mean, really, how do other directors do it? Unless they feel comfortable rewriting a playwright's words to serve their staging needs, how do they slog through the challenges of mounting a new work? If you're out there in the blogosphere and you're a director or playwright or dramaturg who has had to salvage unstage-able scenes in a original work, post and let us know how this all works when one doesn't have the luxury of having the entire creative team on hand at all times...

Roleplaying: The Long (and sadly un-sordid) Story of Stolen Chair's Co-Artistic Directors

So last night marked the final revision of the final scene in Kill Me Like You Mean It. It has been a long developmental process (more on that in our next blog posting), and it's good to feel "done" (a few minor pencilled-in changes will happen up until opening night, I'm sure), but last night was special for other reasons: it reminded me how incredibly fluid the roles of playwright and director are within our company. Some of the lines we were happiest with were written by our director (me) and some of the stage moments we found most satisfying were directed by our playwright, Kiran Rikhye.

Kiran Rikhye and I (Jon Stancato) are the Co-Artistic Directors of the company and have been since its inception, but our specific roles have been in flux since we started collaborating nearly 8 years ago, and I think it's a rather unique theatrical partnership.

A brief Stolen Chair history: A Tale of Two Writer/Directors

Support Group: We began working together as partners in an undergraduate playwriting class; we were from opposite sides of the tracks: different theatrical passions, different processes, different personalities. Soon after, we were the only two students in a directing class at Swarthmore College; we supported each other's work as two novice directors each trying to develop our own visions. After the first workshop performance of our pieces, Kiran's parents remarked on how very different these visions were: I was all about space and physicality and Kiran focused on text and character.

Piecemeal: Kiran and I co-directed a production of The Tempest, using each other's strengths to balance our respective weaknesses. We more or less took turns directing. I would take the first few passes of the scene until its spatial dynamics were roughly established, and then Kiran would dig into the subtleties of the text.

Contract Labor: For my directing thesis, I commissioned an original adaptation of The Dybbuk from Kiran. I gave Kiran specific instructions for each scene: plotting, key lines, tone, etc. She delivered a script; I directed it.

Partnership: Stolen Chair was founded shortly thereafter and ever since then, Kiran has been specifically credited as the writer of each of Stolen Chair's performance texts and I have been billed as the director. This is more or less accurate insofar as there is no way that I could have written any of those scripts and there is no way that Kiran could have conceptualized and staged them. That said, I am in the room offering suggestions during nearly every single moment Kiran is writing, and Kiran is in the theatre during nearly every single minute of rehearsal, offering suggestions to me or directly to the actors.

Over the years (going on 5, happy birthday to us!!!), Kiran and my diametrically opposing styles as writers and directors have nearly merged into a (much more interesting) synthesis. A little part of me burns up everytime an audience ooos and ahhs at a moment that Kiran directed and, for her part, my (admittedly less petty) partner always feels a little bit sorry that my writing contributions remain uncredited, but at the end of the day the divisions of labor are as right as they are wrong...

And who knows? Maybe we're just being lazy and neither of us wants to take on more artistic responsibility...At 11:45pm last night when we are all getting a bit punchy, we (only half-jokingly) asked one of the performers, Tommy Dickie, to stage manage and direct the scene he was acting in...

Ka-Pow

During yesterday's "stumble-through," the whole cast had the opportunity to see the brilliant fight sequence that company member Jon Campbell choreographed for Sam Dingman and Cameron J. Oro. Though it, like everything else in the show, still needs quite a bit of rehearsal (it's okay, we don't open until after New Year's), it really reminded me why I love stage combat so much and made it very clear why combat is currently so in vogue (see Vampire Cowboys, Friday Night Fight Club, et al). For starters, it's undeniably a lot of fun: fun to create, fun to rehearse, fun to perform, fun to watch. More importantly, it models so many components of Stolen Chair's rehearsal philosophies:

1. It demands collaboration, not only between the doers, but between the choreographer and the combatants. As Stolen Chair has learned (time and time again), stage combat which isn't created on/for the specific bodies of the participants will invariably look wooden or worse, actually endanger one or more of the combatants. The same level of collaboration is vital for the director-actor relationship. No matter how many hours I spend researching and working theatrical moments out in my head, once I step into the rehearsal I need to table those dreams and schemes and deal with the "real": the actors' abilities, interests, and passions.
   
2. In order for either combatant to pull off the fight sequence, they need to work very hard to make their scene partners look good--if only actors could approach every scene with this selfless commitment.
   
3. It provides a complex physical score which the actors must use as a vehicle to carry the characters' emotional dynamics. When Stolen Chair creates a production, every moment is precisely "scored," and this challenges any actor working with the Chairs to find the freedom within that structure.
   
4. It forces an important playful distance between the actor and the character. In order to prevent mutual injury, the actors can never actually yield (even in the slightest) to the anger and aggression they are performing, retaining the space between the actor and the mask.
   

We look forward to sharing our li'l brawl with you in January. Tickets are already on sale for Kill Me Like You Mean It...

Oh, and if you are reading this entry (and especially if you are a regular reader of this blog), drop a comment so we know you're out there.