We made it to the end of Week 3. Amazing how just that seems like an accomplishment even though we’re still not through our initial research phase. We’re learning how to negotiate our meeting space better, though it has nothing to do with how we thought we would. As pretty as it’s been, outside has become inhospitable to our work because we can’t effectively communicate with the Zoom room. Our sound disperses too much and those in the Zoom miss out on what’s said in the Room and vice versa. We’ve taken to pitching camp in the main room of a class building with high ceilings, enough space for us to distance safely, but with walls that make the acoustics work. Following that, it’s not weather that prescribes our meeting place; instead, we meet in person when there’s enough of us to make sense. If more than five or six are in the Zoom, the we all shift there. That said, it is so, so hard to curate a diverse, inclusive conversation in the Zoom, especially when so many opt out of the video portion. It becomes too easy to not contribute to the conversation when you aren’t being watched visually. Along the same lines, it makes it impossible for me to read the room and try and get others involved. I will continue to troubleshoot. This much has been confirmed for me: in no way do I want to rehearse and entire play online (though I’m sure admitting to such has cemented its reality in my future). As for the work and the energy, this week felt very much like the middle of a process when the newness has worn off and the rest of the world has started to creep into the room making our overall purpose fuzzy. But that’s okay, even expected, and we will move forward. 

Monday. The rain threatened and pushed us into the Zoom (prior to our pivot from above). In all honesty, this rehearsal was a slog and therefore foggy in my brain and somewhat illegible in my chicken scratch. It wasn’t just the Zoom. Most of us brought that Monday energy and the online format just exacerbates it. I have to think long and hard about how to warm up the Zoom room, which is especially rough because I’ve never been the type of director to install warmup games, zipzapzop, etc. I just like to get to work and come to expect the same from my ensemble. This pandemic is humbling in so many ways. But enough of that; we still did the work and some good things came out of it. I began with an understanding and a gentle nudging towards documentation. It’s hard when we don’t know what’s important and what’s not, but harder still is taking those first steps towards momentum. I’m hoping by the end of next week we feel like that portion of the lab is moving at a decent pace. We moved on to table Act 2 of All My Sons and continued shifting the cast with every chunk of text that we’ve read. It really has broken down the idea of a singular voice playing the character throughout. One of our ensemble members, Will, enjoys large choices when called upon and I can feel my older director brain flinch while my pandemic theatre brain is stimulated. Whether it was their old, fuddy duddy, southern Keller or their oppressive, clawing, New England Mother, their choices played to stereotype in the ways that many of our researched forms play to archetype or stock characters. It made me think, could you have moments of performance like this and yet still transcend the stereotype? Could you pay one character with different actors, depending on the scene or even beat? If it was a comedic, stereotypical moment, could Will wear the mask of the Mother and overplay that side, but as soon as the scene switched to a quieter moment between mother and son, another actor takes dons the mask and plays with subtlety? After we finish tabling the play, I look forward to a conversation around the stock characters of the American Dream. I feel like there’s something there but will await the group to go too far down that road. We had some conversation around using distance in staging and what that looks like. The two characters of Sue and Ann speak for a while and yet couldn’t be further apart emotionally, though that only becomes evident the further you get in the scene. Should we block emotionally? We could put these characters on different sides of the stage, even different spaces to tell that story. An ensemble member, Arden, brought up looking to concert stages as possible inspiration with their different levels, spaces, and relationships to the audience. Kanye’s most recent tour came to mind as an extreme example where he performed on a platform that hung above his audience and visually obstructed them as well. I think looking at how music artists have approached the audience is super interesting and reminds me of my MFA thesis in which I referenced sports crowds as the kind of audience I was after as I looked to their configurations as inspiration. Staying with the staging brainstorm, there is a scene between Chris and George that plays out like a boxing match; why not stage it like one? One member thought that might give it a layer of absurdity that would illicit laughter, which is not untrue unless the entire piece is staged metaphorically. Then I suppose you’re just looking for visual metaphors that are easily legible to the audience. Blunt legibility will be essential. 

On our other parallel journey, I can’t help but be affected by the ongoing election right now. It’s tough for me to tell whether these ideas that I tie together between our current politics and this play land for any of the ensemble. When I was their age, it wouldn’t have with me, but this is a much different time. Regardless of political side, Keller and Kate play like the American stereotype. They ignore the bad stuff, hoping it will go away. They play dumb to hide their knowing flaws. Keller leans into a proper dose of “whataboutism” with George when they talk about his dad. Chris separates himself from his dad emotionally but will be the first to defend his honor, not unlike a son of our current president. This is truly the “All-American family” with all of its sins, flaws, and contradictions. The play speaks to the purity of the American Dream through capitalism and with acceptable losses. I can’t help but think that the faulty plane parts that Keller sent off could easily be faulty vaccines that get dispersed for economic recovery or political gain. Keller says, “That’s the way they do, George. A little man makes a mistake and they hang him by their thumbs; the big ones become ambassadors.” That’s the entire Trump presidency: Michael Cohen, Flynn, Spicer, etc. all hung by their thumbs. Finally, we come to the fall of the hero. Chris realizes that his Dad is everything he feared him to be. He says,” What the hell are you? You’re not even an animal, no animal kills his own, what are you?” Mikayla, our stage manager, offered that this is a direct line to police brutality and I couldn’t agree more. 

So, yes, I guess there was something there. A good reminder that even a slog is worth doing. Even a Zoom is worth it. Come hell or high water, we shall continue. 

Thursday. The slog continued. We were live and in person scientifically speaking, though I didn’t check any pulses and am not convinced on what I would’ve found. I realize that not only are we in this middle part of our research journey, but these students are now over a month into this weird version of school and I can tell it’s getting to them. I can’t lie, it’s getting to me too. But we’ll get through this. The first encounter was Mikayla, who implied that one of the research groups didn’t show up with anything. As we worked our way through the presentations, more than a few researchers failed to contribute and certain holes in their research were quite pronounced. All that said, there was still plenty to pick through. The team assigned to Augusto Boal and his Theatre of the Oppressed was first. I had my own reasons to bring him into the room, but they really attacked him in his entirety, which was wonderful. Rae, a contributing member to this presentation and a student of mine that has worked with Boal’s Joker in adaptation, said at the top that Boal saw traditional theatre as oppressive because the audience is not given a chance to participate. I love this. So much of theatre is made without the audience in mind. All the focus is on the stage. Sure, we worry about sight lines and articulation but there is more to a theatrical event than being able to see and hear the story. Sometimes we’ll even ask what we want the audience to think on the way out of the theatre. But what about during the show? Their participation is half the event and half the creation of the story. A friend of mine always referred to a play’s story being the lotus flower that slowly opens in the liminal space through the meeting and alchemy of audience and players. The group when on to take us through the many iterations of theatre that Boal created and evolved. More than any specific idea, the main inspiration was Boal’s insistence on evolving what his theatre was doing based on the need of the moment. His newspaper theatre responded to the ways in which his audience was encountering the news of the day. His invisible theatre was in protest to his country’s shortcomings. His Joker was devised to be crystal clear about how his audience was to watch his shows. It’s this last one that has always attracted me. I’ve said a few times that I’m an artist who loves gentle metaphor; so much so that it’s gotten me in trouble because I was too gentle and didn’t communicate the story. I’m sensitive to this. However, in our current climate under the pandemic and the uprising for equity and justice, I feel the need to be loud, blunt, and unapologetic; I feel like some iteration of the Joker can give me this. It’s here I want to connect the group thread on the audience’s phones to this idea of a blunt Joker instrument. I’m not entirely sure how to achieve this, but it’s on the list. 

It’s here we ran into a wall, but it’s not entirely on the ensemble. In retrospect, the team attacking Brecht needed some guidance from me on what to look for. There’s a lot that you can present on Bertolt, but I had assumed that alienation (or estrangement) would be touched on, if not at the center of the ideas. Alas, a swing and a whiff. My hope is that in the years to come when they do encounter Brecht, they’ll think back on the conversation we ended up having and it will help. I brought his Epic Theatre into the room to talk about creating distance between your audience and what you are talking about. Brecht believed that the audience should never get lost in the story, but instead always be interrogating the story and he used various tools to accomplish this. I have come around to approach theatre in much the same way, no doubt influenced greatly by his work. I’ve played with characters speaking their own stage directions, making the backstage visible, and achieving transparency in the storytelling. I love constantly reminding the audience that they are watching a theatrical show. It’s never taken anything away and never failed to add to the audience’s experience. I also believe that the best way to speak to our current issues, or the best way to create art to spark the necessary conversation, is to develop distance between our audience and their points of relevance in the story. I brought up Michelle Hensley with the group; she was the founder of Ten Thousand Things, an inspiring theatre out of Minneapolis. Her model is a theatre with professional actors that tour facilities like prisons and women’s detention centers to spark conversation within those communities. She quickly learned that she could not put on a play that held a mirror up to their circumstance because her audience would quickly shut down and stop experiencing the story; they already had that experience in their life and it led them to where they are now. However, if she presented fairy tales to these audiences that dealt with the same essential conflicts and challenges of their lives, then her audience would open up and let the story in. The fairy tale created the necessary distance for the audience to let those relevant points land. I’ve followed this lead in my own creation of what I call new American Myths as well as some of my specific storytelling. I shared with the group that I do an adaptation of Dicken’s A Christmas Carol at the Vance Birthplace very season. Our purpose in this adaptation is to highlight the enslaved people who lived there as well as hold up Zebulon Vance as both the favorite son of North Carolina and a white supremacist. These are not light issues and can hit certain people pretty hard. I can remember the first meeting where we talked about how to tell this story and my mind went straight to toy theatre. By using puppetry—lightboxes, crankies, shadow puppets, and marionettes—we create the distance necessary with an added touch of delight that allows the audience into the story. I want to bring this back around to the blunt instrument of the Joker. I wonder if there is a way to balance that idea with distance and delight; to make the story’s purpose direct during the storytelling while keeping the story itself delightful and digestible. 

Next up was Wole Soyinka and more issues ensued. Beyond a well-presented biography and summaries of his plays, the research hit a roadblock, which I intuit came from two separate issues. One is a lack of effort and I’ll leave that there. But two, and much more importantly, there’s a shameful lack of material on this incredible, Nobel Prize winning artist. I primarily brought him into the room because I’m inspired by his ability to blend western theatre and his native Nigerian theatre into something new in the same way that I’m inspired by Edward Lee. I’m also attracted to his central theme of individual vs. community because that’s at the heart of All My Sons. Finally, though, I wanted to plant a seed in the students to interrogate theatre’s gatekeepers and look for the obvious gaps in our theatre history. There’s so little known about theatre from the continent that invented it. And that’s more than a shame; it’s a disgrace. 

Finally, the Commedia team somehow put together a presentation despite not arriving at the laboratory with one. Working through the stock characters provided the needed context for when we get to the creation of our American Dream stock. We were also attracted to their performances in found spaces and ability to move from space to space in the middle of a show if the size of the audience called for it. That kind of pivoting will be essential under the pandemic. I love that they would use vegetables for props since that’s just what was in the markets during the show. I’ve always been attracted to flexible props and when props can’t be passed around from actor to actor, that flexibility becomes a necessity. Finally, looking at the Commedia troupes as the first buskers that worked like touring musicians delighted me. They would tour regions and build their names just as a band would play dive bars and slowly work their way up to bigger stages. The idea that struck me the most, though, was that actors would play the same stock character in every show for their entire career. The actors in our room bristled at this as would I have at their age and in pretty much every stage of my acting career. But musicians do this all the time. You learn the bass and that’s what you play at every show and in every band you’re a part of (of course, there are exceptions). There’s no stigma of type casting when it comes to musicians. Why do we do this with actors? Why do we as actors strive to break free of it and demand to play every instrument? It’s true that if your box is extremely defined as a stock character is, you can find freedom, just as a bassist finds freedom in their instrument. That kind of blew my mind there at the end. Good end to a rough week. Next week will be better. Onwards and upwards.