December 2010 Archives

We march ever closer to a new year, but we at The Inkwell are holding on a bit longer to the last days of this one.  We're continuing to look back at our Fall Inkreading Series at Woolly Mammoth, asking our playmakers to provide their thoughts.

So here's more thinking by dramaturg Jenn Book Haselwerdt on Monument by Doug Dolcino, which is definitely a thinker's play.  It's got a lot of depth... as deep as any lake you can think of.

By the way, you should take a few minutes to read Jenn's previous blog post her work as a dramaturg on Jason Platt's Strive Seek Find, a reading of which The Inkwell staged last year.

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Here are the things I get to do professionally as a dramaturg:

1. Read scripts. (Great, since I’m a born bookworm.)
2. Think hard about scripts. (Great, since I’m a born nerd.)
3. Talk to people about scripts. (Great, since I like to talk at length about things I find wonderful.)
4. Play nicely with others, and don’t run with scissors. (Great, since safety should always come first.)

It’s hard to believe sometimes that I get hired to do exactly what I love to do, especially with a company like The Inkwell, which really appreciates the work of a dramaturg.  This season, I was lucky to be able to work on the play Monument, with a group of extremely talented artists, including director Jessica Burgess and playwright Doug Dolcino.

I’ve been repeating something a lot over the last couple of weeks. “If I get hired to work on a play that doesn’t provoke any questions, I wonder why I was hired. I understand why everyone else in the room is there: the actors, the director, the playwright. But why hire a dramaturg if there’s no conversation to be had?”

There was a whole lot of conversation to be had about Monument, and I’m so glad there was.

From the moment I read the complex script, I was excited for the opportunity to have a hand in the process. The play was absurd, taking place in a house that straddles two worlds, with characters who are now one person, now another. To be perfectly honest, I had to read the script three times before I felt equipped to have any kind of informed conversation with Jessi and Doug. There was just so much packed into 120 pages.

The first conversation with Doug played out like the first conversations with many playwrights:  we determined what his goals were, what questions he wanted to have answered about his script, and we got answers to some of our more superficial questions (like, “How do you pronounce the characters’ names?”).

The way Doug talked about his play was very interesting: he spoke as if it was a living being, or words he wrote down from some supernatural dictation. He answered “I’m going to have to think about that” for many of our less-superficial questions.  At first, I was surprised by this tactic, but I later realized that Doug is an incredibly thoughtful playwright who wanted to hear how his play was interpreted, rather than imposing his ideas on the team. It was a process unlike one I’d had an opportunity to work with, and I’m glad I got a chance to work this way.

The rest of our conversations about the play were anything but superficial. It was so beneficial to hear the actors read the script at the first table read; although I’d read the script silently several times by that point, I always discover something new when I hear actors. I started to formulate my own theories about a play on which one could write a dissertation. More conversations with Doug and Jessi followed our work with the actors. It was fabulous to have two weekends of rehearsal instead of the standard few days; a play this complex needs real time to parse and (begin to) understand before it’s put on its feet.

What did I get to do beyond in-depth conversations about text, relationships, and transversing worlds? I got to think about how adults “play” when they decide to be different characters in their own lives. I got to learn about immense natural features like Lake Tanganyika and the Quelccaya ice cap. I got to figure out how to say Margot, Janos, and I love you in semaphore. And I even wrote a comic song, inspired by a few of our actors.

One of the reasons I love dramaturgy is that I never have to stop learning…about playmaking, about communication, about relationships, about the ways people use words, and about the world around us. The process of working with Monument gave me an opportunity to continue learning about all of these. In spades.

That's Jenn Book Haselwerdt in the photos above...thinking hard at a rehearsal for Monument.  In the top shot, Jenn listens as Andres Talero and other actors read the latest draft of the play,  In the bottom shot, Jenn and The Inkwell's Artistic Director Jessi Burgess practice semaphore.  These photos were taken by the talented Teresa Castracane.

Beginnings, middles, endings... mid-middles and the beginnings of endings... it's all really hard... meaning it can be really hard to revise a play.

But it's a challenge we love here at The Inkwell, and here are some terrific insights from one of our dramaturgs, Laura Miller, on the challenge of finding the right ending.

She's reflecting on the development process for Krista Knight's Clementine and the Cyber Ducks, one of the plays we stages at the Fall Inkreading Series.

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I am a relative newcomer to the Inkwell process, having been inducted into the "Inky ways" just this year as a script reader and dramaturg for the Inkreading of Krista Knight's Clementine and the Cyber Ducks. A phrase the wonderful Anne McCaw mentioned during my initial training session (and one that has played on a continuous mental loop ever since Clementine rehearsals) is something I believe is a tenet of The Inkwell's new play development viewpoint: beginnings are hard, middles are hard, endings are hard.

SPOILER ALERT: In this post, I will discuss the current ending of Clementine and the Cyber Ducks.

Krista Knight burst into the rehearsal room at Woolly Mammoth Theatre bubbling with energy and exciting ideas for revisions. She was troubled by the play's ending, finding that it lacked the visual punch she desired. The play is inspired by the Gold Rush tune, Oh My Darlin' Clementine, in which the miner '49er's daughter Clementine drowns, so Krista had a clear image of the final moment of death in the play, but the journey towards Clementine's demise was a bit murkier.

During discussions with Krista and our marvelous director, Shirley Serotsky, we agreed that three events needed to occur in order to establish that Clementine's tragic death was inevitable. Clementine needed to lose her father, her money, and her independence -- the three pieces of her life she emphasized the most. Once these three pieces were gone, she would be emotionally rent and, literally, unsteady on her feet. As the necessary losses took shape, we turned our attention to the final scene.

Krista wrote a few versions of the closing scene for the reading, incorporating the honest and useful feedback from Shirley and the incredibly dedicated and focused team of actors, but during our last rehearsal, she found herself torn. She said that it is easy to know when something is completely wrong, but much more difficult to make a decision when two choices feel right, albeit for different reasons.

The first version was exciting and bold, and included Clementine's famous song right at the end. It was also more familiar to our team. The actors read through this version more often throughout our week of rehearsals. We felt comfortable using it. The second version was rawer. It was written towards the end of the rehearsal process and satisfied the need for visual punch. In this version, a veritable sea of oranges pours over the miner's sluice gate, overwhelming the landscape , and intensifying Clementine's drowning scene. Clementine's song is interspersed throughout the scene, prolonging her death. As a group, the team discussed choosing one or the other ending, and Krista and I proposed the idea of presenting both versions, Choose Your Own Adventure-style, at the reading.

Eventually, someone mentioned the word risk. We were reminded that the point of the Inkreading is to be brave, bold, and try something new. Krista and I agreed that both endings could work, but the one to use for this particular reading was one that was a bit scarier, the riskier choice.

Working on new plays is a brave endeavor. To be part of the process, it requires the understanding that it is, in fact, a process, a journey, and it will not always be easy. Beginnings, middles, and ends are hard, and making risky choices takes a lot of guts.

Here are some more photographs from our Inkreading Series taken by Teresa Castracane.  In the first shot, Joe Thornhill, Megan Reichelt, and Stacy Wilson connive as the devlish ducks.  In the second photo, Jim Brady imagines the death of this beloved daughter Clementine, played by Betsy Rosen.

I hope you all had a wonderful Thanksgiving, intrepid InkBlog readers!  Are you still digesting the holiday food and drink?

We at The Inkwell are still digesting the experience of our Fall Inkreading Series...and we continue to share with you the thoughts of all those involved.

Here's Doug Dolcino, author of the momentous Monument, digesting his experience working with Artistic Director Jessica Burgess, dramaturg Jenn Book Haselwerdt and an incredibly talented cast in teasing part and putting together his layered, elusive, and complex play.

Thank you, Doug, for coming along for the ride and providing us such an honest insight into the playwright's struggle to understand his or her own work.

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More than two weeks since the Inkreading of Monument, I have been haunted by the Liebert family, by mailmen and lepers.  It wasn’t that long ago when they first appeared, chattering and lollygagging long enough for me to write the play until (I suppose) they were satisfied. Now they are back, more real and insistent than ever before—but at the same time a little too pushy, like long forgotten companions one never expected to see again. For me the sensation is a weird combination of excitement and trepidation.

No matter. Although these characters have served as my constant and perhaps unruly guests since the earliest drafts, clamoring to be heard before their time is up, it is good to have made their acquaintance again. They mean no harm, after all, for they have something to say, a message to deliver....

So I find myself once again plunged in the countries of Arbythnia and Tarzania—of mail that goes unopened, of choruses, wigwagging and a luscious cascade of voices speaking all at once; of memory, the past and future merging into one; of questions like “Who is this character?” or “Why does she say that?” or “What does he want?”. All of this has followed me home, scribbled down in the margins of my script, and it’s altogether a good thing.

But could it be a play like Monument promises too much, raising more questions than it could possibly answer, much as life does? And did those who attended the reading leave with their own questions about the play, nagging them all the way home like a cloud of gnats? Whatever the case, it was truly an honor to have worked with such a dedicated group of artists as we gently coaxed Monument out of hiding.

I say coaxed because a “finished” script, no matter how polished, is a timid creature.

Or to put it another way: its inner sovereign realm is just as much terra incognita for the playwright as it is for the cast and director—in that sense we are all trespassers on a royal estate filled with lush gardens, baroque fountains, pavilions, twisting paths leading into dark woods and iron gates left open for us to pass through...

What delighted me during the rehearsals was when we stumbled across the mysterious and elusive, the sense that some elemental truth was within our reach, locked away in Monument. We pulled back the dialogue in each scene to see what might be there, pulsing under the surface. In many instances the discoveries were a revelation to me. This was the main theme, the leitmotif, played out in a variety of ways, in each scene and by each character. What was the other theme? A sense of disintegration and impermanence as the Liebert family made its long journey to Tarzania—while at the same time the play sought its own identity and purpose, as complex and multifarious as the human mind.

When I write a play the experience is, more often than not and in some way, incomplete. The process draws heavily on hunches and intuitions, a sense of shape and what a scene wants to sound like. Sometimes the results work and other times they don’t. But this is why opportunities like the Inkwell’s Inkreadings are so invaluable because they highlight where a scene stumbles, where the play has gone astray or lost its central focus. By listening closely to the insights and observations of the director, dramaturg and actors, the playwright learns far more during one rehearsal than from a month of late nights sitting alone puzzling over the script. For this very reason a playwright should mostly keep his or her mouth shut during rehearsals. Other playwrights may take issue with me for saying such a thing but that really doesn’t change the matter....

Thanks to The Inkwell for giving me the chance to take up Monument once again. I was shown every courtesy and kind indulgence by the creative team during six days of intense rehearsals, as exemplified by Jessi’s keen direction, Jenn’s insights as dramaturg, Collin’s bold set designs, and the enthusiastic, wonderfully talented cast who gave their time and energies to Monument. Now that I’m back at my desk, the journey to a distant border (not unlike the one dividing Arbythnia from Tarzania!) continues for the next few weeks and beyond, possibly without end. It is my hope that the choices I make will serve Monument while preserving—perhaps as symbolized by Herman Liebert’s scale model—that inner sovereign realm of the play: a fragile mystery, a wobbly wonder.

In the photograph above, Fatima Quander and Andres Taleros rehearse a scene from Monument.  Teresa Castracane is the talented photographer.