Hello all, and welcome back to the Inkblog. It's your trusty Producing Director Lee Liebeskind, and I am thrilled to invite you into the inner workings of one of our full length Inkreadings -- Rebecca Bossen's Blue Straggler.
As some of you may know, we started working with Rebecca at last year's Page to Stage Festival hosted by The Kennedy Center. We loved this play and found it so intriguing and interesting that we needed to get deeper into the world of the play and spend more time with this writer. So on May 28th we presented a full reading of the latest draft of the play. We brought in one of our favorite directors, Amber Jackson, to work on this play with Rebecca.
Amber is a graduate from Baylor University in Waco, Texas. She has worked as an actor, director, writer, and producer in the Austin, Texas area. She is a recent transplant to the DC area and has been cutting a swath through the community since arriving. She has worked with Constellation Theatre Company as an Assistant Director and Choreographer, she has worked with both Active Cultures, Source Festival, and The Inkwell as a Director. She is also a writer/director for WILL Interactive, a film company in Potomac, Maryland. She thinks outside the box and can create inventive worlds on the stage just with the use of physical bodies.
In her blog entry, she gives us an inner look to the mind of the director during one of our processes and how worlds can come together and align in a very special way.
This is Amber Jackson working with actors on the latest draft of Rebecca Bossen's Blue Straggler.-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
I think we achieved a spark of magic with the Blue Straggler reading. And I think it was because we were lucky enough to have a team of collaborators who weren't afraid to keep pushing to the dark corners of our little box of four rehearsals. When artists embrace fearlessness in those dark corners, you start using the word "yes" a lot. Can the playwright hand the cast and director a 30% rewritten/reordered script the night before a reading? YES. Can you rough block a full-length ever-evolving play over the course of three rehearsals? YES. Can you choreograph a dramatic suicide scene with scripts in hand? YES.
People don't always like being pushed to those dark corners though. It's scary... when I collaborate as a director either in my theatre or film work, I often say, "You can say no if you want to...." (to offer people a way out) then I follow it with "...BUT, I think this moment could be even stronger if we explore the possibility of changing X to Y." Good ideas don't always follow your deadlines. Now I'm not saying that it's a good idea to push too hard too late. There is a certain point when you have to give your play away to the audience, or release your film. You can't keep changing it forever. But you CAN push until every little granule of sand in that hourglass is gone. And sometimes you have a dream team of collaborators that aren't afraid to say "Yes" with you and ride that last bit of sand to the bottom, and I feel lucky to have had that with this team.
Here's to pushing to those dark corners and saying yes when most people say no!!!
That's Anna Quiggins on the left as Clarissa and Esther Williams on the right as Lisa in the Inkreading of Blue Straggler by Rebecca Bossen. Thanks again to Melissa Blackall for the incredible photographs!
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