July 2011 Archives

It's Anne again, intrepid readers, and I'm delighted to introduce another perspective from our recent adventure into navigating the universe.

Mary Watters was the dramaturg for our latest Inkreading of the play Blue Straggler by Rebecca Bossen.  Mary is a keen observer and as you will see a beautiful writer.  In fact, she herself is a playwright.

She's been working with Rebecca and The Inkwell team on Blue Straggler for more than two years.  She was a fervent champion of the play when she first reviewed it (she was one of our intrepid readers for the 2010 open call for submissions), and she's been watching the play expand ever since.

Here are her thoughts on how the complex universe of Blue Straggler has evolved... and continues to grow.

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I just happened across the notes from an April meeting of playwright Rebecca Bossen, The Inkwell's dramaturg supreme Anne McCaw, and me, a playwright learning this new territory of dramaturgy from the other side of the table. The three of us had convened to talk over the next step for this fascinating play, which would be a full reading. Rebecca's first feedback to us: Preparing for and rehearsing the 20-minute segment of Blue Straggler for The Kennedy Center's Page-to-Stage refocused her thinking the play. Although she remained true to the initial inspiration and the mad, mad world of black holes, she realized the play was a more universal story about love, loss, and complicated relationships. Since September she'd gotten clearer about her characters. She saw that she must let science serve the story, but not take center stage.

This April draft did what Rebecca said - and more. She'd taken many of the questions and comments from September to heart, or at least to head. She gave us an expanded peek into Lisa and Clarissa's relationship. Rather than hearing the two women reminisce about their first meeting, we got to see a frazzled, dissertation-dazed Lisa enter Clarissa's chocolate shop, then see Clarissa turn into a chemist/pharmacist/artist to prescribe the right chocolate, one that she'd mixed and made into appetizing art. We heard more about Ragged's universe and the rules that must be obeyed. We got a crash course in astrophysics to hear about the real rules that Lisa is bumping against in her quest to reach her dead lover. I was delighted to see that she'd left in a Lisa's monologue where she desperately works on a mathematical formula to connect them. This monologue was written the day before the play was read in September, and it sparkled.

So was the play ready for production? Uh, no. While Rebecca had addressed many issues, this is a deeply complicated play: a relationship that bounced from aphrodisiac heaven to final ultimatums in arguments, a brain-stretching venture into math and the inner workings of space and time, and mother-daughter mismatches that have never permitted these two individuals to understand each other. Throw in a little mythology and the afterlife ... well, it's no surprise this play is probably straining a whole army of muses.

But the rehearsal project worked its magic again. Lots of questions from perceptive director Amber Jackson and the astute cast she assembled... The ambitious desire to truly realize the movement of bodies in space - and how that helped inform the play (or even led to more questions)... And the already-praised meeting of Rebecca and Amber w/the set designer.

Rebecca had planned to call me Thursday night after her meeting with Amber and the designer. She did call, but in a wonderfully charged state. We'd been talking about the past and present, the many layers of relationships to see when time-shifting to the past, and, perhaps most important, the grave effect on the laws of physics that are experienced when Lisa gets closer to the mathematical equation. This threat, plus Clarissa's work on the "other side" to convince Ragged to give them a little room, could actually bring about a collapse of universal rules and the universe itself. So when the designer decided to make the trunks that "spring open" a real action on stage rather than the sound indicated in the stage directions, something clicked with Rebecca. We began talking about these trunks and what they could represent. She thought of them like that trunk in the attic full of secrets or family artifacts not seen for decades (the past). Or a magic trunk of the unexpected or one that is a passage-way. In fact, we talked about the desperate straits that Clarissa and Lisa are in, as they are together, knowing that the universe may be unlocking, hoping that they could find a trunk - a portal to a new universe or new world - where they could dwell together. Oh yes, and we talked about the nothingness before creation of matter. Then she was off to make some revisions.

Friday night revisions for a Saturday night reading? These were not small revisions, either. But Rebecca pulled it off. She came in with new pages and cuts to certain sections. Somehow, Amber skillfully guided the actors through the script changes, and they did a script-in-hand reading that placed the characters in the center of the room and at one of two ends using the back of the room to orbit in and out of scenes, with the audience sitting on either side of the playing area. Unusual staging is a norm at The Inkwell. Dealing with love, loss, and astrophysics demands the unconventional.

So I can't wait to see what Rebecca comes up with for the next draft.

Hello again, intrepid readers.  It's Lee again, I have something to tell you:  I love showcase readings.  Truly and honestly showcase readings are among of the most unique and interesting things we here at The Inkwell do.  More often then not when I tell someone I am directing a showcase reading, they look at me with a quizzical face and say, 'That's really great!  What's a showcase reading?" 

Now you can read past blogs about what the showcase reading is, and how the playwright feels about them, and how the dramaturgs look at them...but there isn't much about the director's perspective.  So here we go... I'm going to share with you my thoughts after directing The Inkwell's last showcase reading -- Rebels, Rabble-Rousers, and Tricksters.

We at The Inkwell are definitely thinking deep right now, intrepid readers, or big, depending on how you think about the universe.  The last four plays we worked on have got us thinking about the behavior of stars, the importance and nature of God, and the ways in which we might be able to bend space and time.

So in this deep, big think about the universe, here are dramaturg's Meghan Long's thoughts about Kristin Idaszak's play, Fugue (for Particle Accelerator), one of three plays that The Inkwell featured in a showcase reading last month.

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I have had the pleasure of working as a dramaturg with The Inkwell over the past few years and am always eager to collaborate with a new playwright and creative team. I am drawn to The Inkwell's plays that create imaginative, seemingly impossible worlds; plays with offbeat characters; and plays that ask big questions and take risks. It is no surprise that I loved working with Kristin Idaszak - a Chicago playwright, dramaturg, and producer - on her play Fugue (for Particle Accelerator). Fugue was featured in our most recent showcase reading on June 4th.

Kristin is not only interested in turning the world upside down in this play, but also finding those parallel worlds we only hope exist and jumping into the next universe. Hope, a physicist, is building a particle accelerator in search of a parallel universe. Jonas, her boyfriend and EMT, wants her to live in the present. Chris, a hitchhiker with amnesia, and Schrodinger, Hope's cat (who lives in the quantum universe) guide Hope on her search. At the heart of the play is a story about a young couple - Hope and Jonas - at their breaking point as they deal with a horrible decision.

During the first conversation I had with Kristin, she offered her thoughts on the play and something she said stuck with me throughout the process: scientists and playwrights (and all playmakers, I think) are searching for the same thing -- to uncover the truths about the world. Science -- quantum universes, string theory, and Schrodinger's thought experiment -- plays a big part in Fugue. Strip away the science and there is still music; music is just as important to the story. After all, the play is titled Fugue (for Particle Accelerator). What is a fugue? A fugue, in classical music, is a composition of two or more voices built on a subject, or theme, which is introduced in the beginning and recurs frequently throughout the composition.

What does a fugue look like on stage? What does it sound like? How does it move?

Those are just some of the questions we asked during the rehearsal for the Fugue excerpt reading. In the capable hands of our director - and The Inkwell's Producing Director - Lee Liebeskind the fugue got on its feet and came to life - literally. But how could we describe and replicate this fugue in the future? In conversation after the reading, my Inkwell colleague and fellow dramaturg, Laura Esti Miller told me about the Laban Movement Analysis, or LMA. Rudolf Laban (1879-1958) created and pioneered a system for notating dance; creating a written language for specific movements a dancer can make. While this notation was originally used by dancers, it can be adapted and is currently used by many actors, athletes, and physical therapists. This made us wonder - could we adapt and use LMA to choreograph a fugue? If we choreograph and use some variation of LMA to notate the movement we may end up with something like this:

Classical musical fugue composition → Written words on the pages of Fugue (for Particle Accelerator) → Actors as fugue → Notation of actors as a fugue → Resulting in a written catalogue of what a fugue looks like.

Now wouldn't that be cool?

This is why I love the Inkwell, Inkwell plays, and Kristin's play. We are making impossible worlds possible - even those worlds that don't exist in the one we live in.

Intrepid readers, this is Anne again, sitting in the cool of her home away from the sun, which feels awfully close to the planet right now.

The sun is, of course, a star, and it's behaving as it should this time of year... bearing down the heat, lingering far into the evening before giving way to the small universe of other stars we see each night.

If you've been following Inkblog, you'll know that we've been musing on stars and their odd, erratic ways, having just finished an Inkreading of Blue Straggler by Rebecca Bossen.

I'm about to share with you her experience in her own words of working with director Amber Jackson and a terrific cast.  But before I give this blog over to Rebecca, I want to share with you a moment that completely surprised and delighted all of us in this process... a deviation in the playmaking orbit.

When we spoke with Rebecca before the rehearsal process started, she was pretty sure that she would not have time to rewrite her play, which is totally fine with us.  This is the playwright's experience, and we are happy to explore a script as is to see what we discover.

And then she surprised us with a new draft the day of the reading.  We were delighted.  But what surprised and delighted us so much was that she was inspired to revise after talking with Collin Ranney about possible set designs for her play.

As part of the Inkreading process, we try to bring on a consulting designer to dream up the million-dollar production for the playwright.  We hope it helps playwrights dream big about their plays and to see how their play will function in three dimensions.

What Rebecca discovered is a whole other dimension to her play, which began to change the rules of Blue Straggler's universe.  Hooray!  It was more than we could hope for and was a teaching moment for all of us.  Rebecca describes it below.  I myself was reminded of how important it is to bring all kinds of playmakers to the table in the early stages of play development.  And, as Rebecca says, a play is quickly owned by many people... in a beautiful way.

Here's Rebecca's Inkreading experience.

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A playwright sits at a keyboard, speedily click-clacking her way to theatrical brilliance. She hands her script to the right person and--voila!--her play is immediately produced, a critical and commercial success.

Ah, if only it were so easy. I'm sure that this has happened somewhere, for someone, at some time, and I continue to hold out hope that one day this will happen for me. For most of us, however, the path from the keyboard to a theatre is a bit more tortuous (and occasionally torturous). There is the writing itself, which can take months and months. And then maybe a reading and a rewrite. And a rewrite of the rewrite. And another reading, if you're lucky. Which, naturally, will lead to another rewrite. And so on.

At each step of the way, the writer is grateful for the further refining of the piece, the little bits of diamond that begin to glitter among the coal. Then a strange problem arises--the play becomes a better and better piece of writing, but not necessarily a better play. We can get stuck relating to the words in their two-dimensional format, forgetting that they need to one day live and breathe in three-dimensional space. (Or possibly even more dimensions than that--see Blue Straggler for details.)

Enter The Inkwell to the rescue! In their wisdom, they teamed me up with Amber Jackson, a wonderful director who is allergic to music-stand-style readings. She staged the piece more fully and fluidly than I ever could have hoped for, especially given the fact that she was handed an extensively rewritten script 24 hours before we had an audience. That rewrite was due in large part to another one of The Inkwell's fantastic ideas--they gave us the opportunity to work with a set designer (the very talented Collin Ranney) and discuss how a full production of Blue Straggler might look.

A light bulb went on in my head during that conversation with Amber and Collin. Thinking about the characters acting, reacting, and interacting with objects in actual space helped me solve a fundamental storytelling problem. And when I saw Collin's renderings, they took my breath away. Collin's design and Amber's staging gave me a rush of giddy delight, the slightly surreal euphoria of seeing my internal thoughts becoming an external reality.

Of course, the magic of theatre is that the thoughts are no longer mine alone; they are the amalgamation of the thoughts of everyone involved in the process. That kind of alchemy takes time. Despite my writer's fantasy of the instant success, I know that the time taken for such amazing collaboration has brought Blue Straggler into an infinitely better space.

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And here are some of the gorgeous set renderings that Collin Ranney put together for Blue Straggler.  The play takes place in many different orbits, all of which revolve around Lisa, an astrophysicist who finds love and loss tearing her universe apart.

So you'll see in this next rendering all these trunks popped open by Aspen Trees.  This was the idea from Collin that fundamentally changed the trajectory of Blue Straggler.  Collin helped Rebecca imagine another element in the universe of the play, that there are trunks leading to different moments in time and space.  She's taken this idea and run with it in the second act.