Presbyterian 'Avant Garde'

by Kirk Woodward

[Kirk Woodward, who’s been the most prolific contributor to Rick On Theater, wears many hats in the performing arts.  As most readers of ROT know by now, he’s a playwright, composer, lyricist, musician, actor, acting teacher, and director.  He’s even done a stint as a film reviewer. 

[One of the things about Kirk that I admire most is his ability to analyze what he’s done in all or most of these jobs and derive lessons from that contemplation.  He’s very clear-minded about this analysis as is evidenced by the articles he often writes based on what he’s learned from the experience and the work.  He’s not only able to take lessons from it for himself, but he articulates what he’s gleaned so that he can pass those lessons on to others.

[The evidence of this is the many posts on ROT that are the result of his after-action analysis.  Just looking back on his articles on directing for this blog makes this truth self-evident: “Kirk Woodward’s King Lear Journal,” 4 June 2010; “Directing Twelfth Night for Children,” 16 and 19 December 2010; “Reflections on Directing,” 11, 14, 17, and 20 April 2013; “Evaluating a Director,” 1 March 2017; “Thoughts on Rehearsals,” 26 December 2017; “On Directing Shakespeare,” 1 March 2019; and “Directors You’d Rather Not Work With,” 25 June 2019.  

[That’s seven posts, including a two-parter and a four-parter—and I’m not including Kirk’s “George Abbott” on 14 October 2018, a profile of the great Broadway director.

[So now Kirk’s back again on what appears to be his favorite topic, at least as far as Rick On Theater is concerned.  He’s going to talk with us about his most recent directing gig and what he gleaned from it.  He calls this piece “Presbyterian Avant Garde”—but I’ll let him explain the origin of that title.]

In the fall of 2019 I was invited to direct a play for the Union Congregational Church (UCC) Players of Upper Montclair, New Jersey. I had directed for them the previous year a collection of one-act plays we called March Madness, and I was delighted when they asked me to direct for them again.

I was not so delighted when I learned that the play they were considering was a version of the group of poems called Spoon River Anthology, published in 1915 by Edgar Lee Masters (1868-1950). This famous collection of poems, 244 of them, consists of epitaphs spoken by people who have died and been buried in the invented town of Spoon River, Illinois, supposedly near the actual Spoon River (a tributary of the Illinois River).

My problem with the poems, and the proposed directing project, is that by their nature the poems are, well, really depressing. The speakers have all “had their shot,” for better or worse, often for worse. With rare exceptions, their existence, as described in the poems, is entirely looking backwards at how they used to live, in many cases with great disappointment.

There is no denying that Masters did a fine job with these poems. Their imagery is rich but not flossy, and they are full of acute psychological and social insights. They were admired by Ezra Pound (1885-1972), a major arbiter of taste in American poetry of that time.

Masters was a lawyer by trade, associated for some years with the famous attorney Clarence Darrow (1857-1938), who was perhaps best known for his defense of John T Scopes (1900-1970) in the so-called “Monkey Trial” over the issue of evolution in 1925, in Dayton, Tennessee.                   .

But Masters was also a prolific writer, producing fiction, poetry, and drama, as well as poetry. Of these works, Spoon River Anthology is best known today. The Spoon River poems, now in the public domain, have been the basis of song cycles, art exhibitions, and particularly theater pieces, for which they are well suited.

They are monologues (although they can also be, and often are, adapted for choral speaking, or set to music) written for characters varying in age, gender, social position, and accomplishment, so each poem provides a fresh set of acting challenges.

Among notable productions, The Spoon River Project was performed in 2011 in Brooklyn’s famous Green-Wood Cemetery, and has been frequently performed elsewhere. Other arrangements of the material have been performed on Broadway in 1963-64, and Off-Broadway in 1973 and 2017.

But taken as a whole, the poems are gloomy! I could not imagine spending several months working on a project that was so depressing.

So I decided to brighten it up.

A key characteristic of the poems, of course, is that they are spoken as if they are honest epitaphs chiseled on tombstones in the Spoon River graveyard. In that sense they take place beyond the grave – at least their voices speak from some sort of afterlife, since we hear them.

But what sort? The voices in the poems for the most part – with a few exceptions – seem to come from a kind of limbo, or perhaps from the Sheol of the Old Testament, a dark and shadowy world offering no real existence for the dead. That’s at least the effect they give.

Because actors are living beings, any dramatization of Spoon River needs to decide on some idea of the afterlife for its characters. Where are they? Encouraged by the fact that I only had to select perhaps forty out of the 244 poems in the cycle, I bought a copy and looked for the poems that either had a hopeful outlook or could be framed to encompass one.

Plainly put, I decided to set the play in heaven. I chose to imagine (and as a matter of fact do imagine) heaven as a continuation of life, a further stage on the road toward becoming our real selves. I may have been encouraged in this approach by the idea of heaven expounded by Don Juan in the third act (often called “Don Juan in Hell”) of the play Man and Superman (1903) by George Bernard Shaw (1856-1950). In that play Don Juan says:

In Heaven, as I picture it, dear lady, you live and work instead of playing and pretending. You face things as they are; you escape nothing but glamor; and your steadfastness and your peril are your glory. If the play still goes on here and on earth, and all the world is a stage, Heaven is at least behind the scenes.

I selected a number of Masters’s  poems, and in order to demonstrate this idea of heaven, arranged them in a series of scenes with cheerful themes (one of them being “release from restrictive ideas of religion!”), and created a narrator who through the play gives a sort of tour of heaven, pointing out how beneficial it is to be there.

If you think that approach is heavy handed, so did Jennie Cherry, the producer and head of the theater group, and Susan Knight Carlin, a professional actor and an advisor to the group. They pointed out that my approach was, in their words, “too Christian,” that is, too blatantly promotional of a “religious” point of view to “go over” with an audience.

I thought “too Christian” was a funny comment to come from a church theater group, but I also felt they were correct. To tell the truth, I had created this first version of the play as a way to shake loose – for myself as much as anyone – the graveyard atmosphere of the poems, which I was determined would not be the atmosphere of this production.

Jennie had the solution. UCC, the church where we would be presenting the play, intended to emphasize in the following months the theme of “neighborhood,” of community and interconnectedness. I realized that the idea that it's important and nourishing for people continually to develop positive connections with each other would work perfectly with the Spoon River poems I had selected.

Heaven remained, but out went the narrator/tour guide. Ordinarily using a narrator in a dramatic piece is a lousy idea anyway, “telling instead of showing,” as the saying goes, and giving the audience a sense that the writer isn’t able to embody the theme of the play but instead that it is being preached at.

With the narrator gone, I looked for a way that the poems I’d selected could be arranged in a sequence that would have a dramatic shape, emphasizing the concept of a growing community. Ideas began to come. It seemed likely that some of the cast members – still to be chosen – would be able to sing or play musical instruments, so I visualized an upbeat first scene with those same actor/musicians telling stories.

The last scene, I decided, would be a feast with real food; the characters, having over the course of the play become a sort of community, would eat and, once again, entertain themselves with stories. In fact, the cast could invite the audience to come up and help them finish the food after the curtain call.

Between the first and last scenes, I tried to arrange the poems in ways that would show people who were facing the limitations of their past lives; dealing with them; and moving on into more forward-looking ways of thinking. This is the arrangement of scenes I finally decided on:

Musicians’ stories

Mystery

Isolation

“Group”

Pairs

Stories

Wisdom

“Mystery,” following the fairly boisterous musicians’ stories, would, I hoped, set a mood of anticipation that would lead into “Isolation” in which the speakers were still dealing with the results of their past lives and the strangeness of their new ones. “Group” would be a sort of therapy session, where past-life stories would be shared. “Pairs” would bring together estranged couples, and “Stories,” the feast, would be followed by a “Wisdom” section which once again illustrated the strangeness and interest of life that we had encountered in the “Mystery” section.

I knew from the first that I wanted Jennie Cherry to deliver the last speech of the play (“Lucinda Matlock”). I then realized that, in lieu of a narrator, Jennie could be a connecting thread in the play, functioning as a sort of “therapist,” listening to the characters’ stories and occasionally (without speaking) helping them as they dealt with their pasts.

I learned that Josie Shaw, the nine-year-old daughter of David Shaw, the minister of UCC, was interested in being in the play, and I visualized her as somehow connecting with Jennie’s character and being a second continuing thread in the play, further uniting the scenes.

Eventually we decided she would be an angel, and gave her wings! As it turned out, she ended up missing one performance because she was sick, and her absence was felt – it had deprived us of an angel in our heaven.

Auditions for the play weren’t exactly auditions, because we decided, within the theme of “community,” that everyone who tried out for the play would be cast, barring extraordinary circumstances.

For the “auditions” I took a script and cut each speech in it into a slip of paper, laid them all out on a table, and asked the participants to pick one, find a partner, and read the speech conversationally with the partner, who did the same thing.

We repeated this process three times, and Susan and I moved among the readers, trying to get a sense of what they were like and what poems might be appropriate for them. We also asked which speeches they might be interested in doing. I admit that when subsequently assigning scenes, for better or worse I paid little attention to any of this information, feeling that in general almost anyone could do any speech, regardless even of gender.

Over the next few days after the “audition,” several people called or emailed and asked if they could be in the play, and I said yes to all of them, even if I didn’t know them. We ended up with a cast of 17 women (including one child) and men.

Before I knew if we would have a number of men in the cast more or less equal to the number of women, I considered doing genderless casting, having women perform “men’s” speeches and vice versa. This turned out not to be necessary on a large scale, but I did assign several “men’s” speeches to women when gender didn’t seem to matter.

Jennie arranged for the first reading of the play at a party in December, and this event mandated a deadline for me to polish a script and assign speeches, tasks that I avoided until the last possible moment, when I spent an entire day getting them done.

The party/reading was convivial and the group seemed to accept my notion of a concept for the play, not that I necessarily described it very well. There also seemed to be little controversy at the time about my assignment of speeches.

Some of that came in the next two weeks, though. For one actor I took out one speech and added another. One actor quit, and I took his three speeches out altogether; one of the speeches, I was glad to see, really didn’t fit our approach anyway. Sometimes it’s better to be lucky than good. There were other minor adjustments.

Over the Christmas and New Year holidays I put a rehearsal schedule together. I had confidently assured everyone that I could give them whatever number of speeches they wanted, and accommodate any conflicts during the rehearsal period. That confidence was a little overbold.

In particular, the conflicts of three cast members, combined with the scenes they were in, meant that there was not one available day in the rehearsal period up to the last week without someone being absent from whatever scene was called. Working around this, I came up with a schedule of twenty rehearsals, and as it turned out I didn’t have to revise it much.

We had already had a group reading of the script, so when rehearsals began in January we plunged right into working on individual scenes. The early procedure was as follows:

·  Read the scene “neutrally,” just for the words, as much as possible.

·  Discuss the scene, focusing on passages that are difficult to understand.

·  Read the scene aloud individually (and all at one time), concentrating on the images in the speeches.

·  Read the scene with a partner, making it as conversational as possible.

·  Stage the scene.

The cast seemed to enjoy this approach. More ideas about the play unfolded themselves as we proceeded. There would be no “fourth wall” in which the players acted as though there was no audience. The audience would be assumed to be either more of the group in the scene, or the people still living on earth, depending on what the speech called for.

With no “fourth wall,” there was also no need to keep the actors hidden. Our performance space was a large meeting hall with open rooms off two adjacent sides; the actors, we decided, would sit in one of those rooms when not “on stage,” and not try to hide from the audience when not performing. It was this idea that led a cast member to call our staging approach “Presbyterian Avant Garde” (I happen to be a Presbyterian).

From the start we emphasized the themes of “looking back” and “looking forward.” The speakers in Masters’s  poems essentially have no choices; their stories are finished. Our characters look ahead; they also look back, but in the way, I told the cast, that one might look back on, say, a disastrous Christmas party twenty years ago when Uncle Bill got drunk and drove a car into the living room, and the presents were smashed, and all the power went out…

Emotion, one might say, recollected not necessarily in tranquility, but at least the characters have alternatives – they have something ahead of them. I deliberately put a rather ghastly speech (the character is the victim of an explosion) at the beginning of the play, letting the others in the scene greet it with laughter – yes, it was awful, but now look!

I pointed out, in fact, when the cast was joking and having a good time in rehearsal, that their atmosphere of camaraderie – not a spirit of gloom – was exactly what we wanted for many of the scenes in our play.

The cast seemed to accept this idea, and I felt greatly relieved – I hadn’t been sure the concept would work. As a result I enjoyed the rehearsals tremendously, which I certainly didn’t expect to do when I first heard we were going to do Spoon River.

There was a grand piano next to the playing area; we weren’t allowed to move it, and we decided that was fine. Two cast members play piano, and we planned to have them play during the show, but as I worked out the blocking of movements for the show, that turned out to be too difficult, so I decided I’d play the piano myself.

For the first version of the script, I had deliberately chosen to use gospel songs about heaven as transitional music between scenes. I intended these as placeholders for other selections, but they survived the revision process.

One cast member suggested using Steven Foster’s “Gentle Annie,” a sad ballad, and it fit well as an introduction to the “Isolation” section. The cast member who suggested it also sang it, with piano and cello accompaniment. We also worked on songs for the “musicians” in the cast to perform before the show started – a sort of “Spoon River Singalong.”

Most of the songs we chose for the show went back to the period of the poems, or sounded like they might – “Will the Circle Be Unbroken,” “Come and Go With Me,” “In That Great Getting’ Up Mornin’,” “Life’s Railway to Heaven.”

We completed the physical staging of the play a week before the end of January, with the cast running through the “blocking” from beginning to end. Jennie, who had taken down the blocking in her script, was invaluable, because actors, bless their hearts, recall staging in varying degrees, at least in community theater.

What’s more, I write the staging in my script, but as we work the blocking out with the actors, I often modify it without writing down the changes, and then my script is essentially out of date. Fortunately, a stage manager will take down the blocking as it develops. We didn’t have a stage manager as such, but we did have Jennie.

Beginning scene work again after the first full-cast rehearsal, I introduced two new exercises. In one, I asked the actors to take one image – any reference in their speech to a person, place, thing, idea, whatever – and describe it to another actor in detail, with nothing left out. The details, of course, are products of the actors’ imaginations, since the poems themselves seldom spell them out in detail.

I wouldn’t use this exercise in rehearsals for every show, but in this case we were dealing with poems, which means heightened and/or metaphoric language. Certainly in a play one doesn’t want the actors “speaking poetry,” sounding like reciters, but if they have rich pictures of their images, they may draw on those pictures more or less unconsciously while speaking them. At least that’s the hope.

The other exercise called on the actors to identify the central idea or action of their speeches in one sentence, and to present that sentence to another actor. The idea here was to help the actors make main thrusts of their speeches clear so the speeches did not become simply a recitation of words of equal value.

I took that second approach and modified it so the actors, as an exercise, did the scene, but only speaking their “topic sentence” – not the entire poem. This made it much easier for the cast to see the connections between the speeches and to get a sense of how the scene should flow.

We continued to use this approach throughout the rehearsals. A variant exercise was to have the actors read their speeches, speaking aloud only the nouns – or the verbs, or the modifiers. Each of these variations helped the actors get a richer sense of the structure of their speeches.

One sign of a good rehearsal experience, I think, is when ideas flow freely. In this show, with its “communal” approach, ideas from cast members were particularly welcome. For example, one evening we were talking about how to set up the rows of chairs for the audience, and Jennie suggested, “What if we didn’t set up rows but just put the chairs around the room?”

“Think about outdoor town band concerts,” she said. “People bring their chairs and set them wherever they like. We might even just give them chairs!” I thought this was a fabulous idea, and we did it.

Thanks to a friend owning a pickup truck, the principal elements of our set arrived nice and early – two wooden picnic tables, painted purple, with built-in seats for three on each side, lent to us by another Congregational church in town. I put pads on the feet of the tables to keep them from wrecking the floor, and from wrecking us when we tried to move them – they were remarkably heavy.

About halfway through rehearsals, Susan Knight Carlin watched us rehearse “Pairs.” Susan is a professional actor and an excellent acting teacher. It followed, perhaps, that I was nervous having her watch the rehearsal.

I suspect I’m not at my best as a director when someone else in the field is watching, and I’m pretty territorial about my authority as a director – in particular, I go ballistic if one actor “directs” another actor with a suggestion on how things should be done.

However, Susan knows her stuff, and I thought her observations were good. She has a grasp of emotional moments in a play that is richer than mine. So I invited her to talk with the cast about her observations after the full run-through the following Sunday evening. The event went well; she was always positive in her approach, and her comments were sound.

I was eager to see if the performers responded to her remarks, but I had to wait – I had emergency surgery to remove an inflamed appendix that was rupturing, and had to ask Jennie to run the next two rehearsals, which she did to good effect, judging from the comments I heard, and from the results of the full run-through when I finally got back – just about everything in those scenes had improved.

At later rehearsals Susan watched again and made several suggestions, mostly about staging, which significantly improved the scene we were walking on. Part of me resented her essentially correcting work I’d done. On the other hand, part of me recognized that “the play’s the thing,” not my ego – and after all hadn’t I told everyone that this would be a collaborative process? I decided to ask her to keep her eyes open for similar adjustments in staging as we went on.

I was becoming more interested in getting help – before production week, still recovering from the surgery, I ran out of energy half an hour before the end of rehearsal and sat while Jennie took over, quite effectively. By the technical rehearsal, primarily devoted to setting the lighting cues, I did start to feel more up to par.

John Rogers, an outstanding local actor and former director of the Mental Health Players (about which I’ve written elsewhere in this blog: see “Bertolt Brecht and the Mental Health Players,” posted on Rick On Theater on 21 October 2014), emailed after he watched a rehearsal, “Your direction showed wonderful insight and staging choices.  I especially appreciated the amount of interaction among the ‘citizens’ and the ever-changing configurations of people on stage.  The variety really gave the show momentum and energy.” This was a good sign and I shared it with the cast, since it described exactly what we’d been working for.

To be honest, I wish I had cancelled the next-to-last full rehearsal before we opened. The cast was ready for an audience, and lacking one, they started to tinker with what they were doing, in effect working for a response where none would be forthcoming, because nobody was in the seats.

As it turned out, the production was a success. A lot of people saw the show; it was short; after the curtain call they ate. Nothing wrong with that! We also got praise for the acting, the creativity of the staging, and the fact that the presentation wasn’t a downer, as it easily could have been.

                                                         

My friend Art Delo, a fine actor, emailed me, “The more I think about last evening, the more I am impressed with the work.  I don’t believe that a collection of often morbid monologues performed by actors of varying levels could create a mood and a moving narrative. Except that it did. Bravo, Bravo, Bravo.” I’ll take that, gratefully.

Looking back, I realize that in a quirky way, directing Spoon River gave me an opportunity to work the way we visualized when I was first thinking about being a director. In the late 1960’s, theories about directing – and the nature of theater itself – were influenced by the works and writings of such varied figures as the Frenchman Antonin Artaud (1896-1948), the American Richard Schechner (b. 1934), and in particular the German Bertolt Brecht (1898-1956).

Each of them, and many others, espoused radical ideas about theater and the way it was put together, and somehow many of those ideas – not necessarily as their authors had conceived them! – made their way into our production, in terms of:

Conception – our play had not just an entertainment purpose but a social purpose – I suppose I need to say a “religious” purpose, but, at least, a purpose larger than simply putting on a show. It had the purpose of altering the audience’s perception a bit, even if that perception was only about possible views of an afterlife, and about the importance of neighborhood and community in this one.

Brecht, of course, would hate that (“Only the dead,” he wrote, “are beyond being altered by their fellow-men”), but he also says that the theater has to correspond to “the whole radical transformation of the mentality of our time,” so I claim his theories embrace our production.

The script – in a deconstructionist sense we treated Masters’s  poems as “texts,” as raw materials to be given a context that might or might not have been the author’s intention, whatever that might be.

The cast – communal ideas of theater companies have been in the air for decades. We endorsed this idea by welcoming into the cast anyone who wanted to be in it, and considering everyone as an equal.

Visual elements – after my preachy first draft was discarded, we allowed the “story” of our play to reveal itself through visual images that the audience could interpret – isolated figures, a group therapy session, reunitings, a banquet. In a sense, the pictures told the story.

The audience experience – we frankly acknowledged the playing area as such, not trying to hide it or pretend it was something else. The cast was in full view at all times, both before and during the show, whether participating in a scene or not. There was no “fourth wall,” pretending that the actors didn’t know the audience was there. Even the random arrangement of seats for the audience was meant to help spectators take an “objective” view of the show.

Rehearsal techniques – we drew heavily on the actors’ suggestions, and portions of the play, if not all of it, were staged by the actors rather than me, particularly during transitions between scenes. Also, because the actors told the stories of multiple characters, they didn’t pretend to “be” their characters; instead, they represented them.

All of us involved in the show seemed to feel that we had done something worthwhile and useful. We also felt like a community, or at least a neighborhood – which was also our production’s theme. The results were about as satisfying as any I’ve had in theater. I always felt I was directing by the skin of my teeth; there’s a lot to be said for that.