by Kirk Woodward
[Kirk Woodward’s newest
contribution to Rick On Theater, “MicroRep,” is a description of a project Kirk developed to
perform plays in “alternative spaces”—simply put: not in theaters. Of course, that tradition goes back a long
ways, back to the Middle Ages, when the return of theatrical performance after
the fall of the Roman Empire and the classical theater—derived, as it was, from
Greek theater—it’s culture generated, began in churches. It moved outside the church building and took
up a mobile existence on festival wagons.
This gave birth to the itinerant theater of the late Middle Ages which
set up the wagon stages in the courtyards of roadside inns and then in the
early Renaissance, the Italian players pulled up into town squares and
performed the farcical and giddy Commedia dell’Arte, which in addition to being itinerant was also improvised. Eventually, Europeans built special buildings
for their performances and the found-space presentations became the rarity and
the formal theater productions the norm.
In modern times, plays are still presented in parks and open lots, but
for the most part, when a small troupe occupies a found or non-traditional venue
as its home, the company tried very hard to turn it into some semblance of a formal
theater. Even so, theater in alternative
spaces hasn’t vanished from the face of the globe. As Kirk observes, there are still intrepid
casts that set themselves up in odd places and clever sites—and sometimes,
something wonderful ensues.
[When I was a theater teacher
in the middle school of a K-12 prep school in Brooklyn in the late ’70s, it was
my (unstated) policy to try to use non-theater spaces for the one-act plays I
directed twice a year. I directed one
major production in the winter, but I used the school’s proscenium theater for
that. Not only did the students (not to
mention their parents) expect that, but the audience—the rest of the fifth through
eighth grades, and their families and friends, plus some elementary school and
even high school students—could only be accommodated by the big auditorium. But for the fall and spring one-acts, my idea
was to show the students, who were generally pretty theater-savvy even in
middle school—there were several parents of my students who were theater pros—that
“theater” wasn’t always this thing that happened in a big room divided by a
wall with a hole in it. My very first one-act, Pyramus
and Thisbe, the “Rude Mechanicals”
scenes excised from Shakespeare’s A Midsummer
Night’s Dream, was staged in the
children’s playground for the primary school kids behind the school, using the
jungle gym and the teeter-totter as the set.
(It was a huge success, if I do say so myself—as much with the seventh-
and eighth-grade cast, who’d never experienced such a thing and were mighty
skeptical, as with the audience and my boss, the head of the theater program.) I later
did two shows in a small music classroom that had a small proscenium stage at
one end, but I put the acting area for one play in front of the stage as a
thrust--audience on three sides--and used the stage area (with the curtain
drawn) as “backstage.” For the other one, I ignored the stage entirely
and did the play in the round in the middle of the cleared classroom with
the audience on all four sides. (The
school has a former church, used for assemblies and such, attached to the classroom
building and I always wanted to find a play I could produce there. I never did.
Middle school’s a little too early for Murder in a Cathedral, don’t you think?)
[A decade later, I was
teaching theater at a top New Jersey high school, another place where the
students were very knowledgeable about theater.
(This time it was several of the students themselves who were the pros,
not their parents.) But they knew conventional
theater, Broadway and the standards, plays from which movies had been
made. So I began bringing in newspaper
clippings to pin up on a bulletin board that described performances that were .
. . well, different. The first one was Naked Chambers, a 1987 play produced by the site-specific
company En Garde Arts set on the façade
of a TriBeCa highrise: an actor-mountain climber was a cat burglar who climbed down
the side of the building and as he reached the windows of various apartments, a
projected scene would unfold on the window.
Spectators stood around on the sidewalk below, with the regular life of
the neighborhood going on around them. When I shared this with my class, all juniors
and seniors, a boy with a nascent TV acting career underway (he had a recurring
role on a popular sit-com) asked angrily—as if I were taking up his valuable
time—“What does this have to do with theater?”
“It is theater,” I replied,
shocked at his lack of understanding.
That’s exactly why I had done what I did at that Brooklyn middle school. And it’s what Kirk is experimenting with in “MicroRep.” ~Rick]
An active trend in today’s theater is
performance in alternative spaces – plays or other theater pieces performed in
spaces that aren’t theaters. The possibilities are limited only by the
imaginations of the presenters. It seems likely that this approach to theatrical
performance began to take on momentum as one product of the wave of
experimentation that swept through the culture in the 1960s and 1970s.
I remember, in the early 1970s, hearing about a
troupe that performed little plays in front of security cameras in New York
City subway stations, for the “entertainment” of the security guards! Around
the same time I directed a shortened version of Shakespeare’s As You Like It, with its adventures in
the Forest of Arden, in a forest. In a particularly minimalist example of
alternative performance spaces, Actors Theatre of Louisville has presented
plays written to be listened to by a single hearer in a phone booth.
The alternative space approach can be not only
creative but economically viable. The scenario-based comedy Tony n’ Tina’s Wedding, created by the
Artificial Intelligence company in 1985, in its Greenwich Village iteration
staged its first act in a church and its second in a restaurant, to great
commercial success. A more recent example is Sleep No More, which premiered in New York City on March 7, 2011,
and and has achieved both financial success and social cachet. Examples can be
easily multiplied. Based on Shakespeare’s Macbeth,
Sleep No More was written by the
British theater company Punchdrunk and was presented here in a Chelsea warehouse
converted to seem like a hotel.
This article describes a theatrical project
using alternative spaces that I began in January 2017, although it could be said to have begun in
1989. That’s when I wrote adaptations of three classic but not particularly
well known plays: Alcestis by Euripides, Nathan
the Wise by Gotthold Lessing, and The Imaginary Cuckold by Moliere. I wrote in an introduction to the collection, which I
called A Modern Evening of Classic Plays:
These adaptations represent
an attempt to make accessible acting editions of three notable but
seldom-performed plays. Additionally, these versions are designed for small
casts (two women, three men for each) and minimal or no sets, with an eye on
touring. Sets could, of course, be used as desired.
The originals of these plays
are masterpieces of drama, and these versions should not be considered
substitutes for them. They are introductions, and it is hoped that they may
also stand on their own – as themselves, however, not as their far greater
originals.
The Alcestis is well known as the “tragedy with a happy ending.” This
accurate but superficial notion requires a great deal more discussion than can
be attempted here. The Chorus, always a sticking point in staging Greek
tragedy, has been replaced here by the Servant, eliminating set choral pieces
and formal movement.
Nathan the Wise is, or was until recently, the most produced
play in Europe, according to some sources, and yet is virtually never performed
in the Western Hemisphere. This sly, passionate demonstration of the wisdom of
tolerance features one of the greatest set pieces in all drama, the “Parable of
the Rings.”
The Imaginary Betrayal (originally “The Imaginary
Cuckold”) demonstrates Moliere’s ability to combine commedia characters with the shrewdest psychology. Each of the
characters in this play could behave
as accused; the facts are lacking but the mental world is there.
The language in all these
adaptations is modern and fairly free with the original text; it is hoped that
significant sense remains, and that the plays, separately or together, will
provide a novel and valuable theatrical experience.
There were two inspirations for this project in
addition to what I wrote in the introduction. One was an article I read about Václav Havel (1936-2011), who
became the President of Czechoslovakia. The article said that during the period
of Communist dictatorship in his country, Havel, a playwright whose works were
banned by the regime, and two friends put together a 45 minute version of Macbeth and performed it in people’s
living rooms, out of the gaze of the secret police. I liked the idea of “house
theater,” just the actors and a play in a small room.
I also realized that performing three such different plays at one
time would create a sort of small repertory company of actors – I thought of
the project as a “MiniRep” (later “MicroRep”) that ought to challenge actors
and also interest them. It has always been difficult, perhaps even impossible,
to create a repertory theater in this country. Perhaps we could do it on a tiny
scale!
For twenty-eight years my versions
of the plays remained unperformed, because I could never come up with the right
cast at the right time. Then in the fall of 2016, I directed a production of The Odd Couple by Neil Simon, and
realized that two of its actors would be perfect for Modern/Classic: Frank Favala, who played Murray the Cop, is a big
man with a big voice and excellent timing, and Tara Moran, whom I have also
directed previously, is one of my favorite actors. Rounding out the proposed
cast were Art Delo, an actor with a remarkable voice (whose father, an
Episcopal priest, officiated at the wedding of my wife Pat and me), my son
Craig, and Becky Schuster, both excellent performers who practically embody the
concept of “young leads.”
On February 16, 2017, we had a reading of the script at my house with the five actors named above. The
three plays together took a little over an hour and a half to read. The actors
liked the Moliere best, and found Nathan
the oddest. But they all seemed interested in continuing with the work, so MicroRep
was born. A note: I feel actors should be paid for their work, and I envisioned
paying each of these actors $100 for the project.
Rather than give a day to day diary of events, here are some
highlights of the experience, listed by topic.
THE SCRIPT
Based on the reading, I revised the script, cutting about 2,000
words out of about 16,000, or ten pages out of about seventy. I rewrote one
speech so it advanced the plot better than it had. Those were the only changes
I made in the script before rehearsals, although I told the actors I was open
to more ideas on alterations as rehearsals proceeded. As it turned out, we made
few additional changes, usually when the line as written was hard to say. For
example, the speech
Please, promise you won’t let them make me take another father!
has too many ideas crammed into it and is nearly impossible to say
convincingly. It was easily reduced to
Please, don’t let them make me take
another father!
and even that wasn’t ideal:
Please, don’t make me take another
father!
SCHEDULING REHEARSALS
Setting up a rehearsal schedule turned out to be difficult. I
envisioned a two month span for the entire project, roughly a month or so of
rehearsals followed by another of performances. But when the actors emailed me
their conflicts, it turned out that only about ten days were available for
rehearsals over two months, mostly because of commitments to other shows. We
worked with what was available. Ultimately we rehearsed 16 times over four
months, from March through June, and performed the piece four times at the end
of June.
One reason we had to scramble for rehearsal time is that good
actors are likely to be in demand, and that was the case here, with three of
our five actors already involved in other productions as well, or soon to be. I
have become somewhat accustomed to the fact of theatrical life that good actors
frequently have tight schedules. When I say I’ve become accustomed, I mean I
don’t always completely panic. Not completely.
Because the piece was designed to be performed in small spaces, I
figured that we could rehearse at almost any location, so we first met in my
living room, which to my embarrassment wasn’t really good to work in – too
crowded, furniture in unhelpful places. Fortunately my friends Neal and Martha
Day made their house available for us. It had several suitable rehearsal areas;
we used two, and ultimately settled in to one, the living room, which also
became the site of our final performance.
STAGING THE PLAYS
My original idea was that there wouldn’t be any “blocking” for the
plays at all – that the movements of the actors wouldn’t be predetermined, but
that they would go wherever seemed appropriate to them, based on the
arrangement of the playing space and on how they felt inspiration strike.
I’d never worked that way before, and I still haven’t, because at
the first rehearsal it became clear that if my original idea was going to work,
it would take a lot more commitment on everyone’s part, including mine, than was
available. I don’t know if the approach would work for anyone; probably there
are groups that work that way, but I don’t know who they’d be.
For my own reference, fortunately, I’d written ideas for simple
movements in my script, and we worked off those to stage the play. We
established entrances on the right and left of the audience, and rehearsed as
though the audience was directly in front of us – in other words, we staged the
plays as though on a typical proscenium stage, but with no proscenium.
As it turned out, for our first performance we had audience on
three sides of the playing area, so the cast had to adjust so the people at the
sides could regularly see faces.
PROPERTIES, COSTUMES, LIGHTING
From the beginning my idea was that we would have no set – that’s
obvious, since we were to perform in living rooms – and no costumes. The actors
wore whatever clothes they happened to wear that evening. The alternative would
have been to make some sort of costume change for each play.
My friend Colleen Brambilla, an extremely talented choreographer
and director, told me she felt that’s exactly what we should have done – not
with full costumes, but at least with some sort of identifying costume or
property pieces in each play, to help the audience members keep the plays
separate in their minds.
She may be right, but I clung to the “living room” concept of the
play, and the actors wore whatever they wanted. I believe the actors found that
fascinating – plays are always costumed somehow! I enjoyed the novelty, though,
whether or not the audience did. I like to think that, on the positive side,
wearing street clothes set our work apart to some extent.
As far as properties, the objects used in the three plays, we
could have mimed all of them, but found it more practical to use the bare
minimum: a drinking mug, a tiny magnetized chess set, a soldier’s helmet, a
billy club (inflatable), a locket, and an “old document” on yellow paper. The
plays didn’t require any others.
Obviously there was no specific stage lighting either. At the only
performance we gave in a theater (see below), we were offered the lighting
setup they had, and we declined to use it, as not in the spirit of our
adventure.
VALUES IN THE PLAYS / DEVELOPMENTS IN CHARACTERIZATION
One of the most interesting facets of the MicroRep experience was
the way the three plays deepened in meaning for us as we worked on them. That
may be why plays are “classic” – because they reach places in our spirits that aren’t often reached.
It’s hard to give examples, because many such experiences were
momentary, when we suddenly would realize that there was a depth of
characterization that we had not noticed. I observed this happen, for example,
in Frank Favala’s characterization of Nathan . . . .
NATHAN THE WISE
Nathan was the most
difficult of the three pieces we performed. Alcestis
and The Imaginary Betrayal are both,
in similar and different ways, relatively straightforward pieces. They are both
short; they both have strongly humorous aspects; they both demand sincerity on
the part of the characters, even if the audience can see that the characters
are acting foolishly. Betrayal, because
it is a farce, also requires dynamic pacing. But both plays are well within the
wheelhouses of good actors.
Nathan is different.
It’s by far the longest piece of the three, more than three times the length of
the others. It’s also unique in structure, because it contains an intricate
mystery plot involving family relationships. We spent a good deal of rehearsal time
trying to figure out just exactly what those family relationships were.
I didn’t make things any easier by my adaptation, either. In
reducing a complex five-act melodrama to one
forty-minute act, I had to take some pretty drastic shortcuts with the plot,
and these made the last part of the play in particular somewhat hard to follow.
Basically, the audience had to imagine a scene that the they had no prior
reason to visualize (involving some information two characters are given about
Nathan).
We gave Nathan the
largest share of rehearsal time, identified the problems, and confronted them
openly. The cast was determined to make in particular the last section of the
play “work,” and ultimately the play succeeded in traditional theatrical
fashion: the acting made clear what was happening in the
scenes, through the actors’ conviction and focus, what the writing didn’t.
LEARNING LINES
“How do you remember all those lines?” is a question that people
often ask (people asked it of our actors), and that theater people often smile
at, thinking, “That’s not the main issue in acting.” But really, how do they
learn all those lines? What is the internal process that makes it possible for
an actor to repeat word for word the dialogue in a script of perhaps over a
hundred pages? What’s going on in the brain to make that possible?
All I can say is, thank heaven it
happens, or theater would be nothing but a series of staged readings. Each of
the MicroRep actors had a plateful of lines from three different plays to
learn, and when I went back to the publishable script after the production was
over, to include in it the changes we had made during rehearsals, I was impressed
to see that all of the actors were virtually word-perfect in their lines.
PERFORMANCES
Once we had begun the rehearsal process, we started to look for
places to perform our pieces, asking friends and people in the theater that we
know. We ended up giving four performances for about ninety people altogether,
in two living rooms, one “black box” theater (at the Action Theater
Conservatory Studios
in Clifton, New Jersey), and around one outdoor swimming pool.
The swimming pool performance was the most unusual. The hosts,
leaders of the Theater League of Clifton, invited a large number of people,
most of whom, apparently, came to the show – over 35 people. We had set up a
performance area, but as the crowd filtered in it became apparent that we had
not made enough room for both the audience and the actors.
I identified a second area and started to set it up, but the
actors came to me and said that their preference was to do the play on one side
of the swimming pool, with the audience on the other. I was worried about
whether or not the audience would be able to hear the dialogue, some of which
is subtle. Still, I thought, it’s their performance, and if they want to do it
that way, they should.
So that’s how the play was performed, with the actors and audience
on opposite sides of a swimming pool. I was terrified even to look at the
audience for a long while; when I finally did, I saw that they were raptly
attentive to the show.
The cast later reported that it began the first play concentrating
on being heard, but came to realize that all they had to do was act. They gave
a superlative performance, the audience cheered warmly, and the evening was
convivial. Hooray for actors. They are wonderful people.
SELF-PRODUCTION
A few years ago I was in the audience for a panel discussion of
leading directors, and at one point the choreographer and director Kathleen
Marshall looked down the row of panelists and asked, “How many of you are
putting together your own projects, in addition to any work you’re hired for?”
Every hand went up.
In a theatrical world where so many decisions are made by business
rather than artistic people (agents, producers, and so on), it makes sense that
playwrights, directors, and actors create as many projects of their own as they
can.
For example, I know a remarkable number of performers who have
created their own one-person shows. Beyond my own friends, one famous example I’ve
seen is the wonderful Mark Twain Tonight
created by Hal Holbrook (b. 1925).
MicroRep is another example of a self-created project. Our costs
for the production were something like $15 for a few props. (The actors would
have done the play for free.) The rewards can hardly be counted.
I would gladly do similar projects again; I have been trying to think what else I’ve written that might be suitable, and of course I shouldn’t limit myself to my own writing.
I seldom feel nostalgic when a show I’m
involved with is over, but I admit I miss this one. It felt like “pure theater”
– a script, actors, an audience, and not much else, presenting important plays
in an unconventional way. It even felt like a rediscovery of some of the
potential of theater. As I said at the beginning of this article, many such
rediscoveries are being made – a sign of health for theater at this moment.
[In my introduction, I
mentioned an outfit called En Garde Arts which did site-specific productions in
odd places all over the city. The first
one I read about was Dick Beebe’s Naked Chambers, the play on the side of the building.
In 1990, they did Mac Wellman’s Crowbar, a play inside the Victory Theatre on West 42nd Street that was about to
undergo demolition. The audience sat on or
near the stage and the actors worked all
over the rest of the theater as they told, with the help of projections, the story
of the historic house, opened in 1900.
Kirk describes staging one of MicroRep’s plays around a swimming pool. In 1996, I saw Charles L. Mee’s Trojan Women: A Love Story, another En Garde Arts production, at the
abandoned amphitheater in East River Park on the Lower East Side; the first
act, set in Troy, took place beneath the seats of the amphitheater, but the
second act, at a spa in Carthage, was staged around (and in, I think)
a pool (actually the flooded amphitheater)! I also saw a production of A Doll’s House by the Other Theater, performed back in ’95
in the parlor and a few other spaces of the Merchant’s House Museum, originally
a town house built in 1832 in the East
Village; and Tamara in several rooms
of the Park Avenue Armory—we had to follow one character from space to space—in
’87. It was supposed to be Gabriele D’Annunzio’s
villa outside Rome in 1927 and the program was a “passport”!
[Among actors and performers
who’ve created their own performance material: Spaulding Gray (1941-2004) and
his like—all those monologists who recount tales from their own lives—and an
American Academy of Dramatic Arts grad named Cavada Humphrey (1919-2007)—she
came around to talk about her work, I think—who developed a monodrama about
Elizabeth I in the 1970’s called Henry’s Daughter that she shopped around.
[One of Kirk’s last comments,
about the actors having been willing to perform for free, reminds me of a line
an actor friend of mine used to like to say: ”Actors are the only people
who’ll work for nothing if you let them.” I suggested we get T-shirts
printed up!]
