A Theasy Interview With Hook & Eye Theater
11/7/15
Theasy checked in with the enterprising powers-that-be at Hook & Eye Theater to learn more about the company and their upcoming production God Is a Verb. Read our interview with co-artistic directors Carrie Heitman and Chad Lindsey below, and see God Is a Verb through November 21st at The Actors Fund Arts Center, 160 Schermerhorn Street in Brooklyn. You can find out more about the company at hookandeyetheater.com.
THEASY: Tell us a little about Hook & Eye. When were you founded? Who's in charge over there?
CARRIE HEITMAN AND CHAD LINDSEY: We met on stage...in high school in Saginaw, Michigan. Thousands of years later, reuniting in NYC, we co-founded Hook & Eye Theater in 2010. Together, we serve as the company’s artistic directors running the day to day operations. Here’s the what what about us: we’re an ensemble company of theater-makers, actors, dancers, musicians and artists based in Brooklyn, NY. We build totally new theatrical pieces full of joyful athleticism, soul, and song. Each new piece is built with various members of our core ensemble, alongside a rotation of new and seasoned collaborators pulled from our artistic colleagues and the city’s creative community. We teach play-writing at New York's Professional Performing Arts School, and offer 100% free PlayLabs where new work is brought forward, built and developed. Our mission is to build inspiring and inquisitive theater productions to embolden audiences of every age. We are committed to compensating our artists for their work, and offering low-or no-cost tickets to audiences and students.
THEASY: Who/what inspires you? What kind of work do you like to make?
C&C: Anything and everything, work made by Kneehigh, the UK based theatre company. We consistently find ourselves at the unique intersection of playmaking and script-writing. We believe in heavy cross-pollination among disciplines. We use an extended creative process which we believe yields memorable theater. We choose to devise as an ensemble because we believe that the whole is amplified by the combined talents of each artist. We start with a snag, an idea that hooks our collective interest. Usually, said snags involve primary sources rooted in scientific ideas and/or historical moments that move us. Using improvisation, discussion, and research, we tug at the thread until we've found a story to unravel. Working with our writers, musicians and artists to focus our vision, we knit the moments together, add layers, and get the story ready for fastening with our audience. While the timeline of each project varies, it generally takes over a year to conceive, build, and produce each new work.
THEASY: Your upcoming production is God Is a Verb. What excites you most about it?
C&C: God Is a Verb is an engaging and urgent portrait of a world on the brink. In 1969, an eccentric professor gathers a team of offbeat academics to play a game with one goal: make the world work for all humanity. What unfolds tears spacetime as we are whisked from a beatnik cafe to a treetop congressional hearing and back by way of a university telephone. As the clock ticks, the lines blur between the game and the real world and we wonder if we've detached from reality altogether.
We are excited and eager to know what resonates most with our audiences: how personal mythology impacts contemporary history and how a set of deeply held beliefs are upheld and challenged. Knowing that a couple years ago, our snag was a document that our playwright Gavin Broady ran across, the World Game Report (an account of an ambitious, utopian thought experiment undertaken by Bucky where he gathered a group of the brightest minds from dozens of disciplines—mathematics, architecture, biology—with a single goal: disproving the widely accepted notion that the resources of our world are too scarce to match the rate of population growth), has exploded into this full, realized, specific absurd theatrical experience is very fulfilling. Our design team embraced this world whole-heartedly and we offer audiences a wide range of engagement both visually and verbally; we can’t wait to share it!
THEASY: Why should audiences check out God Is a Verb?
C&C: You mean besides the 8 ft bamboo dome we build during the show? Audiences need to check this show out because we pose a lot of questions inside fierce projection and clog dancing. How will I be remembered? What is genius? What if great ideas hit—and the world isn't ready for them? How many times have the gears of progress, time, and place almost meshed, but unmatched, slipped and spun, and in the process great ideas slid into the void? These are the questions that we asked ourselves as we played with biographical material from the life of design scientist R. Buckminster Fuller. The play we have created is a kaleidoscope of fiction and fact. Myth lives next to truth, and neither like the arrangement very much, but the tension is fun to watch!
THEASY: What's next for Hook & Eye?
C&C: She-She-She (working title), our next play in development, explores various facets of memory. Using a style of eyewitness testimonies, case studies in neuroscience, and invented poetical narratives, we will follow a few journeys imagined inside the landscape and history of America’s national parks. Our dramatic inquiry will center on the potential thought experiment of memories being passed down through generations via genetic switches that allow offspring to inherit the experience of their ancestors. One of our primary narratives roots itself in our collective history as a nation: The New Deal Era. Our lens will focus on the She-She-She camps initiated in 1933 by Eleanor Roosevelt as an answer to the Civilian Conservation Corps. Excited by the idea of employing youth in environmental conservation jobs, Roosevelt was discouraged by how the CCC only served men. The She-She-She initiative provided employment for the country’s nearly 200,000 homeless women at the time. Our parallel narrative finds our play in present day, a hobo jungle of individuals who make a “family” and work at one of the nation’s state parks.
Photo: Chad Lindsey and Carrie Heitman.
