Chelfitsch's Eizo-Theater"The landscape, the world, and Accidents:Everything That Happens Outside of This Room@SCARTS court", Hokkaido, 2020（design by SATO Shie/SA+O）
Our cast and crew for the October premiere is almost fully assembled!
I’m waiting to share it here until it’s complete, as we’re still sorting out a few loose ends... but let me tell you, this group of artists is a marvelous one. We never decided in advance how much we might bring on folks who had been part of the development process along the way versus work with new artists who would bring a fresh perspective. In the end, the way it’s shaking out, there’s a little bit of golden continuation from the development process, but a good majority of the artists are climbing on board for the very first time. There are even a few people in the mix who I’ve never met before (but who know Steve and Miriam). Exciting!
I am so eager to get in the room and evolve the script in collaboration with this specific mix of beings, bodies, voices, idiosyncrasies, and ideas. As a writer who more often works outside of traditional theater settings and, for the past five years, has been developing a lot of work from scratch in collaboration with performers, it’s felt so novel to re-immerse in the practice of writing without knowing who the performers ultimately will be. So many different people have dipped in and out of this process over the past 20 months, and every single one has had a profound impact on the work’s development. I can only imagine what will happen now, as this whole new configuration of artists starts digging deep into six intensive weeks of rehearsal.
I think normally, I might feel anxious about all these unknowns colliding for such an incredibly short amount of time. How can we get to know and trust each other, and put this brand new thing on its wobbly feet, and keep making discoveries together toward reducing the wobble, and also, you know, even just simply getting everything learned and memorized, toward seeing it through, all in a matter of weeks? And pretty much only during evenings and weekends, by the way, as many people will be working full-time day jobs or turning around other projects simultaneously. The way theater happens in this country is completely bananas.
And yet, somehow, it happens. One reason I’m not anxious is the fact that all of the artists involved are brilliant, thoughtful, and highly skilled. Another reason is that, once again, The Playwrights’ Center is making dreams come true. As I mentioned in my last post, they supported our workshops in May and June (as part of their Regulars program, where they partner with theaters to help move new plays from development to production). As I worked through revisions in July, I kept thinking about how valuable those May/June sessions had been and wishing I could do something comparable with the artists who would be part of the actual premiere this October. I also happen to be a Core Writer at the PWC, and as such, have the honor of proposing one funded development opportunity for my work each year. Core Writer workshops don’t normally happen until later in the fall or spring, but I asked The Playwrights’ Center if I could pretty please possibly bump mine up to happen right before rehearsals begin - and they said yes!
I can’t begin to express the hugeness of this gift. It gives me one more set of intensive script workshops, with the actual artists who will be seeing this piece through, before I have to let it go enough to let folks start learning their lines. It gives our new creative team some concentrated time to get to know each other, experiment, and begin developing a shared vocabulary before we dive into our normal rehearsal schedule. And in full transparency, it also gives all of the artists a little bit more pay, which makes a big difference.
In other news:
The new and official title of this piece is Early Morning Song.
It will, as you might have guessed by now, include a lot of movement as well as live music.
It will be a kind of collage or meditation rather than a plot- or action-driven “story” (I’m sure anyone who knows my work or Red Eye’s history is shocked by that one).
As we think about relationships between language and sound and movement and light, we’ve been watching scratchy old clips of the original Einstein on the Beach for inspiration (like this one) and excerpts from chelfitsch’s Hot Pepper, Air Conditioner, and the Farewell Speech (like this one). Also Miriam and I have been comparing our experiences working with SuperGroup - whose latest project, PEOPLE I KNOW, opens at Red Eye in November (right after we close) and also features Miriam in the cast!
If you ask me what Early Morning Song is “about” right now, I will be genuinely honored by and grateful for your interest, but I confess I might evade the question, or give a rambling account of our process, or offer a laundry list of themes (such as creation, destruction, existence, labor, legacy, mortality, control, interdependency, women in science, climate change, the universe, trees - all of which are true, but vague). It’s not that I don’t know what the play is about, and it’s not that I want to keep anything secret; rather, I just struggle to find language to articulate work in a meaningful way when I’m still deep in the thick of the creation process. One would think that because my medium is words, I could put them together better to respond to such (reasonable) questions... but to my own chagrin, this is not the case. To create a play and to sum it up are, for me, two very different skill sets that do not always play well together. Some writers can do both; but I work pretty intuitively, letting conversations and ideas simmer for long periods of time, seeing what emerges that I could never anticipate or map out, exploring how my words then interact with my collaborators’ nonverbal worlds of movement and sound and image, etc. So trying to name all that, while still striving to understand it, can quickly feel reductive and incomplete. That said, it is a skill that I’m forever working to improve.... and Red Eye and I both will be sharing lots more information in the coming months... and I can easily tell you all about our process in the meantime... and I hope the many seeds throughout this blog will spark your curiosity enough to simply come experience the work for yourself in October. Truth be told, this piece might ultimately be about different things for different people; so I’ll be very interested to hear what it ends up being about for you!
Images:
1 - Courtesy of Theo Goodell
2 - Miriam, one of the lead artists who also will perform in October, dancing in a development workshop at Red Eye last November
