Last week, the official rehearsal process for Early Morning Song kicked off with an intensive two days of workshopping at The Playwrights’ Center, with (most of) the actual brilliant artists who will bring it all home - which then segued into rehearsals at Red Eye for the October premiere.
Drumroll, please... this is our cast:
Megan Burns!
Kimberly Lesik!
Dolo McComb!
Miriam Must!
Sarah Parker!
Jen Scott!
Dolo is choreographing as well... and we’ll have original music by Skyler Nowinski... plus costumes by Liz Josheff Busa... lighting design by Søren Olsen... stage management by Beth Ann Powers... and of course, Steve Busa directing! SUCH A FANTASTIC GROUP OF HUMANS.
Do you notice a role missing from that list? This production will not have a scenic designer! Pretty early on, Steve was drawn to working primarily with movement, costumes, and light toward a very minimalist visual environment.
Our time at The Playwrights’ Center (where we were lucky to have the added support of Brid Henry, intern extraordinaire) was all about meeting each other, revising the text to be rehearsal-ready, and establishing the start of our sound and movement vocabularies. After the first full read-through of the script on Tuesday, Steve asked the group to popcorn ideas about what the piece is “about.” Here are some of their responses:
science versus nature
a woman’s life’s work - wondering if her work is relevant? will it be relevant one day? is it worth anything? is it all just smoke and mirrors?
humans and our place within everything
an attempt to understand it all, everything we take in daily, and how ridiculous that attempt is; the limits of language
zooming between macro and micro perspectives
the process of striving to work not for yourself, but participating in something larger than yourself
the interconnectedness of lives
extinction
All absolutely correct!
“I don’t know the answers to all those questions, and I want to discover them as we go. Does that make sense? Push back if it doesn’t.”
This quote from Steve from rehearsal the other night perfectly captures his directing style (and our collaborative process overall, and maybe also the play itself). While he has strong impulses about certain moments or images, he largely comes to rehearsal without any fixed ideas about how things should go. Instead, he invites the ensemble to try a bunch of different possibilities, and we let it all simmer as the bigger picture begins to reveal itself. So right now the cast is generating a palette of options for each scene, without setting anything yet. Also, as we’ve known would be the case all along, music and movement are incredibly important pieces of this puzzle (the text I’ve written only works in conversation with them); so Dolo’s exploration and generation of movement in tandem with Skyler’s developing score is pretty central to all that is happening.
A few links if you want to keep simmering with us:
Sarah recommends this Radiolab episode on emergence
Here is a mini interview with yours truly, posted last week during our workshop at The Playwrights’ Center
Jen thankfully introduced us to The Star Hustler
The proliferation of Latin “audio dictionaries” on the internet may prove useful in the coming weeks
We’ll be in rehearsal, but you should check out Northern Lights.mn’s Anthropocene Awareness Association event on September 30 at Macalester College and tell us all about it
Oh, and by the way: Tickets for the October production are officially on sale!! As usual, Red Eye offers a wide range of price options, including two pay-what-you-can performances. Click here to learn more and purchase.
Images:
1 - Ensemble movement warm-up led by Dolo at The Playwrights’ Center
2 - Kimberly Lesik and Jen Scott in rehearsal at Red Eye
Time is moving quickly! This play will be premiere in October! Here are some video glimpses into our most recent workshops, along with a few mini updates about the work’s evolution. Enjoy!
1. The title of this play probably won’t be MAKE. Surprise! We’re simmering with a few possibilities right now, and I’m increasingly drawn to one of them... looking forward to sharing with you soon.
2. These videos came from two workshops we did in May 2016, generously made possible by The Playwrights’ Center. We read the latest version of the script, then spent most of two days on our feet, experimenting with sound and movement using a series of prompts from the script. You can see a few more snippets here.
3. The performers in these videos are Miriam Must, Billy Mullaney, Dolo McComb, Kristin Van Loon, Charles Campbell, and Vie Boheme, with sound by Crystal Myslajek and direction from Steve Busa. This extraordinary group is teaching me so much... it is pure honor to work with them. We’ll have one more workshop all together on June 29.
4. People in the play don’t have names anymore. Lately I’ve been thinking about Einstein on the Beach, that kind of meditative portrait of a famous (male) scientist; and how, in our process, what’s emerging is a (different) kind of meditative portrait of an unknown (female) scientist. The contrast is intriguing to consider.
On a somewhat related but largely unrelated side note, Miriam recently gave me a copy of Lab Girl by Hope Jahren, which quickly took precedent over a large stack of library books despite impending due dates. Highly recommended!
5. Sitting with this piece amidst everything happening in the world over the past six months has felt connected to the need to remember that climate change is urgent, despite the fact people are killing other people with guns every single day. How to be with it all, hold it all at once? How to be present for rapid response while also maintaining the long view and keeping up with that work? I’m acutely aware this play will premiere right before the November elections. Most recently, in grieving Orlando (and there is little I can put into words about that particular event just yet), I have moments of wondering if I should start all over with a whole new play, write a different piece that deals directly and explicitly with all the deeply tangled problems that immediate tragedy brings to light... whatever that might look like.
But then I look back at what has been happening on the page and in the room, and I remember that we’re committed to a creative inquiry and collaborative practice that do, on a cellular level, take on those deeply tangled problems. Wisdom I’ve heard from both Paula Vogel and Erik Ehn in the past three weeks also comes to mind - I’m paraphrasing, but basically it’s the idea that in order to see the sun, we can’t look directly at it. Our eyes will be damaged; it’s too much. Instead we have to look just to the side (and use other senses: feel the heat, smell the plants that are alive because of it) - and before long, we gain a deeper knowledge and experience of the sun after all. And so the same when it comes to looking at something as huge as climate change or as complex as our current sociopolitical reality. I know my own attempts to look straight at these realities tend to result in writing that is simplistic and unsatisfying, if not downright unhelpful; but if I can look just to the side and be open to what different senses and seemingly unrelated experiences will teach - suffice to say, much becomes possible. And so I keep coming back around to our scientist, trusting her lead, open to where she might take us.
So I keep meaning to tell you about this lovely evening of conversation that happened back in July…
As unpacked here and here, Red Eye and I enjoyed an intensive workshop last summer that served as one of the first big milestones in our process. The first two days consisted of text and movement experiments with some guest artists. On the third day, we switched gears and gathered some “non-artists” together for an evening of conversation, toward expanding our thinking about questions and themes we’ve been pushing around. I put “non-artists” in quotes for reasons I will explain in a minute…
First, a little personal history. Part of the impulse behind this gathering came from my years working on staff at Cornerstone Theater Company, a renowned ensemble-based theater company in Los Angeles with a specific methodology for making community-collaborative work. Among other kinds of research for new plays, Cornerstone often hosts story circles, where community members share their stories around a specific topic. These stories, in turn, inform the play that is being written—sometimes in big ways (a story shared could become the backbone for an entire play) and more often in smaller, nuanced ways (events, characters, and ideas from the conversations may get woven into the play’s fabric). Sometimes story circles are wide open to the general public, and sometimes they are smaller invited gatherings. They are always facilitated, ensuring everyone present can share.
My experiences observing and supporting remarkable writers like Shishir Kurup, Sarah Ruhl, Michael John Garcés, Octavio Solis, Alison Carey, Julie Marie Myatt, Page Leong, and others as they moved through this process with Cornerstone had a huge influence on my own early explorations in playwriting. I loved participating in the story circles, then watching the conversations pass through the imagination of the playwright, resulting in a piece of theater that person never would have written otherwise, which then continued to grow into something even more beautifully unpredictable as other artists—typically including a mix of professionals alongside many of the community members who participated in the original story circles—put the play on its feet and brought it to life.
While still in Los Angeles, I got involved with Padua Playwrights (based in the same building where I lived, in the same neighborhood as Cornerstone), where I really began to dig into writing; and from there, I started exploring many different avenues of performance creation, influenced by artists I met in Poland, Providence, New York, and Minneapolis. Every step of the way, I’ve experimented with integrating elements of Cornerstone’s approach into my independent projects, with varying degrees of success; now more than ever, I deeply appreciate the value of having an institutional grounding, committed ensemble, and robust full-time staff to take on the many complex moving parts of community-collaborative work! But even for projects that are not wholly community-collaborative in their making, Cornerstone’s influence is strong as I think about how, why, and with whom theater lives in the world.
Which brings us to the present!
My current new play development process with Red Eye is not a Cornerstone-style community collaboration. But from the beginning of our work together, Steve, Miriam, and I have shared a commitment to expansive thinking about how the play might come into being; and as we conceived the July workshop, we were drawn to the prospect of doing a story circle, to bring new perspectives into the fold and further crack open our thinking. Having mostly percolated ideas with fellow artists so far, we were curious about deliberately reaching out to some people working in different fields. So on Wednesday, July 15, we brought together Kristin, Howard, Randy, Leah, Bettina, Timaria, and Scott—seven acquaintances who work in a wide range of occupations, from education to law to retail to architecture—for an evening of conversation. Everybody knew one of us personally (myself, Steve, or Miriam); but only one knew all three of us, and most of them did not know each other. We also recruited esteemed fellow theater artist, Peter Heeringa, to facilitate so that we could focus on listening, rather than running the room.
The first lesson of the evening surfaced as soon as we went around the circle for introductions. Peter asked the participants to share their names and something about themselves, such as what they do for a living or how they like to spend their time; and to my surprise, almost everybody introduced themselves as artists! The few who didn’t still acknowledged their creative interests and how those interests influence their working lives. Pretty much nobody brought up the occupation that had spurred us to think of them in the first place. It was such an important reminder that artists are everywhere! And it also didn’t matter at all, for no matter what their primary occupations or interests, it was clear we had a remarkable group of people who had come with distinct and valuable perspectives, histories, personalities, and insights to offer.
Also, this group was ready to dig deep right away. Peter offered a warm-up prompt, asking everyone to riff on the Frankenstein story (what it brings to mind, what it means to them, associations), but the responses were not warm-up responses. These folks were ready to talk. The warm-up led into a rich discussion about how the concept of “creations that consume their creators” has played out in different ways in each of our own lives - which then led to more open conversation about control and loss of control, love, parenting, creativity and collaboration, work-life balance, mental health, fitness, death and grief, bodies versus technology, science, religion, capitalism, the individual versus the collective, the role of art in society, and how the world (as we know it) will end. So, you know, a few things.
We filmed the whole conversation; but sadly, the first half of the footage has vanished and the second half is without sound, mouths moving and bodies gesturing in silence. The silent video is actually quite beautiful (I’m already thinking about how it could inform choreography); but unfortunately, it doesn’t help much in terms of referencing back to the actual conversation. All I have, instead, are my scribbly notes.
Kristin talked about a loved one who is bipolar and the complexities of what is lost in treatment; how the creation and rebirth of a “stable” person can seem to include losing certain vibrant aspects of that person’s personality; balancing the serious risks of non-treatment with the trade-offs that come with treatment. She also talked about the edges of grief, the valuable perspective that grief can provide, how comfortable one can become lingering in it, how alarming and disorienting it can be to wake up and not feel grief; and about our culture’s worship of capitalism, how a framework has been created in which Trump is a viable presidential candidate.
Howard observed that Frankenstein and so many other classic works are morality stories, warning about the dangers of humans attempting to “play God,” or replace God with science; but that he is much more concerned by the way faith is too often used for exploitation. He also talked about cancer, Jewish identity, and reinventing himself twice, first as a corporate lawyer “who helped rich people get richer” in New York (where he felt like he was never Jewish enough); then as “a guy who could fit into Stillwater, Minnesota with a baseball cap, burger, and beer” (and in this context, he suddenly felt perceived as extremely Jewish).
Timaria talked about being a young woman climbing the corporate ladder, and how good intentions aren’t always enough—how difficult choices have to be made. She also talked about being in love, how that’s the closest she’s ever felt to losing control; the inexplicable and impractical things one is willing to do for another person, like driving clear across the state just to spend a few hours together—how simultaneously scary and beautiful that can be.
Scott talked about intrinsic versus extrinsic reward, how the thrill of creativity takes precedence for him over the satisfaction of completion; for example, in his job, he often conceives projects, then hands them off to people with different skill sets to carry out and finish. He also mused about “real” collaboration versus the “appearance” of collaboration, observing that, even in very collaborative environments, there’s often still a hierarchy of sorts—whether it’s the CEO of Apple or lead architects at Burning Man.
Leah shared about her capacity to be consumed by the physical and meditative action of quilting; and about the consuming nature of grief when a relationship ends, how it’s not necessarily dramatic from day to day, but how there’s a process of rolling around in it that is emotionally consuming, and cathartic over time. She also confessed that she’s always been jealous of people who have a strong, ecstatic faith in something larger than themselves; how she secretly used to want to be a Catholic nun, to experience the all-consuming devotion of sacrifice, pain, and pleasure combined.
Randy shared about the many years he spent consumed by creating businesses—how it all started when he was as young as three years old, as he discovered the joy of positive affirmation when he created things; how his journey ultimately has been both fulfilling and agonizing; how connection to people in other countries has been one of the most important revelations; how such relationships teach you about yourself as well as how important it is to adjust your efforts to meet other people’s needs.
Bettina talked about not growing up in the U.S. and therefore not having the same cultural references as others in the group. She remembered wanting, from a young age, to create something so badly, but wrestling with what it takes to create, from space to resources to the right people, and what happens when what you create isn’t valued. She now has three children and is in awe of their beauty, completely consumed—but also acknowledges she can’t control what happens with them; that their wishes, ideas, and goals aren’t always what she would imagine; that surrender is required.
As I recall these snippets, my brain is flooded by so many other things that were shared and discussed. This recap really only barely scratches the surface.
Maybe most of all, it’s the feeling that followed me from this gathering – a sense of awe and gratitude for these individuals who were willing to be vulnerable, sharing their experiences, memories, fears, hopes, and questions so openly – that has been sticking just as much as the content discussed. The phenomenon of strangers coming together in a space, pouring out pieces of their lives, then going their separate ways. None of us knew (or yet knows) what the next day will bring, let alone how this all might color a new play; but there we were, together for an evening, sharing and receiving and witnessing and honoring. There is something so beautiful and crucial about that.
Images:
1 – Steve Busa talking with story circle participants at Red Eye, July 2015. Still image from video by Miriam Must.
2 – The cast of atTraction, written by Page Leong and directed by Michael John Garcés, in rehearsal outside Cornerstone, 2008. Photo by Gary Leonard (via Cornerstone Theater Company).
3-5 – Story circle participants in action at Red Eye, July 2015. Still image from video by Miriam Must.
