What Does Happen

 

About 6-7 months ago, I began work on what would be Idle Muse Theatre Company’s 11th full-length production, THE MONUMENT.  I had no idea what to expect from a project of this kind, but I had an inkling it would involve a good deal of introspection and thought about the nature of what we it is we do in the pursuit of this art form.  I was right…but I’d be lying if I claimed this left me anymore prepared for the challenges I was to encounter.

And that was rather the point.

All theatre involves acts of bravery and discipline – but for THE MONUMENT, these were just the price of admission…the baseline required for a seat at the table.  To the many artists and staff who believed that the opportunity to learn something about ourselves was worth spending a little time in a dark place:  Thank you.  I am forever in your debt.

Theatre is an art form that exists not on the page or even on the stage – but in the space between Player and Audience.  To the Idle Muse extended family, who came along and made that journey to the Forest with us:  Thank you.  I am forever in your debt.

What we learned was…what we knew from the beginning:  this was a play about those things which are lost…and also those that endure.

--Evan Jackson

 

Last Call

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

  

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

What is the Monument?

Idle Muse has been getting lot of questions lately about our upcoming production, THE MONUMENT by Colleen Wagner.  Here's a video we've put together to help answer some of them.

Special Thanks to our friend Meagan Evanoff for producing and editing.

It takes laughter too

I’ve been spending a lot of time in recent weeks talking about what has been unexpected.

We’re in the thick of things now – about midway through the rehearsal process, when the “getting to know you” feelings toward the text and each other have faded in favor of the natural rhythms of collaborative exploration.  It’s an exciting time, when deeper, more specific work really starts to take off, made possible by a shared sense of direction established over weeks of “heavy lifting.”

This is the stuff of the Player’s craft and it can be a bit hard to explain without jargon or poetic terms, but you inevitably try to when interested parties ask about how it’s going.  I’ve found that it’s been easier to talk about what has not gone according to plan rather than what has – and thereby illuminate the course of our journey in charting where we have diverged from it.

First off, it is a myth that it’s easier to direct a two-person show than it is to direct large cast.  There are wonderful benefits to doing so: there’s less blocking to manage, the schedule can be more elastic to allow for the needs of the moment, and the additional opportunity for personal attention can generate wonderful depth in the playing.

But there are also less places to hide.  There is an armor in large groups and it’s easier to fall into the protective shell of one’s organizational role when interacting with them.  When it’s just the three of you on the rehearsal floor night after night, you have little opportunity to keep a safe distance.  It’s nothing to be afraid of and it opens the door to truly honest work – I’d even make the argument that directors should always strive for that level of accessibility. 

But that structurally-generated intimacy, combined with emotionally heavy material, can have a way of ratcheting up the intensity of focus in the work, the sense that everything is under a microscope - at least in the beginning – with little downtime. 

Now take the weight of all the above and crash it against some very specific, very physical sequences of stage combat…and a director’s instinctive sense of organic progress can become easily masked.

These are certainly challenges that can be overcome, but they serve as a reminder that the director is not just the guardian of everyone else’s process – he also needs to allow room for his own process and it’s necessary adjustments to address the needs of the moment.

Because absolutely everything is process.

With THE MONUMENT, I have the extreme luxury of working with an amazing violence designer, Greg Poljacik of Gravity and Momentum, and two actors who are very experienced with fight choreography.  And one of the cardinal precepts of theatrical collaboration is that I don’t have to have all the answers.  Sometimes, being a good director simply means remembering to ask: “what do you need to be able to move forward?”

She hit him so hard she knocked him out of focus.

So we are now in a place I like to call, “hitting our stride.”  Where we are emerging into a freedom from technical hang-ups, like unfamiliar lines and clunky blocking.  The work here is all about expanding and deepening the existing framework.  We began, after a fashion, by making sketches and now the shape of what will eventually become the show is beginning to appear.

Likewise, we are finding our way in navigating the emotional fallout.  I have spent a great deal of time in this blog considering how to approach a play about war crimes with the appropriate humility and respect.  For a theatre artist, doing this means being willing to face some pretty horrific things and exploring what it means to let the resulting feelings affect you.

Yes, living in that emotional place can be profoundly stifling, even outside of rehearsal…making it a bit harder to get up in morning, make it to the next work meeting, or walk in the door for the next scenework session.

But human beings are resilient.

We find coping mechanisms when we need them.  And somewhere along the way, that most human of coping mechanisms found it’s way back into our presence: the smile.

It was tentative at first – and perhaps a little unsure of it's welcome…but as technical challenges began to fall away, it also somehow became okay again to begin enjoying the work and craft for its own sake.  There was a kind of progressive realization that a journey into darkness is only bearable when shared with others: a common understanding that a grin at a flubbed line, a laugh at confused blocking – or even an outright intentional joke - can in fact be an expression of respect for the gravity of the material in play…the seriousness of the undertaking made more apparent in that it requires a sort a release valve to keep moving forward.

Doing our job right, it seems, and therefore doing the material justice, means acknowledging when the art is well done…and treasuring the moments that remind us we’re still alive – even in the midst of darkness.

There are not words

Earlier this week, I encountered something that made me pause – I had just taken my seat at work for the morning.  In keeping with what is after many years become a well-worn routine, I let the computer fire-up while I successfully acquired a caffeinated beverage and settled in.  It was just after this that my break from autopilot occurred as I began skimming headlines, in observance of a brief internet obeisance before diving into email.

Amongst the usual leads regarding celebrity divorces, election gains and starlet’s outfits, CNN included something that stood out as just a little heavier:  “Syria:  Battle for the cities.”  Naturally, I skipped right over it and went on looking for something about the sci-fi movie I saw over the weekend and was now in an extended process of picking apart with my wife and friends.

And then I didn’t.

Here I was, just beginning rehearsals on a play about war crimes and presented with a parallel story, detailing real-life events just like those addressed in the very text I was working on.  Not happening sometime in the past, not happening in a fictional place – but happening right now in the real world.  Today.

So I’m sitting there, in my cube at work, looking straight down both barrels of what I hold important and what I treat as disposable information.

Well, I didn’t like the way I felt very much.  And it seemed somehow “not right” that in my handy little research notebook for this play, I lacked even a single photo from the conflict in Syria.

So I chose to click on the link to the story about Syria.  A country that I understood to be in the process of being ravaged, but with an understanding that was completely empty.  Which is to say, I understood this was so only in a cognitive sense.  The words, “Syria is being ravaged,” were both the beginning and end of my knowledge on the matter.

I want to pause here and state that I certainly don’t mean to imply this choice to view an internet link was or is somehow emblematic of a great shift in my perspective or that it represents a fundamental improvement in my quality as a human being.  It’s important simply because it’s the next event chronologically in the story.  And because the above link led me to Google searches and more headlines.  This time with the world “children” in them. 

I made myself keep clicking.  There are, it turns out, a lot of really graphic photos related to the conflict in Syria freely available on the web.  Like many of you, I’ve seen enough photos of atrocities in my education to last a lifetime, especially in my ongoing research for this play.  But so many of those are of the aftermath, of desiccated corpses unearthed, photographed across a distance of time removed in black and white.  The internet changes things, though.  You can see the faces in these shots.  Real human faces.  Across the globe virtually in realtime.

And again:  children.

There really aren’t any words.  There is not a sentence I am capable of writing that wouldn’t somehow diminish the things contained in those photographs.  If you want to see them for yourself – and I’m not asserting here that you should do so – but if you choose to look for them...simple Google searches for “Syria Houla” and “Hom Massacre” will bring back what you’re looking for.  Click the link to view images and turn off filtering in the Safe Search settings.

And one last time:  I cannot stress enough that these are EXTREMELY GRAPHIC IMAGES.

There’s no moral at the end of this story.  No life lesson.  From my perspective, it’s a story about trying to figure what that lesson could possibly be.  I don’t know if I could do it every day.  There’s all the obligations.  Places I have to be.  Things I have to get done.  They require a certain amount of mental stamina and a certain active desire to find islands of fun and joy within the rush in order to simply keep on…going.  Is it reasonable to expect a compassionate human being to somehow pay attention to every truly horrible thing that happens in the world and still make it to work on time?

Whether you think taking a look at photos of war crimes is important, right now, wherever you happen to be, is a choice that belongs to you.  It’s also up to you to define for yourself what that choice even means.

But on that morning, for a brief instant, I caught just the tiniest glimpse of what happens to people in ravaged places…and I have to believe that as an artist telling the story of this play, it’s important that, for a moment, I stopped and wondered at what horror they must feel when such things can happen in the world – and yet be overlooked.

It might sound something like this

 

Last night, Idle Muse Theatre Company attended the 39th Annual Joseph Jefferson Awards.  Although it was not our first time being honored with a nomination, it was the first time we attended as a company and joined the Chicago Theatre Community in a night of celebration.  To be present for that collective expression of joy in what we do, on such a big scale, was both humbling and immensely inspiring.

Among the many memorable parts of the evening were the performances we were treated to, from the honorees for Production - Musical. Watching them, I was reminded of the transformative power of music and the magical way in which it can move a moment.

I’ve written before about sense responses and the role they play as raw material in the design process.  In my last post, I wanted to share a quick glimpse into some of the materials that have passed across the design table recently.

When it comes to the music and sound design of the show, that act of sharing becomes a little more challenging because we’re talking about art forms that are intangible in the traditional sense.

Directors and Sound Designers often address this by sharing collections of concept music with each other.  These are tracks that may never make it into the show or may somehow go in a totally different direction from what ultimately becomes the final design – but they serve as opening offerings in the discussion about what a moment might sound like.  They serve as points of navigation from which together we can begin to move toward or away.

Here’s a list of some points of navigation we’re using at the moment, which, if you so desire, you can take to iTunes, Amazon, Spotify, Pandora – whatever flavor you like your music in – and come along for the ride.

 

Track	Time	Artist	Album
Terrible Tommy	3:50	Ryan Horne	The Whistler & The Majestic
David	3:39	Noah Gundersen	Family
Fade Into You	4:58	Mazzy Star	So Tonight That I Might See
Into Dust	5:41	Mazzy Star	So Tonight That I Might See
Kells Opening Theme	4:18	Iona	The Book of Kells
Glass	4:32	Bat for Lashes	Two Suns
Keep the Streets Empty for Me	5:34	Fever Ray	Red Riding Hood
Cry, Cry	3:58	Mazzy Star	Among My Swan
So Tonight That I Might See	7:19	Mazzy Star	So Tonight That I Might See
Mercy Street	5:44	Fever Ray	Mercy Street - Single
Prayer in Passing	6:22	Anoushka Shankar	Rise
Putting the Dog to Sleep	5:48	The Antlers	Burst Apart (Deluxe Version)
Siren Song	4:58	Bat for Lashes	Two Suns
All These Things That I've Done	5:04	The Killers	Hot Fuss
Tranquilize (feat Lou Reed)	3:49	The Killers	Sawdust

And then there are the meetings… (a photo essay)

 

Let me be frank: I love designers.

In the past, I’ve used these blogs to post thoughts about the central ideas of the play we’re working on and meditations on the process.  I don’t plan on this blog being particularly different in the long run, but we’ve been out of touch for a bit.

Here’s a quick glimpse at what Idle Muse has been up to in the meantime.

 

It begins with something like this:

 

You discuss proof of concepts – they look kinda like this:

 

Then, you might find yourself passing around a couple of these:

 

And it ends with something like this…(okay, it probably begins with something like this too…)

No Place for the Innocent

“The entire play moves toward the Forest…”

I found myself speaking this sentence aloud in a recent design meeting, and it has stuck with me.

Whenever one begins work on a play that addresses controversial, historical or political material, one is immediately confronted with the question of how it will be handled. With respect, certainly – to the witnesses and their stories. This is of paramount importance. With honesty, naturally – else why are we in the Theatre? These are cardinal rules of the craft and we strive to make them manifest in all that we do.

But what does this commitment mean when these ideals are put in the context of a fairly recent and very dark chapter of history? A string of events from which there are still living witnesses who may justifiably be called “survivors”?

As a rule, I don’t like political plays. Which is not to say that I avoid texts relevant to the current political or social climate – to the contrary. In fact, Idle Muse Theatre Company is defined by its interest in plays which explore the relationship between the individual and a larger world. But plays that are built around the goal of expressing a particular social agenda, rather than a human story, often run the risk of becoming reductivist. They can be difficult for the audience to engage with and sometimes feel like a really long set-up for a kind of “punchline” ending, in which the punchline is a particular manifesto or political soundbite.

The Monument is not such a play.

When I begin work on a new production, I naturally frame it mentally as a sort of journey. “Process” is a word theatre folk commonly use, and with good reason. The creation of a theatrical work involves a large amount of exploration and collaboration that can only be accomplished over extended time and in the company of others. It’s not something that can (or should) be accomplished all at once, and it continues to evolve until the last curtain call. Who was it that said great works are never completed, they are only abandoned?

Theatre artists undertake this effort because we find meaning in that journey. We seek out the opportunity to wrestle with big ideas, strut and fret, fart, groan, laugh – and above all discover – in the name of connecting a story to full house of strangers and loved ones. And when it’s all over we mourn the end but find ourselves the better for it.

We truly enjoy it.

But The Monument’s journey is different. This is a journey to the Forest. Capital F. A thing beyond the archetypical, fairy tale woods signifying the dark places of the psyche and the monsters that dwell therein. This is something far worse.

From the play’s very first scene, we learn that the Forest, with all its attendant fears and associations, is a place of horrible inhumanity. The crimes committed there were of a nature so heinous, that by necessity, all the action that follows must move toward their unmasking.

The Monument might be a different sort of experience from what audiences have come to expect from Idle Muse. Rest assured that we will approach it with the same commitment to delivering unflinching honesty within a transporting experience that we always do. I can promise you that. But this time that journey might be a little bit darker, and it might even make you a little bit uncomfortable on the way…

On some level, as a culture, we are undeniably drawn to these kinds of stories. Police and procedural dramas have dominated prime time television unchallenged for about as long as I can remember. Jungian analysts would tell you here that the act of “solving” the murders portrayed in these programs is a mythic archetype; a way of ordering and addressing the greater human questions surrounding Death. In this way, uncovering the mundane and brutal details of how someone died can be an analogue for confronting perhaps the greatest questions of our existence.

I originally chose this play because I felt it was asking questions found in the aftermath of a political war of attrition. The question of how to move forward as a people after we become so polarized and so extreme that there seems no way back…well that was a question that was both timely and worthy of chasing for months of my life.

It’s also humbling.

I’ve begun to realize that when you start down this line of thinking, it becomes impossible to hide behind the big questions and avoid the personalization. I have only to engage in my morning ritual of reading internet news and the parallels come rushing in. In recent weeks, I have discovered that I am now also on a journey into a world where women have to fight for control of what happens to their bodies, where dissension from the group is punishable by violence, where it’s okay to kill someone because of their race and the garment they are wearing. This is a Forest that just seems to get darker and deeper the farther in you get.

I don’t know for certain that I’m ready for it. I’m already dreading the “bleed effect” that always seems to happen while I’m in production. You spend so much time in a play’s imaginary world that it starts to get into your body and your moods. To feel these feelings and think these thoughts for months at a time…

And what’s that journey going to be like now? Like I said, we participate in this art form because it’s something we enjoy. How do you justify laughing and reveling in the process in this context? What does it mean if you’re taking pleasure in telling a story about war crimes?

I’m not even going to pretend I know the answers to these questions. I do know that the questions posed by The Monument, both thematically and personally, are undeniably important. I know that choosing to face them will tell me something about what it means to be a human being right now.

So…

I’m beginning this production blog by inviting you to undertake this journey to the Forest with us. To be perfectly frank, we can’t do it without your help. It may not always be easy – and it may stop in some dark places along the way, where horrible monsters make their home…but these are questions that are worth facing.

These are questions about us.