I Still Haven't Found What I'm Looking For
But I'm one step closer than I was yesterday.
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I’m looking for a play. I’m trying to find it in the rehearsal room with my artistic collaborators. Using the novel WE by Yevgeny Zamyatin, I’m on a quest to uncover an engaging, expressive, meaningful theatrical adaptation of Zamyatin’s story. I haven’t found the play yet, but one rehearsal at a time my collaborators and I are taking steps toward opening night. Many steps have been successful strides, but this week I stumbled.
In Edith Wharton’s view, “Life is always either a tightrope or a feather bed. Give me the tightrope.” This week I found myself on that tightrope, and as I write this essay, I am reminded that I chose to put myself there. I put myself on a tightrope because I believe artists must be brave, creative risk-takers. Although I disastrously fell from a great hight, I know I can learn from failing. Failing reminds me that my collaborators and I are resourceful and resilient. As lyricist Dorothy Fields wrote:
Nothing's impossible, I have found For when my chin is on the ground. I pick myself up, Dust myself off And start all over again.
On the last day of the week, I planned to run a rough draft of the entire play for a small, invited audience. In my experience, the best way to know what is or is not working in a play is to put the work up in front of an audience. The audience came, but sadly, I was only able to present Act I. That happened because when I put all the material I generated with my collaborators together into one sequence, I discovered I had nearly two hours of content for Act I! To put it mildly, that’s too long.
The eternal length of the run-through made the story hard to follow and we all lost our patience because it was impossible to discern the play’s central conflict.
Although it would have been wonderful if the invited audience saw a near-perfect, stage ready run-through of the play, I needed to see all the material I created with my collaborators on its feet, in front of an audience, so I could know with one-hundred percent certainty what was working, what needed revisions, and what needed to be cut.
While it’s embarrassing to let people see work-in-progress that simply does not work, I’d much rather know what the problems are now when I still have almost two months before opening to intervene. Nothing lights a fire under a director’s tail than putting up work in front of an audience that flops. It’s an energizing experience that thrusts me forward, demanding I take my work seriously and focus harder than before.
I can’t be that disheartened; having too much material is a far better problem than not having enough material to cobble together a cohesive show. Also, as one of my collaborators reminded me, Act I is always troublesome because it has to set up a lot of pieces that get knocked down to create the drama. I’m not the first theater artist who has had this problem and I am not the last.
It would be easy to wallow in self-pity and beat myself to a pulp for being so foolish as to get myself and my collaborators into this jam, but that would be a waste of time. I am choosing instead to accept that all the material cannot fit in the show and, as the director and producer of the work, I have a responsibility to my collaborators, the project funders and the author of the novel to get the production back on track. I’m also choosing to remind myself that solving creative problems is a theater director’s job; this is what I am supposed to be doing. When it all works out in the end, I will have the satisfaction of knowing my collaborators and I achieved success through hard work, commitment, and artistry.
The main problem the run had was a lousy idea on my part. The novel is written as the journal entries of the main character, and I thought it would be interesting to see some of these entries as direct address monologues featuring the main character talking to the audience. We’ve tried to bring these monologues to life in rehearsal with some success, but in front of an audience, it was simply too much talking and not enough action. The monologues added time, slowed down the pace of the play and took the audience’s attention away from the central plot. This problem may be easily fixed by cutting all or most of the monologue text and inserting any information that is necessary to move the story along into dialogue in active scenes between characters.
The secondary problem was superfluous scenes that illustrated aspects of the futuristic dystopia in which the story is set, but did not move the drama along. I’ve identified scenes that can go and I’ve already taken them out of a new draft of the script.
With this new script in hand, I am going back into the rehearsal room to solve the problem. If we can whittle the play down to the most exciting parts, problem solved; and we already have a myriad of dynamic moments–just look at the rehearsal photo below!
If the show is full of moments like the one above, we will have a knock-out production.
My task is clear: cut the script down to the most potent, exciting moments with the knowledge that I am not alone in this endeavor. I have very smart, talented, creative collaborators to help me solve this problem and surely when I get back in the rehearsal room, my collaborators will have ideas to share.
We will say “goodbye and thank you” to several moments in the play that we spent a lot of time developing, but leaving select moments behind is for the benefit of the whole.
The time spent creating these moments was not wasted. I learned a lot about the underlying novel from creating them and I know my collaborators did as well. As we move to edit the piece, everyone in the room will know things about the source material that we didn’t know before, and that will be very useful to the editing process.
Last, and most importantly, this experience has reminded me that I can’t think of anything I’d rather spend time in my life on than making art with talented, thoughtful, generous collaborators. The time I have spent with them has brought nothing but joy and fulfillment into my life. That’s hard to find these days. I know it has brought us together as an ensemble because after the run-through one audience member said, “I can tell the cast really likes each other.” A harmonious, supportive ensemble is created, and I have no doubt I played a role in developing that dynamic between the cast members. I can give myself credit for that.
Generative theater processes are adventures. Artists need to go on adventures to learn about themselves and their craft. Through the adventure, artist develop their skills and emerge with new knowledge and, ideally, with a great work of art. I have not found the play I’m looking for yet, but I will, one rehearsal at a time.
Thank you for reading. I’ll keep you posted on how things progress and I look forward to seeing you at the theater October 11 - 20, 2024.
WE is made possible by grant funding from the Foundation Against Intolerance & Racism (FAIR) in the Arts, the Puffin Foundation Ltd., and NYSCA-A.R.T./New York Creative Opportunity Fund (A Statewide Theatre Regrant Program). Production design support provided by the Edith Lutyens and Norman Bel Geddes Design Enhancement Fund, a program of the Alliance of Resident Theatres/New York (A.R.T./New York).
Reading about your process makes me feel like I’m in the room — thank you! I well understand the need to take a hard look at “where you are,” and what you need to do to get where you want to go. The discipline around generous editing is a fine and necessary one, and your production will shine not least in part because of it. Break a leg!