Category: Backstage

Our reading of The Laramie Project: Ten Years Later on Monday went off very successfully, albeit with some last minute scrambling. When I walked into the green room at 6 (for a go at 8:30), there were three or so pages of e-mail with minor changes to the version of the script that we’d received the Friday before. Trouble for me was that about half of them affected my text, so I scribbled changes into my book, hoping I’d be able to read them. I groused that, since some of this material was journal entries made by the Tectonics, it was definitely going to look like I was reading my own journal entries.

Shortly after 8:00, the feed from Lincoln Center, projected in-house at RCC’s CenterStage, brought Glenn Close, Judy Shepard, and Moisés Kaufman to Reston in sound and light. Way cool. I am so honored to have been part of this event.

At about half past, we took out the grand drape and began to read for the 200 or so patrons assembled. We had only worked with lights in one prior rehearsal, and with the text changes that entailed characters coming downstage, needing light where there was none before, there were a few moments that recalled the spotlight business in The Actor’s Nightmare. But, as I said, we got through it.

I suspect that my affinity for Matthew Shepard’s story and The Laramie Project is less idealistic than it is for many other actors, designers, and technicians who have worked on various productions. Granted, I deplore what happened to this young man, and I support doing what we can to prevent it from happening to someone else, but I don’t have the visceral feeling that I have to work on the show because of that. Rather—and this is testimony to the fine job of playwriting that Kaufman and crew have done—I am fascinated by, drawn to, all of the personages-characters of Laramie, Wyoming that have been assembled into this text: the guys in the white hats and the guys in the black ones. I was as committed to telling the story of Fred Phelps (a seriously troubled man) as I was to Harry Woods, in my characterization a retiring, gentle man who acquires a measure of dignity. In the new play, I was as interested in pushing some personal boundaries as Jonas Slonaker as I was in the great work that David H. did as Representative Peterson and that Joshua did as Aaron McKinney.

And yet, who knows where this story will lead me next? I now own, by virtue of participation in this project, a copy of Judy Shepard’s The Meaning of Matthew. Once I read the book, I suspect that his meaning for me will have transformed in some way. Is Matthew Shepard my scarab? Perhaps, perhaps. A couple of months ago, I was helping my mother clean out her apartment. Generally, the only old magazines that she squirreled away had something to do with royalty, be it British (the Windsors) or American (the Kennedys). And she had forgotten that I had worked on The Laramie Project a few years back—trust me, I know she doesn’t remember. Yet there I was, crashing through a pile of old papers, and she walks in from the other room with a battered magazine and asks, “Would you be interested in this?” It was the 26 October 1998 issue of Time. Matthew’s fence was the cover image.

As to the text of the Ten Years Later epilogue, I admire the Tectonics for clarifying one of the piece’s themes: the stories we tell ourselves begin to change as soon as we tell them. The change comes from many directions: we don’t remember clearly, the facts are too painful or embarrassing to accept, the plain narrative doesn’t have a clear meaning, the eyewitnesses die or move away. Call it urban myth, call it folklore, call it rumor, but this is what a tragedy’s story becomes in the retelling. And as a result, the simple linear progress that perhaps the playwrights expected to be able to tell has become this murky, twining thing. To me, the core of the play is the moment called “Potluck,” which interleaves an interview with John Dorst, folklorist at the University of Wyoming (and read by yours truly), with an account of some average Joes of Laramie giving their take on what happened. In one draft of the script, Dorst says,

You start with more formed things, the facts of the case or the court proceedings. And the folkloric process is one of winnowing and reduction, the paring away of detail until frequently the actual events—something you might call a story—dissipate.

* * *

This is definitely the issue—maybe the core issue here in Laramie—the desire for control over memory or over history.

Elizabeth Blair’s piece for NPR is quite good, and expresses some of these thoughts more clearly; it excepts an article by JoAnn Wypijewski written shortly after the murder.

We received the nearly final final draft of the script today, and we so we spent a chunk of this evening’s scheduled rehearsal scrambling to assign people to some of the new bit parts that have been created. Scenes have been sliced and diced and rearranged, to the good, I think. In one of my sections, in particular, the point that my speaker is making is much stronger, more sharply focused. Of course we already miss some of the little moments and characters from the earlier draft that we’ve become attached to.

It’s challenging—our production will be lightly staged (midway between the full productions and the readings from music stands that we’re hearing about), with our cast of fourteen seated in two rows of chairs when at neutral position, standing and coming forward to play the moments—to adapt to the rearranged script. We have only three more meetings scheduled between now and the 12th, and that’s probably the only date when all fourteen of us are in the same room together. But what an opportunity to be part of the evolutionary development of this text, to try to ride this bronco of a script.

A small online community of participants in the project has also sprung up.

I almost let it pass without mention that Clean, by Audrey Cefaly, featuring Erika Imhoof and Nello DiBlasio, directed by Leta Hall, assisted by moi, has been selected by Silver Spring Stage to represent the company at the annual Maryland community theater one-act festival in January.

Saturday we spent a great day with Greg Pierotti of the Tectonic Theater Project. Greg was in town to workshop with the University of Maryland, Reston Community Players, and other groups in preparation for the simul premiere of an epilogue to The Laramie Project (which I performed with RCP in 2004).

We read a draft of the script (one from September 1) in sections, a third of the play at a time, and then Greg offered notes and other information that will color the performances. Since Greg did a lot of the interviewing for the material in this draft, he was invaluable as a resource to find out what this character sounds like or where another is coming from. He made it clear that one of the roles I will be reading on October 12 has the biggest, most emotional arc, and is also his favorite role of the 50-odd. No pressure.

Greg also went into some detail about the company’s process of building up a play from “moments.” Each 1- to 20-page scene starts out as a proposal and presentation by a company member. Once there are sufficient moments, polished to a certain degree, the writers assemble them into a running order, sort of in the way that tesserae are assembled into a mosaic (my image). Once so ordered, the moments begin to interact with one another and may require rearrangement and rewrites. Thus, in this draft we have evidence of the shuffling, as a speaker carries forward from one moment to the following but is reintroduced unnecessarily by a narrator. There’s also an incident that Russell Henderson refers to in this draft, and the draft doesn’t make it clear that it happened after the 1998 killing of Matthew Shepard—this will be fixed. At any rate, Greg reminded us that the closing line of each moment is a button, a question to be considered, a thought that tinges the way we watch subsequent moments, a challenge that may be confirmed or contradicted by the next moment.

While the company definitely has a story that they want to tell with this script, Greg says that they are fine-tuning the emotional temperature of the material, lest the enterprise come off like a crusade by the “Gay Avengers.” He gave some specific advice on how to play a specific laugh line (the joke is at his expense, no less): the writers are eager to inject as much lightness into this production as possible, as the last third of the play is rather rough sledding. “Laugh whore,” I think he called himself. More advice from my notes: play against the thoughtful quality of the text. More than once he told me, “X is very clear about what he is saying; avoid rumination and the naturalistic searching for your thoughts.”

He offered several anecdotes to illustrate the deep empathy shown by Fr. Roger Schmit, who echoes Greg’s own charge to find the inherent dignity in each and every one of these people.

Directory Andy and the cast will put this material on its feet with some simple staging, starting with a rehearsal on Friday. Maybe with a new draft of the script?

Reston Community Players and the Reston Community Center will participate in the mass premiere of The Laramie Project—10 Years Later on October 12. Plans are still being put together (as well as the script!), but the goal is for 100 regional, university, and community theaters to present the piece as a cross-country reading on the eleventh anniversary of Matthew Shepard’s death.

Hooray for us: it has come to my attention that Providence Players of Fairfax’s production of All My Sons has been honored with the 2009 Ruby Griffith Award for All Round Production Excellence.

My third-act scene regularly generated chuckles, and I’m not sure why. I did take the scene rather briskly, and since it comes on the heels of the wrenching fight scene between Chris and Joe, perhaps some of the audience were looking for a release. Leta says that we’re willing to find humor in one’s admitted hypocrisy, but I’m not quite buying it. Here’s the passage (w/o stage directions) that almost always got a laugh:

JIM. What’d Joe do, tell him?

MOTHER. Tell him what?

JIM. Don’t be afraid, Kate, I know. I’ve always known.

MOTHER. How?

JIM. It occurred to me a long time ago.

MOTHER. I always had the feeling that in the back of his head, Chris… almost knew. I didn’t think it would be such a shock.

JIM. Chris would never know how to live with a thing like that. It takes a certain talent… for lying. You have it, and I do. But not him.

—Arthur Miller, All My Sons, Act III

Maybe it’s because I mislearned the penultimate sentence as “You have it, and I have it.”?

So we had a solid opening weekend and now is the time of cleaning costumes. Although I have to deal with my own socks, we otherwise have the luxury with the Players of a team responsible for laundering and dry cleaning everything else. (Though I don’t know how Tina is going to deal with the suspenders that are sewn onto my suit pants.)

I’ve been sleeping well, but I felt the need for a power doze offstage during the end of Act I. My blood sugar just falls off the table mid-afternoon, I guess. In the James Lee, there are two more or less comfortable places to hang out between scenes: the interior loading dock area, just offstage left, furnished with a few chairs and a scary second-hand couch; and the makeup room downstairs, which usually has the outside door open for a breeze. Where you don’t want to be, at least in the summer, is stage right, in the shallow wing space with hardly anything to sit on; or downstairs in “the hole,” the combination lumber storage and dressing area. The hole is also where the dimmer packs for the lighting equipment are. The very hot dimmer packs.

The rest of this character’s accoutrements are fun, too. I have a tight-fitting pair of Harry Truman spectacles scrounged from somewhere: good thing that I don’t have to read anything through them, because they’re bifocals with a strong reading correction. And Beth has become my bow tie wrangler—just one of her jobs along with hair and makeup.

Yesterday evening we did our first full tech run with all elements present—well, nearly so, since we didn’t have either of the two boys who are doubling Bert. I have a rather natty seersucker suit for a costume (and it’s apparently a venerable piece among the Players); my project for the weekend is learning how to tie my bow tie. I need to get my hair trimmed: I will run up to my salon in Bethesda on Tuesday at lunch, a day when I really don’t have the slack to spare. Every tech week has its special challenge, and this one’s turns out to be dealing with Chip and his dancing all over the deck taking publicity pictures while the scene is running. Beth is pushing against my instincts for what sort of colors my scene in Act 3 should have. The principals are doing great work. It’ll be a pretty good show.

We did a stumble-through of Act I of All My Sons outdoors in the Saturday sun, which is appropriate as that act takes place on a hot weekend morning. Then we moved indoors to get through most of Act II. I/we haven’t worked much on the top of Act III, which is actually OK because I haven’t learned the words yet.

One of the advantages of working with Providence is that the company has generous access to the performance space in the James Lee Community Center for rehearsals and set building. Indeed, we start building set, in place, next weekend, five weeks in advance of opening. Every performance space has its good points and bad. The stage at the Lee is a conventional proscenium, I’m guessing twenty feet by fifteen; but the wing space is extremely shallow (about three to four feet) and there is no fly space: all the curtains only travel. Dressing and green rooms are off left; since the white cyc lies nearly flat against the upstage wall, I don’t yet know how actors get into place for stage right entrances. Something else I noticed: there’s no fire curtain.

“You know, Moisés, how much has really changed in Manhattan in the last 10 years?”

Moisés Kaufman goes back to Laramie, ten years after.

It’s been about 10 days since we closed Incorruptible, the last show of the season. In the brief interval before the one acts festival opens the 2008-09 season, the Stage honored actors and designers for the just-closed season, and Leta picked up the directing award. Good on ya, mate.

Lessons learned from this project:

• I need to me more specific about what and when to accomplish during dry tech time. We got everything done, and by the time actors arrived for wet tech, things went more or less smoothly. But beforehand, there was a little too much milling around before I got down to asking lights “So what cues do you have for me?” Perhaps the trick is to schedule separate time slots for props, sound, and lights.
• Props always kill me. I was much better prepared this time, especially once I got the table maps set up. But we did have some last-minute scurrying. The last thing I did Wednesday night before preview Thursday was weighting and tying the body bags.
• Following practice at RCP, I use numbers to cue lights and letters to cue sound. It’s not quite as necessary at the Stage, because I don’t have to pass cues to lights: I’m running the board myself. Next time around, I would skip some letters that sound too much alike: we had two cues at the end of show where a lot is happening designated M and N, and sometimes my sound op was confused. Also, I figured out that sometimes it makes sense to letter more than one effect—like a fade-down followed by the next music track on a CD—as just one cue.
• I’m going to recommend to the Stage that they invest in a wireless headset system. It’s not important within the booth, but it would assist communicating with (a) the director during wet tech and (b) box office staff on show nights. We spend too much time literally running back and forth from the house to the booth.
• I have an old PDA with a voice recorder that I used to use when I was acting. It would have been handy to have it around for this show.
• A small video camera trained on the lobby doors. I can’t see this area from the booth, so I can’t see latecomers making their way to their seats just as I drop the house lights, nor can I ever be sure that the doorkeeper has closed the lobby door.

I also need to make sure that the Stage board gets these recommendations.