When “demolition” becomes inspiration

 creativity  1 Response »
Jan 282011
 

In preparation to direct the three plays that will be featured in Plays from the Provincetown Players, I needed to come up with an idea, some kind of concept, that would allow me to unify three seemingly disparate one-act plays.  While each one is a gem on its own, presented together they can become a bit more unwieldy.

Part of what has fascinated me about the controversy surrounding the renovation and reconstruction of the Provincetown Playhouse has been the opposition of many community members to structural change within the theatre.  History tells us that the original building was a stable, then a bottle factory, and then finally a theatre when in 1918 George “Jig” Cram Cook rented the space and renovated it to be suitable for performances by the Provincetown Players.

To address the community members’ concerns, NYU agreed to maintain the integrity of the four walls of the original structure, but the interior would be gutted and redesigned to reflect the needs of a modern, 21st century theatre-making process. However, at one point during the demolition of the interior and the adjacent building, a large section of the theatre’s north wall was adversely affected.  Some say that NYU was trying to demolish the building.  I know from having worked in the space before the renovation/reconstruction and working in it now that the more likely reason was that the wall itself was extremely delicate and had actually been weakened in prior renovations, long before NYU even owned the property.

Regardless of what side one chooses to believe in that argument, the more important concept for me lies with dramatic possibilities of a wall collapsing and what might lie beneath and within that collapse.  I became interested in the idea of what might have been buried under the wall or even encased in the wall.  Could the Provincetown Players have left artifacts behind, and what would happen if someone found those artifacts?  How could I use an incident like this as the catalyst for performing these three one-act plays?

In brief, Aria da Capo by Edna St. Vincent Millay is a tough nut to crack.  It pulls from the British Harlequinade tradition and Greek tragedy, while simultaneously following the musical structure of a da capo aria, hence the name.  However, the play is interrupted at several points along the way and has subtle messages within that give insight into the time when it was written: 1920.

Fog by Eugene O’Neill is the story of two men trapped on a lifeboat after their passenger vessel crashes off the coast of Newfoundland.  Written in 1914 and one of O’Neill’s early plays that takes place on the sea, it reveals O’Neill’s interest in the struggle between art and business, as well as his own personal obsession with the Titanic disaster from just two years before.

Susan Glaspell’s play Trifles is the most realistic of the three plays and tackles the age-old conflict between men and women and how these two sexes see the world differently.  Using the story of a woman who allegedly killed her husband as its backdrop, Trifles allows an audience to watch the pieces of a puzzle come together for some and not for others.

Very different stories that need some kind of unifying framework in performance.

This is where the collapsed wall comes in.

We’re not going to include a collapsed wall in our production, but I have asked the scenic designer, Andy Hall, to take us backwards in recent time, to a moment when an imagined Provincetown Playhouse is being renovated.  In our initial discussions about scenic possibilities, I realized that all three plays have an element of discovery, and that the characters ultimately come to see what’s actually present in their own worlds.  Similarly, I think that in the renovated Provincetown Playhouse, even though it has changed radically, we can still see what’s there: the legacy of these three playwrights and many others who’ve worked there over the last century.  Legacy doesn’t disappear when a physical structure changes.

So, in short, five NYU students enter the active construction site of the Provincetown Playhouse to complete a school project.  Through a series of unfortunate events, they uncover a box containing a set of artifacts linked to the theatre and these three playwrights.  The young people encounter some other forces at work in the theatre, forces that lead them to discover scripts for these three plays.  Somehow, they find themselves enacting the plays, and the lessons learned from history and from art bring them to some conclusions about themselves.

Below, I’ve included photos that move from the Provincetown Playhouse under construction through to Andy Hall’s working model of the scenic design for the production.  The images serve as source and inspiration for me in the creation process, and I hope they pique your interest and encourage you to come out and see how we’ve turned a “demolished” wall into a catalyst for something theatrically compelling that also teaches about the history of the Provincetown Playhouse through the words, actions, and relationships of the people who used it, not through the bricks that were there in 1918.

This is the exterior of the Provincetown Playhouse during the renovation in March 2010.

This is the interior of the Provincetown Playhouse during renovation, March 2010

An interior view of the Provincetown Playhouse, January 2011

This is the initial scenic design rendering by Andy Hall for Plays from the Provincetown Players

Model for Plays from the Provincetown Players, designed by Andy Hall

Photos 1 and 2 courtesy of Randy Susevich

Working at the Provincetown Playhouse

 creativity  2 Responses »
Jan 212011
 

I currently have the distinct pleasure and privilege of working in the newly renovated Provincetown Playhouse at 133 Macdougal Street in Manhattan. The theatre has often been referred to as the birthplace of modern American drama because it housed productions of plays written and produced by the Provincetown Players, an early 20th century experimental theatre group that included Eugene O’Neill, George Cram Cook, and Susan Glaspell, among others. The group worked in this Greenwich Village site from 1918 to 1929, creating an innovative and influential American theatrical aesthetic.

NYU’s recent renovation and reconfiguration of the theatre was completed in August 2010, and I am now directing a production of three one-act plays from the original Provincetown Players. Our rehearsals for the project started this week, and the newly renovated space has embraced the company and our work with open arms. We are working with three plays: Aria da Capo by the poet Edna St. Vincent Millay, Fog, an early play by Eugene O’Neill, and Trifles, by Susan Glaspell, one of the founding members of the Provincetown Players. The company is also creating original scripted material that will frame the performances of these plays and address why it’s important for them to be remounted almost 100 years after they were written.

The last three days have consisted of read-throughs of the scripts and digging through historical source material, as I’m invested in telling the stories of the playhouse and these playwrights in and around their plays. The actors are making significant contributions to the development of this framework text through written and physical improvisations. We’ve discovered exciting relationships within the framework script, while also making some connections to the history of the space and to the playwrights themselves. For me personally, it has been a great experience to get to know these three playwrights on a more intimate level, as the research has uncovered elements of their personal lives that aren’t necessarily clear from simply reading their plays. Some examples:

- In his play Fog, Eugene O’Neill writes a character who reveals that he has contemplated suicide. He wrote the play in 1914, two years after his own suicide attempt. The parallels between his character and his own experience are striking and revealing.

- Susan Glaspell based her play Trifles on an actual murder case in Iowa that she covered as a news reporter for a local paper. However, upon further research into Glaspell’s work as a reporter, we’ve uncovered some remarkable messages that she conveyed to female readers through her writings when covering the society news for the paper.

- Edna St. Vincent Millay, one of the great female poets of the early 20th century, received her middle name from St. Vincent’s Hospital in New York City. Just prior to her birth, Millay’s uncle was rescued from the hold of a ship after being trapped inside of it for many days. He was discovered when the ship landed in NYC and taken to St. Vincent’s for treatment and recovery. Millay’s family honored the hospital’s work by including its name in her assigned birth name.

While these pieces of specific trivia are helping the company to hone in on the playwrights and their plays, what’s really magical is that the Provincetown Playhouse itself is giving us such support. Even though it is reconfigured and looking very different than it did when O’Neill, Glaspell, and Millay were working there, I definitely feel the presence of the playwrights and their influence each time we have worked over the past week. When NYU announced its plans to renovate and rebuild the theatre, many people expressed anger and concern over the plan because NYU was not preserving the “original playhouse.” As a historian, I can understand the urge to preserve elements of the past, lest we forget their importance. However, too rigid a grasp on the past can keep us stuck in the past as well. History is documented to remind us, not to hold us back. Having taught in this new space all last semester and now rehearsing in it, I can say with confidence that the new space has not lost the power of its ancestor. The true legacy of the Provincetown Playhouse is that it provided a physical structure that protected and cultivated new, experimental voices, ushering in the beginning of a truly American theatrical aesthetic. Even though its architecture has changed, that change is for the better, as the new Provincetown Playhouse can more adequately respond to the needs of contemporary theatre artists making new plays and mounting productions of classics. We feel its support as we work, and we look forward to audiences feeling the same.

The performance run of Plays from the Provincetown Players will be February 25-March 6. Follow our Twitter thread at #ptownplays, as members of the company tweet on a regular basis about the rehearsal process leading up to the opening. And stay tuned for more posts from me about the creative process.