Artists I admire: Team Enthroned

My blog was quieter than usual this week because I was in Dublin, Ireland, completing the work on the premiere of Jenny Macdonald's one-woman show Enthroned at the First Fortnight Festival.

The week was a whirlwind of activity, but also loads of fun and incredibly gratifying. Beyond the work I've been doing with Jenny over the last six months, I had the opportunity and privilege to work with Troy Hourie, my friend and colleague of 20 years and a fantastic scenographer. He created a unified visual world for Jenny's play, and it allows for Jenny to have a beautiful and transformative final moment in the play.

I also had the chance to work with Jenny's fantastic producer Michelle Cahill, who kept us all moving forward with a smile and a quiet support. I felt supported from start to finish because of Michelle, and I wish I could find some way to have her here in NYC. What a gift!

And Sorcha Shanahan started as the assistant director and stage manager, and then became the lighting technician and also the house manager. She did all of those jobs with a bright smile, and a level of enthusiasm and precision that's difficult to match. 

Our ASM Seroosh Salimi came into mix on Wednesday, and in a couple of hours, it was like he had been with us from the beginning.

It was a pleasure and a privilege to be there in Ireland, working with friends and colleagues old and new, to make something that was truly gratifying and moving in its opening on Thursday evening. I sat and watched it all unfold, somehow connected to each of the people above, watching them work in their own individual ways to make the production a rousing success.

For all of the above, and because I'm so damned proud of what we accomplished as a group of artists, the members of Team Enthroned are the artists I admire this week.

Coming through

I've had the pleasure of working on a new project over the past few days, and my brain is buzzing with lots of anecdotes.  I'm collaborating with a Canadian writer and performer named Jenny Macdonald on her new one-woman show, Enthroned, set to premiere in Dublin's First Fortnight Festival in January 2016.

We've been in the studio together over the last five days, refining the second half of the play through new writing and then workshopping various sections. Our time together reaffirmed many things for me as an artist and a collaborator, and then one of the most important takeaways came from Jenny after one of our sessions. We were talking about the creative process, the challenges of writing, the difficulties of "knowing" the state of a project when we're right in the middle of it all.  Then Jenny said the following:

Creativity is not something you do; it's something that you let come through you.

Can it be that easy? Uh huh. It can. "Doing" often prevents me from discovering, because I'm too busy to notice what's really right in front of my face.

Loosen the grip. Stop forcing it. Let it come through me.

This relates to last week's musing about equal distribution of weight and not leaning forward. Maybe not having to try so hard. Let it come through me. Let it present itself. Let it emerge when it's ready. What a concept...

Jenny shared that nugget and many other pieces of wisdom during our work together these past few days. A pleasure and a privilege to collaborate with her on finding the creative path to a new piece of writing while embracing the notion that it's not about finishing. Rather, it's about finding the next stopping place for a share out to those that gather to see.

Stage directions: help or hindrance

A longstanding debate: Do I follow the stage directions in a script? Did the playwright write them or did the stage manager record them from the first production? What if my scenic design doesn't allow for the exact execution of the playwright's stage directions? Some of the questions I frequently hear from actors and directors, and the list goes on.

Of course, there's no single correct answer to any of these questions, but my typical response is that people should pay attention to what's written in the script. If it's an acting edition published by Samuel French, Dramatist Play Service, etc., chances are the stage directions came from the original production as implemented by the director and recorded by the stage manager. Theplaywright might have edited this version to some extent for publication, but that doesn't necessarily mean that there was full agreement with all of the actors' and director's choices.

If the script comes from a published anthology or collection of a playwright's work, it's more likely that the writer had more of a hand in the editing process and/or made changes and updates to the play based on feedback and production experience. I am more inclined to trust these stage directions as coming directly from the playwright.

I do know this: People are regularly told to ignore the stage directions included in a script, and I find that very disturbing. It's akin to telling a musician to ignore all of the dynamic markings written into a score. Unimaginable, right? Not so much in the theatre. For some reason, other theatre artists think that playwrights don't understand how the physical world of a play can work. I had a director tell me once that she knew more about my play than I did. It's that kind of attitude that creates problematic collaborations stemming from a lack of trust. I watched that same director rehearse a scene in one of my plays for 45 minutes because she couldn't get the blocking to work. She spent that time doing everything but what I had written in the stage directions. When she finally found for herself what I had written, suddenly the scene started to work just fine. Maybe if she had paid attention to what I had written in the first place, she wouldn't have wasted everyone's time.

All that to say, don't start off a process by ignoring the stage directions. Give playwrights the benefit of the doubt. Many of us do know how to craft the physical world of the play, and other theatre artists owe us at least a crack at it by trying out what we've written. Trust goes a long way in any collaboration, particularly between a writer and a director.