The Production Notebooks, Volume 2: Theatre in Process

Copyright © 2001 by Mark J. Bly

The Production Notebooks: Theatre in Process, Volume II is published by Theatre Communications Group, Inc., 355 Lexington Ave., New York, NY 10017-6603.

All rights reserved. Except for brief passages quoted in newspaper, magazine, radio or television reviews, no part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying or recording, or by an information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher.

The First Picture Show notebook by Corey Madden. Production photographs at Mark Taper Forum copyright © 1999 by Craig Schwartz; production photographs at ACT copyright © 1999 by Ken Friedman.

Shakespeare Rapid Eye Movement notebook by Lise Ann Johnson. Production photographs copyright © 1993 by Wilfried Hösl; set design sketches copyright © 1993 by Christian Schaller; program/magazine cover design copyright © 1993 by Bayerisches Staatsschauspiel.

In the Blood notebook by John Dias. Production photographs copyright © 1999 by Michal Daniel.

Geography notebook by Katherine Profeta. Production photographs copyright © 1997 by T. Charles Erickson; design sketches copyright © 1997 by Liz Prince.

The Literary Managers and Dramaturgs of the Americas (LMDA) was instrumental in the promoting and funding of this project.

This publication is made possible in part with public funds from the New York State Council on the Arts, a State Agency.

TCG books are exclusively distributed to the book trade by Consortium Book Sales and Distribution, 1045 Westgate Dr., St. Paul, MN 55114.

The Library of Congress has catalogued Volume I as follows:

The production notebooks / edited and with an introduction by Mark Bly.

1. Theater—Production and direction. 2. Dramaturges—United States—Diaries. I. Bly, Mark. II. Series.

PN2053.P751996

792’.0232—dc2005—45987

CIP

Volume II ISBN 978-1-55936-822-3

Cover photo is Ralph Lemon (standing) and Goulei Tchépoho in the Rock Throwing scene from the Yale Repertory Theatre production of Geography. Copyright © 1997 by T. Charles Erickson.

Book and cover design by Lisa Govan

First Edition, November 2001

I dedicate this book with love to the memory of my father, Myrle S. Bly, and my uncle, Selmer (Sam) Bly, two great old Norwegian storytellers who first taught me about the value of communal history.

CONTENTS

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

INTRODUCTION

by Mark Bly

The First Picture Show

American Conservatory Theater and Mark Taper Forum

Corey Madden

Shakespeare Rapid Eye Movement

Bayerisches Staatsschauspiel

Lise Ann Johnson

In the Blood

The Joseph Papp Public Theater/New York Shakespeare Festival

John Dias

Geography

Yale Repertory Theatre

Katherine Profeta

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

This book would not have been possible without the generosity and cooperation of many people. I am extremely grateful to the artistic directors, stage directors, other artists, technicians and theatre staffs who produced, staged and participated in the work described in this volume. I would especially like to thank Gordon Davidson, Carey Perloff, George Wolfe, Stan Wojewodski, Jr., Victoria Nolan, David Gordon, Ain Gordon, David Esbjornson, Robert Lepage, Ralph Lemon, Ann Rosenthal, Suzan-Lori Parks, Peter Novak, Jan Hartley, Ken Friedman, Craig Schwartz, T. Charles Erickson, Wilfried Hösl, Michal Daniel, Christian Schaller, Liz Prince and Rachel Fain.

The Production Notebooks Project was born in 1990, when Anne Cattaneo, the newly elected president of Literary Managers and Dramaturgs of the Americas (LMDA), asked me to suggest endeavors that the organization should be backing. I proposed a series of casebooks, dedicated to recording the creative processes of major theatre artists and the evolution of noteworthy productions. Anne and LMDA raised the funds to begin the project, and the organization has continued its support and encouragement through the preparation of Volume II. I would especially like to thank D. D. Kugler and Virginia Coates, the current president and treasurer; and Geoff Proehl and Jayme Koszyn, two past presidents of LMDA, for their dedication and assistance; and Peggy Marks, an LMDA board member, for taking us gently through the legal labyrinths.

Funding to begin this series was provided by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. Additional funding was provided by the Ettinger Foundation. I am deeply grateful for the opportunity these organizations provided. Rachel Newton Bellow, formerly of the Mellon Foundation, was especially supportive of our aspirations; and I am once again grateful to Rocco Landesman for his prescient backing of this project.

I am indebted to Terence Nemeth and Kathy Sova of Theatre Communications Group for their expertise, perseverance and boundless patience during the preparation of this volume. Kathy provided the personal attention and good will that made my life substantially easier. Ruth Hein was our alert copy editor.

Both Elizabeth Bennett and Merv Antonio were kind enough to give me the benefit of their good advice, assistance and encouragement in the development of this volume and this series. I also want to thank James and Catherine Johnson, who provided assistance at a crucial moment to ensure that our Shakespeare Rapid Eye Movement notebook got off to a good start.

I am grateful to my wife, Pamela K. Anderson, who has assisted me at every stage of this project, from the initial proposals and contracts, through the editorial process, to the final drive to pull together all the details of an effort involving multiple authors and several institutions.

Finally, I most especially thank the four dramaturgs who made this volume possible: John Dias, Lise Ann Johnson, Corey Madden and Katherine Profeta. They gave up holidays, weekends and evenings with family and friends to finish these notebooks on time. In the midst of a multitude of other professional obligations, they managed to take the notes and record the moments that would give our readers insight into the sometimes chaotic process of theatre production. I thank them for the excellent job they did and for affirming manyfold the confidence I had in them.

. . . the theatre, strictly speaking, is not a business at all, but a collection of individualized chaos that operates best when it is allowed to flower in its proper medley of disorder, derangement, irregularity and confusion. Its want of method, its untidiness and its discord are not the totality of anarchy it so often seems to be, but the natural progression of its own strange patterns, which sometimes arrange themselves into a wonderful symmetry that is inexplicable to the bewildered outsider.

—MOSS HART

Act One, 1959

The classification of the constituents of a chaos, nothing less is here essayed.

—HERMAN MELVILLE

Moby Dick, 1851

INTRODUCTION

You should write it down because if you don’t write it down then they will come along and tell the future that we did not exist. You should write it down and you should hide it under a rock.

—SUZAN-LORI PARKS

Speech of YES AND GREENS BLACK-EYED PEAS CORNBREAD, From The Death of the Last Black Man in the Whole Entire World, 1992

In the early 1990s, I created the Production Notebooks Project to rectify in some small way the astonishing dearth of documentation of the artistic process in contemporary American theatre. It is rare in the theatre world for even the most imaginatively conceived stagings to be chronicled beyond the typical archival gestures: a promptbook; a grainy videotape secreted away in the bowels of the library at Lincoln Center; and a smattering of hastily written reviews and publicity photographs. The artistic explorations of the preproduction and rehearsal periods are largely forgotten in the frenetic rush to opening night, and only faint traces and shadowy impressions of an artistic journey witnessed by a select few are left behind.

I envisioned a series of notebooks or casebooks, dedicated to recording the creative processes of major theatre artists and the evolution of selected productions. These notebooks would contain, at a minimum, the prerehearsal planning and shaping of the overall vision or approach to the play; the evolution of the staged text, particularly in the development of a new script; and an exploration of the day-to-day rehearsal process. With the encouragement and support of the not-for-profit professional organization, Literary Managers and Dramaturgs of the Americas (LMDA), The Production Notebooks series was born.

Volume I included the work of the late director Garland Wright and dramaturg Jim Lewis, on The Clytemnestra Project at the Guthrie Theater; director Robert Wilson and dramaturg Chris Baker, on Danton’s Death at the Alley Theatre; poet Ntozake Shange, director Talvin Wilks and dramaturg Shelby Jiggetts on The Love Space Demands at Crossroads Theatre Company; and director Dominique Serrand and dramaturg Paul Walsh on the company-created Children of Paradise: Shooting a Dream at Theatre de la Jeune Lune.

The primary criterion for inclusion in the series has been that the individuals collaborating on the production must be artists of consequence who have a history of creating imaginative, thought-provoking work.

A second requirement is the availability of an analytical writer, versed in all aspects of theatre, who would be intimately involved in the work from conception through closing. As I indicated in Volume I, at most not-for-profit resident theatres in the United States today, there are artists, known as dramaturgs, who meet these criteria.

A final key requisite is that both the producing theatre and the stage director are willing to allow the dramaturg’s observations of private meetings and rehearsals to be published.

Critical approbation has not been a factor in the selection of productions included in either the first or the second volume. The stagework of these artists merits chronicling, whether the final production is acclaimed a failure or a success. The evolution of each project is what interests me the most, especially commentary on the obstacles encountered by the artists, and the temporary aesthetic detours and artistic choices made.

A residual effect of these notebooks will be the promotion of a greater awareness of the creative work being done by dramaturgs in resident theatres today. While there is no single origin theory of dramaturgy in the United States, significant pioneering work in the emerging field of production dramaturgy occurred in the 1980s, at theatres such as the Eureka Theatre Company, the Guthrie Theater and South Coast Repertory, to name a few.

Prior to this time, dramaturgs traditionally had been office-bound researchers, script readers and text editors. But in the 1980s at theatres such as these, dramaturgs began to take on a more collaborative role, participating actively in the rehearsal process. These artists, often called production dramaturgs, to reflect the precise nature of their work, can function in a multifaceted manner, helping the director and other artists to interpret and shape the sociological, textual, acting, directing and design values, as well as culturally sensitive aesthetic approaches.

In addition to growth within the field, several dramaturgs have chosen to become artistic directors of major theatre organizations, a logical result of the dramaturg’s wide-ranging, yet in-depth, knowledge of dramatic literature and the theatrical process. A few enterprising dramaturgs have also ventured into opera, dance, film and television, extending the profession into other disciplines. The Geography notebook, by Katherine Profeta, in this volume, is an example of this extension of the profession into the field of dance. Also, many dramaturgs maintain dual careers, such as dramaturg/playwright or dramaturg/critic. To borrow a phrase from the paleontologist Stephen Jay Gould, dramaturgs in the United States and Canada are continuing to evolve, transform and bristle with multiple possibilities.

The four production notebooks contained in this book have all been created by practicing dramaturgs: Corey Madden, associate artistic director of the Mark Taper Forum, on The First Picture Show, written by David Gordon and Ain Gordon, directed by David Gordon, and coproduced by the Mark Taper Forum and the American Conservatory Theater (1999); John Dias, now associate producer at The Joseph Papp Public Theater/New York Shakespeare Festival, on In the Blood, by Suzan-Lori Parks, directed by David Esbjornson (1999); Katherine Profeta, then a student dramaturg at the Yale Repertory Theatre, on Geography, conceived and directed by Ralph Lemon (1997); and Lise Ann Johnson, freelance dramaturg, on Shakespeare Rapid Eye Movement, directed by Robert Lepage for the Bayerisches Staatsschauspiel in Munich, Germany (1993).

Although the production notebooks in this volume were not commissioned as models for the practice of production dramaturgy, the notebooks do reflect some of the professional challenges and opportunities of a dramaturg’s daily life in the theatre. In three of the four stagings documented in this volume, the chronicler is also the production’s official dramaturg. In the fourth instance, Robert Lepage’s Shakespeare Rapid Eye Movement in Munich, the freelance dramaturg, Lise Ann Johnson, documented the staging for this volume, although her formal role was as observer and not dramaturg.

I selected these particular productions for several key reasons. David and Ain Gordon’s work with the Pick Up Company has consistently challenged the existing vocabularies of stage presentation and performance techniques. My interest was heightened when I discovered that an early impetus for The First Picture Show was the connection David Gordon made between his own largely undocumented stagework and the work done by many silent film pioneers whose films have all but disappeared. One song in The First Picture Show, delivered by the filmmaker Billy, states the problem plaintively:

No film I made exists

Only titles, only lists,

Only year and cast and cost,

The films themselves have all been lost.

They’re only in my head.

And when I’m dead,

And all is said and done,

There isn’t even one for anyone to see

The joke’s on me

No one will ever see

The pictures that I made.

As is clear from these lyrics, David Gordon and Ain Gordon’s concern for preserving evidence of artistic achievement is in accord with my original impulse for the creation of the series.

While only in her thirties, Suzan-Lori Parks is already recognized as a major voice in the American theatre, and one whose process as a playwright deserves to be chronicled, particularly in relation to her stylistic explorations and questioning of traditional historical perspectives. In the Blood is in part inspired by Nathaniel Hawthorne’s classic, The Scarlet Letter, and offers up a provocative stage portrait of a bewildered Hester of the Streets in a contemporary American urban setting.

Ralph Lemon’s multidisciplinary project, Geography, produced at the Yale Repertory Theatre, brings together an extensive group of collaborators, including dancers, percussionists, designers, a poet, two composers and an installation artist, from places as diverse as Côte d’ Ivoire, Guinea, Spain and the United States, to create a work for the theatre. Many of Lemon’s collaborators had no previous resident theatre experience. The fusion of cultures and perspectives generated a unique working process rarely encountered in the theatre world.

Finally, when I learned in 1992 that the internationally renowned French-Canadian director Robert Lepage was creating a project that linked the geography of dreams, the works of Shakespeare and the collective unconscious, I was immediately drawn to what came to be known as Shakespeare Rapid Eye Movement. Staged at the Bayerisches Staatsschauspiel in Munich, Germany, using the resident acting company, the piece presented three dream excerpts in German translation from Shakespeare’s Richard III, A Midsummer Night’s Dream and The Tempest. As the reader will discover, cross-cultural currents influenced the resulting production in unexpected ways.

At their best, the production notebooks in this volume reflect a desire on the part of the artists involved to stretch the boundaries of theatrical expression and to challenge existing collaborative models that are often comforting but calcified. Robert Lepage, in a 1994 interview with Karen Fricker, observed about his creative process:

There is no recipe, no series of rules, no theory behind what we do. You cannot put a Shakespeare play and a Tennessee Williams play in the same microwave oven and expect them to be done. How is this meal going to be cooked? We’ll have to discover that as we go along.

The four notebooks that follow confirm that there are no recipes for achieving a successful artistic collaboration. But the notebooks do record the artistic journeys made and the problems encountered and the temporary detours taken. Ultimately, it is my desire that the notebooks will have a long-term impact on theatre as we enter the twenty-first century, offering rare windows into the creative lives of some of our leading theatre artists, and perhaps in doing so, awakening future artists to unexpected acts of the imagination.

Mark Bly

Project Director and Editor

Mark Bly is Associate Artistic Director of the Yale Repertory Theatre and Chair of the Playwriting Department at the Yale School of Drama. His varied professional experience includes dramaturging more than sixty productions at theatres such as Arena Stage, Washington, D.C.; the Guthrie Theater, Minneapolis; Seattle Repertory Theatre, Seattle; Long Wharf Theatre, New Haven, CT; and Yale Repertory Theatre, New Haven, CT.

Literary Managers and Dramaturgs of the Americas (LMDA) is a professional association serving literary managers, dramaturgs and other theatre professionals throughout North and South America. With a job hotline, annual conferences and various publications, the organization promotes and publicizes the work of its members and facilitates study and debate on the nature and function of dramaturgy and literary management in American theatre.

The FIRST PICTURE SHOW

AT AMERICAN CONSERVATORY THEATER AND MARK TAPER FORUM

by Corey Madden

The First Picture Show began in 1995 when the Mark Taper Forum commissioned David and Ain Gordon to create a work of theatre, dance and music for its stage. In 1998 the American Conservatory Theater (ACT) joined the project as a development partner, and the show premiered on the ACT stage in San Francisco in May 1999. The production debuted on the Taper stage in Los Angeles in August 1999. Directed by David Gordon, The First Picture Show moves seamlessly from drama to dance, dialogue to song, present to past. It changes rapidly from one performance style to another, one story to another, one character to another, to create a constantly shifting, fast-paced and complex new amalgam. Corey Madden, who is the associate artistic director at the Mark Taper Forum, served as the production’s dramaturg through its four years, three readings, four workshops and two major productions.

At American Conservatory Theater

CAST

At Mark Taper Forum

CAST

SUMMARY OF THE PLOT OF THE FIRST PICTURE SHOW AT THE MARK TAPER FORUM OPENING NIGHT

The First Picture Show concerns the past and present of Anne First, a silent film director who made her last film in 1932 at the age of thirty-eight. Confined to a retirement home for members of the motion-picture industry, she is surrounded by many of her former colleagues. At ninety-nine, Anne is unhappy and isolated from everyone in the home. She is haunted by her memories of being a young filmmaker and by some unnamed betrayal in her past. By chance Anne’s great-great-niece, Jane, discovers her long-lost connection to Anne through a diary someone sent her. Jane decides to make a documentary about Anne’s life. When they first meet, Anne refuses to talk to Jane, so Jane decides to make her film about the residents in the home, instead.

Memory sequences reveal Anne’s life from her girlhood days in Ohio through her last filmmaking experience. We see her early success in silent films, when opportunities are widely available, and later her furious struggle to continue making films against the almost insurmountable obstacles of