Survey
* Your assessment is very important for improving the workof artificial intelligence, which forms the content of this project
* Your assessment is very important for improving the workof artificial intelligence, which forms the content of this project
Improvisational theatre wikipedia , lookup
Development of musical theatre wikipedia , lookup
Theatre of the Oppressed wikipedia , lookup
Augsburger Puppenkiste wikipedia , lookup
History of theatre wikipedia , lookup
Theatre of the Absurd wikipedia , lookup
Medieval theatre wikipedia , lookup
Theatre of India wikipedia , lookup
Playwrights’ POV Volume 2 Issue 1 June 10, 2013 RARE: My Story of Breaking Free Nada Marie Christiane Mayla, Krystal Nausbaum, James Hazlett, Mike Liu, and Andreas Prinz in an ensemble shot of Soulpepper’s production of Rare. On right, Krystal Nausbaum and James Hazlett share a hug. Photos: John Gundy. By JUDITH THOMPSON My experience in creating the play Rare with nine brilliant performers with Down Syndrome was the most enlightening, humbling, and gratifying theatre experience of my life. few months to talk about her writing and career path as a theatre artist. Krystal is an astonishing performer, but her writing was unformed and I was having trouble helping her with it. It all began on a Tuesday afternoon in November 2011, in the Second Cup on the south side of Bloor street near Bathurst. The grimy café was packed with high school students, screenwriters, and street involved folk, all talking at the top of their voices. I was meeting with Krystal, a young actress with neon pink hair and Down Syndrome, and her mother, Madeleine. Krystal had been part of my devised play SICK, which premiered at the Next Stage Festival in Toronto in January 2010. Krystal was hungering to continue her creative practice, and so the three of us would meet every On that Tuesday afternoon I looked at her organized, dynamic mother and made a proposal: “if you are willing to apply to the Fringe, and if we actually make it, I would be happy to volunteer my time to create a play with a full cast of performers, all with Down Syndrome.” Madeleine wondered if they all needed to have Down Syndrome, and I was clear: all of them, and a nice big cast. Madeleine agreed, we got in, and though a newbie, she pulled off producing a Fringe show with the expertise of a veteran. Through the 1 Playwrights Guild of Canada’s Online Journal Actors in Judith Thompson’s Rare. Photo: boomersinfokiosk.blogspot.ca Down Syndrome society she put the word out and she secured us affordable space through the Fringe. script and throwing themselves on the floor screaming, while somebody else would declare their unrequited romantic love for another member of the cast, who would go rigid with fury or embarrassment and hide for the rest of the rehearsal. Our auditions attracted about forty performers with Down Syndrome. I chose the nine most unique performers, an orchestra of distinctive tones and physical types. I knew we would need a very long time to create a polished play, so I asked for a commitment of six months. We met twice in January, three times in March, four in April and then by May it was four or five times a week, from eleven to five, with an hour-long lunch that always became two and a half hours of revelry and mad eating of junky lunch food, like poutine and cheeseburgers, followed by the healthy packed lunch their parents had prepared. After a while, we had to institute a ‘healthy lunch contest’. It didn’t really work… it was always somebody’s birthday and they always had to have cake. It seemed they could never remember either the order of speaking or what they wanted to say. More than once, Madeleine gently suggested that I had better give my notice to the Fringe that this show was not going to happen. I laughed, because I had heard this before, during the eight years that I directed and abridged Shakespeare with a cast of seventy at Palmerston Public school. As late as five days before opening, some of the kids’ parents would shake their heads and tell me that this was a mess, and we had better just say the performance was cancelled. I laughed at them while I reassured them: it was going to be fine. Not just fine, but amazing. And it always was. Over the top amazing - the kids just rose to the theatrical standard that had been prepared for them. The food issues were only a small example of the novel challenges we faced. Every rehearsal would feature somebody ripping up their 2 Playwrights Guild of Canada’s Online Journal I knew that Rare would be the same (although to be honest, I did have a few panicky moments, followed by calm confidence) and I promised Madeleine that all would be fine, and I carried on. Oh, and the golden key to success? Lots and lots of help from hugely talented and energetic young theatre artists: our gifted singer and songwriter Victoria Carr, our tireless a.s.m.s Llyandra Jones, Suzanne Roberts Smith, Emily Kedar, Rosamund Small, and Grace Campbell. It would have been very wobbly indeed without these incredible talents. On the opening night of Hannah Moscovitch’s The Children’s Republic, I was lucky enough to persuade Nicholas Hutcheson, who was her script supervisor and had been my student years before at University of Guelph, to assist me with the script. He said yes! months in, I informed the cast that 97 percent of parents choose to terminate when told that their baby would have Down Syndrome. I asked them what they thought of that choice. There was a very long silence, and then Nick Herd spoke. He said, “That’s discrimination. That’s wrong, that’s against our right to be who we are, what we are. We are RARE, we’re unique.” I looked over at Nick, who typed it in, word for word. There was the centerpiece of the show. They all loved to dance, especially Nick and Suzanne. A few days later I brought in the music of “The Dying Swan”, from Swan Lake. I asked Nick to dance to this. He studied the dance on YouTube and then performed a staggering version. I brought the actress and Things were falling into place. I knew I had “That’s discrimination. That’s wrong, that’s against our right to be who we are, what we are. We are RARE, we’re unique.” to have a script supervisor, as my method in devising these plays is to ask simple questions. “What do you wish?” Or “I feel like a bit of dusty pavement today, what do you feel like?” Or “let’s talk about falling in love.” Or “what is your mother like?” Has anyone died in your family?” And on and on, while the script supervisor madly typed in every word the performers utter. And then I woud refine and sculpt and cajole until those perfect poetic answers emerged - the ones I was looking for but could not, in good conscience, impose. I knew that the script had to be in the words of the performers, other than the necessary stitching that would have to be done. Each of the performers had their own poetic sensibility, their own way of seeing the world and expressing themselves. They all courageously offered stories, responses and words. From the beginning, the politics were part of the piece: what is it to have Down Syndrome in a world obsessed with perfection? One day, three Publisher: Playwrights Canada Press. Image: Rita Leistner. Design: Blake Sproule 3 Playwrights Guild of Canada’s Online Journal “I became visible when engaged in theatrical practice. Before I began working in theatre I felt completely invisible. Like a ghost. But when I was on stage, it was as if I became real. I know it’s strange and neurotic, but there it is, and that is why I need it.” dance teacher Nicki Guadagni in to polish it up, and as soon as she suggested that Nick watch his hands, the dance blossomed. especially Caesarian scars.” Dear body, my feet have bunions now.” And so on and so on. Boring. I wanted to get to the mucky, difficult stuff of life. And so asked for two two-week workshops. And thus my alternate playwriting path began. And it was like creating a path out of the woods. Listening to story after story, response after response, and cutting and clearing and choosing and finally creating a beautiful path, all from their amazing courage, their exquisite words. He was absolutely inspirational in that dance. Suzanne, a large young woman with an extreme stutter, also danced like an angel. I helped her create a dance for Dylan’s song “Out There.” So, how was it different, as a playwright, to work with artists with Down Syndrome? I worked this way for the first time on Body & Soul, a play that was commissioned by Brenda Surminski, representing Ogilvy and Mather, for Dove. She asked me if I would be interested in creating a play about beauty and aging with real women between the ages of forty-five and eighty. I jumped at it, with the condition that no Dove products would be mentioned, let alone be featured on stage. They agreed and were respectfully hands-off during the whole process. So, how was working with fourteen powerhouse women different than working with nine performers with Down Syndrome? Only one way and that is that all the performers with Down Syndrome believed in me from the beginning, and although most of the women in Body & Soul also believed, there were a few doubters. After all, I was discovering my methodology, improvising a lot, making wrong turns and reversing, doing loops and changing my mind about blocking daily. But that is the way I work, and it does work. I basically discovered this way of working on my feet. I did not really know what I was going to do, going into our workshops. My only experience with this kind of theatre was listening to war stories about the Farm Show, and the first day of every class I taught at the University of Guelph, when I would ask the students to tell me a story of transformation from their lives. These sessions were always, always, breathtaking. I knew that real, personal stories worked magic. My performers in Rare brought in new ideas every day. I would say yes to everything, but then continue to work the way I was working. Occasionally I would try a promising idea but usually the ideas were like this one: “I want Sarah and I to come to the front of the stage and sing Celine Dion’s “My Heart Will go On” from the Titanic.” I would say it sounded WONDERFUL, and we might consider it… in a while. And Suzanne, in this case, was very reasonable. She was not a good singer, in fact not one of the cast could sing, although they could all dance (a puzzle to me…) but they all were convinced they were wonderful singers! I just had to change the subject and praise the amazing work they were The folks at Ogilvy suggested that the women wear nude body suits and sit on chairs reading letters to their body. I knew that would not work, as the letters to the body we received from hundreds of women all over the country were pretty much all the same. “Dear body, I wish I could get rid of those fifteen extra pounds of fat and love my scars, because they are who I am, 4 Playwrights Guild of Canada’s Online Journal Jane Foster and Joann McIntyre in Theatre Passe Muraille’s 1980 production of The Crackwalker. Photo: Joel Benard doing. doing a dig and finding treasure. The treasure has always been there, but mostly it is not visible. Am I the playwright? The co-creator? Only the director? In a real devised piece, everyone is credited with the creation. I found the crediting very difficult, but the most honest description is that I created it as a theatre piece using (mostly) the words and experiences of the cast, curated over six months. In a way, it was not so different from writing a play at my computer. The cast were my characters, and they spoke in their own voices only. When I write I try to channel my characters’ voices, in this case they were already there. I just massaged and guided them. A fascinating process, one I plan to continue. A parallel playwriting path for me. Many people in the audience assumed that the cast had made every choice, and we did not tell them any different, as it was important for them to be treated as mature artists, which they are. And Rare is a play, not a showcase. These are complex and intelligent human beings, they are artists. However, when they are interviewed, to the surprise of the Soulpepper marketing people, they are sometimes a bit incoherent, off topic, and endearingly obsessed with a certain aspect of things i.e. “My beautiful sister always brought me here and I love her, and she is my best friend,” or “My dad is the best, he just is the best, just the best.” And so on. I feel that I became visible when engaged in theatrical practice. Before I began working in theatre I felt completely invisible. Like a ghost. But when I was on stage, it was as if I became real. I know it’s strange and neurotic, but there it is, and that is why I need it. *** Theatre became my life when I was eleven years old and I played Helen Keller in a production my mother, Mary Thompson, directed at a university theatre in 1966. Attempting to understand what it might be like to be blind, deaf and unable to communicate brought the world into focus for My privilege was finding the brilliance underneath the apparent incoherence. Like 5 Playwrights Guild of Canada’s Online Journal The Crackwalker turned out to be a profoundly political play - a reveal of a suffering underclass in our supposedly classless, cradle-to-grave socialist utopia. I just wrote what I saw, a sort of front-line journalistic theatre writing. me for the first time. At twelve, in Kingston, Ontario, I played Betty in The Crucible, trying to fly out the window, screaming and screaming. This was freedom, release from the dreary and frightening quotidian. And I believe it was when I began to identify with the wild and untamable outsider, yearning to be seen. Writing theatre came easily to me, as I had been immersed in the theatre since I was a child. I didn’t need books. I didn’t even take the playwriting course offered at Queen’s. Still in the passive mode, it didn’t occur to me that I had anything to say whatsoever. As I joined drama classes and high school plays, the excitement never abated, but it was clouded by an overwhelming sense of the passivity of an actor in traditional theatre. It was all about hope. Hoping to be cast. Hoping to get a good part. Hoping to be liked. Hoping to be admitted to a theatre school. Hoping and praying not to be kicked out. And then once I graduated from theatre school, would they choose me? Will I be cast in this movie of the week at CBC? (I wasn’t) Will I be chosen? Do they want me? Why don’t they want me? Waiting and hoping. So: after the success of my first play, I grabbed the excuse to step off the actor path, and onto the playwright path. People reminded me that it was possible to do both - witness the brilliant Linda Griffiths and Daniel McIvor and many more but I just was not interested in performing other people’s work, or being buffeted around the country by a career. The one positive thing about theatre school, besides learning to be on time and getting several dance classes a day, was MASK class. It was in mask class, searching for a suitable monologue, that I gave up and wrote it myself. An act of desperation. But the monologue went so well that I continued writing for my mask characters. And then there was that weekend when my roommate had left the city and everyone was busy, and I was very much alone, with one channel on the TV and absolutely nothing to do and nowhere to go. I pulled my roommate’s typewriter out and began to write what became The Crackwalker, inspired by a summer job and one of my mask characters. So I moved out of passivity and into a real participant in my own creative life, only through loneliness and desperation. I was still quite unformed when I began writing and so the writing of the play was really a sort of channeling of characters I had met in a make work summer job interning with social workers and the permanently unemployable in Kingston, Ontario. I had no political point of view at all, and yet Publisher: Playwrights Canada Press. Photo: Dean Palmer. Design: JLArt 6 Playwrights Guild of Canada’s Online Journal Theatre. White Biting Dog, I am Yours, Lion in the Streets, followed by a long stint of writing for film and television in order to feed my family with radio plays and children’s plays in the mix. However, when writing for film and television, one falls back into passivity. The producers and directors are the bosses and their wishes regarding the stories must be carried out. I felt like I had a noose around my neck. An artist must be free, or the art is spoiled like milk left out on a summer’s day. So I returned to playwriting full time. My position at the University of Guelph has allowed me to take on true creative adventures for little or no pay: neither SICK nor Rare put a penny in my pocket, but they were research, which the University not only supports but requires. I am truly fortunate. Hardee Lineham and Joann McIntyre in Theatre Passe Muraille’s 1980 production of The Crackwalker. Photo: Joel Benard In my first year out of theatre school I did a Northern Ontario school tour of Bus Riley’s Back in Town. A more unsuitable play for Northern Ontario high schoolers could not be imagined and they let us know this by talking so loudly to each other in the gymnasium that we couldn’t even hear each other on stage. And then the part of Eve in an Alan Ayckbourn Christmas play in Winnipeg just after my father died. On stage at the MTC, I vowed to myself that this was the end. I was leaving acting and writing my OWN plays. I would no longer be a passenger in my own career. So, with a few grants here and there, and the extraordinary encouragement of the late great Urjo Kareda, I wrote play after play, always assured of a berth at the Tarragon These risky projects have led to a very exciting new project: The Rare Theatre Company. Along with my producers Brenda Surminski, Nicholas Hutcheson and Lois Fine, we have formed a theatre company that is devoted to bringing the voices of disability and other marginalized communities to the stage... in their own words, and played by themselves and nobody else. Albert Shultz of Soulpepper has offered us a partnership wherein they will grant us space and the theatre and even a lighting designer, and we provide the rest. For three years. We are presently without any funding, but we are over the moon with excitement. *** The overwhelming success of Rare and the forming of our company have given me greater courage and conviction as a playwright; recently I made the difficult decision to “break up” with Nightwood Theatre, the first time I have ever moved away from the playwright-as-beggar position we usually find ourselves in. I remain “I vowed to myself that this was the end... I would no longer be a passenger in my own career.” 7 Playwrights Guild of Canada’s Online Journal “The play is provocative, and it will piss a lot of people off, which is true to form for me.” very grateful to that organization for having me as playwright in residence, for giving me several short workshops and the staged reading. I am thankful especially to the warm and tremendously gifted and intelligent Erica Koptyo. But we both agreed that somewhow, Nightwood and I were just not suited to one another, and it was not in the best interesrs of the play to continue. And yes, that means I do not have a promise of production anywhere yet. But I am creatively free, and as soon as I withdrew my play for consideration, I understood the form the play should take. A true moment of epiphany. I was true to myself and the play, so I became a free playwright again. My voice returned. The play is provocative, and it will piss a lot of people off, which is true to form for me. I have taken the story back, and I know it will be produced here and all over the world, just like Palace of the End, which was dumped by Ross Manson, turned down by Tarragon, and only slotted into CanStage because Rachel Corrie was deemed unsuitable. Break free, strike out, assert your voice. I am fifty-eight years old, but I feel like I have just truly broken free of artistic passivity, and I am learning to fly. Judith Thompson (born September 20, 1954) is a Canadian playwright who lives in Toronto, Ontario. The Globe and Mail once declared that “...a playwright as good as Judith Thompson is a miracle.” She has twice been awarded the Governor General’s Award for Drama and is the recipient of many other awards, including the Order of Canada. The opinions expressed in this article are the author’s and do not reflect those of Playwrights Guild of Canada. Editing and Layout: Sarah Malik 8