New Leaf Theatre

Tonight we are having a birthday party for New Leaf Theatre.  We are 7 years old.  We are learning to write cursive, riding our bicycle - without training wheels - with a skinned left knee, and missing two front teeth.  Also, I just had a birthday.  I am 20 years older than New Leaf.  I’ll let you do the math.

I told everyone that I would bake a cake for the occasion.  I said that it might be slanty, but I would do my best.  About half-way through I decided that I would make an artistic decision - since the cake’s going to be slanty anyway, why not make it slanty on purpose?  Now I’m working with the idea that the cake is being created by New Leaf.  Which is to say that the cake looks like it was made BY a 7-year-old…  Not FOR a 7-year-old.  Here is a picture of the cake:

See what I mean? 

 Yesterday we got one heck of a birthday present.  For the first time in our history, we are nominated for two Non-Equity Jeff Awards.  Best Ensemble for The Dining Room.  And also best director for The Dining Room.  Which has officially blown my mind. 

Marsha actually had to point out to me (at one in the morning, not long after the nominations had been posted) that the 2nd one was on there - I went from looking for Ensemble and being esctatic to looking at sound design and being disappointed, but still being excited since (to me anyway) Best Ensemble in this case means all of us.  Because that’s what we were working on that show - one of the best ensembles I’ve ever seen.  Jared Moore - because he is in my opinion the best lighting designer in the city - is once again competing against himself in Best Lighting Design for two non-Leaf shows.  Nick Keenan was noted to have been robbed in TimeOut Chicago.  I agree.  Very, very much.

Tonight, we have so much to celebrate - seven years of a wonderful company (I will celebrate all seven tonight, even though I’ve only been around for one!), two Jeff nominations, being reunited with friends old and new (if the recent removal of his wisdom teeth doesn’t stop him, our founder will be there tonight), and also what the future may hold.  Maybe that’s the best birthday present of them all - the fact that we’ve really only just begun.  Just think about how much has happened since you were seven…

A week ago we had our second official “playdate” to brainstorm for the original piece we are creating for next season.  At this early stage, it is still termed “The Original Play” (TOP).

 Nick has been doing a great job of trying to keep us focused on small-step goals during these sessions, and trying to keep our flow of thoughts organized.  It’s so difficult to begin when you decide to create something from the ground up.  What form will this piece take?  What are we trying to accomplish?  How do we even begin?

 We started this session asking ourselves what things we have seen onstage that really excited us.  We love cleverness in theatre - when something is accomplished in a surprising way.   We like the idea of using research to avoid universal symbols - thinking outside the box to express things in new ways. 

We also discussed different types of formats and storytelling techniques.  We love ensemble.  We feel true stories are disarming to an audiences, and discussed confession-type pieces.  We like the idea of using movement to evoke a story; of communicating without words.  Layers of stories.  Vignettes that connect to each other in unexpected ways, stories that begin by finishing the story preceeding them.  We would love to play with repetition - seeing the same moment more than once, with different meanings each time.

No matter what we’re discussing, we seem to always fall back into talking about content.  We played with the idea of forced communities - a classroom, an office, a bus or train, a religion, an audience.  How do we act in these situations and what does it say about us?  We talked about the legacies we try to create for ourselves, and what happens when our legacy isn’t reading to anyone else.   We love exploring shared experiences, of using “we” rather than “I.”  Strongly connecting with our audience is something we feel we do well and is a thing that is very important in our work.

Content seems to be something most of us find easy to discuss, but we could talk about content for weeks on end and not get anywhere on structuring our ideas.  Content can easily dictate structure, but structure can also form content.   That’s a harder angle for us to come from, it seems, but maybe that’s why we need to keep pushing ourselves to do it.  Frankly, this process is as scary as it is exciting for us, and sometimes we step back and say, what on earth are we doing?  What are we trying to create, and to what purpose?  Attempting to start this process from seemingly odd angles may be just the way to help us find that answer. Maybe we can sneak up on it from behind.

Writing is hard. 

Even in the best circumstances, when you’re inspired, or writing something purely creative, imaginative, fluid or formless, it’s still tricky business.  There’s the self-doubt, the “violence of articulation” (as Momma Anne says) when you take that first step into the void, discovering tone, word choice, grammar, punctuation - so many things can derail you from your simple task of finding the words to convey your thought, your point, your purpose.

This is what I’ve been discovering as Marsha and I have waded through the writing and rewriting process on several proposals over the last few weeks.  Not just is writing hard - writing at least marginally well I mean - but writing about something you love that seems intangible, illusive: that’s really, really hard. 

I was looking at our website tonight, double checking that I’d used the proper photo credits in a proposal that we’re about to submit and I was struck once again by this company, this place that I stumbled into a little over a year ago, running into an unknown shelter out of the snow and the wind and the darkness, only to find myself - simply - home. 

But what I keep struggling with - what I think many of us are struggling with - is how to put that feeling, that subjective experience, that internal, instinctive knowledge of what New Leaf is - into words.  We’re lucky when we can talk with each other about it in a way that really encapsulates what we’re trying to say.  As we continue to grow, it’s becoming increasingly vital that we talk about ourselves in ways that make sense to artists with whom we’d like to work, with colleagues from other companies, with prospective board members, and - perhaps most dauntingly - potential funders. 

So, I’m curious.  How do you talk about the things you love?  What do you say?  How do you persuade others that they should care about it just as deeply as you do?  How do you find the words?

It’s always a shock to the system when you live through the same events as someone else and as you look back, they somehow have a completely different experience than your own.

Reading reviews and getting honest feedback from an audience is always fraught with difficulty because of this phenomenon, and many performers frankly avoid going through it by refusing to read reviews. When you’re putting up a show, you need to fill in so much backstory for yourself to flesh out your character and the world of the play, and 70% of that work never sees stage time. Despite that, it’s still a critical part of the story, and you never get to share it with the audience. How much of this narrative - the way you’re telling this particular story - the audience does end up intuiting from the resonance of your performance is the difference between a good review and a devastating one. What can be frustrating for the performer is that ultimately, it’s about the audience’s ability to see and hear and feel more than your own ability to speak, act, show, and communicate.

The most difficult and scary part about producing theater - especially newer works - is that we have almost no means of controlling the exact narrative the audience walks away with - we have the collaborative process, and the clarity that (sometimes) comes with a well-defined artistic concept. With classics, there’s often decades or hundreds of years of established narrative that focuses attention on your specific production.

That risk is of course the fundamental appeal of new plays for some over other entertainment media like film, television and literature. In recorded and published media, the audience is allowed to go back, and reexamine, and in some cases find the “correct” interpretation intended by the artist. In theater, there are no second chances to re-examine and realign the audience’s experience. The story that played out in the audience’s head and heart, inspired by the events and actions you put on stage, is the story that actually happened. Of course we’re all living through the same events, but in some cases, we as artists don’t often get the feedback of finding out what that exact story was.

On Goldfish Bowl, we knew we had a challenging script that could and would be interpreted in myriad ways, even with our collective backstories added to the mix. That’s one of the reasons that we explored the process of creating this production in depth on our podcast and through this blog - it was another tool, other than performance, concept, and production design, that could be used to get some of our core audience to walk into the theater ready to experience the full scope of the narrative we wanted them to experience - inside the theater and outside the theater. And maybe even attempting to seed a specific narrative is a little quixotic of us - it’s where marketing intersects art, and our audience is sharp enough to only accept the marketing they want to accept.

We’ve been talking on the blog how we, as individuals, remember the last moment of our childhood, and in an odd, circuitous way, that ongoing narrative has become something equally momentous - I think that Goldfish Bowl marks the end of New Leaf’s childhood as a company. The emerging narrative from our string of reviews is that Goldfish Bowl is an intelligent and at the same time confusing play. We’ve been recognized in these reviews for consistently producing challenging work well, and taken to task for not drawing focus to elements of the play that we’ve found less vital to our mission as a company - the setting of the Cuban Missle Crisis, for us - and some would argue, for the play - is less important a point of focus than the rich, obscured, and downright disoriented world of childhood memory that Iris inhabits.

In many ways, this critical narrative doesn’t jive with how we see ourselves (tale as old as time, right?), and yet it’s the narrative that we must now move forward with through the rest of the run. Now it’s the narrative that our audience may be bringing with them as they walk in the theater, and it’s a narrative we are unable to address now that rehearsals are long over. A young theater company will complain when someone doesn’t “get” the play, because they don’t fully realize how important the audience’s given narrative is. An older theater company realizes that the purpose of a show isn’t simply about getting an audience to ‘accurately’ interpret your production - it’s about resonance, those moments that stick with you for much longer than the two hours you sit in the theater. It’s about tricking moments of clarity and self-reflection out of your audience, even if those moments are wildly unrelated to the show. It’s about providing an ideal setting for reflection, and sometimes that setting requires stepping back and not over-conceptualizing a script. That reflection is the gold that we’re mining for in this work - it is the mechanism of renewal.

As a member of the creative team, I personally found those moments of reflection in Goldfish Bowl from the first time we read it as a company, and those moments have been brought out and crystallized by the work of Greg and the entire cast. There’s a line in the play, “You’re just not very good at being human, Mr. Lawrence.” That provided that moment of self-reflection for me, and John Wehrman’s face as Kaitlin says it still hits me like a ton of bricks. My personal narrative that I bring as a viewer of the show finds that resonance in the pain of a character like Mr. Lawrence - a character unable to clearly communicate with the rest of the world through polite conversation, but whose face betrays a rich internal world boiling under the surface.

It’s how I feel as a sound designer. I’m unable to say what I want to say directly… I say it through music, tones, and frequencies. I was talking with New Leaf lighting designer and zen guru Jared Moore about how he deals with the problem of the narrative disconnect after his nearly 100 shows in Chicago. As designers, we’ve been exceedingly lucky to be singled out as much as we have, because frankly the narrative of the story is shepherded through rehearsal by the director and the narrative will always be what critics want to talk about and what the audience wants to hear before they see a show - “Is the play good?” “What’s the play about?” “Does the play jive with my values?” Up against questions like that, our individual efforts don’t play out well, and usually don’t show up in the reviews. When artists don’t get feedback, their work doesn’t grow.

Jared’s comments clarified my own feelings on the subject: You have to let the narrative happen. The audience’s ability - your ability - to form your own narrative over and through our story is what allows you as a member of the audience to have ownership of our work. It makes you part of the creative team, and in many ways the audience has always been the most fundamental part of the creative team. That’s what makes theater different. Audiences may rarely understand the specifics of what I had in mind when I create a design, but that doesn’t have to be a discouraging thing — because what they do find is something that they had lost and they need again - a memory, an emotion, a moment unlocked and treasured.

We cannot control how other people see our work, and yes, that’s often frustrating, and to be candid, a source of fear and trepidation. But without that dichotomy of interpretation, there’s no surprise, doubt, disagreement, and reconnection. There’s no dialogue between artist and audience, and no conversation as you walk home from the theater. As we often say at New Leaf - those are the moments where a great theater company gets you hooked.

“My mother says you know when your childhood ends. It’s the moment you stop being happy, and start remembering when you used to be.”

The first time I read Girl in the Goldfish Bowl, this statement (which is a paraphrase of the actual script) hit me like a tone of bricks.

By this definition, the last day of my childhood was March 17, 1986.

I was in the fourth grade, and my family had just moved from a very small town in southern Indiana to a very large suburb of Washington, D.C.  Culture shock - obviously.  Moving in the middle of the school year - horrible.  But the real trauma for me was the sudden, complete, visceral understanding of what it meant when something changed irrevocably.

You see, my parents had done an outstanding job of selling me on this move.  They touted the opportunities I would have, the places I’d go, the things I’d learn, the friends I’d make - it was going to be a great adventure.  We would leave this one-horse town behind and live somewhere Big and Real and Important.  A Place where Things Happened. 

It wasn’t until I was sitting in my new classroom, looking at a sea of unfamiliar faces all sneaking sideways glances at me, wondering why the blackboard was green, why they had tables instead of desks, and why the advanced reading group was using the book I had finished last year that it hit me: this is it.  This is what my life will be now.  Everything was unfamiliar.  I kept discovering that things I didn’t realize I took for granted were all different and unexpected - like having the rug pulled out from under you when you thought you were standing on the linoleum.

And so, on March 17, 1986, I looked around the classroom, I looked down at my spelling list, and I wept.  I cried for all of the things in Indiana that I’d lost but didn’t know I was losing.  I cried because I didn’t know what was supposed to happen next.  I cried because I wanted to go home, but I knew I couldn’t.

Today, March 14, 2008, nearly 22 years later, I look around my little temp office on Michigan Avenue, I look out the window, and I cry just a little.  For the nine-year-old who didn’t know what hit her.

 So, my friends:  how you you  mark the end of your childhood?  Did you know it was happening when it happened?  Was it exciting, or sad, or scary?  Tell me.