New Leaf Theatre

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.

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