Stage Banter: The Arena Stage Blog

Notes from Rehearsal: Love in Afghanistan

by Maria Edmundson, Artistic Development Fellow

Last week Arena Stage hosted Charles Randolph-Wright for a workshop to develop his play Love in Afghanistan, which will be the first show in the Kogod Cradle our 2013-2014 Season.

Charles has been working on this play for a year, and this was its second workshop at Arena.  For this workshop, Charles brought in a new version of the script to be read and talked through piece by piece.  The participants in this discussion included actors reading for each part, a dramaturge, Jocelyn Clarke, the director, Lucie Tiberghien, and the Director of Artistic Programming at Arena Stage, David Snider.  The mission of a workshop is to see what works, to strip away what does not, and to help the play become what it is trying to be.

The group’s response to the play was: yes; go deeper. 

We talked about structure. Is the rhythm working here?  Are these scenes in an order that serves the momentum of the piece? 

We talked about clarity.  This play has many layers.  How does one write a rich, complex story that is also clear and driven?  Does the audience understand the right things at the right time?  What things are standing out as the most important parts of the play? 

We talked about setting.  This play takes place at Bagram Air Force Base outside of Kabul, and writing about Afghanistan is like dancing on quicksand.  Is this Afghanistan 2010? 2012? 2013?  How do the cultural and societal structures of Afghanistan shape what can and cannot happen there? 

We talked about stakes.  This play is set in a dangerous, uncertain world.  What is it like to live in constant danger?  How does that affect priorities and what people will do to get what they want?  How do the stakes come into greater focus and relief throughout the story?

The version of the script that we worked with did not include h
ow the play ended, although Charles did have some ideas about what was going to happen.  Not having an ending opened our discussion up to explore where the currents of the play were taking each of us.  How did we imagine the story progressing?  If something about the play changed, how would that influence what might happen later?  As we got to know the characters, what did we think they would do next? 

Charles invited us into this creative process, just as the audience will be invited to the conversation in the fall. Last week, we worked on the questions of a workshop.  In the fall, those questions will already have been answered, but the audience will get to see what questions the production of the play asks.

Notes from Rehearsal: The Age of Innocence

by Maria Edmundson, Artistic Development Fellow

In January of this year, I had the opportunity to work as an assistant on a two-week long workshop of Karen Zacarías’ adaptation of The Age of Innocence, by Edith Wharton, directed by dramaturg Jocelyn Clarke. 

So, what is the purpose of a two-week workshop of a play in development and what does the process look like?  The principal question Karen and Jocelyn had for this project was, “does this story work on stage?”  Is it a play or is it just parts of a book that are being read on stage?  As for the process, we began with table talk, reading the script.  Very quickly, however, we moved away from the table and into the Kogod Cradle, to put the play on its feet and discover its structure.

A central investigation in this workshop was how the piece works as that hybrid beast, an adaptation.  The goal of an adaptation being, of course, to exploit the new form to reveal or shed light on a new facet of the work ,rather than to retell the story as it is in its original incarnation.

Karen decided to frame the events of the novel with Wharton’s narration by doubling two roles played by one actress: the object of the protagonist’s adoration, Ellen, and a character who is author of the work, Edith.  It became clear that we needed a set of rules to govern how the Edith character creates and controls the world of the play and how she switches from Edith to Ellen.

These rules resulted in a vocabulary of movements, gestures, and music.  For example, Edith always wears a red shawl, delivered and removed from her by her helpmeet, a cheerful butler, and whenever Edith sits in a scene to listen to her story unfold, her chair has its back to the scene.

This set of rules expanded to dictate the movements of the company.  Gestural lines were to be round and flowing, not angular and sharp.  When actors were not in a scene, they arranged themselves in frozen tableaux at the back of the stage.  These rules were created to mimic the rhythm and structure of society in the world of the play.  In The Age of Innocence, Wharton offers a commentary on society as much as she tells a story of ill-fated lovers.  Society is the driving force in the lives of the characters and must be an engine of the play.  The vocabulary of movement sets up a society in which stillness, precision, and beauty reign.  The tableaux ensure that the group sees everything.  There is no escape from the eyes of the world.  This frozenness and distance also allowed us to stage frustrated longing and desire outside of our contemporary vision of what that looks like.

The development of this vocabulary was a conversation between Jocelyn, with his clear eye for movement and ear for music, the actors who imagined the play out of thin air, and me, who perused the music of Andre Desplat, Arvo Pärt, and Max Richter and operated the sound board.

In the end, I could see the opera, the ballroom, and the church; and in answer to the questions we were investigating, I thought yes, this is a play.