In Rehearsal: Daniel Beaty's New Play

by David Dower

This week I've got a ringside seat in the development process on Daniel Beaty's new play, Resurrection. Some Stage Banter readers will have seen the December reading here at Arena as part of our Downstairs Series. And many of you caught his electrifying solo turn in Emergence-See! when it played here last year.

Well, now Daniel's at work on a multi-actor play that is headed toward its world premiere later this year. We're at Hartford Stage, to further develop the text and start to explore ways that music can contribute to the overall event.

We often hear from audience members that they want to know what happens behind the closed doors of rehearsal. And Stage Banter has a history of bringing you stories from the rehearsal rooms of plays we're producing. But we don't often take you inside the development process. Come on in.

The rehearsal studio is set up with a bunch of folding tables forming a square with enough chairs for the cast of six, the director, the playwright, the composer, the stage manager, the Associate Producer from Hartford Stage, and me representing Arena. A big bright room with lots of windows and a blond, hardwood floor. It's a lot like what you'd expect a rehearsal studio to look like if you've seen Hollywood movies about dancers.

This play focuses on the interconnected lives of six African American males, ages 10 - 60.  The ten-year-old, Thuliso Dingwall, comes with his mother. She sits silently through all of the rehearsals, off to one side, but zeroed in on what's happening. She confesses that she and Thuliso rehearse at home each night to be ready for the next day's work. The kid's a natural but his additional preparation also shows. He's confident, relaxed, and fully present—how many ten-year-olds do you know who could sit for a six hour stretch with a bunch of adults talking about "motivation" and "subtext" and "story structure" and remain totally engaged? And when the script work gets back around to his character, a child prodigy mixing a Special Herbal Ice Tea to cure the pain of black men everywhere, he's right on cue and challenging the other, more seasoned actors with the force of his connection to the material. And yes, Mr. Dingwall, you are hilarious. Your improvised rap with composer Daniel Bernard Roumain's hip hop violin jam was an "imperative" treat...

It's powerful to see how Thuliso's presence affects the behavior of the rest of the men at the table (we're all men on this one except for Hartford's Associate Producer Hana Sharif, and she's not able to be there much of the time). The script deals with adult sexuality in places, with adult failures and missteps at others. And in another room, this would lead to all sorts of blue humor and raucous riffing on past humiliations and triumphs. But here we are always aware of the young man at the table and our responsibility toward him. It mirrors the relationships in the play and keeps us all focused on the purpose of the work.  Thuliso holds this center effortlessly. The actors and director seem to wear the responsibility like a respite, like a gift. It's an honor for me to be at this table.

The work that's taking place this week has to do primarily with aligning the text of the play with Daniel's intentions for the journey he's set each of these men on. Resurrection builds to a simultaneous act of resurrection for all six characters, and laying the separate tracks of their lives leading to this moment is a feat. He's braiding their disparate lives into a unified whole, a community forged of individual arcs of pain, and offering up their deliverance through a shared expression of faith. So everyone is in chairs, reading through the script aloud, stopping at many points to clarify or question, crafting a path for each actor through the emotional arc of their role.

Director Oz Scott is familiar with this form, having directed the original productions of For Colored Girls... both at the Public Theater and on Broadway. Oz is multi-tasking like crazy in this room. He's got his blackberry jumping with news of the Directors Guild contract negotiations, photos of the set mock-ups for Daniel's solo version of Resurrection which starts rehearsal at True Colors next week, and arranging for tickets for friends in the area.  (The reading here at Hartford sold out quickly. They added a second. It sold out as quickly. Now there are more than 300 people on the waiting list. There are over 1,000 people trying to get in to hear this work-in-progress this weekend!)

But he's also got a very, very close ear on the script as it rolls by, and he snaps into focus when he hears a confusion or has a question about character or plot. He opens the door to discussion between the actor involved, the playwright, and himself and intense, elliptical conversations take place about what's intended and how to get at it. Does it require an adjustment on the part of the actor—a new take on the line, a new approach to the moment—or does it need to go to Daniel to solve it through the writing. And sometimes, as is ever the case, it simply needs to be resolved in the director. Oz listens to the discussion, adjusts his own understanding of the moment, and he and the actor dig into to recrafting the moments leading up to it so that he's in the right place when he gets to the lines in question. 

"OK, then let's go all the way back to the moment when you open the door and see what Kecia's laid out there for you. Rather than take that as 'Aw man this is great! She's got all my favorite stuff up in here. What a great send-off she's made for me...' come at it from the sense that 'Aw man, what's she got goin' on here? I got to be careful here... All my favorite stuff. And she's looking so fine. She's making sure I'm going to be stayin' here for ever.' " He's got the actor switching gears from a carefree joy about meeting his girlfriend on the roof for a 'graduation present' to a sense of trepidation, an awareness of the temptations that could keep him home in the projects and out of Morehouse. The character's whole journey rearranges itself around this sense of dangerous temptation, and when this twenty-year-old arrives at his moment of truth it's right on time and right in tune with the arrival of the other five voices in the play.

It's this balance that we call "new play development" at this moment in the life of a play.  Careful listening and communication between the writer, the director, the actor, and the dramaturg—all centered on getting the play's moments to add up to the journey the writer imagines. Sometimes the actor adjusts, sometimes the director, sometimes the playwright and little by little all these players tune their ears and minds to each other, in search of that single unified sound that makes the play seem true, inevitable, whole.

The trick is to be listening to this play, to this specific voice, to this specific truth. We fall into a trap in developing plays of saying things like "A good play always delivers 'X' at this point in the story", or "That character would never..." or "The audience is going to need..." and making it the job of the writer to fit the template of our imposed expectations. Story comes in many forms, and storytellers use many voices and devices to tell them. A good process of new play development means we are all inside the form and purpose of this specific journey, and equally at work mastering the voice and devices being deployed along its telling.