How do you rehearse a play when the audience
is a main character?
by Deborah Stein
This past Friday, my play God
Save Gertrude opened at
The Playwrights’ Center’s Waring Jones Theater,
as part of the Workhaus Collective’s inaugural
season in residence at PWC. A “rock concert with
characters,” Gertrude follows a Queen who has just lost the throne in a coup,
and has escaped to an abandoned music club for safety.
In her youth, she used to perform for sold-out crowds
in this club, and over the course of the play she performs
a farewell concert to a crowd of imaginary (yet devoted)
fans. I wrote the songs with my friend and collaborator
David Hanbury, who also traveled to Minneapolis for the
production in order to reprise the role of Mama’s
Boy, which he first played when we were in school together
and again at PlayLabs in 2006.
David and I have had an
ongoing conversation about Gertrude’s
relationship with the audience; writing the songs,
we talked a lot about what Gertrude wanted from the
audience
with
each number. So my primary concern for the production
was, How do we create a theatrical experience that
is an event,
dependent on the audience and performers sharing a
single space together, in real time?
Of course, in theater,
the audience is always a main character; however, unique
challenges arise when a
piece relies so
heavily on direct address and creating a rapport between
performer and audience.
And yet we needed to rehearse
without one.
Here are some of the things I took into
consideration during our process:
1. Collaboration
with the director
Randy Reyes was the first person on
board in Minneapolis, after Workhaus. I had seen his
production of
Marcus Quinones’ Circle
Around the Island at the Guthrie last
spring, and was really taken by the way he
transformed the
Dowling Studio and
presented the piece in the round—you
almost couldn’t
recognize the room.
At our first meeting last
spring, at the Spyhouse coffee shop, I told
Randy that my ideal venue
for the play
was the 7th Street Entry here in Minneapolis,
with its stage
squashed into a corner and wide yet shallow
seating area. After I drew a crude blueprint
of this
small club, Randy
took the pencil and started marking all the
different locations from which the actors could
enter.
My heart began to race—this
really could be the kind of environmental,
balls-to-the-wall theatrical experience I had
always hoped it would be.
2. Collaboration
with the set designer
Rudimentary sketch in
hand, we met with designer Anna Lawrence, who instantly
started dreaming
up ways to
realize this
kind of 360-degree staging in the Waring
Jones Theater, a space traditionally set up with
risers in a proscenium
or thrust. Over six months of collaboration,
Anna devised a pretty brilliant set which,
to her great
credit,
renders her work invisible: she stripped
the Waring Jones of all
its usual trappings, leaving a bare space
with a small stage for the band, and ramshackle
audience seating
around which the action unfolds in every
corner.
3. Collaboration with the performers
Our dreams for the
space obviously created a huge challenge for the actors.
Working
in our
small
rehearsal studio,
Randy wisely chose not to focus too much
on blocking—to
use this time to find the emotional and
narrative arcs of each scene and the
play as a whole. By the time we transferred
to the theater, the actors were grounded
in the intimacy of each scene. But none
of us—not me, not Randy,
nor the actors—had any sense yet
of how this work would translate into
a space where every single audience
member would be seeing the scene from
a different angle.
Of course, this would
not have been possible without a team
of actors who were game
for this grand experiment,
who were willing to take on faith that
their hard work would translate into
the unconventional
space.
And
in the
case of the marvelous Annie Enneking,
she had the toughest task: as Gertrude,
she
had to
find her
way into the
monologues and songs, all of which are
written as if delivered to
a live audience.
But of course, while
we could imagine and project how a real audience might
react,
there was
really no way
of knowing
until our first preview. Annie was
pretty stunning in rehearsal throughout the
entire process,
but on preview
night she
became Gertrude. Hassling the audience,
throwing barbs, flirting with the front
row—her performance was
fearsome and had me in stitches.
4.
Accept that you really have no idea
what it’s
going to be like until… well,
until the audience is there.
In this
process I realized that what I created
could only be a blueprint
for the
theatrical
event—we could
plan and scheme for months (years!),
but the piece as written really wouldn’t
exist until Annie stepped out on that
stage and looked the audience square
in the eye.
That she was able to do
this so confidently and thrillingly
is a great testament
to her talent
and trust, and
also to the hard work and (dare I say
it?) outside-the-box thinking of my
collaborators Randy and Anna.
By choosing the environmental
staging, we sacrificed one of the most
reliable tools of art-making: the ability
to control
how the audience
sees
what they see. By taking this away
from us, Anna’s
space demands that both actors and
audience remain alive to each other’s
presence at every moment.
And the audience—so
far, they’ve come out
for it. They laughed. They heckled. I’m even told
that that one or two of them cried. But most importantly
for the life of the piece—they were there. In the room. With Annie. And
so for the first time, Gertrude could
really speak. |
