Finding the
New Among the Old
by Christina Ham
This past summer I was pleased to have had the opportunity
to develop my play After
Adam at PlayPenn’s New
Play Development Conference. In a lot of ways this play
is a very old friend. In playwriting terms it means that
the initial draft was written some six years ago, but
it has had many incarnations since then as I’ve
struggled with not only the meaning, but the execution,
of the play. During the nine days that were allotted
to me at the conference the greatest challenge wasn’t
going to be the rewrites, but the struggle of trying
to “get it up” for a play that I’ve
met at square one many times before. It can be a loathsome
process with the possibility of no payoff (production)
at the end of the rainbow. How does one go in with fresh
eyes on a project that seems very familiar, but in a
lot of ways remains a stranger to them?
The key obstacle
that had to be overcome was trying to track the play’s
characters. This was in part due to the fact that I
had crafted a supernatural drama.
I thought it would be cool to explore this theatrical
medium due to my love of the horror genre. But how
do you dramaturg a play that defies the laws of the
metaphysical
when it comes to character and the passage of time?
While over time and many drafts I relished in the play’s
murkiness, it was during this past summer that I decided
to make some concrete decisions.
After Adam is
the story of two brothers that are reunited due to the
unexpected
suicide of their father. However,
as the play progresses, you realize that you have witnessed
the play from the point of view of the protagonist
who has been deceased since the play began, and that
all
of the play’s events have transpired in his mind.
However, at its core, it’s a story that deals
with cyclical multi-generational abuse, insanity, and
addiction
as witnessed through the eyes of this same protagonist.
As
I consulted with my director Jade King Carroll and
dramaturg Kittson O’Neill about this issue, it
became clear that I had to become an expert when it
came to the identity of my protagonist. The type of
process
that we decided best worked for the script was to do
an table reading of the play in which we “beat
up the script.” We went beat by beat and established
not only what was happening at that moment, but also
to establish when these cyclical events were occurring
and when identities merged and then split apart. When
does the father become the son? And, when does the
son become a father? What are the things that we inherit
from family that we can never escape? Page by page,
beat
by beat, I had to answer these questions for myself
and, when these answers didn’t line up with the
rules of the world of the play that I had established,
then
that material had to be cut.
The benefit of working
on a play that is somewhat abstract with a room full
of actors is that they ask you to
address things in a concrete manner. So for all the
times that
I would defer to more philosophical responses or
reasonings for why things happened the way they did,
I could no
longer do that. I was able to make clearer choices
for the play while not sacrificing some of the mystique
that
I and other fans of the play believe works for the
piece.
While I was able to get the script to a satisfactory
stopping point for the public reading, when I returned
from Philadelphia I took over a month off before
I went back into the play and completed the arduous
adjustments
that allowed me to reach my goal for this latest
rewrite. Only time will tell if another incarnation
of this
piece
is to come. |
