TTT Talks

One of my favorite things about working for Ten Thousand Things is getting to read the feedback from the audiences who see the show outside of a typical theatre venue.

With Vasa Lisa, one astute audience member at Cornerstone Advocacy in Bloomington remarked, “I am fascinated by players doing multiple roles.” That got me thinking about the ways in which TTT uses “doubling,” or the use of one actor in different roles.

Practically, we use doubling in the theatre for a basic reason. Our play is bigger than the actors whom we know most theatres will be able to afford to tell it. Economics is part and parcel of the doubling experience. And in many ways, the notion of doubling is intrinsic to how we approach adaptation—a novel, with its immense scope—will be simply too big to put on stage. It’s equally difficult to think about writing a play that has lots of characters without thinking that actors are going to have to take on more than one role. Read the rest of this entry »

The lights are off; the sound is light.

I thought I’d blog today about one of the unique challenges of writing a play for Ten Thousand Things—which is that the play is performed with all the lights on.

In a play that performs in a theatre, the lights serve to establish atmosphere and mood. A typical lighting plot for a play might have hundreds of light cues, many of them imperceptible, colors shifting mid-monologue, or the light moving from character to character in a scene to help tell the audience who to pay attention to. Light shapes both the plot of scenes in a “regular” play and serves often to guide an audience through the emotional arc of a story. In a Ten Thousand Things play, there are no light cues. Instead, there are the ingenious sounds that Peter Vitale, the theatre’s music director, delivers as underscore, transition, emphasis, and, of course, song.
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We’ve had several performances of Vasa Lisa by now. Many of the audiences have been all female: from chemical dependency centers, to women’s correctional facilities, to a teen pregnancy center.

This gender division feels unique to me as a theatre-goer. How many of you have been in an audience that is gender specific? It’s different than a mixed gender audience, the same way it’s different when we get together with a group of women friends, or our sisters—there’s an ease present in the room for women when they are with other women. (I think you can probably say the same thing about all male audiences, too.) I don’t want to get into trouble by generalizing but I do want to notice in this blog post how terrific these all female audiences have been. Read the rest of this entry »

The Hubb Adult Learning Center is aptly named, at least the “Hub” part of it (minus a “b”). It feels like a big connector for an incredible group of people from different cultures. The place—bright and cheerful inside—truly bustles with energy and what feels to me like good energy. As the seats filled up at this morning’s show, I marveled at the collection of people in the room: some ESL speakers; some needing to get their GEDs; all of them at a particular place in their journeys through whatever metaphoric forest they may be trying to make their way through. I wondered today if the show would work with this audience; if this audience might be able to find some common ground. Read the rest of this entry »

Writing a play for Ten Thousand Things Theatre is a different proposition to writing what I can only call a “regular” play, meaning a play that is intended for a usual audience in any other theatre. For one, it is impossible to write a play for TTT without thinking of the audiences it is going to encounter. And while playwrights might unconsciously think of their audiences (or more likely producers) who will put on their play, I feel pretty clear that most writers may say it’s stultifying to write with an audience in their heads.

And, yet, I feel like for the past months I have had nothing but imagined audiences in my head, considering the protagonist’s every move, wondering at her motives and perhaps seeing their own lives and struggles represented in some way. For this play, this imagining of the audience began at the play’s very conception when Michelle Hensley and I discussed the idea of writing something with a female at the center, a piece that might speak to both incarcerated women, women in shelters and chemical dependency and teen pregnancy centers. Read the rest of this entry »

The canary in the mine was my suitcase. The zipper broke.

It was 9:30am on Monday at Wayside House during the last week of our tour. The teeth of the zipper exploded at one end, and I couldn’t get my costumes out of the suitcase. No big deal. Nancy came to the rescue, because I am notoriously useless with any mechanical device, simple or digital, especially before 10am; but it was the first sign that The Gremlins were paying a visit and would stick around for the whole morning. One or two insignificant hiccoughs in the routine are not worth any attention, but when they start piling up, you realize it might have been better to stay in bed: lines were flubbed, forgotten, rewritten; set pieces weren’t moved and those that were sometimes got slammed into the low ceiling; when Audrey approached the cow Bessie at the top of Act Two, her tail fell off (Bessie’s, not Audrey’s) and she fell over either in a pre-natal stroke or the victim of a really weird cow-tipping prank; concentrations were muddied, some jokes fell flat, at times we gave up and just had to giggle; all-in-all, one of those performances when the cast feels like forgetting it ever happened and chalking one up for The Gremlins. It’s not a big deal, they’re Gremlins that no one else probably noticed; and really, you’d think they wouldn’t be worth dignifying in a public forum like this because they are so tedious and petty, but many blogs are for exploding the minutiae of our lives and the minor irritation they give us into a recordable history that will lie forever in the Bone Yard of the Web for future generations to excavate and wonder how we ever had the fortitude to survive Bigger Gremlins like War and Poverty and Famine and Pollution. But maybe we didn’t.

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A Day in the Life of Hymen*, the Newborn Calf:
An Udderly New Take on As You Like It

I bunk every night in the coldest place imaginable: the back of a rental van, stuffed in a plastic tub between pieces of aluminum bark. It’s not ideal, but I don’t complain about it, because we are not all alone unhappy; this wide and universal theater presents more woeful pageants than the scene wherein I play.

The goddess Nahn-cee made me out of felt and thread and stuffing. I knew from the beginning that I was meant for the stage, and I was proven right when, not even a day old, I was cast in my first show. I’m not one for tooting my own horns, but there’s no defying fate.

My day is short, and it begins lovingly in the arms of the goddess Nahn-cee: she releases me from my plastic barn and gently beds me on a linoleum or hardwood floor. There I await my destiny. And wait. And wait. Read the rest of this entry »

I’m certainly no expert, but I like to think I know the basics of comedy: louder and faster = funnier; words with a “k” sound in them are pretty reliable; a funny voice can get the job done nicely; the structure of three is the foundation of every good long set-up; but rhythm and timing can resurrect even the deadest joke, and therefore they trump everything.

But comedy also relies on the audience’s aesthetic disposition: what’s funny for one person is not for another. Audiences always have been finicky, mercurial beasts for the performer: there’s a “good house” and a “bad one”; some crowds seem made up of people who (honestly) say “It was so funny I almost laughed out loud,” and others who laugh at moments that aren’t funny at all, as if they’re addicts and just need the end of any old line to cue another fix. Performers need more than a paycheck to feel redeemed or even justified. We need the affirmation of an audience.

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Click.
Rattlerattlerattleslam.
Rattlerattlerattleslam.

Entering the Ramsey County Women’s Corrections reminds me of my first Ten Thousand Things show—Kevin Kling’s At Your Service!—eight years ago. When I heard the three sets of doors close behind me, I knew I had no idea where I was. This was a place that was completely foreign to me, as I imagine it would be to most people reading this blog.

Performing in a correctional facility strips the comfortable plastic veneer off one’s compassion, or at least one’s understanding of it.  I’d like to think that I am sympathetic to people who are in these facilities; that in spite of whatever transgressions put them there, they are a hidden facet of our human community and deserve my compassion. But compassion (to suffer with) implies understanding and that’s the rub that pinches any cozy sense of the word. I cannot understand what it’s like to live in such a place for months and years. It’s impossible. The three times I have entered a prison at the beginning of a tour I am reminded of that. Walking along the corridor with my suitcase of costumes and a set piece in tow, my understanding of compassion gets a hard kick in the pants: because I cannot truly grasp what it’s like for the inhabitants, my prosaic idea of compassion smacks of condescension. It is a world that defies understanding for me, and when one is unable to understand a thing, one mustn’t presume to have ideas about it. One must bow before its profundity and not tarnish it with hollow sympathies: give it its dignity and respect. And that, I feel, is a compassion that serves. Read the rest of this entry »

Final run-through of As You Like It in the Epworth Church Son Shine Room for about a half-dozen fresh faces: check

Mental notes of my botched lines during this run-through: check

Mental notes of my botched intentions: check

Mental notes of misplaced costume pieces scattered around the four corners of the playing space for the five characters I play (my responsibility): check

Nationality of the composer Antonín Dvořák: Czech

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