I was leading a Patsy Rodenburg physical warm-up; at one point, I said, “Now slowly raise your arms up over year head, while taking care not to raise your shoulders as well.” Suddenly there we were, 17 of us, with our hands in the air in a circle, and one of the men burst out, “Don’t shoot!” It took us all a moment to recover from laughter and carry on with the exercise.

During another exercise, half the group sits to watch while half the group forms a line at the front of the room. Before I’ve finished explaining what we’re going to do, the men in the line all start joking:  “I didn’t do it, it was Number 3.”

We played improv freeze tag, each of us jumping into the scene and taking it in new directions.  There was laughter, there was dancing, there was discovery, there was learning.  There were moments when these incarcerated men, some of them serving 25-life, were free.

We talked  about what presence is, about how we all have it, but that for many of us, it gets beaten down, sometimes literally, sometimes verbally or emotionally, but that we can get back to it.  RTA believes strongly that we are teaching skills that will help the men to re-enter the world.  So I mentioned that the kind of presence (active listening, engagement, communication, etc) that one wants to cultivate onstage is the same kind of presence that will help with the job interview, applying to college, wooing the lady, etc.

I love it that I am able to bring some laughter, some lightness and some perspective inside those walls. Both the literal stone walls of the facility and the carefully constructed facades behind which the men conceal themselves.

And, scene.

Jake Mahler as Lysander and Denice Mahler as Hermia

Harley Granville Barker, a director, Shakespeare scholar and clever redhead, wrote, “Let us humbly own how hard it is not to write nonsense about art.”  He wrote this in his preface to A Midsummer Night’s Dream, which is a kind of nonsense that becomes art.  In no particular order, A Midsummer Night’s Dream is love, sex, wooing, (spoiler alert!) wedding, upsetting one’s parents, taking the occasional woman by storm (or at least by conquest), magic, moonlight, misunderstanding, transformation and all the domains that there adjacent lie.

We love this play, we produce this play, we come see this play because of the rich and multi-faceted ways in which it shows us how ridiculous we are and how essential love is.  Through the four social strata of the play (aristocracy, gentry, laborers and immortals), we discover a sense of wonder, a sense of play, the fragile relationship between order and chaos, the danger inherent in passions suppressed or denied.  Through the very structure of his language – from rhymed couplets to blank verse to intense shared verse lines and back again — Shakespeare shows us relationships fraying and fracturing, recovering and healing.

Many of us have made impulsively bad decisions in pursuit of love; we can probably all remember foolishness once upon a summer night.  Helena’s fairly clear-eyed, for instance, about the rose-colored glasses she wears for Demetrius: “Things base and vile, holding no quantity, / Love can transform to form and dignity,” but Helena wants Demetrius back so intensely that she is willing to risk her best friend’s life on one last chance at love.  Titania loves Oberon, but she’s not about to give him that Indian boy; petulant Oberon is quite prepared to force her hand by whatever magical means necessary.

Dreams can be wonderful stuff, but they often careen out of control.  Moonlight can be romantic, but it casts shadows.  Both can skew our perceptions in alarming ways, firing our imaginations to suspect the worst, the sexiest, the cruelest, the most frightening.  The line between a dream and a nightmare can be thin and full of fissures.  Is it a nightmare because it ends badly or wakes you with a start?  Does it remain a dream because it has a happy ending?  When or how does it cross over from one to the other?  A happily moonlit playground and a dark, scary forest can be bordered by the same trees.

Rehearsing with Bridge Rue, Daniel Stevens, Ronald Peet, Kevin Hauver and Stephanie Holladay Earl l Photo by Tommy Thompson

Titania's first entrance in performance

Dreams and nightmares are both difficult to recall in sharp detail upon waking, drifting ephemerally away as one struggles to remember.  Like snowflakes and productions of Midsummer, no two are quite alike.  The four Athenian lovers and Titania come to a new understanding through their experiences in the forest; they find their way to a new or restored love, even as they strive to recall the details.  Bottom seems happily unaware of his transformation, but his company’s performance of Pyramus & Thisbe casts into relief all of the heated emotions of the forest journey.  For all of the strife, upset and discord, no one has died; no one grieves.  The “story of the night told over /… grows to something of great constancy.”

The churlish Samuel Pepys saw a production of this play in 1662, and observed in his diary: “To the King’s Theatre where we saw Midsummer Night’s Dream, which I had never seen before, nor shall ever again, for it is the most insipid ridiculous play that ever I saw in my life.”  The play is ridiculous, but we hope it is delightfully so, and filled with the rich complexity, wonder and joy of new love discovered and old love savored.

Critical response

Since the show is touring, we haven’t had much in the way of formal reviews, but here is what members of the audience have said:

“That was amazing, and a little bit inappropriate.” – Sixth grader

From some college students:

“The company did a phenomenal job and had me laughing from start to end. It is one thing to read the play, which I have more than once, and to see the words just come alive as these people did was truly wonderful. After the performance ended my friend and I went to their website to look at future shows that would be playing this season. We hope to take a trip to VA, for another chance to see this astounding company perform once again.”

“My attention was kept the entire time; I have been to 3 plays on Broadway and didn’t have as much fun as I did here. I thought it was great.”

“It was fantastic. The actors were great, really involved the audience, never got boring. Even the intermission with the live band was phenomenal. This would totally convince me to take a theatre or Shakespeare class. Just seeing Shakespeare in person, as its meant to, really adds to the significance and impact of his work.”

“I adored the play and the company that performed it. I laughed so much that my face actually hurt.”

“After such an enjoyable performance, I have only one question on my mind: Can they come back again?”

“… I want to thank you deeply from the bottom of my heart for reminding me what passion looks like. What passion feels like! All of you have an infectious energy about you and I walked away from the first performance feeling as if you gave me little pieces of yourselves to take back to my dorm room. You guys are PHENOMENAL and I can honestly say that you have touched my life this weekend.  I am profoundly grateful.”

Miching mallecho

If you’ve been reading my blog or following me on Twitter, you probably know that I’m teaching a Shakespeare workshop at Sing Sing Correctional Facility this autumn, that the men were curious but deeply skeptical about Shakespeare when we began.  A few weeks into the workshop, I received word through the grapevine (the somewhat unreliable prison communication channel of choice) that the class was ‘boring.’ I didn’t hear this distressing news from any of the men actually IN the class, so it was difficult to ascertain whether the whole thing was a bad job or if there was a specific component that stunk.  I also heard this: “Kate said this would be fun, and it’s not fun.”

O, that this too too sullied flesh would melt!  I was mortified; I cannot disappoint these men.  I thought it was fun.  I had worked very hard to make it fun.  I had asked the guys how they were liking the class and the feedback had been positive.

By the time I heard the new news at the old prison, I was on my way out of the facility for the night, and couldn’t communicate with the men for another week.  I paced and fretted between wanting to up-end my syllabus to make it better (whatever that might mean) and waiting ‘til I had a chance to speak with the men in the class about the reports I was getting.  They would be reluctant to tell me directly, I knew, because they are so appreciative of the time each RTA facilitator makes for them; they feel it would be disrespectful to complain.

When the next Tuesday finally arrived and I could ask, I did.  There was a collective air of hesitation in the room.  I said, “If you don’t tell me what’s not working, then I can’t fix it.”  H. said that he felt he’d been misrepresented in the report, that he liked the class, but that the readings were boring.  Not the Shakespeare, but the supplementary readings on the Elizabethan period.  Phew!  O, the readings. A couple of others chimed in, agreeing that those readings were hard.  I talked about why I had included them (sparing them the details about how many articles and essays I had re-read, searching for the most succinct for them), but conceded that they could be dry.  We went back and forth about what was working (the scene work, the ‘up on our feet’ work) and what wasn’t (the dreaded readings, me talking too much).  And then we got to work.

I felt like I earned a couple of new credibility stripes with the men because I didn’t get angry or stomp off or burst into tears, because I discussed what wasn’t working with them, proposed some changes and moved forward.  Is it too much to hope that they learned a bit about offering constructive, non-violent communication as a way to change a situation?

Maybe the improv’s the thing

So last night.  We had a prosecution team, a defense team, a jury of five of Claudius’ peers, No, really, his peers.  Think about it.

I about leapt with glee when our lead prosecutor began his opening statement, with no coaching from me, by saying “The people of Denmark have charged Claudius – we won’t call him King because we believe he has not lawfully come to that royal title…”  He charged him with murder and with high treason.  Yes!  Where’d he get ‘high treason’ from?  Who cares?  He got it. The bailiff swore witnesses in on the text of the play, asking them to “tell the truth, the whole truth, so help you Shakespeare.” The defense team was zealous in their attempts to create reasonable doubt by suggesting that perhaps Prince Hamlet had offed his father.  The objections flew fast and furious.  Eyes were a-gleam with joy as the prosecutor challenged the defense team’s interrogation; “your Honor, the witness is a personal friend of the prince, and not a trained psychologist.”

I was thrilled because, with a little prompting, they were thumbing through the script to find the text that supported their arguments, and witnesses were testifying with their own words from the play.  Horatio completely perjured himself on the stand because, he said, he’d sworn to Hamlet not to tell what he had seen.

I don’t know if the opportunity to control a situation in which they’ve been controlled themselves contributed to their engagement, but they embraced their roles with enthusiasm.

It’s silly fun, but it’s also text-bound fun: you cannot prosecute Claudius unless you can engage with the text, find the language that supports your argument and ask the questions that cause the witness to quote the right moment in the play.  These men are now passionately at play with Shakespeare, their former linguistic nemesis.

We had to take a recess, but court will resume next Tuesday night.

I’ll be sure to post the verdict.

Fat chance, boys.

“Let’s read it again,” I say. “Let’s just see if we can figure out what time it is.”  We begin to read, going around the circle with each person reading until he arrives at a period, then moving to the next man in the circle.  After just a few lines, H cries out, “It’s midnight! It’s midnight!” Yes.  How do you know?  “Tis now struck twelve, ‘tis now struck twelve!”  Several of the men are nodding, smiling at the man who has learned to tell Shakespearean time.

“Let’s start again at the beginning, and see if we can figure out what the weather is like.”  They’re still guarded, but armed with the solidity of midnight, they begin once more to read.  Again, after a few moments, one of the men says, “It’s cold outside, it’s cold!”  How do you know? “’Tis bitter cold and I am sick at heart.”

A small knotted cloud of suspicion starts to dissipate over the classroom as the first scene of Hamlet starts to yield up its secrets.  We start to talk about why Barnardo has to ask “who’s there?” and the man who discovered that it is midnight says, confidently now, “He can’t see.”   Suddenly a raft of understanding about all the greetings and questions in the first 20-odd lines sails through the room.

Stand and unfold yourself

We’re up on our feet, with a freshly appointed Francisco, Marcellus, Barnardo and Horatio exploring Elizabethan staging conditions as we’ve been able to realize them inside a maximum security prison.  Fifteen school desks are in a U-shape, to mimic all the places where a spectator might stand around the platform stage at the Globe.  The grim fluorescent lights shine on the spectators as on the performers; everyone can see everyone, and everyone is engaged in mining the text.

The first pass is awkward, stilted.  Before we take a second pass, we talk about how Shakespeare tells us what time it is, where we are, what the weather is like only if he feels that we need to know, only if it is relevant to the action.  I tell them there will be lots of scenes in this play where we won’t know what time it is or whether it is cold because, in those scenes, it doesn’t matter.  So if we know it is cold and dark, it is to a purpose.  I ask what the men think that purpose might be.  M says, “You know a ghost is scarier in the dark.”  P adds, “You’re less certain of what is true in the middle of the night.”

We take a second pass at the scene, exploring the idea that the characters cannot see one another because of the pervasive darkness, considering how that might affect their movement.  We play with the anxiety that they might have about the possibility of “this thing” appearing again; how does that change the way they move? I am fired up, as I watch light bulbs of understanding flicker, then beam brightly in the men’s eyes.  They are having a good time, discovering that they understand what’s happening in this elusive ‘middle English’, as they call it (later, I’ll bring them some actual Middle English, so that they can see the difference; this, too, makes Shakespeare more accessible).

The rivals of my watch

But then something unexpectedly cool happens.  As I am pointing out that the characters are unable to recognize one another in the dark, and as we experiment with staging how they all immediately recognize the ghost, I make a discovery of my own.  How many times have I read / taught / worked on this play?  I don’t even know.  But I suddenly realize that Shakespeare – through the sentinels’ inability to see one another and their instantaneous, shared sighting of the ghost of old King Hamlet – is telling us that the ghost glows in the dark.  The men laugh at me when I enthusiastically share this discovery.  P says, “You’re crazy, Kate,” but an animated discussion begins about how we can show the ghost’s luminosity.

We pause in our exploration of the scene to hold ghost auditions.  How might he move?  What might he do?  What does the text tell us that he does?  We each take a turn to move across the room, or snake through the circle, some stomping purposefully, some gliding, one darting feverishly to and fro.  At the end of our first session, when we have tamed Act I, scene i, C says, “this tells me that the ghost is an important factor in the play and that what the ghost reveals will be important.” T observed that Barnardo showed great concern for his coworker, Francisco, in urging him to get some rest: “this set the mood of hard work and how a friend cares.”  The men were particularly interested in the relationship between the ghost and the preparations for war, and went off to read scene ii with an expectation that they would learn more about the impending battle.

Well, yes.  In a way.

“Setting a goal is not the main thing. It is deciding how you will go about achieving it and staying with that plan.” — Knute Rockne

How many hours each week are you working on your dream?  I don’t ask how many hours you temp or wait tables; I am not asking how many hours you bitch about how hard the business is or opine that you really could use some new headshots.  I am asking how many hours you build your career and make your art.

If you aren’t auditioning as often as you can and going to readings, or reading plays on your own; if you aren’t taking a class or working with a coach when you can afford it, or getting some friends together to show one another work or read together when you can’t, then what are you doing?  If you aren’t setting aside time to write if you’re a writer, or time to look at art or study the light if you’re a designer, then what are you doing?  If you aren’t writing the letters, sending the thank you notes (always send the thank you notes) and running yourself just a little ragged, then you aren’t doing all you can do.

And don’t tell me that it’s hard.  In the words of the wise David Ball, “Too many people will always be after your theater job (if you ever get one) for you to survive being lazy.”

Coaching

“With the right kind of coaching and determination you can accomplish anything.” — Reese Witherspoon

In the October 3^rd issue of the New Yorker, Dr. Atul Gawande wrote about coaching, observing that athletes and opera singers have coaches; perhaps he, as a surgeon, could also benefit from having a coach.  “Even Rafael Nadal has a coach. Nearly every élite tennis player in the world does.  Professional athletes use coaches to make sure they are as good as they can be. “

Except that there isn’t any policy or practice of having a surgical coach, so he had to invent it for himself.  His rates of post-surgical complications dropped steadily early in his career, as he gained in proficiency, but eventually they plateaued.  Concerned that he had only one worrying direction to go if he had stopped improving, he invited his former professor into his operating room.  He found this anxiety-inducing and embarrassing when problems arose, but as he listened to guidance and observations from his ‘coach,’ Dr. Gawande’s rates of post-surgical complication again began to decrease.

Opera singers know that they have to sing, even between gigs, to keep in voice.  Dr. Gawande mentions in his article that when she is preparing for a concert, Renée Fleming works with her coach several times a week.  Instrumental musicians practice every day, usually for hours.  Dancers go to class several mornings a week.  Even weekend warriors get to the gym 3-4 times each week to stay strong and fit.

Among performing artists, it is principally actors who don’t have a regimen to work every day.  Whether that be doing one’s vocal warm-up or actually acting.  A dear (and thoughtfully engaged) actress friend told me recently that it has never occurred to her to take a class because when she was a conservatory undergrad, her teachers told her and her classmates that by the time they graduated, they would ‘know everything and never need another class.’  The professional negligence implicit in the attitude of these particular conservatory instructors is outweighed only by their gob-smacking arrogance.  (My friend confided this to me, incidentally, while asking for coaching, having realized that she did not, in fact, know all there was to know about acting.)

If Rafael Nadal has a coach, and if Renée Fleming has a coach, you may benefit from the insights of an outside eye, too.  For the observations and the guidance, but also for the structure, the regular commitment to do the work.  Coach with someone like me if and when you can, but this isn’t about money; this is about discipline, readiness and fitness.  If you want a life in the theatre, put as much time into the theatre as you put into the survival job.

Get strategic about your career

What’s your plan?  How are you going to get there?  Where do you want to be in six months?  Where does that mean you need to be in a month?  What does the require you to accomplish this week?

You can build this into your schedule.  You can organize a play reading once a week or reserve a seat for whatever’s being read at New Dramatists.  You can take twenty minutes each morning to do a vocal warm-up; you can run through your monologues two evenings a week.  You can set aside two hours to write thank you postcards and to send out letters.  If you cannot afford it weekly, you could book time with an acting coach once a month, or participate in a group such as the Shakespeare Forum, which is ‘pay what you can, everyone chips in’ workshop.

Work, audition, rehearse, read, analyze, train, coach.  Whatever you do, put time into being as good as you can be, so that you are ready and truly able to take advantage of that lucky break, if you are lucky enough to get one.

Rehearsing Helena (Bridge Rue), Hermia (Denice Mahler) and Lysander (Jake Mahler) on the Blackfriars' stage; photo by Michael Amendola

Repertory meets the rubber meets the road

Of course, the day before we started rehearsals for MND, the troupe had their second dress rehearsal for The Winter’s Tale, and one day during our process, we stopped work on MND so that they could have a third WT dress rehearsal (by way of keeping it fresh).  Such is the nature of preparing a repertory to tour.  I won’t be there when the first performances happen, in early September, although I will definitely parachute in to see the production on the road over the next ten months.

All of this makes it just a little bit harder for me as a director to let go of my — uh, the show. One of my great joys, once I know the actors have got the show on the run, is to watch the audience watch the play.  To see what lands with them, to see where we missed, where I might want to go back and tweak a bit.  We had an audience of about 30 people at our second dress last Thursday morning, and I am delighted to report that they laughed until they wept more than once during the play.  Which is what I really want to discuss.

Recovering the joy, all kinds of it

Part of what draws me to ASC is that the company and I share a love of the text and an aversion to the cultural church approach to the plays.

The American Shakespeare Center is all about recovering the joy in Shakespeare.  The company has a devout commitment to Shakespeare’s text and to the mission of connecting that text to modern audiences; one of the salient ingredients in creating that connection is joy.  They (we) stage Shakespeare’s plays using Shakespeare’s staging conditions, which invite the audience into the action.  Not in a ‘tweet while you watch’ kind of way, but in a ‘get sucked into the storytelling’ kind of way.  At ASC, they ‘do it with the lights on’, meaning that the audience is lit by the same light that shines on the actors, facilitating 360° eye contact, which restores the soliloquy (amongst other moments) to its original value of exchange between actor and audience.

When Artistic Director Jim Warren first asked me to return to ASC this season, my heart broke just a little because I love love love working at ASC but I was not particularly keen to direct Midsummer.  Like most of the people reading this post, I imagine, I’ve seen too many mediocre productions of the play where the actors bang mercilessly on the rhyme, slaves (not collaborators) to the iamb; where Titania and Oberon stop to recite rather than act; where Puck is just odd without paying attention to the clues in the text.  As I dove headlong into my preparation and research, I discovered that there were certain speeches or moments in the play that I couldn’t recall seeing staged to my satisfaction.  These moments of disappointment became the kernel of my approach to directing the play.  I was determined to revivify these moments, to make them active, to make them cohere and, yes, jump.

As I worked with the actors playing Titania and Oberon to eschew magical, breathy, Liv Tyler / Middle Earth declamation in favor of using their heightened language to passionately pursue what they want from one another, as I collaborated with the actors playing the four lovers to discover how each character uses the language differently to achieve their desires, as we all dove into the world of the play, I discovered that I am not anything like bored with this nearly perfect play.  On the contrary, the reason we keep doing it is because it is so good.  I was blaming the faults of myriad productions on the play itself.  My rehearsal process at ASC, while seeking to recover the joy for the audiences around the country, helped me to recover the joy, too.

It is easy to get cynical about producing A Midsummer Night’s Dream or A Christmas Carol, but we don’t just produce them because they make for good box office.  Unpack that cashbox a minute:  people buy tickets to these plays because they love them.  A Midsummer Night’s Dream is gateway Shakespeare:  if people have a ‘helpless laughter, tears of joy streaming down their face’ experience with this play, they’ll come back to see more challenging pieces.

We love this play, we produce this play, we come see this play because of the rich and multi-faceted ways in which it shows us how ridiculous we are and how essential love is.  Through the four social strata of the play (aristocracy, gentry, laborers and immortals), we discover a sense of wonder, a sense of play, the fragile relationship between order and chaos, the danger inherent in passions suppressed or denied.  Even the misguided performance of Pyramus & Thisbe by Peter Quince’s little troupe teaches us not to take the events in the forest too seriously: everyone makes it back to Athens and no one dies.

Through the very structure of his language – from rhymed couplets to blank verse to stichomythia to intense shared verse lines and back again — Shakespeare shows us relationships fraying and fracturing, recovering and healing.

The four lovers (Patrick Earl, Jake Mahler, Bridget Rue and Denice Mahler). Photo courtesy of the American Shakespeare Center -- Almost Blasphemy Tour -- July 2011.

I was tickled to learn from a Shakespeare scholar and from a veteran actor / fight director that they had both heard things in our production that they had never heard in countless other productions of this play: the Shakespeare scholar said he had never understood Oberon’s “I know a bank where the wild thyme blows” so clearly and the actor / fight director said he had never seen Oberon and Titania engage with one another so directly, nor had he ever seen Helena fully register the risk to her friend that sharing her secret with Demetrius entails.  He also expressed sorrow when he realized that the play-within-the-play was about to end, because, he said, he just wanted to spend more time with these people.  Another actor who sat in on a rehearsal (they’re all open to the public at ASC) remarked that she couldn’t remember seeing a room full of such happy actors.

The Almost Blasphemy troupe will perform A Midsummer Night’s Dream at something like 75% of their stops during 2011-2012.  As we were finishing our last notes session the other afternoon, I entreated the actors not to become cynical about this play as familiar in our mouths as household names.  Because it is about love.  And joy.

That artistic director was asking me to tell him about my aesthetic, about what kind of theatre I want to make.  And I didn’t have an answer to that question as he posed it.  In retrospect, I didn’t have an answer to any version of the question; wide-eyed and hopeful, I just wanted to work.  I recommend being clear-eyed yet hopeful.

People are going to pigeon-hole you in this business.  They are busy and pigeon-holing, however frustrating it may be, is a time-saver.  Producers, artistic directors, casting directors and agents, to name a few of our hard-working colleagues, are overextended.  If they can come up with a short-hand way to think about you, that saves them time and energy that they can ill afford to spare.  Think this is unfair?  Then choose to have the tools to pigeon hole yourself.  If you don’t like that phrase, fair enough.

Choose to have the tools to brand yourself.

If people are going to come up with a reduced or short-hand way to think about you, control the discourse and teach them the short-hand that actually represents you.

Have an answer to the questions:  Who are five playwrights that speak to you, director?  What are five roles that you want to play right now, actor?  Who are your influences, designer?

Write your own tag line.

If Nike can just do it, so can you.  One actor friend describes himself as “6’4 of awkward grace.”  We know he’s tall, and the unexpected marriage of “awkward” to “grace” suggests to me that he has some poise as well as some comic timing in that lanky frame.  And it’s catchy.  A casting director can get that stuck in her head just as easily as whatever she was thinking: even easier, actually, because the actor has saved her the effort of encapsulating him.

Think about the work that speaks to you, that you really want to do.  What is it about that style, that genre, that composer?  What is it that you do that no one else does?  What is it essential that we understand about you as an artist?  What do you want to be when you grow up?  Make a list of your attributes, of what you think is special about you.  Then ask your friends and your colleagues for a few adjectives with which they might describe you.  Compare the lists.  See what words, phrases or ideas recur.  This will help you find your way to your tagline, and possibly to a personal mission statement as well, which can help to keep you focused on which opportunities you want to pursue.

Once you find that 4-6 word phrase that encapsulates your essential self as a performer, director, playwright or designer, put it on your business cards, on your resume, on your website, use it as a sign-off when you send that email or that follow-up postcard.

You are sending the follow-up postcards, aren’t you?  But that’s for another post.

We had two short weeks in impossibly beautiful Aspen to stage Steven Dietz’s Becky’s New Car — a whirlwind ride of a one woman show that happens to have six other actors in it.  And while we were in tech, the carpenters, pavers and gardeners were working round the clock to complete Theatre Aspen’s gorgeous new Hurst Theatre.  Designer David Thompson built some beautiful ambient sound cues which I never heard during tech due to the whine of saw blades and the roar of the earth leveling equipment outside the tent; I heard them during our first preview and thought, “Hey, what’s that? I think I like it.”

Reviews

Stewart Oksenhorn, The Aspen Times

“Becky, played with great accessibility by Sandy Duncan, works at — what else? — a car dealership. … Becky’s New Car has something to say — about mid-life crises, the balance between fantasy and ordinary, cars and what they mean to us.  But the fast pace, the coincidences and some good one-liners keep the atmosphere fizzy. … Duncan is a memorable presence … the dialogue is funny, the characters sympathetic, the story arc satisfying …”

Damien Williamson, Aspen Daily News

“Starring Sandy Duncan, and directed by Kate Powers, Becky’s New Car is a perfect blend of hilarious comedy and poignant storytelling, about the choices and consequences that follow for a middle-aged woman at her ‘fork in the road.’ ”

On the verge of donut greatness

How can I describe my experience directing Tracy Letts’ Superior Donuts with men inside Sing Sing Correctional Facility?  Thrilling, challenging, profoundly moving, frustrating, fun, exhilarating, playful, instructive, just like rehearsing any play with a dedicated company anywhere.  Except that it isn’t.

These men have all been convicted of serious crimes; they are incarcerated in a maximum security prison.  Most of them have never seen a play other than those staged by the group to which they now belong: Rehabilitation Through the Arts.

RTA at Sing Sing has a steering committee comprised of six men who are developing their leadership skills through running the program inside the facility; it was the steering committee that selected Superior Donuts from a short list of plays that included plays by Shakespeare, August Wilson and Agatha Christie.  Of course, they only told me that their choice was Superior Donuts after scaring my aesthetic socks off by claiming they wanted to stage a dreadful, hoary old murder mystery; they tell me the look on my face was priceless.

The process

We rehearsed three nights a week for nearly five months.  Sometimes in a room in the Sing Sing schoolhouse (think slowly crumbling 1940s-era cinder block elementary school anywhere), and periodically on the slightly raked stage of the Sing Sing auditorium with the cacophony of several other classes, church services and programs going on in the background.  Some of the men in the program are working their way up from functionally illiterate; some of them are finishing the master’s degree program.  Some of the men are veterans of RTA and have worked on many productions; three of my cast members had never been onstage before.  I was frequently reminded that habits I take to be self-evident had to be taught, such as writing down one’s blocking.

RTA is not about making actors or about great productions; a great production is a bonus and an opportunity to share a story and some ideas with the population.  The real accomplishment is in the journey each man takes.  They are able to develop critical thinking skills, conflict management, tolerance for different points of view, long-range planning, commitment to and follow-through with an activity; they are able to explore and experience trust in a scene partner, in their cast mates, in a director.  The RTA member playing the lead role of Arthur took a tremendous leap this spring in accessing his emotions, in processing frustration with himself, in working towards a goal, in leadership by example, in dismantling a carefully cultivated façade and being more honestly himself.

The RTA actor playing Officer James Bailey told me early in the rehearsal process that he had grown up in a strict household, and that he needed my help to learn how to laugh; the scene where he fought with his partner was ultimately hilarious, and then he had to discover how to hold for laughter.  He was strikingly candid about his abject terror at standing in front of an audience; he also said that next to the birth of his daughter, he had never experienced as much joy as he felt in working on the play.

The production

The men performed Superior Donuts three times: twice for the general population of the prison and once for an invited civilian audience of 270.  It is fascinating to watch each audience watch the play; the incarcerated audience receives the play very differently from the civilian audience.  Different lines are funny; different moments are moving.

My incarcerated assistant director tells me that if the inmates don’t like the play, they have been known to start shouting for the correctional officers to take them back to their cells: “Early go back, early go back; this play sucks!”  We didn’t have that with Superior Donuts.  The incarcerated audiences groaned in frustration each time Arthur lost his nerve to make a move on Randy, the ‘milky-gray lady cop’; they roared with laughter when Randy told her partner, James, that he is ‘like a fuckin’ after-school special’; they raised the roof during the fight between Arthur and Luther.  They recognized Luther and Kevin as people they have known or have been.  As Arthur says of Franco’s book, the inmates were ‘swept along by the story.’  One inmate spectator told me that he had been at Sing Sing for ten years, and that “this was the best play they’ve done.”  When I asked him what made it the best, he said, “I felt like we were right in it with them.”  The men in the play told me that back in the cellblock, there were lively discussions about hope, about the possibility of change, about friendships that cross racial boundaries.  Yay!

With the cast backstage, just before curtain

One of the actors in the  production told me that he thought the civilian audience would applaud if they just stood onstage and turned out not to be monsters.  I conceded the possibility, but told him that he and his colleagues had the opportunity to move the civilian audience, to share the ideas and themes of the play with them as well, and that they’d be able to feel the difference between polite golf-claps and true applause.  The civilian audience came to the production polite, courteous and expectant, but they laughed and gasped and I saw more than a few tears.  (They also laughed at the Starbucks and Whole Foods jokes in a way that the long incarcerated simply cannot.)

One unifying thread:  standing ovations all three nights.

Sean ‘Dino’ Johnson, an alum of RTA who now works with Council for Unity, has told me that on performance nights, the men performing in the play don’t feel like they are in prison.  They are rock stars on the cell block on those nights; they feel free.  The final performance, when 270 civilians arrive to watch their work and speak with them, is bittersweet, he says; it is exhilarating, but the usual post-show funk is enhanced by several orders of magnitude.  It is important and transformational for these men to be recognized by the civilian audience for their accomplishment, but immediately after the civilians depart, as the costumes are counted & packed, they are simply prisoners once more.

The next part of the journey

RTA wisely spreads out the post-show activities and plans workshops so that there is always a next thing for which to prepare; a week after the last performance, we’ll have a cast gathering in the chow hall at Sing Sing.  The men will prepare a meal to share with the RTA volunteers, and we’ll give them certificates to commemorate their various achievements, from prop master to light board op to actor.  A week later, we’ll have a processing session where we’ll share our thoughts about what worked, what didn’t, what we could do better, what each man learned, how he grew through the experience.

In Superior Donuts, Max tells Arthur, “People still can, can always change later,” and when Luther tries to shrug off his unseemly influence on 21-year-old Franco, Arthur says, “Right, because you and I, we only made good decisions when we were 21.”  In a room filled with men who made bad decisions when they were 18 or 19 or 21, we were keen to convey hope and the possibility of change.  Like the character of Arthur, who has cut himself off from the kindness of the world through fear, we wanted to share the value of possibility and transformation with all of our audiences, incarcerated and free.  Franco challenges Arthur, “Don’t you even believe in possibilities?”  In the company of RTA’s production of Superior Donuts, you bet we do.

Response from civilian audience members

“Kate, thank you for an extraordinary evening. I can’t wait to have some time to talk with you about the entire experience.   Your work on Superior Donuts was Superior Directing and we more than appreciated it. So thank you and big congratulations. You must be in major adrenaline drop mode. And I was thinking of those actors and their shift back to their other reality. It kinda made for a sleepless night last night actually. The whole thing was incredibly moving on a lot of levels, which I feel sure you often hear.”

– Actress Sandy Duncan

“This morning it feels like last night was the kind of experience I’ll not stop revisiting for quite a while.  I am so grateful to have been a part of such a special evening.”

– Barbara Wolkoff, SDC

“An astonishing evening, complete with an understudy going on in the role of Franco with stunning success. What a remarkable piece of work, Kate! I especially liked meeting the inmate-performers after the show, and being escorted by several other inmates to see their artwork exhibit. Rehabilitation Through the Arts sure looks as if it is fulfilling its mission.”

– Ann Sachs, Theatrical Intelligence

“The performance of Superior Donuts last Friday was amazing and powerful; you did a fantastic job directing! You really bring out the best in those men and you should feel very proud that your production could rival any professional acting company.  I very much wanted to meet the stage manager so please send my congratulations to Ace and the entire production team.  The show ran flawlessly and I am sure you know how much I appreciate that as a stage manager myself.”

– Lori Wekselblatt, coordinator, Theatre Design / Stage Technology Program, SUNY Purchase

“By the end of last night’s play, I was emotional in a very good way.  I think it was a summation of seeing your work, your work being amazingly good, everybody else’s work, it being very good and what I imagine was genuine change (which I think is rare).  I don’t know any of them, but imagine their lives sank to some dark lows and that society had given up on them.  To see the results of what happens when one (you!) gave them a chance was amazing.  If I were the governor, there would be 10-20 more gentlemen in free society today.  As much as I would like that, it’s probably best that I’m not a governor.”

– Curt Elsasser, friend of the director and mensch

Want to know more ?

• Rehabilitation Through the Arts
• We are Arthur: actor Michael McKean’s visit to our rehearsals for Superior Donuts
• Michael McKean’s Huffington Post article on his visit
• Jens Schott’s beautiful, comprehensive photostream
• Director’s notebook: Behind the scenes, behind bars
• Director’s notebook: Friday night fights
• Director’s notebook: Listen to a silenced voice
• Director’s notebook: Maximum security casting

I used to imagine that incarcerated actors would have no schedule conflicts.  That they would be available to rehearse at any time.  That they don’t have anything else to do.  I was as wrong as I could be.  I marvel at how busy the men who participate in Rehabilitation Through the Arts (RTA) are: they all have their work assignments, scattered throughout the prison, as law library clerks, gallery porters, chow hall workers, plumbers, recreational aides; many of them are in school, whether it is the pre-college, college or master’s programs; there are advocacy and counseling, mentoring and study groups; there are those wonderful, all-too-short-yet-sacrosanct visits with family and friends.

Cultivating patience

It can be difficult to adhere to a thoughtfully constructed rehearsal schedule because

• I might arrive at the prison to discover that some one has been stabbed, and therefore half the facility – and half the men in my program – is in lockdown;
• I might learn before I set out for the prison that the whole place is in lockdown, and that rehearsals – indeed, all programs – are on hold for the duration;
• One of the actors might be on a conjugal, or ‘trailer’, visit with his wife and kids; alternately, a couple weeks ago, one of the incarcerated actors in my show was ‘too worn out’ from his trailer to come to rehearsal.  Hold off on the nudge, nudge, wink, wink routine, though; even as the other men made jokes about how he needed the blue pill for his next trailer, he actually caught a terrible cold from his wife.
• One of the actors is on keeplock: he has committed an infraction, gotten into it with a corrections officer, or been caught up in a small anticipatory sweep, and is consigned to his cell 23/7 – someone else will jump up to play his part, but the freshly minted understudy might live in a different cellblock from the actor he’s covering, so they may never see one another to share info on the work;
• One night this winter, I arrived at the schoolhouse within the prison to discover that, save for two correctional officers, I was completely alone.  I sat in our classroom for more than 45 minutes of our precious two hour allotment by myself, wondering what was going on and whether anyone might eventually arrive.  About half the company finally did; due to an incident earlier that day, dinner had been delayed and everything was running late, but sometimes there is no explanation at all;
• The first warm day.  Hard as it is to believe on this snowy April 1^st, it was 76° F one Friday a couple weeks ago.  While the rest of New York City frolicked and flirted with the apparent arrival of spring, the vibe inside Sing Sing was decidedly wonky.  Warm spring days are no fun when you can only look at them through prison bars; everyone was disgruntled and unfocused that night.

Logistics

Another challenge when working with the incarcerated is the idea of follow-through.  Each of these men is on his own journey away from his crime and towards rehabilitation.  Some of them are not very far along that road, and others have traversed worlds.  I don’t want to generalize, but it is often difficult to get a swift and direct response from the men about the next steps in a process.  For example, getting our set built for Superior Donuts.  Oy.

Several years ago, RTA staged West Side Story at Sing Sing: the counter from the drug store in WSS can be recycled/modified into the counter of Arthur Przybyszewski’s donut shop.  Great.  How big is it?  No one can remember.  Can we measure it? Where is it?  It’s in this remote storage area of the facility, and weeks go by before a couple of RTA guys can get permission to go there to measure it.  We cannot determine dimensions for a whole host of other set pieces til we know what we have in that unit, and whether we can then draft, cajole or inveigle the wood shop to help us build the rest.  It’s a bit difficult for me to be certain who is handling this, who will get the answers we need.

The elements of production

In tandem with producer and RTA founder Katherine Vockins, I am become set designer, costumer designer, properties artisan as well as fight director, stage director and facilitator.  Every element of production has to be cleared with the administration of the facility and Katherine has a gift for this as well as a seemingly endless supply of mindful patience.  When costuming inside Sing Sing, one cannot dress the incarcerated actors in black, blue, gray or white, because the correctional officers wear those colors.  (So much for that concept production where everything is shades of gray, except for the sprinkles on the donuts!!)  The two cops in our production may look more like forest rangers than police officers in their khaki duds.  Clothing being what it is, namely, a potential security risk, an officer must be present for costume fittings.

The men can borrow some items from various locations throughout the facility, but about half the props will have to come from the outside, and will have to be cleared.  We can have no glass coffee pots in this particular outpost of Superior Donuts; heck, we have to get clearance to have some donuts.  In fact, most of the donuts will be papier maché, constructed and painted by RTA’s art class; we will get a gate clearance in order to bring in half a dozen actual donuts for each performance, for those moments in the play when they become practical.  Which is to say, edible.

I have to remember – and the warmth and energy that the men bring to our rehearsals helps me to remember – that putting on a good production is ancillary to our principal goal, which is to help the men express themselves, learn how to trust, to communicate, to build community, to work towards a long-term goal, to plan, to think critically, to collaborate, to help them rejoin the company of the larger community.