We Don't Need No Playwright: How Ensemble-Created Work Is Changing L.A. Theater

Comments (0) By Steven Leigh Morris Thursday, Mar 29 2012

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Kronis and Alger have been working together here since 1999. Their insistence that the play comes first is a very traditional view of how theater is created.

Yet, while most of the script is set before rehearsals begin, the ensemble still has a chance to make contributions once its members have started working together. Alger finishes his play, which the actors may not have seen yet, while watching actor exercises. Observing the actors' movements and vocal rhythms helps him determine the rhythms of the script.

PHOTOGRAPHY BY STAR FOREMAN

Ghost Road currently is collaborating on a play about neurology and creative genius.

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"We withhold the script until one week into the rehearsal process," Alger explains. "One reason is to prepare them as an ensemble; the other reason is to give me a chance to make adjustments as we see rehearsals." Once the actors have the text in hand, "There's maybe 15 percent of the text that gets adjusted. Songs may appear, particularly if an actor has the ability to play an instrument."

But at some point in the rehearsal process, Kronis and Alger cut off all further revisions. "When you're making a new piece, at one point you have to stop fiddling with the text and work with what you've got, and in some ways that's a restraint," Kronis says. "At some point, I usually feel I don't know what I'm going to do with this text, but because we've decided we're not going to change it, those constraints can be wonderful. They can be annoying, but if you stick with it, something will come of it."

Something certainly has come of The Treatment. Theatre Movement Bazaar has been invited to perform its production at South Coast Repertory later this year.

If Ghost Road Company has the playwright work around the company, while Theatre Movement Bazaar molds its choreography to the text, writer-director Nancy Keystone's Critical Mass Performance Group is a combination of the two. Several weeks ago, Keystone staged a workshop of An Alcestis Project, her own reworking of Euripides' Alcestis — the drama of a wife who bargains with the god Apollo to take her husband's preordained place in the afterlife, and the husband's guilt-ridden attempt to follow her there after her departure. The group's other works include The Akhmatova Project (about Russian poet Anna Akhmatova under the tyranny of Stalin) and Apollo (making a discomfiting link between the U.S. space program and Nazi scientists).

Keystone has written the texts to all of her archly stylized productions, which come marbled with striking visual imagery. For Alcestis, like Noon, Keystone flung herself into the researched investigation of ideas about marriage, loyalty and mortality. The piece was developed in two weeks, at the start of which there was no script. In two intense weeks of rehearsal, eight hours a day, through improvisations and exercises, the director worked intensely on a script that aligned with the work of the ensemble. The result was disciplined and stirring.

The paradigm of a director-playwright such as Keystone hardly diminishes the role of the playwright as the final arbiter in the creative process.

It's sweet to discuss new, inventive models for creating theater, but to understand this trend fully, you have to follow the money.

Theater created with the heavy input of the director and the ensemble, in tiny companies such as the ones above, has lately become more recognized by larger institutional theaters and foundations. For instance, four years ago, Center Theatre Group received a $1 million grant from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation to support and develop ensemble-generated work, "because there was a general swell of interest in ensemble-created work across the country," says CTG's Diane Rodriguez.

This funding included a major grant to the New England Foundation for the Arts to support the touring of American ensemble work within the United States and Europe. Rodriguez served on the grant's advisory panel: "We're attempting to create a touring network for ensembles within the country."

The La Jolla Playhouse, one of the nation's pre-eminent regional theaters, has two programs, The Edge and Without Walls, underwritten by the James Irvine Foundation. These programs develop, respectively, experimental/collaborative work by companies such as the Builders Association and site-specific theater from the likes of L.A.'s Moving Arts.

This spring, Moving Arts presented its Car Plays in the La Jolla theater's parking lot. The event was a series of short, rotating playlets, conceived by Paul Stein and written by various playwrights, staged for audiences of two in a series of very small theaters on four wheels. Several cars were lined up, with a pair of actors waiting inside each. Carhops escorted pairs of audience members into the backseat of each vehicle and closed the doors, and the actors would play a 10-minute drama inside the car.

One scenario, for instance, involved a pair of Iraq War veterans, agonizing through the last minutes before the car was set to explode in front of a government building; the drama centered around children described crossing in front of the building, and the conflict over whether to proceed with the bombing. The doors then were flung open and the audience duo escorted to the next car forward to see a different play, while a new pair witnessed the car-bomb drama, which the actors replayed multiple times.