Each month I am writing an article for ETC's newsletter that offers a little detail on our process developing the show. This is an entertaining pursuit, since we don't have a show per se yet, and won't really until production week. I'll share them here on the development 'blog. Think of them as a peek into the director's mind and an effort to keep all the communication open. The first of these:
What’s So Funny
I have a joke with some of my friends that consists only of screaming, “RELAX!” at someone who is already sort of tense. If the humor of this is lost on you, don’t worry. It’s probably more cruel than funny, though sometimes it makes the person being shouted at laugh and gain a little perspective on that about which they had been tense. It’s remarkably difficult to perform this joke on oneself, because A) people will think you’re bonkers if you randomly scream “RELAX!” at seemingly no one at all, and 2) when you’re tense it’s tough to focus on anything other than the tension. So it’s a real friend who will snap you out of a tense stand-still with a little homeopathic dose of cruelty.
Somewhat to my surprise, Zuppa del Giorno (ZdG) will be contributing another wholly original comedy to ETC’s season this winter (earlier in the year, it had seemed we wouldn’t be able to pull together the resources for this). Much to my surprise, the show will feature the returns of founding member Todd d’Amour and recent convert Conor McGuigan, who are each hilariously creative and miraculously haven’t made anything together yet. Almost completely to my surprise, I’m directing the show; my first time in such a position since working on every show since ZdG’s inception in 2002. We’re in store for quite an adventure.
For those of you who haven’t experienced one of our shows before - and, perhaps, some of you who have but never thought about how these things come about - a few facts: we start every development process, even those with scripted material, from scratch; the shows are devised and developed through improvisation and experimentation, often based on individual research on a particular topic or theme; the final product is to a greater or lesser extent semi-improvised. That last fact means the show is always changing, growing and unpredictable, and the only way to do that is to understand the show - not a script or story, but the show itself - in our bones. And that first fact? That first fact means we start with nothing: A blank sheet.
I don’t know if there’s anything that can produce a more paralyzing anxiety than a blank sheet. Writers loathe a block, and painters are famous for disposing of hundreds of fresh starts. In improvisation, too, we offer “givens” or variables in order to give a performer a few little anchors for their imagination; grains of sand around which we hope to grow a pearl. That’s exactly what I did in last month’s callbacks for a third cast member - offering up suggestions of a profession, location and object, over and over again - so the actors wouldn’t have to worry about impressing us and summoning a story from thin air. “Givens” are more a giving of permission than anything else. Giving “givens” had nothing to do with the good stuff that came out of our auditioners’ imaginations. That good stuff, like all good things, came from the nothing.
I can’t lie. (Actually, I’m an excellent liar, but you get my point.) The blank page terrifies me too. I find excitement in that terror, and promise, but it’s all always terrifying, and I’ve given us our own anchoring grain of creative sand for this show. All of our productions have explored the connections between the commedia dell’arte and more contemporary forms of expression, from situation comedy to silent film to the opera and Shakespeare, and in that tradition we’re seeing what we can do with another theme: Puppetry. I think there’s a lot of potential in this for doing new things with our uniquely creative and physical form of theatre.
We’ll start with several brief development rehearsals in the fall, when I and Conor and Todd - and our new cast member, Elizabeth Hope Williams - will dig around and fall down and find out just what’s so funny about puppets. I’m really looking forward to sharing this process with anyone who’s curious, and soon we’ll have a ‘blog set up where anyone can contribute a little feedback. We’re all in this together. So, if you see one of us walking the streets of Scranton one weekend with an anxious, preoccupied expression on his or her face, please remember to get in our face and scream, “RELAX!” We’ll thank you for it.
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