(Left: a hand made poster from our first production in 1979)
Hi. It’s Corey posting again. I want to give you an inside look at several projects that we’re currently developing. But first, I want to tell you about an event that Sara Schwartz, our executive director, and I participated in just a few days ago. Along with several other colleagues, we were invited to make a presentation about ensemble theatre to the Arts Loan Fund. ALF is a consortium of the major arts funders in the area including the Irvine Foundation, the Haas Fund and the City’s Grants for the Arts program. This invitation is a clear signal that the work we’ve been doing with our sister companies in the Network of Ensemble Theatres to raise the profile of companies like TJT and the other 73 member theatres of the NET (TJT was one of the seven original founding companies in 1995) is working! The fact that some of the largest arts funders in California wanted to know about the history, the creative processes and the special challenges of ensemble theatre is a very significant development.
While the definition of ensemble theatre is naturally fluid, it almost always embraces the idea that primary decision-making power rests in the hands of the artists who, ideally, have been working together over extended periods of time in some version of a collaborative process. That’s what TJT has been doing, in ever-evolving ways, for nearly three decades.
Right now we have four projects that are all still in very early stages of development. We’re a long way from announcing any of these publicly. It’s certainly possible that not all of them will end up as mainstage productions.
First, we’ve commissioned the unusually gifted young playwright Marcus Gardley to write a play based on the story of civil rights activists Andrew Goodman, Michael Schwerner and James Chaney who were murdered by Ku Klux Klan members in 1964 in Mississippi. The names of these two young Jews and one young African-American have become emblems of the civil rights movement itself. We feel that theirs is the kind of story that needs to be told if our country is ever going to heal its wounded racial history. [see the works of the brilliant historian and activist, Manning Marable for more; as well as the latest from China Galland (yes, my wife) Love Cemetery]
In the early nineties, co-founder Naomi Newman collaborated on a piece with African-American actor/writer/director John O’Neal, from New Orleans, that examined African-American/Jewish relations (Crossing the Broken Bridge). It took nearly three years to complete but went on to tour, for several years, back and forth across America, often bringing black and Jewish communities together, sometimes for the first time.
Marcus Gardley collaborated with TJT artistic director, Aaron Davidman, on last year’s award-winning Happiness is a Dreamhouse in Lorin for Shotgun Players in Berkeley. Together they created a piece of heart-rending, yet ultimately hopeful theatre that galvanized an entire, largely African-American, community who had never had a chance to see themselves and their place represented on stage before.
Aaron had dreamed of working with the Schwerner-Goodman-Chaney story for years. When he first mentioned it to me, I marveled that someone who hadn’t yet been born when the tragic events took place understood the necessity of not allowing the story to be forgotten. I was nineteen, acting in a college drama festival when I heard that news and wondered why I wasn’t in Mississippi myself.
A few years after Aaron first mentioned the idea, he met and worked with Marcus. Last November we both saw a reading of one of Marcus’s plays at the Public Theatre in New York. I recognized in this young black writer who’d grown up in Oakland a kindred spirit. Though he often uses history as a source, he’s anything but dry or didactic. He has a kind of x-ray vision that lets him see through the shell of the historical record into the pulsing heart of myth and story that we can all recognize.
For the record, Marcus received his MFA from Yale, and has received commissions from the Yale Repertory Theatre, Playwright’s Horizon, South Coast Repertory among others.
As a member of the TJT ensemble, I’m very excited about the idea of Marcus being in residence with us to develop this project even though, at this point, I have no idea what my role will be in it. In an ensemble, anyone’s experience winds up influencing and affecting everyone’s. I love how porous our boundaries have become. In the early days we did everything in-house, but somewhere in the mid-eighties we started working with directors, actors, writers, designers from outside TJT and discovered that our center was strong and flexible and, more often than not, our sense of the ensemble stretched to include the so-called “guest-artists.”
Meanwhile, I’ve been taking a break from performing this fall in order to complete the “architecture” of a new, original TJT piece inspired by the history of The Group Theatre (1931-1941). In their ten years of life, this hugely influential company can be said to have invented the American theatre. Much of what we take for granted about theatre and the work of the actor and much of what still seems experimental and risky was first attempted, in this country, by the Group. Interestingly the most famous, eloquent and controversial of its founding members happened to be Jewish. These included Stella Adler and her brother Luther Adler, whose father Jacob Adler was the reigning star of the New York Yiddish theatre for most of its existence; Harold Clurman, the Sorbonne-educated visionary whose mesmerizing discourses galvanized the dozens of actors who formed the first Group Theatre acting ensemble; Lee Strasberg, passionate iconoclast who wound up creating the approach to acting known as “The Method.” I think there’s more than an arbitrary relationship between the Group’s commitment to a vision of a permanent community of actors creating a theatre that would enliven and astonish Americans from all walks of life and mirror back their deepest struggles, dreams and shadows and the Jewish identity of its leaders. In any place besides America, any time before the 30s, Jews like Clurman, the Adlers, Strasberg, Morris Carnovsky and Clifford Odets, would have been rabbis or scholars, scribes or cantors. Eastern European Jews had only emerged from the isolation of shtetl and ghetto a few decades earlier. The generation these people belonged to was still infused with all the pent-up energy that was finally being allowed to run free in the larger, American, secular world. At the same time, they had access to a long and rich tradition of study, of the sanctity and power of language, of the necessity to speak truth to power. So I’m developing characters – both contemporary and historical – and exercises on which to base improvisations. I’m compiling collections of quotes from the Group Theatre members, scenes and fragments from plays by Odets and others that were premiered by the Group and questions that contemporary ensemble theatre makers might ask of our artistic ancestors. All of this material will be explored by a group of TJT and guest actors in a workshop in early summer 2008 that will be sponsored by Theatreworks (the South Bay’s largest resident theatre) New Play Program.
At the same time, our artistic director Aaron Davidman has been researching, writing and workshopping a solo piece on the Middle-East based on a series of shattering interviews he conducted in the U.S., the U.K., Israel and the occupied territories last summer, often with “people on the ground” who are less concerned with ideology than survival. The initial workshop performances of this piece happened at Theatre J in D.C. with artistic director Ari Roth acting as Aaron’s dramaturg. Aaron will continue to develop this piece in front of audiences in periodic in-progress showings. There may well be some other workshop performances and readings as well, so keep watching this blog or sign up for email updates on our website.
I’ve already written about the Prayer Project, our long-term collaboration with Liz Lerman and the Dance Exchange and there’s nothing more to say about it right now.
Posted under First Blog, Uncategorized
This post was written by AkilahC on September 23, 2007
