Last week I participated in an event called “Crossing the Lines,” a cooperative effort between Playwrights’ Studio, Scotland and the Arches. I asked my friend and collaborator Lottie to join in the fast and furious exploration of and staging of a scene from Debbie Jones’ “The Incredible Mercy of Limpet and Leach.” I chose this playwright because she’s a friend and when would we get a chance to work together? I chose the scene because it had two characters in it, it’s not terribly long, and I thought I could stage it in two days. Without money or time or very much tech I had to be extremely precise about how I was going to produce this scene study.
And after all it was just a scene study for the public. It was billed as an experiment of the “textual nature.” Giving a group of artists a chance to direct contemporary text in a way that illuminated the piece in a “new” and “exciting” way. At face value the idea is excellent – get a bunch of people who don’t normally work with text-based plays the chance to direct them. Its inevitable – isn’t it? – that their interpretations of the text will be unique, especially if their artistic discipline isn’t theatre or performance. The directors would get to choose whatever text they wanted from a list of playwrights and could stage it in whatever way they wanted but only on the condition that none of the words were changed. And the entire night would be framed as a “scratch” event, so the audience would have minimal expectations about the scale of the production values.
As a first go at this event I thought Wed. night was hugely successful. All the pieces were interesting, totally different from one another and probably quite different from what the playwright had imagined when setting down their text.Unfortunately all of the directors that night are theatre and performance directors so the approach was pretty uniform. I wonder, what if a dancer had been a director or a film maker? What if a sculpture had had a go that night?
Also, most of the scripts were unknown to the audience so the reaction to the piece could only go so far as to be a reaction to what was witnessed – and not how did the piece speak to/reject/illuminate/mar the text. So, while people seemed to have an emotional reaction to my piece and responded to it as a piece in itself there was only one person who was able to speak to the success or failure of my experiments with the text – the playwright herself. Because no one else knew the text any other way it was hard for them to respond to my staging as a staging of this text and not a whole piece in and of itself.
One piece was a staging of a well known play in Scotland and that one proved the most provocative in many ways because people had something to compare this staging on Wed. night to. They could say how it affected their understanding of/emotional reaction to the text because they knew the text outside of this particular staging of it. I think in future they should choose one text – a well known text – and that is the text the artists direct. That way we can see how different artists illuminate a text side by side. And if the audience is likely to know that text than not only will they see how different artists interpret the text they can see how their own interpretation of the text influences their understanding of it and reactions to these other interpretations. If the audience already has a relationship to the text they are more likely to find these unusual stagings more provocative. And they’ll be able to form a more critical standpoint to the experiment.
Another possibility for the event is to have the playwrights involved on the night so that after the pieces conclude there is a talk back where the directors and the playwrights have a dialogue in front of the audience where they share their reactions, thoughts, and questions about the text. This gives the audience and the artists another dimension to appreciate the extent that the piece was an experiment or how it illuminated the text and in what ways.
In its current form it only serves as an experimental process that illuminates the text for me and Lottie and in my case the playwright (the other pieces didn’t have playwrights in attendance.) I also think it’s critical they reach outside the theatre community and include non-theatre makers. But if they do that then they should find some resources to hire actors because by virtue of not being theatre people they won’t have Lottie’s laying around the place to ask for help. They may also not have any experience with lighting and sound and could use more than the allocated 15 minutes we were given on Wed. and might even do with a stage manager who could help smooth the way for each project by acting as a liason to the technician on the day, having visited rehearsals and spoken with each director individually.
So I enjoyed my experience and learned a great deal about exploring this text, but I hope that some of the dynamics about the event itself are teased out as they curate the next “Crossing the Lines.”
