Week #11 : 'The Laramie Project' by Moises Kaufman and the Tectonic Theatre Project

“If you would have asked me before, I would have told you, Laramie is a beautiful town, secluded enough that you can have your own identity … A own with a strong sense of community – everyone knows everyone … A town with a personality that most larger cities are stripped of.  Now, after Matthew, I would say that Laramie is a town defined by an accident, a crime.  We’ve become Waco, we’ve become Jasper.  We’re a noun, a definition, a sign.  We may be able to get rid of that … but it will sure take a while.”  - JEBADIAH SCHULTZ

Matthew Shepard was kidnapped, beaten within an inch of his life, tied to a pole in the middle of a field and left to die by two boys – Russell Henderson and Aaron McKinney. 

The reasoning for this crime – Matthew was gay. 

The Laramie Project was written by Moises Kaufman and the Members of the ‘Tectonic Theatre Project’.  It explores the hate/homosexual crime of Matthew Shepard in Laramie, Wyoming in 1998.  8 Actors portray 67 Characters in this ruthless re-telling of the true crime that shocked not only a small town, but the entirety of the USA. 

Over a year and a half and six visits in 1998 and 1999, the members of the ‘Tectonic Theatre Project’ conducted over 200 interviews with people closely related to the crime and those who were living in Laramie at the time – whether they were long term residents or students at the University of Wyoming who knew Shepard. 

This allows an overall breakdown of the events leading up to the kidnapping and subsequent murder, the crime itself and the aftermath that was bought down onto the town and its inhabitants.

Broken down into ‘moments’ not scenes, Kaufman explains the reasoning behind this:

“When writing this play, we used a technique I developed called ‘moment work’.  It is a method to create and analyse theatre from a structuralist (or tectonic) perspective.  For that reason, there are no ‘scenes’ in this play only ‘moments’.  A ‘moment’ does not mean a change of locale, or an entrance or exit of actors or characters.  It is simply a unit of theatrical time, which is then juxtaposed with other units to convey meaning.”

All of the moments in the script allude to the content that will be delivered on the stage.  Moments such as:

·        Journal Entries (of the Tectonic Theatre Project)

·        Alison and Marge

·        The Word

·        The Essential Facts

·        E-mail

·        Medical Update

Allow the audience to easily grasp the situation and the types of ‘characters’ that are going to be on stage.  (I use ‘characters’ in this form as they are all real life people, recalling real life events) 

You could break down the events in the script even further and give sections ‘Chapters’ of meanings.  (I learnt this from Director Leticia Caceres as a good way to conduct rehearsals – You and the cast section out the script into these chapters and give them a simple title so everyone is on the same page when you are rehearsing a specific section and not have to use archaic phrases eg: “Today were going to work on pages 20-34.”  Instead you can create much more meaning into the phrase “Today we are going to be working on the Vigils.”)

The chapters that I have created for this play are as follows (This will give you a good breakdown of the structure of the play, which is very important to the flow of the production):

1.      Laramie

2.     Personality

3.     Religion

4.     Crime

5.     Realisation

6.     Deposition

7.     News reports

8.     Definitive Recognition and Repercussion

9.     Vigils

10.    Contrast

11.    Death

12.    Funeral

13.    Court (Henderson)

14.   After

15.   Court (McKinney)

16.   Statement

17.   Epilogue

Since each actor has to portray 6 to 12 ‘characters’ (and in the original staged production, portraying themselves in some instances) each character has to change on stage.  It is therefore specified in the script that the characters need only define themselves by a hat, shirt, a pair of glasses.  All costume items can either be left onstage so actors can remain onstage for the entirety of the production.

In a similar vein, the set needs only be quite minimal.  A couple of chairs, a table or two and the use of technology; is all you need to carry on a successful production.  It is one of those strong liturgical plays where the actors and dialogue completely speak for themselves.

“So how could it not be a town where this kind of thing happens?  Like, that’s just totally – like, it’s just totally like circular logic, like how can you even say that?  And we have to mourn this and we have to be sad that we live in a town, a state, a country where shit like this happens.  I mean, these are people trying to distance themselves from this crime.  And we need to own this crime.  I feel.  Everyone needs to own it.  We are like this.  We ARE like this.  WE are LIKE this.” – ZUBAIDA ULA

You can find out more about the show from the following websites:

http://www.laramieproject.org/

http://www.tectonictheaterproject.org/The_Laramie_Project.html

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u1qiTmF0p4A

http://www.matthewshepard.org/our-works/lp-support

Next Week: 'Philadelphia, Here I Come!' by Brian Friel

Week #7 : 'Equus' by Peter Shaffer

The 1973 play Equus by Peter Shaffer deals with the tragic tale about a teenage boy, Alan Strang, who blinds six horses in a quest for sexual freedom from his families constraints on his sexuality.


As the play develops, the other main character, psychiatrist Martin Dysart, tries to unfold what has happened that could forge an irreversible terrible decision in a young boy. As Dysart delves further into Strang's imaginary world, his own life is gradually exposed as stagnant and passionless. As the audience continues to travel further into Equus, we hear the disturbing and terrifying tale of Alan Strang, who, because his religious mother and his hypocrite father, makes his own religion based on horses, the bible and sexual deviation. 
Dysart, is not able to imagine anything like Strange has lived through in his young life as has completely lost his passion for his wife and who walks around carrying an unfulfilled dream about love and devotion.  Despite the horrific cruelty the Strang has delivered to the horses in blinding them, Dysart has an epiphany that this megalomaniac behaviour might just lead to a fulfilling life for some. 

Dysart - "A child is born into a world of phenomena all equal in their power to enslave.  it sniffs - it sucks - it strokes its eyes over the whole uncomfortable range.  Suddenly one strikes.  Why? Moments snap together like magnets, forging a chain of shackles.  Why?  I can trace them.  I can even, with time, pull them apart again.  But why at the start they were ever magnetised at all - just those particular moments of experience and no others - I don't know.  And nor does anyone else.  Yet if I don't know - if I can never know that - then what am I doing here?  I don't mean clinically doing or socially doing - I mean fundamentally!  These questions, these Whys, are fundamental - yet they have no place in a consulting room.  So then, do I?...  This is the feeling more and more with me.  No Place.  Displacement....."

 However Dysart's views have changed in the course of trying to treat Strang, he ends up envying this ability to create and believe in a religion with so much passion and devotion.  But all of this is to no avail as Dysart must confirm to the expectatins of his position as psychiatrist and treat Strang and reintroduce him into the community and an acceptable path that confirms to societal structures. 

Usually performed in a minimalist way, four benches are utilised in varying ways in the stage - As the pens for the hoses and seats for Dysart's office. However mainly in a square configuration within a round stage. This allows the audience to create their own opinions based on the script and performances, rather than the ideas represented though religion and the horses.  The cast sit on the stage and enter the stage area within the square when they are required or when the lines diverge and respond with the flashbacks being observed within the plot - Thus creating a philosophical idea within the themes of societal constraints (trying to fit a square peg into a round hole.)
As per the minimalist set, the horses are always stylised and not to be depicted as real animals.  They are used to represent the god-like symbolic meaning for Strang, his religion and the only way that he can express his sexual desires.  Peter Shaffer clearly explains in the notes at the start of the script explaining how the staging and the representation of the horses.  He explains that at no times should the horses be seen as a literal animal.  never should they crouch on all fours.  They must always stand upright and the effect of the horse needs to be mimetic thorugh the use of the actors head, arms, legs, knees and neck.  Pride should be taken by the actors to carefully place the stylised headpiece in front of the audience with precise timing.

Daniel Radcliffe (oh, dear young - or should I now say 'old' Harry Potter) performed in Equus for London............. To shocking reviews.... I mean, how dare Radcliffe get his kit off on stage (yup, 'Strang' gets COMPLETELY naked on stage to show his devotion to his horses), when he still is contracted with the Harry Potter films..... I applaud him for this decision. As an adult playing a teenage role in the films he chose the perfect moment to extend his repertoire and force his name into the spotlight within theatre.  Opening in early 2007 at the Gielguld Theatre in London, and then making a move to the American Broadway stage in 2008, the director Thea Sharrock chose well.  Her minimalist design captivated audiences along with Radcliffe's portrayal of Alan Strang.  The New York Times reported "Mr. Radcliffe has an air of heightened ordinariness, of the everyday lad who snags your attention with an extra, possibly dangerous gleam of intensity. That extra dimension has always been concentrated in Mr. Radcliffe’s Alsatian-blue gaze, very handy for glaring down otherworldly ghouls if you’re Harry Potter. Or if you’re Alan Strang, for blocking and enticing frightened grown-ups who both do and do not want to understand why you act as you do."

But I digress...

Shaffer has used four key elements within the play script of Equus.  The key elements to bring together this tale of brutality and religion are:

Forms of Greek Tragedy as used in the symbolic nature of the horses and the tragic-hero of Alan Strang... Or is is Martin Dysart?  They both gain epiphanies into their lives (although Dysart more than Strang.)  The horses are described as creating a chorus of noises and distortion that Strang furthers his religion and god-like facination on 'Nugget', the main horse at the stables - His Equus - his God, his Dyonisus.

Using horses as a central image and as a metaphor of crisis.  The horses move in unison and create choral sounds that worsen and relinquish as Strang's emotions fluctuate throughout the course of the plot.

The central ideas of religion and ritual to forge a meaning in ones life.  Strang uses the horses to further his ideas of religion that have been taught by his mother and grown distain with his father.  When Strang cannot perform sexually for Jill, he takes his anger out on the horses and blinds them because he has shamed himself in front of his god and religion.

And finally that the ideas of society and societal norms are the determiners of 'normal and abnormal behaviour'.  Both Strang and Dysart have set determiners on how and why society determine normal behaviour.  Strang knos he doesn't conform to society, so he doesn't even bother trying (I'm not sure he ever tried) and Dysart knows that to hold onto his position as a psychiatrist he must conform to society and turn out patients to what society has determined they should be after treatment - But does he agree with this??


Mockingbird Theatre in Melbourne, Australia just finished a sell out season of Equus at The Brunswick Mechanics Institute Performing Arts Centre.  Aparently it was a brilliant production for a company that is speedily emerging into the Australian arts scene.  I wish I had been able to see it.

Next Week: 'The Dumb Waiter' by Harold Pinter

Week #5 : 'Crave' by Sarah Kane

M - I don't want to die alone and not be found till my bones are clean 

and the rent is overdue.

A - I am not what I am, I am what I do.

C - No one can hate me more than I hate myself.

B - The fags aren't killing me fast enough.

These are the characters of Sarah Kane's 'Crave'. Four disturbed and self-destructive characters of interweaving dialogues where there is no clear ending or beginning for any of them.

It remains unclear whom is talking to whom, if at all.  Multiple conversations, multiple plot lines, multiple phrases of repetition, yet you get this unyielding feeling that no one is really talking to anyone and that no one truly understand what the others are saying.  Yet you get the feeling that each character really does understand the others.

The four characters, known only by singular letters, have distinct personalities and tones within the script:

A is an older man whom has lost his partner.  We are not given specifics to the facts behind her departure... He admits that he is a pedophile (we can take a pretty clear guess and to why she left).

B, a younger man is intent on killing himself with booze and cigarettes, but without it looking like a suicide.

C is a younger woman whom, we assume, was abused by her father with only her mother as solitude.  She is a sufferer of anorexia and bulimia.

M, an older woman, who is desperate to have a baby before she dies.

The premise of 'Crave' is.... well..... I'm not really sure how to describe it....  
The play really has no plot per say, it is a non conventional, non physical indication about four different characters journeys towards love, truth, lies, and self destruction... yet there is something about the script that draws you in, wanting to know more, wanting the characters to give up more information about themselves.  There is no location, no time setting, no tangible information to allow you to grasp onto anything.  All you have is this wanting to find out more - Who are A, B, C & M? Where are they? Why are they here? How are they connected? Is there even a connection to be made?
It is a fascinating and riveting play that allows you into the psyche of these four characters.

Sarah Kane, a inherently private person who wrote experimentally and with an uncompromising vision for In-Yer-Face theatre and it's forms.  She was heralded as one of the most talented playwrights of the 1990s.  Unfortunately, the world lost this prolific writer in 1999 when she committed suicide.  Mark Ravenhill (a fellow playwright who wrote 'Shopping and Fucking') labelled her "a contemporary writer with a classical sensibility who created a theatre of great moments of beauty and cruelty, a theatre to which it was only possible to respond with a sense of awe."

'4.48 Psychosis' (which was posthumously directed at the Royal Court Theatre in 2000) is often stated as her suicide note, but I personally think we need to be careful not to read into all of her plays as a layered version of her life and depression as we can often do with other poets whom have suffered from debilitating illnesses.

This short documentary (4 minutes) gives a fantastic snapshot of her and her works and their importance within the post-modern theatrical society.

Her dialogue in 'Crave' is less of a dramatic script but more of a tonal poem that is fractured and lacking direction of any linear form.  For instance, over 2 pages we are surrounded by the words 'Yes' and 'No' repearted over and over by all of the characters in no repetitive format.  Sometimes the characters respond to each other, mostly it seems they talk to themselves, infrequently you can follow a characters lines (disregarding the lines in-between) to follow a plot angle of a particular character. Each character also has their prophetic moments in this seemingly ramble of random dialogue. 

C - Depression's inadequate.  A full scale emotional collapse is the minimum required to justify letting everyone down.

A - Death is my lover and he wants to move in.

B - There's a difference between articulacy and intelligence.  I can't articulate the difference but there is one.

M - There's something very unflattering about being desired when the other person is so drunk they can't see.

Kane deliberately uses no stage directions in her poetry driven plays (she does use them in her more linear scripts - 'Cleansed' and 'Blasted', and sparingly in 'Phaedra's Love' - however they do not interfere with the dialogue and are more used in moments of silence and to frame a particular emotive premise).

Is this really true?
It takes an imaginative mind to work
towards a truly inspiring art form that has
been created by another imaginative person.

All of her five plays (and one 10 minute screen play) do not conform to the rules of grammar, but use punctuation to indicate delivery of the lines instead.  Kane had a clear idea on how she wanted her works to be heard, not staged.  

Her plays are tough, terse and troubled yet deal with a tremendous amount of compassion and drive.  (yes, I see what I have done there with the alliteration... I didn't mean it!)

Due to the difficult language and inherently difficult staging, so little Kane productions are directed that it was difficult to find a recent review of 'Crave'.  

The most recent production that I can find was in 2012 (the previous one was 2008) in York at the Theatre Royal.  It was played as a double bill with a Russian play - 'Illusions' by Ivan Viripaev.  Reviewer Lyn Gardner writes "... there is noting remotely cosy about this evening, which turns despair into an art form and constantly asks what it is that makes us human: our capacity to love, or our capacity to lie to others - and most of all to ourselves?

During Crave, the audience experiences a universe seen though a cracked mirror; Illusions begin with the expectation of a punchline, but as it continues it starts to feel as if we, huddled on the stage and staring out at the empty auditorium, are the joke.  it's like a bedtime story gone awry.  The threat is our inability to make sense of a shifting universe, to really know another human being and keep love constant." 

Sarah Kane's plays will never date.  They will endure though time and space.

Next Week: 'Electra' by Euripides