A Farewell from Lemon…

“…I really feel I’ve had a great life, because of what I’ve learned from the people I knew.”

– Lemon, “Aunt Dan & Lemon”

At the end of this wonderful adventure with “Aunt Dan & Lemon”, this line is one that leaves the strongest impression, as we finish yet another chapter in the BackStage family story.

I thought about all the lines of logic and argument Lemon and Dan share with the audience, the political, moral, and social considerations and challenges Wallace Shawn presents, and the obvious “family” issues present in Lemon’s childhood.

But as I pondered how I wanted to say goodbye and what words would best convey my feelings about this incomparable experience, what I am left with is the family I gained through this production – “the people I knew”.

Matthew Reeder, Artistic Director of BackStage Theatre, and our fearless leader for “Aunt Dan & Lemon” taught me to have faith in not knowing.  To trust the unseen, the formidable “gray”, and know the truth lies within.

Brenda Barrie showed me an artist’s path that exemplified grace and poise.  Her questions or times where the journey to Dan was less clear were never larger than her quiet strength and determination.

Ron Kuzava is a warrior – an actor who never let a personal challenge interfere with finding and gloriously executing a role made for him.

Eric Paskey is fearless.  Let me tell you, this man knows how to play. He spent many nights in rehearsal owning the room and setting, then raising, the bar for fun.

Anita Deely is an actor that lives in the present – all the time.  I learned how to accept each rehearsal and performance for their own splendid individuality, accomplishment, and success – and released expectation for empty duplications.

Caitlin Emmons reminded me to see things new – from the beginning of an actors’ journey – with anticipation and excitement.  She is eager to learn and wise beyond her years as a result of her brave vulnerability.

Michael Reyes is a force of positivity.  He took each day and saw its gifts.  Our strides and growth as a family were constantly celebrated by him, and our mistakes were brushed away with love.

Jen Poulin, Heath Hays, Brandon Wardell, Tom Haigh, Joanna Melville, Elise Kauzlaric, Geoff Coates & Megan Frei created a magical world for us, and generously listened and addressed every concern and idea.  The ability these artists possess to see a world from several new lenses and then collaborate, bringing the best of each to an astonishing collective whole, reminded me of every piece’s value – seen and unseen.

Our board and donors, our staff, our subscribers – you showed us commitment and dedication in the midst of uncertainty with this controversial play.  Your championing of BackStage Theatre humbles me to be a part of such a strongly supported vision.

Part of finishing a story is accepting you’ve reached the end, but the amazing thing is that still, in my memory, what I’ve learned from the family of “Aunt Dan & Lemon” will continue on and on…

And I will be forever grateful.

Rebekah Ward-Hays

I admit with a certain amount of professional anxiety that I am about to embark upon a theatrical journey that scares the life out of me.  Here I am, sitting at my desk just hours before the first read-through of Aunt Dan and Lemon, nursing the feeling that already, this play has executed a kind of preemptive strike upon my artistic sensibilities and has, to a certain degree, prevailed. It is very disconcerting for a director to stare at a script that he has read a zillion times over and still have so many damned unanswered questions.

When they are staged, Wallace Shawn’s rarely-produced plays tend to garner a lot of critical praise, but John Simon, critic for New York Magazine, famously hates this play. And on a surface level, his criticisms have merit. Aunt Dan and Lemon seems to be completely unconcerned with the universal rules of playwriting. The play has nothing that might resemble traditional dramatic action, has little dramatic conflict and offers very little in the way of answers for the myriad questions it raises throughout the course of the evening.

And yet, after that very first reading nearly a year ago, I was left absolutely gobsmacked at the final page.  This play has no right to be as compelling as it is.  It has no right to succeed.

After several weeks of attempting to invent for myself a million pragmatic reasons why programming this play would be a huge mistake, I brought this play to our ensemble for a reading.  The truth is, those well-formed, pragmatic excuses were steadily losing the battle against the ghostly whispers that lingered in the crevices of my brain every time I read the thing.  The ensemble reading was, I guess, an attempt to excorsize those whispers, so I could shelf this beast and move on.  It couldn’t possibly hold up in a reading.

But of course, it backfired beautifully.  The ensemble reading was a monster.  This astonishing play was even more compelling and mysterious and frightening when it was read out loud.  What was worse, it was perfectly castable within our own ensemble and the play fit our mission like a glove and was easily producible on our shoestring budget.  It was a done deal.  There was no going back.

In the months that followed, the unanswered questions that linger around the edges of this play are still thick and palpable, and the question of its ability to “succeed” has made me question the set of parameters by which a play’s success is typically measured.  Does a piece of theatre really “succeed” only by engaging in the high drama of conflict?  Is a play “successful” only if it tells its story through riveting action?  I remember the mantra of one of my early playwrighting teachers:  ”Show us, don’t tell us.”

In most cases, I believe these Artistotlian rules of drama to be of enormous use to playwrights, and in most cases, plays with little propulsive action, little conflict and that offer very little in the in the way of stabilizing resolutions are doomed to fail miserably on the stage.  Not only are these the basic guiding principles of drama, but they are tools that we as human beings employ every day as a means to organizing our very real world.  What Shawn does by eschewing these typical rules of dramatic organization is remind us that real life is rarely lived in high conflict; that despite the constant influx of information from every conceivable source, sometimes the most dangerous ideas are passed in the form of whispers from people who are closest to us.

Come closer, this play seems to ask.  Step inside.  Listen carefully, and dare not to be spellbound.  John Simon is right:  ”nothing happens” on the stage.  But this is not an arbitrary decision.  Shawn, by asking the audience to listen deeply, seems to be more concerned about what happens in the troubled consciences and hungry souls of his audience as they are pulled closer to the heart of Lemon’s secret.  When Wallace Shawn claims that Aunt Dan & Lemon is “about the audience,” he means it.

This is going to be one hell of a journey for everyone involved.  It’s been a long time since I have felt so excited and so beautifully freaked-out before I began a process.

It is time to clench my fists and step into the dark.

I have been having a conversation with a very talented and once quite successful friend about his inclination to return to the musical theatre stage after an almost ten year hiatus in the 9-5 corporate world.  This inclination apparently resulted from a particularly potent burst of (of all things) shower-singing.  He claims (and I don’t believe him, but the story is better this way) that once he made the decision to give up the stage he essentially quit singing, cold-turkey, even in the shower (mm-hm).  But recently, his stage-diva heart broke through his well-crafted armor, and he broke down and sang his lungs out, and apparently something essential shifted inside and he suddenly and deeply and painfully missed it.

Since then, he has been timidly inquiring about the present state of the Chicago theatre scene.  His equity card is long defunct and he is carrying a ten year gap in his performance resume.  He asked if I thought he was nuts for considering a return to the stage at the old age of 35.

“Of course you’re nuts.  Don’t do it,” I told him.  ”Unless, of course, you can’t live without it.”

A day or so later, I found myself thinking about my own pronouncement.  Being the artistic director of a theatre company with very limited resources more often than not places the artist in the backseat to the detail manager.  Amongst cash-flow questions and budget resources, season planning, strategy retreats, rights acquisitions, casting, production staffing and networking, I find myself with very little time to remember why the hell I chose to do this . . . why I can’t live without it.

I can point to an onstage moment almost twenty years ago when my geeky teenage life was broken open by the first of a series of I-Can’t-Live-Without-This moments.  The moment occurred while singing the final bars of the “Moonfall (Reprise)” in the latter half of the Mystery of Edwin Drood.  Standing in the arms of a pretty teenage soprano, we blasted our untrained lungs into the darkness beyond edge of the stage.  And it was in that instant that I sensed for the first time, that perfect, widescreen silence between our final notes and the eruption of the applause.  And it was that tiny moment of pure, church-like silence that stopped me in my adolescent tracks.  To me, that silence was proof that something real and good had been exchanged between myself and the audience, and in that brief moment of silence, we had been somehow unified; sharing an experience that was full and warm and giving and true.  I felt generous and at home in that silence.  I felt I had given a small, deep gift, and that gift had been accepted with grace and humility, without the clutter of politics.  It was a powerful, deeply human moment of connection, and it spoke to something missing in my everyday encounters with everyday people.

Twenty years and two degrees later, that silence still profoundly motivates me.  And the perfect expression of that unifying silence alludes me, thank God, so I keep looking for it in the stories I choose to tell.  I tell stories in the theatre because the theatre allows a sonorous silence of unity to explode in a room full of disparate, noisy creatures.

It is difficult to talk about something that is without sound or color, something so rich and so personal.  But there it is.  It is why I cannot live without it.

So what I want to know is: Why can’t you live without it? I want to hear your story.

We reach the end of our final week of rehearsal-room exploration for “On An Average Day.” This has been a breakneck process built around a muscular piece of theatre. As always, the director wants another week of rehearsal, but that is a luxury that we (like so may other smallish companies who rent rehearsal and performance space) literally cannot afford. So here we are.

And as the week comes to a close, as I look out over the approaching onslaught of a whirlwind tech process, I feel charged by the lingering snaps of dramatic electricity that have slowly developed in that tiny room during these last few weeks. Despite a full-blown viral invasion that eventually compromised the health of both actors, forcing me to actually cancel an actual rehearsal (a first, ever) the story stands strong on its skeletal legs. The actors are pointed headlong into the arc of this comic near-tragedy with strong hearts and hungry instincts.

Kolvenbach’s play is a delectible challenge: a visceral two-hander about two decent, flawed men who are battling to hold together authentic lives in the shadow of a mysterious and distant father. It is a play about men written by a man concerned with the increasingly inarticulate nature of the male heart.

On a technical, structural level “On An Average Day” appears to be a back-to-basics excersize: Kolvenbach has placed two complicated characters in a claustrophobic room, loaded them with a volcanic set of given circumstances, and set them loose on each other. And yet, there is something else, something spooky and intangible that lurks around the edges of this seemingly conventional setup. Something like a strange face in an old photograph, or footsteps in an empty hallway, or a sourceless smell. Something haunted, and theatrical.

For the last three weeks, we’ve been thrashing out the story in our tiny flourescent room. In three short days, we take that story, step into the dark, and attempt to turn it into theatre.

When considering the idea of story, any story told anywhere in the world, the question of origin always comes into question. Every story ever told contains both a grain of truth and the seed of a lie. Human tells story, human hears story, human remembers story, human tells story. Between the time that the human changes from the hearer to the rememberer and finally to the teller, the story shifts, taking on characteristics of each subsequent tellers’ history; their own sense of self. Certain details are either emboldened or diminished, and the thrust of the story shifts. The identity of the teller comes into clearer focus as he becomes a summary of the stories he remembers and chooses to call his own. The tellers’ identity is revealed not only by the stories he chooses to tell, but how he chooses to tell them.

“Memory of Water” closed this weekend. In one of the funnier moments of the play, the three sisters bicker over the reliability of a prominent childhood memory. Catherine tells the story, and Mary claims actual ownership of the story’s circumstances. Teresa confirms Catherine’s inaccurate recollection of the story. Mystified, Catherine cannot fathom this new truth. “You appropriated it, because it fits,” Mary explains. In spite of the fact that the events of the story didn’t actually happen to her, the story had become a inextricable facet of Catherine’s identity.

This is the way story infiltrates our lives. For as long as there have been stories and a campfire to tell them around, human beings have used the strands of narrative to bring order and meaning to our own lives. Stories provide us with tangible identities and ground us in a chaotic world. In the course of a lifetime, we collect the stories that float around us and put them to use. The way we use those stories says more about our identities than the origin behind the stories themselves.

At its’ core, a theatre company is simply an organized collection of storytellers. A very wise father of a very wise friend observed that the function of storytellers in a community is to unlock the grip of broken stories and to engage the community in working ones. Soon, BackStage Theatre Company will present its’ final show of the 2008-2009 Season. John Kolvenbach’s “On An Average Day” directly addresses the dire consequences of living a life within the parameters of a broken story.

We, as storytellers and as human beings, need to constantly reexamine our universal stories. To endure, a community needs new stories, and it is our job as theatre artists to tell them. These days we light our campfires from the grid and color them with gels, but we still gather in the dark to hear a good story.