A year ago I attended a play at Freehold’s Black Box Theater
in Seattle called Web, a dark
reimagining of the Charlotte’s Web children’s story.
The play stimulated my curiosity about acting. Freehold offers acting classes. I took some
of those classes. In February our
instructor challenged her class to propose a performance for what Freehold
calls its annual Incubator Series. Two
of the students in the class submitted an idea for performing a scene
from an established play, one proposed a performance by his improv group, and I
submitted a hastily written play.
Offramp, a play,
about a panhandler at a freeway exit who is approached by an organization demanding
a cut of his take, was accepted. With
the help of a Freehold mentor, I found a director, a stage manager and five
actors. Through the month of March I
watched the words I’d written become a performance as director and actors sweated
through the rehearsal process. The director
was a little leery of having the author on-site—he’d done this once before with
an author who kept rewriting lines through the rehearsals. I promised to be a
passive observer eager to learn about how a director works with actors, and
that’s what I was.
The two performances took place this weekend. I can’t say too much yet about the experience
of watching my play because I’m still absorbing its impact. Today I’d just say this: If a year and a month ago someone had
suggested as we left the theater that I would write a play that would be performed
in that same Black Box theater, with one of the leading actors in Web having a role in my play, I’d have said
they shouldn’t be smoking whatever it was they were.
Life lesson:
sometimes the stream of causes and effects in our lives carries us beyond
what even a vivid imagination could foresee.
Case in point for me: Offramp.
No comments:
Post a Comment