Production blog

Since we begin tech today, I thought the  home stretch would be a great time to reflect on the play’s genesis.

As we launch into the final phase of production, she looks back at the beginning.

GENESIS OF THE SCRIPT:

I feel like, when I first began writing Mouse in a Jar, I’d left little breadcrumbs for myself, imbedded them secretly throughout the text because I wasn’t willing to admit what they were and this was what the play was about. I remember the first draft had a lot of supernatural elements to it. They’ve been mostly axxed. What was filtered out of that was a dark magical realism,where a family’s experience is translated in their world, specifically their basement apartment.

The first thoughts and images for MOUSE revolved around basements, Slavic food and the subterranean, nocturnal, urban animals that enter your home, uninvited. All these things, twisted in a different way than we’re used to seeing them. The basement apartment was especially vivid, with its pictures on the wall breathing in and out like bellies. And a certain…other thing. That shows up when the house gets nervous.

For a long time, I thought Mouse in a Jar was about the frustration of trying to ‘fix’ someone who wanted none of it. Then I realized the story was about the fixer and her dangerous determination to ‘fix’ the ‘broken.’ I think MOUSE looks a lot at excuses for taking the ‘easier’ way out and what’s behind our ferocity to defend that choice. Mouse in a Jar follows the relationship of two women for whom each other’s ‘easy way out’ is directly opposed and directly endangering the other.

With Mouse, I was personally less interested in finding the cause of Daga and Ma’s abnormalities than in pairing these two very different, oddly-behaving people with warring definitions of safety in a place such that each of their own goals was reliant upon the other changing her definition. And agency is a choice; when one character backs down to let the other pass, it’s like sending her off to the gallows. And when she stops her, it’s intrusion.

More recent, drastic changes to the script occurred with the character of Fip. He began as an awkward, impotent man-child. For the longest time, his name was Boy. His awkwardness has since morphed to inner disturbance and his impotence is no more. He’s more of a challenge to the other characters in the space. I think adding actors in the workshops – we’ve had two different sets – did great things for the characters. I just wasn’t comfortable having an actor play someone named Boy. He deserved a name and all the other aspects of a person. And the actors’ questions made me honest. I saw in myself my reasons for shirking him and I worked to fix it. I gave him more story, more meat, more of a chance to do damage and greatness.

It’s hard to say, at this point, what’s my own and what’s MOUSE. Memory is fickle.And so much has developed in the play. And there’s always a third and a fourth to every second side to a story. I’ll admit to a lot of psychology in the characters of Mouse in a Jar coming from my life and the lives of those in it. And, of course, the heritage. But I hope to one day write plays featuring Slavic people and immigrants with the breadth and honesty that August Wilson wrote African Americans and Adam Rapp Midwesterns, Jose Rivera Hispanics, where I can create people that shared my experiences and my America without them being seen as members of my life.

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A lot of people ask why MOUSE is an important play to me, why I’ve been drawn to the text. I think I am more than willing to talk about how caught up I was by Martyna’s language the moment I turned over page one, what a visceral punch her text packs, what a treat her rich and complex world of rhythm, image and sound are to me, I am less likely to mention that I see scraps of myself in her story.

Now it is important to note that this is not a play about domestic violence. If it was the story would follow a more conventional path dumping us off at the moral: hitting people is bad. Instead this story happens to be grounded in a darker family dynamic, but the narrative investigates how these people chose to negotiate their lives against the backdrop of dysfunction, not the dysfunction itself.

That being said, it’s probably worth mentioning that I often come home form rehearsal with my stomach in knots because some of the work we do unearths shards of memory for me. A different time in my life where one false move only seemed to lead to another to another to another, until I found myself painted pretty desperately in to the corner not even sure what a way out would look like.

It’s a gut reaction as the viewer to boil these women’s problem’s down to victimization, but we are doing the story a huge disservice if we allow that. The truth here is that people are frustratingly complicated and they want things that often seem to nullify or eclipse other desires.

What is love in this basement? There’s nothing cheap or shallow about it. It’s got the same complexity as any other love, perhaps the stakes are just higher, perhaps there’s just so much more to lose here. But I would guess that’s not the truth, we all want the same things when we love someone, consistency, reciprocation, perfection. Often we will turn a blind eye to the imperfections of our partners or the complaints of others just to hold onto the dream of our love. I think it’s hard to admit how little perspective we can have in those situations, how much we will sweep under the carpet for a shot at connection. That’s what’s going on in this basement and sometimes those knots in my stomach as I bike home are in recognition of my own story and sometimes there about all of us.

Apparently, some Israelis make jokes about suicide bombing. After running with friends in The Race for the Cure in D.C., a survivor of breast cancer hosted a Not Dead Yet party. A good octogenarian playwright friend of mine – maybe he’s septuagenarian, not sure; either way he’s alluded he’s up there — makes frequent jabs at his age, using terms like ‘hospice care’ and ‘coffin’ with the same ease as I use ‘venti.’ Is he scared of dying? Don’t know. Am I scared he’ll die? Absolutely. But my concern won’t coat him in immortality any more than someone in the Middle East or the terminal ward can affect safety from his neighbor and her body by worrying.

So how do you survive day to day in a dark world?

By laughing your head off.

When someone is so deeply entrenched in a certain way of life – a dark life, let’s say, in a sinisterly magical basement apartment — she finds whatever treats lay in the trash and transforms them into tricks. They become armor, an arsenal. They become the stuff of dark humor – ways of diffusing the soul-shrapnelizing sadness of life without numbing yourself to its truth in the process. At one point in Mouse in a Jar, one of the sisters considers the most efficient vehicle for the rat poison she hopes her unresponsive mother will finally feed her husband: [Read more →]

I thought I might share some thoughts about why it is I love new work and refuse to do anything else.

I tend to work very collaboratively, and I get the most joy out of crafting a play with an ensemble of creative thinkers. I’ve found that the most collaborative place is a room full of people trying to crack open a new work. If you are lucky (and I am in this instance) you have a solid, trusting, creative relationship with a playwright, and for me there is nothing for satisfying than being allowed to act as a sounding board for that artist as they chart a path for a new piece. [Read more →]

On Sundays we have a special treat. Caitlin Parrish our assistant director, and also the lady in charge of our Guerilla dramaturgy, presents a half hour of something she calls storyturgy. I’m going to paraphrase her definition, but she’s described it to me largely as a jumping off point for thought and discourse. The work she brings in provides a variety of ways to get at the themes of the play from outside sources and narratives that parallel the work. It’s meant to open up conversation within the group and allow us to take a break and let our minds wander and free associate.

MOUSE, being a new play, requires that we approach the structure of all our investigations with some flexibility. The dramaturgy for this show is no different, and Caitlin’s dramaturgical mode allows for our actor packet to function much more as a living document. I thought I’d include her notes from week one of Storyturgy below. Feel free to peruse the links and imagine yourself huddled with us around a table watching Portishead videos  and listening to Caitlin weave creepy fairy tales in her exceptional storytelling voice!

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Thought I would share some images from our first weeks of rehearsal and our puppet workshop from the weekend.

At 10:45 last night my stage manager Cynthia and I finally found the right place for the table in our set after three days of adjustments. This has involved a lot of sitting and hmming, switching places and hmming some more. Right now the space is represented by a series of multi-colored taped lines Cynthia has carefully measured against the set designer’s drawings and some artfully placed folding chairs. I’m not going to give away the genius of Bill Anderson’s set design, but MOUSE IN A JAR takes place in a basement and Red Tape’s space is anything but a basement. This is all to say that despite what is currently a cavernous space we’ve zeroed in on our dank cramped playing area and specifically where that table lives in it.

It’s amazing what a couple of feet let alone inches can do to open up a space and create the right dynamic. It’s also amazing what this play continues to do to me as we dig into each scene and try to lay the physical groundwork of who moves where and why. I come in to rehearsal with a sense of the skeletal movement of the piece, aware that as the actors give my direction a shot we may discover that another set of moves feels better, or that the moment plays better a couple of feet or even inches in a different direction.

When a beat in the scene lands we can all feel it resonating, almost buzzing in the air. It’s a giddy energizing feeling, and after three hours of hard work last night we finished with one of those moments.

Which is why Cynthia and I had plenty of energy to move the table around the space for 1/2 an hour after the actors had gone, and why at 11:00 I started walking through the blocking I anticipate for our Sunday rehearsal with Ma and HIM ( a man the size of fear with no face).  As I was walking and talking about how we will try to execute his almost catastrophic entrances and exits, I realized I was going to cry a little. One of the things that has drawn me to this play is my overwhelming visceral reaction to the images Martyna has so artfully woven through the text. HIM is one of the scariest things I’ve imagined since I was a child terrified to leave my bed in the middle of the night.

I was showing Cynthia some of the movement I want to try with our actor Don, and as I was talking through it using Cynthia as a stand in for Ma we both got chills, and agreed the combination of a man with no face, and the pooling darkness in the Red Tape space was a little too much for the end of a long day.

To try and capture a little of Martyna’s extremely effective aesthetic I’ve uploaded some images she put together for me back in March when we first started thinking about how the show should look. I shared these images with our production team and they’ve used some of it as a jumping off point for our design that certainly gives me the chills.

Today will find us in the trenches of scene seven again which comprises half an hour of the second act. So much goes on here, so much is on the line, so much is laid bare that it can be overwhelming. It’s also an exhausting scene, the consequences of all actions reach a fever pitch and then must sustain that pitch before spectacularly breaking apart. I anticipate we’ll be spending a lot of time mapping out the network of betrayal, loss, risk and reward in this scene.

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Last night we jumped into scene three which comprises a good chunk of act one. It was our first time on our feet, our first time in the space, and our last night with Martyna.

Scene three is an intricate little thing. We talked about the quality of attacks these women wage against each other and how the underlying yearning to be allowed in and have a shared intimacy, leads to some truly cruel acts.

One image I came away with last night is of Daga and Ma, Daughter and Mother. In the act of pressing their advantage, one steps just half a foot over the line and the other, seeing a vulnerability, beats the first back into a retreat. It’s the quality of that vulnerability I find so compelling. As soon as one woman can get the other to engage, answer a direct question or take a definitive stand, they’ve slipped up. Allowing themselves to be vulnerable in the act of caring.

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