THE ROOM

          “There is a moment when the connection to the spirit that fuels creation is supreme. Some call it inspiration, My old man called it the room. It’s where the soul connects to the universe behind the mind’s eye and is transported to a place, where the greatest paintings are revealed, where the greatest stories are recited. And you could go inside the room and listen and see, observe and bring its gifts out to share with the world. The room is where you met the creator.” 

This is a monologue from JAZZLAND, a new play by Keith Glover. It received its world premiere in July 2006 at The Contemporary American Theater Festival. I begin my blog today with this quote because I have been thinking about “the room.” The room is very important to theater artists. Plays, theater, art, come alive in a room. The room is a spiritual, inspirational place. The room is where we tell our stories.

On June 8th we will begin the rehearsal process for the 2009 Theater Festival. Playwrights, actors, directors, designers, and theater artists will arrive in Shepherdstown to give birth to five new American plays.

Each of the directors have been meeting with their playwrights and designers, reading and re-reading their scripts, making notes, doing research, asking questions of the text, searching out details and making personal connections to the work. During this time each director begins to create  a mental movie of how they see the action unfolding. They are exploring the script and are making discoveries. The key elements usually arrive early in the process.

I find this pre-production period invigorating and creatively stimulating. I have learned to trust my intuition at every step in the process. During this pre-production period I immerse myself into the “world of the play”…seeking out the heart of the playwright.

THE ROOM:

A play in the theater is a peculiar convention. It is more than peculiar. It’s absurd, it’s ungainly, it’s awkward, it’s unbelievable. In our society as busy and playful as it is, three hundred people walk into a crowded theater lobby for the privilege of going into a dark room and sitting there for two hours while a group of people at the other end of the dark room impersonate human behavior. At the conclusion of this process, the three hundred people who have been sitting silently and motionlessly in the dark clap their hands, signifying satisfaction, and return to their regular lives. It is a peculiar activity, especially when you consider that human beings do not usually sit together in the dark for two hours motionlessly and silently giving their undivided attention to something outside themselves. To sit in silence and give their attention to something outside themselves is a very rare experience.

The experience of drama is one of those moments in which a human being sits in awe, wonder, and admiration of something outside of self.

When one is in this state, one is not aware of the experiencing self. One looks back on it in this way: “I don’t remember anything specifically. I don’t remember being worried or happy. I don’t remember anything except the general feeling of having been absorbed. I didn’t know who I was, I lost track of time, I didn’t have a care in the world, I was completely in it, I was on the edge of my seat, I was captivated, I was compelled, I was enthralled, I was spellbound.”

Theater people will endure considerable hardship and sacrifice in hopes of attaining even a few moments of this theatrical unity.

 

          Todd London writes in his book: THE ART OF THEATER:

          “ We are in a room together. We are in a room with black walls, or maybe in a warehouse with sides of corrugated steel. It might be a beautiful, gilded hall from an earlier century, plush draperies and portraits, the light from chandeliers crystalling off plaster friezes running along the base of a vaulted ceiling. How about an actual living room, where the hostess rings a little bell for the performance to begin? Perhaps we are seated around a fire or on stone benches embedded in the side of a hill, a sacred place rife with our shared history; this isn’t what you think of as a room, but the open world has rooms, too, and our presence here circumscribes one. Maybe we’re arranged on folding chairs in a raw barn or even in front of a painting of a barn on canvas hung at the back of an old Masonic Lodge; a young man from town, dressed as a cowboy, steps out from the side of the painted barn and begins to sing, ‘Oh, what a beautiful Mornin’…What is the first place you imagine when you read the word ‘theater’? Whatever you imagine, wherever we are, the important thing is this: we are in a room together.”  

Everything about the theater depends on its live-ness and presence. At least one person must perform and at least one person must watch. Everything depends on a real moment in time…a real shared space.

Ed Herendeen