Bright Alchemy Theatre

Workshop Production of “When The Stars Go Out”

Sep 14th 2011

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This is the reason we’ve been too busy to update this blog in months and months and months. When The Stars Go Out (formerly known as “The Apocalypse Project”) has its workshop production at the Mead Theatre Lab at Flashpoint in less than two weeks. This is where we see if our investigation into the question of why we feel the need to tell stories of our own destruction resonates with anybody else. A reading at the Kennedy Center’s Page-to-Stage Festival suggests that it probably will.

September 23 – 25, 2011
Friday 8 p.m. (invite only)

Saturday 8 p.m.

Sunday 3 p.m.

Tickets: Pay-What-You-Can

Mead Theatre Lab at Flashpoint: 916 G Street, NW • Washington, DC

When The Stars Go Out is a sneak-preview, workshop performance of Bright Alchemy Theatre’s newest devised piece. Naomi struggles with the death of her best friend and impending motherhood while her husband, on a journey to the farthest reaches of the solar system, may never come home again.

Starring: Megan Reichelt, Brandon Mitchell, Christian Sullivan, Alison Talvacchio, and Gwen Grastorf.

Words by Stephen Spotswood.

Direction by Jay Brock, assisted by Cat Gill.

Lighting design by Kevin Boyce.

Sound design and original composition by Gregg Martin.

This performance is made possible by a Creative Communities Fund grant. The Creative Communities Fund is supported, in part, by Leveraging Investments in Creativity (LINC) as part of its Creative Communities program. Additional support is provided by The Community Foundation for the National Capital Region.

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Terrible Practicalities: Space, Money, and Text

May 29th 2011

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So by now some of you might be thinking, “Yes, this devising process is all well and good, but when do we get around to the theatre part?”

Soon. Much sooner than I thought, actually. And if that sentence sounds ominous, I don’t really mean it to be so. It’s my deadline-fear showing. Back in October, before we had meeting one on this project—before we’d even begun rehearsals for our previous production—I applied for Bright Alchemy to be a participant in the Mead Theatre Lab Program. The program provides four or five residencies per year to theatre artists, providing access to artistic advisors and two-to-five weeks in their small black box theatre near Washington, DC’s Chinatown. Along with that program, I also submitted an application for an attached Creative Communities Fund Grant.

I was told last month that we had been accepted for both. I think I actually did a two-arms-in-the-air-for-victory move in the middle of 14^th Street when I got the call.

And so Bright Alchemy will present the workshop production—the rough, fully staged, PWYC, soliciting input from the audience production—of its newest piece at the Mead Theatre at Flashpoint Sept 23-25. And we’ll have the two weeks prior to rehearse in the space. And we’ll have the funding to bring in the designers we want to work with and ensure that we can pay all our artists.

That the committee chose this project over several dozen others, makes me a little giddy. I had never written a grant before (and now that I’m batting a thousand, I may never again). And it was a proposal for a piece that, at the time, consisted only of a process and a question “Why do we as a species feel the need to tell stories of our own destruction?” But they must have seen something worth investing in, which means I feel just a smidge of pressure to live up to that expectation. Thus the deadline anxiety.

Our latest meeting is filled with practicalities. We discuss a timeline: when rehearsals would probably start, the likelihood of a reading at the Kennedy Center’s Page to Stage Festival, etc.

I try to pin down artists. While we’ve had about a dozen regular collaborators, not all of them will be available come September. However, many are able and willing, and having a budget means being able to successfully compete for their time.

And I introduce text. The first four pages of…something. How did I get these pages? There’s an article in the latest issue of Theatre Forum that profiles DAH, an experimental Serbian theatre group. DAH takes pieces of existing text and turns them into heavily movement based, abstract narratives. The article talks about how, after the group has created all of this material, one of the directors in the group will take it and arrange it into a finished composition. Like a piece of music, but with movement and a story, though not always one that resembles the original source material.

I guess my role has been to do the same. I take what we’ve been talking about: the themes, the stories, the topics that have provoked interest, even the mood of the conversation, and translate it into a theatrical text. That text may tell a wholly new and original story, but hopefully it does so in a way that incorporates many of the ideas we’ve been discussing.

Also, hopefully, it will not suck.

As a playwright, I hate showing unfinished rough drafts. Hate it. Working with Bright Alchemy, I have had to get over that. Or at least hide the anxiety manageably well. So, in the spirit of transparency, and with the idea that as soon as people began providing feedback online about the process they became collaborators themselves, I’ve posted those pages online…here. If you have questions, thoughts, creative expletives–please spew them below.

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The First Pages

May 6th 2011

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Here it is. A rough, possible beginning for our play. Maybe it will survive until the actual workshop production. Maybe it will be tossed in a sack and thrown in the river. Only time will tell. Your questions, thoughts, and comments would be greatly appreciated.

A screen flickers to life. It shows MICHAEL, an astronaut, speaking from a small space a great distance away.

MICHAEL

Is this on? Is this working? Can you hear me, sweetheart? I hope so. This camera rig is about the one thing on this ship I can’t fix, so I am highly dubious. But Houston says the signal’s strong and I trust the eggheads.

You been seeing the pictures we’re sending back. Amazing stuff. The Asteroid Belt seen from the inside. The dwarf planets of Neptune trailing streams of ice into the outer-rim sunlight.

Right now we’re…Shit, where are we? Close to Pluto’s orbit, I think. Five billion kilometers out.

We did a 360 today. Real slow. Just to test the stabilizers and knock some of the space dust off the ship. Got a real good look at Earth. Just a little pinprick of blue in the window. The size of one of your freckles. Shoot, one of your freckles would eclipse it. Just about swallow it whole.

You are so far away from me right now. Five billion kilometers. It’s just crazy to think about. Nothing prepares you for the scale of things. I was just thinking today that—

The camera shakes.

Whoah. Harvey are you drunk at the stick again! Sorry. Sometimes there are asteroids, but they’re nothing to—

Another shake. Metal crunches.

What the hell was that? Hang on, darlin’.

MICHAEL steps out of the frame, but we hear him.

What did we hit? Harvey, answer me. Did we hit something?

Oh God.

Oh my God.

The stars…

Naomi, the stars…They’re going out. The stars are going out. They’re going out.

MICHAEL comes back into the frame.

Naomi, I can’t see the stars. They’re going black. I can’t see the stars. They’re going out. I can’t see the stars. They’re going out. The stars are going out.

These words are repeated

and repeated

and repeated

The transmission is torn apart by terrible static.

NAOMI wakes screaming. She’s tucked into a sleeping bag in a dark room that’s not her home. Scattered around the floor are empty bags of junk food and bottled water.

NAOMI
Oh, fuck me sideways.

Wow. Is that what sleep is going to be like from now on? Those dreams. All the time now.

You know, until recently, I hadn’t had a nightmare since…since puberty. I did not really miss them.

Oh, wow, that was a bad one.

You know, I used to not scream myself awake before dawn. I used to take pills. Beautiful little blue pills to tamp the bad dreams down. I used to have long hours of unbroken, peaceful sleep.

NAOMI stands up. She is hugely pregnant.

I used to have a visible waistline. I miss these things. I miss the pills, and the slumber, and the wearing of jeans. I miss large glasses of pinot noir and tiny shots of tequila. Even though tequila makes me sick, I still miss it. You want some tequila, little fella? Just a bit? You’re sleeping. Good for fucking you.

I miss my husband.

There’s a transmitter, maybe as small as a transister radio. She turns the volume up. There’s a quiet, steady beep.

There he is. There’s your Daddy. About two hours away from leaving the solar system. Farther than anyone has ever gone before.

Yeah, I know. You don’t give a shit. Something else I miss—a semi-functional bladder.

NAOMI goes to the bathroom. While she’s gone, ELISE enters.

ELISE
Naomi? Naomi!

NAOMI
(from off)

Occupado.

ELISE
Sorry.

ELISE begins cleaning up the food wrappers. There’s the sound of flushing. NAOMI returns.

NAOMI
I could have done that.

ELISE
Please. If you bend this far, you’d fall over.

NAOMI
You calling me fat?

ELISE
I’m calling you enormous. In a beautiful, glowy way.

NAOMI
Elise, have I ever told you what an absolute puta madre you are?

ELISE
Not today. You know, you don’t have to sleep at the observatory. As soon as they come out of the Oort Cloud and we get video back, someone will call you. They can set up a feed in your bedroom.

NAOMI
Elise.

ELISE
You should be home.

NAOMI
My home does not have a 200-inch telescope with a linked Cray. My home does not have a dedicated receiver so I can listen to the shuttle’s black box signal.

ELISE
You can take it with you.

NAOMI

My home has a really big, empty bed.

ELISE
Yeah. Okay. But I draw the line at you giving birth here. I am not picking up placenta.

NAOMI
Dealio.

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Week 7: Planning Your Own Funeral

May 2nd 2011

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Week 7. Funerals are rituals. A really obvious statement, I know. But I wonder if we forget sometimes. That we start to think of them as capstones; monuments; dry and sober epilogues to the deceased. When really, they aren’t for the dead at all. They’re for the living.

Asking a group of highly theatrical people to plan their own funeral, I was prepared for grandeur and a little bit of irreverence. But they still manage to surprise me.

One actress is fascinated with the simple physicality of grieving. “I love the idea of a party funeral,” she says. “An Irish wake. You can celebrate or mourn. This great drunken catharsis.”

Another actress has an idea so lovely, that I want to steal it. “When I’m cremated, everyone who wants a vial of my ashes can get one. And they can keep it or sprinkle it somewhere. Whatever they want. Everyone who wants me can take me in that form.”

And one actor admits that he’s given very little thought to his own funeral or his own death. He’s always thought that he’d go out in some vast disaster that would negate the whole idea of separate funerals.

But he also speaks about how a viewing is very important to some people. To see the body and know that the person is gone, that their death is real.

One actress who can’t make the meeting sends me an e-mail ahead of time. “A Jazz funeral procession, possibly playing “Spirit in the Sky” at one point,” she writes. “Then a Viking funeral, where you put me in a ship, set it on fire, and send me out to sea. You may get arrested, but that is a risk I am willing to take.”

I am considering stealing this, as well. And, as I know she will read this: Megan, I promise to set you on fire if and when the time comes.

But maybe we’ll have discovered the secret of immortality by then. Our species has spent a good chunk of its evolution discovering ways to live on. There are the myriad afterlife myths, of course. But even the act of writing is itself a form of immortality. We keep breathing in stories long after we stop in real life.

And now there’s the Internet. That’s something we talk about at length—the idea of data ghosts. Many of us are Facebook friends with someone who’s dead. Some of those sites have been turned into memorials—digital tombstones that still fire off random postings written by loved ones.

And now, one actor reveals, you can hire someone to manage your data after death—all your social networking sites, your passwords, your blogs. Divvied up or deconstructed after you die. The idea of living part of your life online was a big theme in A Cre@tion Story for Naomi. And I suspect that dying online will play a part in this next piece.

I said at the beginning that funerals are rituals for the living, and I think the answers people bring support that. They foster grief; they bring catharsis and resolution; they act as epilogues, or prologues to some new chapter.

And they are the most symbolic of our rituals. The deceased is not really there. Just their body, or ashes, or maybe a photo. Their presence exists only in the stories people tell about them. Just like theatre. Chekhov’s characters don’t care what happens to the cherry orchard. They don’t exist. Only the audience has any stake in it. They’re who the ritual is for.

And with that thought, we decide to take a break. There are shows that need to be closed, one of which is mine, and people are scattering for Easter—a holiday centered around death and resurrection, and don’t think we don’t find this perfectly appropriate.

The next update will deal with topics far more frightening and serious than Death: Space and Money. And the first actual (potential) text of the play.

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Week 6: The End of the World Gets Personal

May 2nd 2011

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Week 6: This is the first week where there was homework. For the last two months, we’ve been talking about Apocalypse on the grand scale. Lots of great thoughts circling vast concepts of evolution and society. I thought it might be useful to start thinking on the micro scale. Throughout the process, we have briefly touched on the idea of personal destruction stories—moments that were apocalyptic (physically, emotionally, spiritually) to a single life. And by apocalyptic, I don’t necessarily mean violent. I mean that something changed. Something was destroyed, and something else grew out of the ashes.

That was the totally noncompulsory homework: think about apocalypse on a personal level and see what you come up with.

Some of the stories are deceptively simple: one actress speaks about an apple tree in her parent’s backyard that acted as a guidepost for her childhood and a miscommunication with a landscaper that resulted in it being torn down.

Others seem tragically common: family deaths, divorce, loved ones brains being hijacked by Alzheimer’s.

The late, great Paul Danaceau once remarked that he enjoyed coming to our workshops because it was like therapy. And if therapy is talking about things important to you that you don’t feel comfortable telling anyone else, than Paul had a point. We create a safe, creative place to talk about unsafe things. There is also sometimes crying.

And while everyone’s stories are unique, there is a distinct throughline: the death of childhood. The vanishing of touchstones—people, places, things—that once marked the boundaries of our lives. The sense that what seemed so solid in our youth will eventually fade. You can’t go home again, because the home you knew doesn’t exist anymore.

Seems kind of obvious when put down in 12-point Cambria.

Or maybe not so obvious. Maybe that’s something we don’t like to think about. That a story about an apple tree can be shorthand for the fact that life is an engine that turns the joys of today into the memories of tomorrow. That potential turns into present turns into past.

Another topic of discussion is Death with a capital “D”. Someone notes that we are surprisingly shut off from the reality of death. For the first time in human history, we can go from cradle to grave without ever being up-close and personal with a dead human body. One actress talks about how, as a child, she did not want to be in the room when a family member passed away. She did not want to be there when something as powerful as a human life disappeared.

“And if I don’t see the body, then they’re still out there somewhere,” she says.

A director speaks about the first show he directed as an undergrad. During the opening night, one of his lead actors died on stage. For several moments, the audience didn’t know whether the calls for an ambulance were a part of the show or not.

And our resident composer talks about thanatology—the study of death and how to ease people into it—and incorporating music into the process. He also tells a story of a four-day camping trip in northern Minnesota with his now-wife and an acquaintence that took them out onto a frozen lake. When their feet began to plunge through the ice, he realized that he could be a few steps away from a very cold death. That night, they camped a few miles from the highway—and well off the ice—and there is no evidence of any humanity. It was desolate and beautiful.

Loss, death, the passing of childhood. Of course, it’s not like I was expecting an exploration of destruction myths to generate stories about flowers and puppy kisses. And if the discussion is trending in a certain direction, I like to step on the accelerator.

Next week’s homework: planning your own funeral.

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Week 3: Short-Circuiting Armageddon

May 2nd 2011

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Week 3. Is it just me, or are destruction stories a lot less interesting—or at least less fantastical—than creation stories? And there are a lot fewer variations on how things end than on how things begin. Maybe because with creation you have to work for it. We can’t imagine how things like worlds and civilizations can be born whole cloth. So we tell amazing stories about giant turtles, or gods sculpting creation out of clay. But a destruction story is a lot easier to tell. Oh, we can still make up a fantastical destruction myth. But who would believe it. When there are so many all-too-common ways to destroy a world.

This week’s workshop comes on the heels of the quake in Japan, and it is hard to talk about the idea of apocalypse in the abstract when we have a very real example of devastation.

Like so many other people on the planet, we are following the events online. Here are people whose world—everything that they had ever known—has been turned upside down in an instant. I learned about it on Twitter; watched the video on news sites; followed various feeds as events continued to unfold.

One of our ensemble members wonders if this instant access to technology, this ability to jump from feed to feed, to have a nation’s suffering compressed into a 45 second video clip of waves sweeping through streets, desensitizes us to the reality of human pain. If these were our neighbors, wouldn’t we rush to help? If these were our family, wouldn’t we cry in horror? Instead, we donate money, or we do not.

It’s a question that’s come up before: Does technology unite us, or isolate us, or both? Also, does this awareness that these terrible events are happening breed empathy or numbness?

I suggest that, either way, it’s better than the alternative.

Go back 100 years, and it would have been months before anyone on this side of the world would have heard about such an event. A little farther back, and we might never have known at all. And we certainly wouldn’t have cared about people of a different race on the other side of the globe.

Someone suggests that everyone on the Internet is responsible for empathizing with the entire world. I don’t know if it’s a responsibility we’ve acknowledged or accepted. But I hope that a collective awareness of the pain of others is better than ignorance of it.

As I’m writing this, there’s a Twitter stream building on #2amt debating the definition of audience. Should we make theatre for the people within driving distance; should we make theatre for ourselves; should we make theatre for anybody and everybody?

I do not know the answer.

I will say this: one thing that dramaturging the creation and destruction myths of disparate cultures has taught us is that, as a species, we share the same needs and the same fears. We tell the same stories again and again, spanning continents and centuries.

Whether this means an all-nude Macbeth is going to play in Poughkeepsie, I have no fucking clue.

But it does mean that a Japanese filmmaker can stuff a nation’s collective fear of nuclear Armageddon into a rubber monster suit and cement one of the most well-known 20^th century destruction myths into the zeitgeist.

Maybe that’s another reason we tell stories of our own destruction. So we can understand it, grasp it, and concoct ways to fight back. Storytelling as a way to short-circuit Armageddon.

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Week Two: Apocalypse as Sequel

Mar 17th 2011

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So, here we are. Week two and hip-deep in the initial group dramaturgy of Bright Alchemy’s devising process, which started with the question “Why do we as a species feel compelled to tell stories of our own destruction?”

It’s very early, but I’m already beginning to get that familiar feeling of drowning in images and data. It’s a nice feeling. Better than the alternative. And, if it seems overwhelming, I just have to remind myself that it’s the equivalent of turning the puzzle box over and dumping the pieces out on a table. Easier to imagine the shape of things this way.

Eventually out of all this free association, themes will emerge, or loose strands of connected stories and images will eventually become themes. What free association, you ask?

Some of it is simple words or images: survivor stories; cosmic reboot; four horsemen; the final screen of a silent, black and white movie with the simple words “THE END”; 7 seals; 2012; Y2K; asteroids; trinitite, the glass formed at Trinity, New Mexico, where they tested the bomb.

A composer who saw Naomi, but did not get a chance to work on it, talks about how the play reminded him of the concept of a technological Singularity—the point where we advance technology to the point where it is indistinguishable from human consciousness. This brings up the question of whether we’re proud of our inventive nature or fearful of it, and leads back to a discussion from the previous week about how birth and destruction can go hand-in-hand.

One actress tells us the story of the Pawnee destruction myth, which prophesies that when the South Star finally catches up to the North star, the world will end. Which is a nice connection to Naomi, which dealt heavily with astronomy.

Another actress tells a story of riding through the Arizona desert in the backseat of a car while on a family vacation. A rainstorm turned into a sandstorm and the world became an impenetrable blood-red blur as, on the radio, a fire and brimstone preacher prophesied the end of the world.

I mention that one of the big problems I have with certain brands of Christianity is that their adherents seem to be waiting for something better rather than working to make this world a better place to live.

One actor responds to this by noting that some people want a better world and try to make it; some people want to be given a better world and try to make themselves worthy of it; and some people like the world the way it is.

But the one thought that we keep coming back to is the idea of multiple Apocalypses. That world is always going through changes and who’s to say we haven’t experienced any number of Apocalypses?

One of the concepts we touched on while developing Naomi is the difference between static and dynamic societies. Static societies are ones that do not change much from one generation to the next. Consequently, their myths include blueprints for living that a person would have expected to apply to their great-great-great grandchildren as much as it applied to themselves.

However, our society is a dynamic one. We expect the world to change drastically in our own lifetime. And maybe this is why there are so many more stories about the end of the world being written today. Because we can more easily imagine great change occurring.

Not to mention the fact that, as of the mid-20^th century, we finally have the ability to destroy ourselves entirely. That somebody now has the responsibility not to push a button, to wake up everyday and say, “I will not destroy the world today.”

Steve Beal, who got to be the triple-threat of Grandfather, Rabbi, and Voice of Coyote in our last production, says, “The world gets recreated so much during one person’s lifetime. That rate of change leads us to wonder when this is going to end, where this is going to go?”

Maybe an Apocalypse is not about an end to the world, but an end of our world; a shift in the way we see things. After which, there is a new world.. When you strip away the destructive connotation, the word “apocalypse” is Greek for “revelation.” Which means that the line between creation myths and destruction myths becomes incredibly dim.

Which, as dramatic story fodder, has great possibilities.

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Week One: There’s a 10:30 in the Morning?

Mar 17th 2011

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Wherein I live-blog the devising process for our latest project

My living room is full of artists eating baked goods and mainlining coffee. The latter is not surprising, since it’s 10:30 A.M. on a Sunday. What is surprising is that a dozen theatre-makers chose to subject themselves to this sun-drenched world while there was still sleep to be had.

Present are most of the artists that worked on our last project; a few who worked on Gilgamesh; and several we’ve never worked with before. A lot of people in the room have never met each other. Which is a small miracle, considering the intimacy of the DC theatre community. And it’s probably a good sign. Collaboration needs new perspectives, new talent, fresh brains.

After everyone is settled and at least semi-conscious, I make my pitch, which is this: Our last project, A Creation Story for Naomi, started with a single central question—What is the purpose of creation myths? It ended with a play about Naomi, a brilliant 16-year old girl obsessed with the stars and struggling with how to break out of her self-imposed shell. She and her online friends travel from one creation story to another, searching for one that can help define who she is and what she will become.

I explain how I’d like our next project to be a thematic and narrative sequel to Naomi that we start with the central question: Why do we as a species feel compelled to tell stories of our own destruction? From Revelations to Ragnarok to Michael Bay’s entire canon, we are constantly killing ourselves again and again, at least in our imaginations.

I’d like to explore that question and those stories and whatever else might come up along the way. And then I’d like to take that work and use it to tell the story of Naomi 15 years down the line. I enjoyed telling the story of Naomi and her friends, and I’d like to learn more about them.

Someone talks about what they know of Ragnarok, and how a performance piece they saw dealt with the concept of a World Tree.

Someone mentions the Hindu destruction myth and Shiva the destroyer.

Another person reminds me about the myth of the Flood, which played a part in our adaptation of Gilgamesh and which might be the oldest and most widespread destruction myth.

Eventually someone brings up zombies. And rightfully so, since they are one of our many modern-day destruction myths. Someone mentions an article they saw about research into creating a real-life zombie virus. We ask her what she’s been smoking. Just coffee beans, she says, and promises to find the article for our next meeting.

With our first project, we had the narrative already laid out for us. It was just a matter of exploring what aspects of the Gilgamesh epic excited us and how to adapt it for the stage and the modern age. With Naomi, we started with a single question—one that was so big that we spent a year dramaturging and workshopping–before I created a narrative structure to dramatize our conversation.

With this new project, I’m looking to walk somewhere in the middle. To start with not only a broad central question, but a very loose narrative base as well. So I tell everyone that I think I know three things about our adult Naomi, three things that I believe will help us tell a story about destruction: she’s an astronomer at an observatory; she’s married to an astronaut who is currently in space; and she’s very, very pregnant.

The idea of a pregnant protagonist sparks a discussion about how, in theatre, pregnancy is frequently a destructive force. That it destroys lives. That it can be frightening. And this leads to talk of how children have to sometimes destroy their parents, or the idea of their parents, in order to take their place.

This makes me very happy. Not the destroying parents part. But that the ideas come so freely and with such energy. We end after an hour and a half, with a plan to meet in a week, and for everyone to bring in whatever they think will be helpful to the conversation. Whether it’s an article on zombie viruses or a stolen Gideon Bible. Or an intravenous caffeine drip.

I will make morning people of them yet.

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A Much Needed Post-Play Nap

Feb 15th 2011

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Swear to God, I haven’t forgotten this site. It’s just that the closing of Naomi has left all of us mildly stunned. After working on a project for two-plus years, there is some inevitable post-show malaise.

However, nap-time is almost over, and Bright Alchemy‘s next project will be announced shortly. After which, this website will not go untended for long. I have a plan–an audacious, possibly unrealizable plan–to blog our devising process week-by-week (or month-by-month depending on how frequently we get together). The goal is to document our process as best I can and give at least one example of devised theatre from initial idea to finished production.

I also plan on posting regularly on www.2amtheatre.com. Which you should check out. It’s got smart, passionate people saying smart, passionate things about theatre.

See you soon,

Steve

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One. Last. Show.

Jan 28th 2011

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One more show (Saturday, Jan. 29, 7:30 p.m.) and then we pack it up. No rainchecks. No extensions. And seats are going fast for A Cre@tion Story for Naomi.

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