A couple of weeks back, I stopped in on Mickle Maher’s “Working With the Playwright” class, where Maher is working with students to write an adaptation of Constantin Stanislavski’s An Actor Prepares for a spring production at the New Logan Center for the Arts. I’m a 2010 UT alum, and I’m writing an article on the process for the University arts website.
The stage is set for the class, with Danzig leading.
The class started with students reading their reactions to chapters of Constantin Stanislavski’s An Actor Prepares. Then, they began a work-through of a scene Maher had written, with guest artist Adrian Danzig in the lead role of Stanislavski. Stanislavski’s work is a bit of high theory, which Maher’s been given the tricky task of dramatizing. Without giving away too much, I’ll note that Maher’s built into the script a series of foils who don’t want Stanislavski to complete his work. Danzig, a clown by calling, had his own series of ideas on how to raise the stakes in the scene. What if paper began raining from the ceiling, interrupting Stanislavski’s narrative? What if he had a giant fan to clear the paper? What about a leafblower? Maher, Danzig, and director Devon DeMayo wrestled a bit over these ideas before moving forward.
Playwright Mickle Maher.
This sort of amicable creative collision called me back to my early years in UT, when I’d decided that I wanted to be a dramaturg, a job I thought mostly involved forcing a director to sort their ideas into something coherent. Studious little dumpling that I was, I’d perform deep research on some theme that ran through a show, and present it in carefully researched packets to the creative team; for the rest of the rehearsal process, I’d offer opinions on how to fix anachronisms and erase minor inconsistencies. But somewhere between my Neo-Futurist TAPS workshop and office hours sessions with Heidi Coleman, I realized that dramaturgy is probably, at its best, exactly not that kind of nitpicky research. Instead, it’s the addition of a voice to the room, proliferating ideas that make not a lick of sense on the page, but somehow add up to something affecting when they flow over an audience.
We think of Stanislavski as guardian of realism, consistency, coherence– a sort of ersatz grandfather to the “careful, accurate, small” school of American drama. But, as Maher pointed out, Stanislavski’s approach to theater was actually mystical– he loved yoga, he insisted on the importance of searching for truth in one’s partner. And as Stalin rose to power in Stanislavski’s native Russia, Stanislavski became less and less tied to realism– less convinced that you needed real dogs barking offstage in a garden scene, or that the sound of a string snapping necessarily signified the sound of construction. An Actor Prepares traces this latter legacy.
The script of the play is still in development.
This, it seems to me as an outsider in the process, is the great challenge for Maher’s project, and what makes it interesting for him and his class: Stanislavski’s been an equal contributor to the very modern project of verisimilitude, and the very post-modern project of pastiche. How do you capture that double-legacy in a play about his work? Getting three artists in the room who have their own, stark opinions on what truthful staging is seems like a good start. We’ll see what emerges in the coming weeks.
- by Christopher Shea, AB ’10
Photos by Julia Dratel.
Interesting.