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.

Watch THE HOMECOMING‘s director Will Bishop and Andrew Cutler, playing Lenny, discuss working together, working on Pinter’s text, and more.

“The Physicists was written in 1961, which was a pretty unique time in the history of science. The weird thing is that people really cared about science, in a way they never had before. In the middle ages, science was something afew pointy-headed academics did. After the scientific revolution, science was seen as something more useful, but not especially more so than anything else. As late as the turn of the century, science was still a small-potatoes enterprise done in back rooms of universities. However, by the sixties, science had been launched into a position of unprecedented prestige and importance by WWII, the Bomb, and the Space Race. In the late fifties we get huge pushes for science education in the US, and scientific progress is seen as a major political issue.

The Bomb

One of the biggest reasons for this is the atomic bomb. There are few single events that changed the world as thoroughly as the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki did. WWII was an incredibly destructive and deadly war, but at least people mostly died the old-fashioned way. But, with the invention of The Bomb, suddenly entire cities can vaporized by anyone with a plane and enough science.

The State of Physics

This new focus on science (especially physics) led to a level of prestige that has rarely been matched before or since. There was a huge influx of new young physicists, and established physicists were given a great deal of funding for a variety of research projects. The universities were still major centers of physics research, but government projects and even private laboratories started to fund a great deal of research as well.

Intellectually, physics was in a period of great change. Around 1930 the discoveries of general relativity and quantum mechanics overturned pretty much everything we thought we knew about science. Newton’s mechanics had long been the standard example of rock-solid scientific truth, and suddenly they no longer applied. By 1961 physicists had absorbed the implications of this, and were starting to make major strides in understanding these theories. There was hope that a “unified field theory” might soon be found, which could describe all the fundamental physical forces under one theory. (Einstein worked on this for many years, up to his death.) There was a great deal of optimism that physics would continue to progress at a tremendous speed, and that breakthroughs even more fundamental than relativity or quantum might be just around the corner.”

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