I have started this blog as a place to post on my process of directing and designing for Jumping Mouse, a play for young audiences written by my dear friend Zach Patzig. This ties into my Division III, which examines the intersections between creating visual art and creating theatre for young audiences. All plays should have an aesthetic, an all encompassing visual cohesion that sets the tone and clues the audience in to what they are seeing. This manifests in the costumes, the props, and the set, but also in the ways the actors move, speak their lines, and the stage pictures they make with their bodies. My job as director is to examine these theatrical and artistic worlds; the world of the words of the script, the world of the physical things that we make to tell the story, and the world of the things our bodies do onstage, and make them into one play, one spectacle, one story.
This is especially important in creating theatre for children. When young children see a play, they are transported into the story in a way that adult audiences do not necessarily experience. The story becomes real to them. When I was acting in a play for young audiences called "Of Bears and Bunnies," there was a moment where we, the actors, were caught in a net. One child believed so passionately in the world of the play that he ran onstage and tried to rip the net away to free us. Plays for children are not like television. There is no screen separating the story from reality. The actors playing the characters are real people, standing in front of them, performing an identity that is real to the child. They do not necessarily see the actor underneath.
Two thirds of my final project for my senior year at Hampshire was directing The Yellow Boat, by David Saar. It was performed in January in the Mainstage Theatre at Hampshire College, as part of the Theatre Department's Slotted Season. This play was about Benjamin, young hemophiliac boy who was a great artist, who contracted AIDS and died at the age of eight. The play was written by his father, as a celebration of his life, for children eight and up. In creating that world, we had to let go of "realistic" scenes and performative techniques in order to create a theatrical representation of Benjamin's imagination. The set was painted white, to represent a blank sheet of paper, and the actors drew pictures on the back of the set, which was a whiteboard. The only furniture was a series of platforms at the back and a giant yellow boat on wheels, which functioned as ambulance, couch, and hospital bed. We had a large budget of over a thousand dollars, and a team of 18 incredible artists, working on everything from making props, to painting sets, to building giant boats, to creating incredible rainbows of light across the stage.
Jumping Mouse has a budget of $127. The team consists of me, Zach Patzig, the playwright/stage manager, Zach Apony the dramaturg, and six actors.
My goal is to create a theatrical experience that will match the Yellow Boat, despite having a tenth of the budget and much fewer people working on it. I want to make this story into a spectacle, and I want the children who come and see this play to believe fully and wholeheartedly in this world. I want to make towering, epic masks that represent the animal characters, and I want them to be representative of the culture of the Native American story that Jumping Mouse comes from. And I want this blog to be where I document everything I do in the pursuit of that goal.
I also will be making the shadow puppets for another dear friend and collaborator, Kaia Jackson's play, Out of Silence, so basically I'm just going to be busy and busier until everything goes up and I graduate.
