Readers
Theatre Play Selection: I suppose any discussion about play selection has to start with three quick overviews: of the company, the artists whose company it is, and the audience it plays to. Think of these considerations as an imaginary theatre: the stage the productions are set on-the company and its artists-and the house they play to-the audience that comes to watch. Our company, Readers Theatre Repertory, now in its third season in Portland, Oregon, is dedicated to staging "small stories with big ideas at their heart"-stories that alternately amuse, confront, assuage and inspire. We use one-act plays as our source materials. Shows are "blocked," that is, actors are not necessarily on stools or utilizing music stands but move, and use playing areas, though scripts are held and there is no memorization. The company rehearses actors for two nights, and stages the one-hour productions once a month, on a Friday and Saturday night, charging $8.00 for admission. The evenings feature anywhere from one to four plays, depending on the length of the plays chosen. Our playing space, also a critical factor, is an art gallery which allows for about 35 seats. The "stage" varies depending on the month's show, which can range from a pastoral oil painting hanging, to a riotous barbed wire-and-neon sculpture collection that must somehow be acted around. Quite a challenge, but one we relish! The five co-artistic directors all have a foundation in academic and professional theatre. Most importantly, all 5 love readers theatre, and have a shared vision of intelligent RT tailored specifically for adults. We're also a bunch of pretty basic non-ego driven "can-do" types. On show night, if the cream isn't there for the folks' coffee, you can count on it: one of us is out the door to get it before any of the others has to ask for it. Audiences in Portland are smart, sophisticated, and picky. They are highly educated; check out more library books than anywhere else in the country; and even in these stringent times buy tickets to the opera, ballet, symphony and to the many theatre offerings around town, large and small. (We already knew how strong our independent film community is-we just learned our city bought more tickets to Winged Migration than anyplace else in the world!) We have a tough crowd to please, and a lot of competition. And that's a good thing: it keeps us honest as artists-placing demands on ourselves and our actors to bring the best to our theatre every month, and stage it the best we can. Now we have our imaginary theatre: an understanding of who we are-company, artists, and audience. To that construct, I bring myself, the director. I bring first, my heart, and second, my mind. I start with who I am: a defender of the underdog, an overambitious procrastinator, an angry pacifist, a fragile optimist; and to that, I add what I do: in a calculating fashion, analyze plays' worth as a draw to our theatre; professionally market them to the press and public; analytically dissect them for meaning; then direct our actors to communicate that meaning to our audience. I am, just like you, a mass of interesting contradictions. But I have found a through line in my work as an artist: hope. My play selections are nearly always about hope. Now, does that mean they are saccharine and sentimental? Hardly. They are often dark journeys into a carnival hall of mirrors, as it were, in one-act play form, chosen to show what twisted beings we become when hopelessness takes hold. And certainly while other plays shine a light on the brighter side of hope, yet others focus on the struggle between hope and despair, for isn't that the pendulum on which so many of us swing? I've discussed our imaginary theatre-that is, the conditions in which we perform our work-and a bit about who I am and what I do, and the over-arching theme to my work, at least at this time. An additional final factor in play selection stems from my upbringing and that would be "the moment, and what it needs." As a Unitarian minister's daughter, if something catastrophic happened on a Sunday morning on the way to church, my father could completely change a carefully prepared sermon in the time it took to cross from the parking lot to the pulpit, to respond to it. To give the congregation what it needed. I inherited that confidence. I use my director's notes as small sermons, and my plays as opportunities to respond to the moment, and what it needs. Here are a few words from our program, on the first anniversary of September 11th: On a global scale, we cannot ignore the fact that this weekend follows the anniversary of September 11th, with its abiding theme of love and loss. I have been grappling with love and loss in my own life as well, and it seems to me it comes down to this: at the core of our human condition is the need to love, and be loved. Inevitably, loss accompanies that love, whether by life's expected slings and arrows, by tragedy, or by design. That's a given. It is how we react to that inevitability that distinguishes us. In the face of loss, do we continue to live, and love again; or do we die-at least, to be dead at heart: dead to love. As an artist, I wanted to present material that reflected this topic. After an extended search for plays, I found what I was looking for in a surprising place. Tony Kushner's Terminating and Tom Stoppard's Fifteen Minute Hamlet appear at first read to be about many things, but not, possibly, about this theme. But the characters in both plays are suffering from the loss of love; they are engaged in a struggle with that loss; and they must make life-altering decisions in the face of it. These then, were the stories I wanted to share. Working on this show has given me plenty to think about, during this sorrowful autumn. I think love is a kind of light, and it's a light that diminishes the darkness that is loss itself. For reasons large and small, universal and personal, I say: choose light. Choose love, and choose to love again. --MM The exciting thing about play selection is that it is indeed a journey of discovery: to successfully choose them challenges each of us to understand our company, our playing space, our audience, and best of all, our ever-changing and complicated selves. I wish you luck on your adventure! One Act Play Resources:
*These can be found used on the Internet; earlier years are very good, say from 1975-1989.
READERS
THEATRE REPERTORY Mary McDonald-Lewis
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