Stateless: Workshop Performances

Stateless: a performance by Dan Wolf and Tom Sheppard, two performers recently made popular by their successful production Angry Black White Boy. Stateless: a performance that has inspired this written reflection about workshop performances in new play development. Stateless: a word that aptly describes the performance’s effect on me: nonplussed, irresolute, as if swayed by a breeze.  Stateless didn't much move me, but saying so hardly criticizes this workshop performance because it’s a workshop performance.  All foibles forgiven under the ‘not-done-yet’ clause, and all constructive criticism welcomed.  So what constructive criticism can be offered?

Dan Wolf and Tommy Sheppard didn’t show us their planned ending, suggesting no interest in a comprehensive reaction to the play's gestalt. I assume they only desired access to our emotional responses and choices of attention. Where did we fixate? What did we feel?  After all, in the post show discussion, they only asked, ‘what stuck out to you?’  However, if such was their intention, I wonder why they presented the material at all.  How can our emotional and intellectual reactions comprehensively inform their dramaturgical choices if we aren’t reacting to the whole?

More over, I must ask the question: how valuable is the audience’s self reported reactions to the script’s construction?  Shortly after a workshop reading of his work, a playwright acquaintance of mine declared, “It doesn’t matter what the audience says, you already know what they’ll say.  The audience is not the point, getting in a room with actors and a director is the point.”  I’m not settled with this cavalier attitude towards the receptor of one’s work, but it illustrates something important.  If you don’t know how the audience will react, and that’s the goal of your workshop, then you’re squandering resources.

Because I have some inside info on the workshop, I know that Wolf, Sheppard, and their director Ellen Sebastian Chang did not squander resources.  The public performances of Stateless only partly comprised their dramaturgical efforts.  However, the question still remains, what valuable kernels came from the public’s reaction?

One audience member gave a comment that I find, upon reflection, to be the most enduringly valuable.  She essentially asked, “How does one tell parallel stories without focusing on equivalencies?” Don’t be fooled, it’s not rhetorical. Parallel stories are told all the time without focusing on equivalencies. To do so, authors divide the components of a story’s dramatic structure between the parallel sub-parts.  This differs from sharing the dramatic structure between parallel narratives, which builds in redundancy and focuses on equivalencies. Stateless favored the latter.  For example, Jack and Jill went up the hill and broke their heads.  We can tell the first half of this story from Jill’s perspective and the second from Jack’s without necessarily losing anything.  If we tell the whole story from both Jack and Jill’s perspectives, alternating between the two, we invite greater focus on comparison of perspective than on the story.

Like the audience member who asked the apt question, I’m not sure if Stateless wants to be about equivalencies. The show opens with a wonderful line, which I cannot recall verbatim, but asserts that we deconstruct the past to assemble the future. In the play, the vehicle of this deconstruction and re-assembly are letters, one that both Wolf and Sheppard receive from their grandparents and then write to their children. Letters bridge the divide between past, present, and future, and this theme surfaces at both the performance’s beginning and workshop ‘ending.’ Given this positioning within the performance’s structure, it seems critically important. Yet, I cannot marry the dramatic ballistics of this past-to-future theme with the story’s comparison inclined structure. The two work together like holding a gun squarely at one’s chest, and pulling the trigger with one’s thumb.  But this may be my limitation and not Wolf’s or Sheppard’s. After all, just because the Pope can’t marry two men, doesn’t mean it can’t be done.

The workshop performance of Stateless therefore yielded a rather interesting kernel: a dramaturgical question that cuts directly to the play’s core.  However, I should note that this audience member’s comment about equivalencies is uncommon in my experience.  Therefore I’m still questioning the value of workshop performances and audience feedback.  I do not intend this blog to attack workshop performances, but rather to meditate on their uses.  Some producers do workshop performances, but not all, suggesting that their value is not universally recognized or that they are not universally feasible.  So stay tuned, this discussion isn’t over.  I’m certain future experiences will elicit additional blogs relating to this subject, and illuminate pertinent discussions not hosted here.