Chapter 2: Play Development

Play development at APTP is the process of collaboratively devising original performances based on a real-life story or stories. This is the most sprawling and least linear part of our creative process, and the phase that differs the most from project to project. An APTP script has no single playwright; indeed, an APTP project often has no script for months or years, as the company collectively works its way toward a performance strategy and generates volumes of possible text, movement, and music. During play development, ensemble members do not yet have assigned characters to play; rather, all ensemble members contribute to the creation of all characters and all parts of the story.

Play development for began the same day we first listened to Rachel tell her story. With a crushing story like this one, we find it helps the ensemble and storyteller alike to have an artistic activity through which to immediately engage the material. We began with APTP's version of the Image Wheel, an exercise conceived by Augusto Boal. First, all of us who heard Rachel's story compiled a list of themes we identified in the story, with the direction that we needed to compress the way we expressed each theme into a single word: family, violence, zealotry, fear, identity, narrative, salvation, resilience, and grace were some of our themes that first day. Next, the group stands in a circle, each person facing away from its center, each with his or her eyes closed. A facilitator calls out one of the themes. As the facilitator counts slowly to three, each ensemble member turns in to the circle and shapes his or her body into a sculpture that, for that actor, embodies the given theme as it relates to our story. The actors all keep their eyes closed; only the facilitator sees their work-this exercise is about beginning to find one's own way into someone else's story, not about generating possible performance material.

We've found that the Image Wheel is often a fruitful first step in analyzing a story. This part of our process can look much like an exhilarating college literature seminar. In the case of God's Work, a circle of twenty of us spent two eight-hour days reading aloud sixty pages of story transcript. We stopped every couple pages to talk about what we had just read. We wallpapered our theater with super-sized post-it notes, some dedicated to descriptions of characters, others filled with notes about relationships, some with descriptions of environments and locations, others with lists of vocabulary specific to this story and these characters (coming forth, the list, Mr. Brown...), three whole sheets taken up with the tortures to which Nicu subjected his children, other pages scribbled on with theatrical challenges posed by the story (our main storyteller is an infant during a pivotal section; staging all the torture...), still others filled with theatrical opportunities and ideas, every sheet annotated with page numbers from the transcript so that we could easily refer to our source material during the months and months of work that would follow. Our discussion those two days was frequently so animated that two or three people simultaneously ran about the room as note-takers to keep up with the frenzied outpouring of ideas.

Play Development on God's Work continued for two years, during which APTP also staged its Heat Included festival and two productions of a new work, Saffron, at four different venues. When we weren't working on another project, we came together in workshops two or three times a week to explore how Rachel's story might work as theater. At each workshop, directors David Feiner and Laura Wiley gave ensemble members assignments that asked them to envision different parts of the story on stage. Some assignments called for actors to improvise a given scene from the story without preparation, in front of the rest of the ensemble. Other assignments gave small groups of actors a set amount of time to conceive an idea and rehearse it into a rough draft performance, with each group sharing its work with the rest of the ensemble at day's end. Some assignments asked actors to focus on text, some on movement, some on sound, some on a combination. Typically, multiple groups worked simultaneously on the same assignment. At the end of the day-after seeing several possible approaches to a scene, theme, or challenge-we would talk: about what elements of each group's work best told Rachel's story, about what elements were most exciting theatrically, and about where to go next.

There are, of course, days when we seem to learn nothing, when none of the work strikes a chord. More commonly, we make small discoveries: a ten-minute improvisation yields one exchange of electrifying dialogue that later defines the entire approach to the Rachel-Irina reunion scene; after two days of playing with the idea, we all concede that putting on stage the Connect-Four game with which Nicu humiliated his children every Christmas has proven exceptionally un-theatrical; the two-actor version of the scene in which Petar removes Rachel from the basement is more emotionally potent than the ones that try to convey the chaos of that day using a dozen performers.

And then there are the Aha! moments, the major discoveries that shape not just one scene, but through which our strategy for the piece as a whole becomes clear. Here are a few of the Aha! days from the God's Work play development process:

We dedicated many workshops to figuring out how to stage the children learning the Bible verses that Nicu ordered them to memorize each day, with torture the penalty if they failed. We all considered this daily requirement central to the audience's understanding both of the children's experience and of Nicu's assumed identity. Yet any literal staging of this ritual proved un-theatrical; actors with their heads buried in books, or scribbling out lines over and over in notebooks, failed to convey how strenuous the work was, or how high the stakes were. The solution came one day when Laura gave each ensemble member the task of conveying the memorization of Bible verses without using text or props. Jesus Matta, who would eventually play Nicu, returned with a simple but stunning scene: he somersaulted frantically around the stage space, over and over and over, with increasing clumsiness that communicated desperation as time ran out. We all got excited. Laura taped out a smaller square of stage space, then asked ten more actors to join Jesus in the tighter space. Laura told them that they were each children learning their Bible verses. With a confined and crowded space, new elements of the scene appeared. Some actors competed with one another, trying to tumble faster, confronting each other violently if they crossed paths and collided. Others aided one another, teaching those who were struggling to remember how to tumble. In these encounters, we recognized the ways in which the children would relate to one another during their forced memorization: some of the older children would help the younger ones, some would become so fearful of Nicu's wrath that they competed ferociously to succeed. We had our concept for Bible verses. Even more than that, we had a concept for the physicality of the children that would shape how we staged much of their life in the basement.

Two more Aha! discoveries followed from that same day. Another ensemble member approached Bible verses by writing the lines all over her body with a thick pen. We all responded to the image of her body marked-scarred-with ink by the end of her scene. Someone suggested we use this approach to theatricalize the tortures Nicu inflicted on the children. A frenzy of ideas followed: the children could write the name of each torture on their skin as it happened, Nicu should write the tortures on their skin so we could see him scar them, he could write their transgressions on their skin so we would see him brand them as sinners. We tried all these over the following weeks. We found the writing too time-consuming and too small physically. We needed an approach that would make Nicu big and brutal-and that he could do to all 11 siblings in a minute or so of stage time. We abandoned the words and tried strokes of paint. The violence was palpable. One instant an actor's body was clean and pure; a swipe of Nicu's brush arm grossly violated that purity. Nicu would become, as Laura phrased it, "an artist of torture." From the decision to use paint came another idea that would fundamentally shape God's Work. Paint could be washed off. Irina and Petar would bathe Rachel at the end of the play, allowing us to stage their healing love for her without a series of maudlin scenes. The water would represent both birth and baptism, merging two major themes in the play. God's Work would end with a water ballet.

  Continue to Chapter 3: Rehearsal

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