Chapter 1: Story

God's Work began in the fall of 2003, two and a half years before the play opened, when Rachel first started to tell APTP the story of her childhood and her family. In this case, our storyteller was a member of the APTP ensemble; for many other productions, we have gone outside our ensemble to find the stories we perform.

A high-school freshman in 2003, Rachel first gave us a glimpse into her life through an autobiographical solo performance exercise during one of the ensemble's biweekly theater workshops. Rachel's performance began, "I have two different families, one the worst, and one the best." More than two years later, these words would inspire the first lines of God's Work.

The slices of her life that Rachel shared during performance exercises enticed others of us to ask her to share the full story. Rachel's first telling of the story-with about 20 APTP artists gathered round in a circle-lasted three hours over the course of two days in October, 2003. Day two (a week after day one) ended with 45 minutes of questions to clarify and add detail. Of the 15 actors who performed in God's Work, eight were ensemble members at the time of Rachel's first storytelling.

We would ask Rachel to story tell again twice more during the 30 months we spent, on and off, creating God's Work: once in the winter of 2004, and then once again with an intimate group filling the sofas of the APTP office in March, 2005. On each of these occasions, Rachel delved into details that she had remembered since previous interviews, or shared specific episodes in response to our search for scenes that we could dramatize. Rachel's life-and therefore her story-also changed during this time: after several years of legal obstacles created by her father, Rachel's adoption by her aunt and uncle became official just six months before God's Work opened.

Most elements featured in the play were present in the very first tellings: honest and explicit descriptions of tortures inflicted by Rachel's father, Nicu; the way that the older children cared for their younger siblings; the role that religious fervor played in Nicu's treatment of his children and wife; the children turning on one another to gain favor with their father; Rachel's ability to simultaneously love and critique her mother; Rachel's own recognition of the transformative impact that learning the story of the year she spent with her aunt and uncle as an infant had on her; and, of course, magnificent descriptions of the love and wisdom with which Rachel's aunt and uncle created a place where she could heal. Some crucial elements did come late in the process, including these two which we heard first in March '05:

Rachel's description of the games that she and her siblings would invent with lint collected from an old rug (Nicu denied the children toys except on Thanksgiving and Christmas)...From this memory, we crafted our notion of a fantasy world through which the children preserved their humanity and some faint sense of hope.

Rachel's assertion, in her own words, that her aunt and uncle "brought me into this world."...This encouraged us wholeheartedly in a direction we were already headed: to envision the play as a sequence of births, with Rachel's return at age nine to her aunt and uncle as both birth and baptism.

All along the way, at every storytelling circle, from October '03 when she was 14 to opening night in March '06 when she was 17, Rachel astonished us with her poise, her honesty, her readiness to share, and the self-aware but never self-pitying way she told her story.

At the storyteller's request, we haven't used her name here. Instead, we refer to her and her family members by the names we gave them in God's Work.

  Continue with Chapter 2: Play Development

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