As suggested by their alliterative title, the self-proclaimed Peripatetic Playwrights - Emily Drumsta '06, Matthew Kelly '06, Krista Knight '06 and Jen Silverman '06 - spent a frantic December wandering everywhere across campus from Johnny Rockets on Thayer Street to the Sciences Library elevator searching for inspiration to add to the "nomad play," which is what they were calling it at the time. This weekend, the peripatetic play, now titled "Growing Born" finds a home at Production Workshop's lower space in the hands of director Danielle Kourtesis '07.
The driving force behind "Growing Born" was a spirit of collaboration. The four playwrights have studied together throughout their Brown careers, Kelly said. Though the quartet had extensive playwriting experience, none of them had ever worked as a team to produce a single script. Professor of Literary Arts Paula Vogel, whose class Drumsta, Kelly and Knight took and in which Silverman is currently enrolled, "talked a lot about collaborative theatre," and the students decided to "see what it'd be like to create one joint script," Kelly said. He added that for all the on-campus focus on new techniques in theater, very little collaborative theater like "Growing Born" appears at the University.
This past fall, Kelly and Knight began discussing the basic idea behind the nomad theater process they eventually created, and Drumsta and Silverman soon joined in the plans. "As we talked about it, we started developing rules we were going to play by," Silverman said.
In late November the playwrights met with Kourtesis, whom Kelly had recruited to direct, to brainstorm further. "We decided we would (each) create a laundry list of 10 items that would be required to appear in the first draft of the script," Kelly said. They created the lists while in transit during Thanksgiving break. Items ranged from an empty studio apartment to a bull in a subway. The latter element actually made it into final drafts, the playwrights said.
Drumsta volunteered to write the first 10 pages of the play while sitting in Johnny Rockets, guided only by her laundry list. She then sent Kelly to the Bear's Lair to write the next 10 pages. According to the group's guidelines, Kelly's pages could precede, follow or be interspersed among Drumsta's, but he was forbidden from deleting anything already written.
"While we were writing, we didn't talk about it (or) worry about who wrote what," Silverman said. The process continued for two rotations and produced a rough draft, which evolved to a full draft on Dec. 16, Silverman said.
The writing locations influenced the script in a variety of ways, some more clearly than others. Silverman recalled her turn penning pages in the SciLi elevator: upon rereading, she noticed that the jerky motion of the elevator had influenced her script to feel "all very urgent."
Midway through the writing process, Kelly and Knight proposed the developing play - at the time only 40 pages long - to PW for the first slot of the second semester. "In proposing for the PW board, most people submit scripts and proposals," said Alex Rosenthal '08, a PW board member and the production manager of "Growing Born." "This is unique in that the PW board was given a description of the process - not knowing what would happen."
"PW trusted us and took a tremendous leap of faith. ... I'm just impressed they put faith in us," Silverman said. Kourtesis held auditions just as reading period started, though the cast of eight actors had as little formal script to work with as the PW board had.
Before winter break, Silverman and Kelly went through the script to make necessary changes and spent their first week of winter break exchanging phone calls, e-mails and instant messages. The show's design team received the final script just after Christmas, but the show never quite settled into the typical production process.
"Just as the playwrights created an innovatively collaborative process, we've tried to make this as collaborative as possible," Rosenthal said.
Everyone - the design crew, the actors and Elizabeth Broadwin '07, the play's stage manager and assistant director - helped to edit the script based on their own ideas and for reasons of practicality, Kourtesis said. A swimming pool, for instance, was cut.
"As far as I'm concerned, everyone's directed the show to some extent. I really love experimenting (and) that definitely happened a lot in the rehearsal process - the actors contributed lots of ideas (and) I really like the way this process ended up," Kourtesis added.
Overall, Kourtesis attributed the personality of the show to its unusual beginning. "Basically, that writing technique has influenced every aspect of the show. They started writing in all these places that didn't have any explicit connection, but throughout this process, we've all come together." That synthesis, she added, is reflected onstage.
"Every time I see it (in rehearsal), it just changes. It gets a little tighter, a little crazier. ... I trust what they're doing - they make choices that surprise me and I enjoy those choices," Silverman said. "This is the thing with the collaborative process - what we were trying to do and what I think we pulled off was to influence each other."
