Process notes on "Tip of Things" by Catherine Banks

Catherine Banks

I had a huge struggle to find my elevator play. I had this idea that I liked very much but I couldn’t make it work. I get a lot of petitions about really worthy causes from people with names like David, Sacha, Emily with my name in the body of the text. Example: Catherine thank you for signing the petition to end blank and we hope you will also sign our petition to save blank. I confess after a while I started to feel like I was a very bad person if I didn’t sign. So I came up with this sort of plot that my character would be trapped in the elevator with a David, Sacha or Emily and that the audience would be behind these sort of movers’ curtains and play the role of people that needed to be saved by the petition. I guess I thought the elevator would be could be a metaphor, blah blah blah idea was not working and was not working still not working several months later.

Then Heather Inglis was in Halifax. Then I had a workshop in a week, then in days.

I like the short play format and I had written several that I had never finished during a beautiful workshop with the inspiring Marie Irene Fornes. I pulled them out and looked each over. The play I settled on was one that I had written set in a hotel room. As soon as I put those two women in the elevator, in action, my imagination re-sparked and I was off.

Our plan for the workshop was to spend half of it around the table and half in an elevator. The cast was Andrea Lee Norwood and Ann-Marie Kerr.  Emmy Alcorn of Mulgrave Road - who commissioned the piece- came into Halifax from Guysborough for the workshop  - there are no elevators in Guysborough. After a couple of intense hours around a table we all squeezed into the production elevator at the Neptune Theatre for this crazy little workshop. We borrowed a cleaning cart we found in the hallway and Ann-Marie used Heather's coat as a baby. Our elevator kept getting called even though it was technically “locked”.  Emmy had to get off for a bit and we had a hell of time getting back to her floor. Then about half way through I had to take a break from it all, I can get very nervous in small confined places. It was a great afternoon and we all laughed a lot. What I discovered was that being so close to the characters and unable to walk out electrified the experience. Rather than being an “audience member” I become a witness. That’s what it felt like to me at least.

I think Andrea, Ann-Marie and Emmy were pretty puzzled about the piece at the beginning of the day and it was fun to watch as they came to it line by line. I loved how Ann Marie was right there, all her own mothering instincts arriving like a freight train. The small space seemed to amplify all of it.

I came in hoping that I was on the tip of something---meaning hoping I was writing something very intense. Now I’m pretty sure of that and I’m happy that this play has found the right home in this project.

My next steps actually don’t have to do with the element of elevators per se, but rather  with exploring the script itself in a fairly conventional way. I’m considering adding a layer of class—or race— to the play. What if the baby is Asian and the mother white? Not to make a big statement but as another layer.

I am very excited to see and read the other elevator plays. What did people do? How did they solve the problems? How did they approach the task within the "rules"?.

They sound amazing.

AMAZING.

Looking forward.

Elevated Drama

Rick Chafe

I had my first ever workshop-by-Skype last week, linking Edmonton and Winnipeg, and can report it works very well.  At least for a play that's 2 and a half minutes long. 

Mine is a naturalistic piece:  A young man gets on with the audience, rides the elevator up to the top floor of a medical building.  His girlfriend gets on, finished her appointment early.  The kit was wrong, she's pregnant.  They try to have as private a conversation as possible in an elevator, but it immediately, well, elevates.  Or descends.  Whatever. 

We started calling the style hyper-realism—a result, I think, not of the scene itself, but of the audience being implicated in the realism of the action, something Ken Williams talked about in the previous post.  They won't be implicated as participants in the conversation (presumably that is—as Ken said, who knows what an audience will do in this situation?), but rather as non-participants.  As bystanders, whom are suddenly made to be non-participating eavesdroppers on one of those uber-private conversations embarrassingly played out far-too-publicly.  But they also must play their role as a theatre audience: to watch and listen to a play.  The young couple has pushed their way to the back of the elevator.  Will the audience turn and watch?  Or follow polite public protocol and keep their gaze focused forward and ears focused back?

These were not my primary concerns in writing the play.  I was just writing a private story that could spill out in a public place.  But this is almost entirely the dynamic we played with for the whole afternoon's workshop: the drama played out between the two characters while making use of the added tensions of the drama between the characters and the audience.

You could say playing all this in an elevator eliminates the fourth wall.  But I don't think it will do that at all.  I think instead it will make us hyper-aware of the fourth wall. Yes, the physical space between actor and audience has been eliminated—for a full house performance the actors' bodies might be in contact with audience bodies for the whole play.  But the result for at least some of the audience is sure to be a heightened awareness of the fact that these two people are actors, that I'm the audience, that none of us are real people in real life—and felt more sharply than we would ever experience it in a black box seated ten or a hundred feet away from the stage.  

Just to crank that idea one notch farther, I think one of the implications of doing plays in elevators—for naturalism certainly, but maybe in different ways with all of the types of performance the project will present—is that it will push the audience to experience two kinds of fourth wall conventions at the same time: the fourth wall rule of theatre, that actors and audience shall pretend to be unaware of each other, and the fourth wall rule of social space, that citizens shall pretend not to notice each other's embarrassing public behavior, and we shall pretend to mind own business.  Which I think are both pretty much the same rule.

So that's what we found playing for a couple of hours in one possible elevator world.  I'm looking forward to walking into another fifteen.