Back to Blogging! A summer in the theater

I lied in my last post. Nearly three months ago I promised to keep writing and I haven’t. Here is where I start again. Newly relocated to Durham, NH and starting an MFA writing program, I plan to recommit myself to this blog and post, at minimum, a weekly essay. Although I am no longer in Chile, I want to keep exploring my months there and use this as an exercise space to keep writing and exploring new topics.

 If my summer was absent of written words on my part, it was, at least, filled with spoken words.

By day I worked in Guild Hall, the Hamptons’ answer to a community cultural space. Two galleries, a beautiful, intimate 360 seat theater, and an educational center comprise the modest, white building on Main Street in East Hampton and while it is a respected, historical institution, the great shame is that too few locals are familiar with it. Patronized mainly by Manhattanites, Guild Hall can’t help but cater to that crowd. What about the locals? The amateurs? The youth? True, its museum has several admirable programs to showcase the work of local artists. But what about a weekly coffee house or open mic night. Let’s give the aspiring 17 year old poet an opportunity to stand up and voice his/ her words.

As a 16 year-old I went over one night after basketball practice, donned a white dress and performed Helena at a high school arts night. Few people attended. Even fewer paid attention to the Shakespearean monologue. And no one, I am sure, except my father and I, remember it. But in it, I had an opportunity to perform. There should be more evenings like this. Open the theater to the local community, let the stage lights illuminate the beautifully renovated circus tent ceiling, and welcome amateur audiences to test their work on a crowd.

By night, I production managed a non-profit theater company, called Mulford Repertory Theatre. Imagine this:

Two actors, both a full generation younger than the characters whose words they inhabit, stand in a 300 year-old barn with a leaky roof. These trappings contrast the play’s setting and do little to bring forth a $900,000 upper west side apartment. And yet, that’s where we are… simultaneously within a plush Manahattan living room and an overheated barn at the historic Mulford Farm in East Hampton. The scene over, the actors brush past the brocade curtains and step off the white shag rug onto the decades-old straw in the horse stall designated as “backstage.” The female lead teeters in her heels, which were never intended to balance on dirt and hay, strips off her dress and allows the silent, nearly invisible wardrobe assistant to slide the next costume over her head.

The fifty folding chairs in the audience hold summering theater fans from the many neighboring hamlets. After parking on Main Street, they’ve crossed the farm’s lawn, passing the original windmill, farmhouse and slanting outhouse, and followed a path of glowing lanterns toward the great double doors of the barn.

It’s wonderful childlike game of make-believe we all play in the theater. Where else can you get dozens of adults to willingly forget normal conventions and slip away into a slightly fractured reality? Everyone in the barn, including many buttoned-up, stoic types, participates in an unspoken agreement to suspend reality and play.

That, in and of itself, seems a small magic act. Even without the fireflies flitting across the paling sky, it would be a fantastical evening: fifty adults are playing pretend, conjuring a world in which the weathered wooden beams in this colonial barn logically belong in the apartment of a wealthy urban couple.

For me, this summer at Mulford was a welcome sort of second chapter to the ten summers I spent with the Hamptons Shakespeare Festival in Montauk. There too we set theater in non-traditional spaces, let actors speak their words to the open air and welcomed the geese, wind, trees, grass, and weather to be active participants in the show. Both offered theater which interacted with its surroundings rather than muting it.

A reviewer asked me why I thought people were drawn to Mulford Rep. I knew without hesitation that it’s the intimacy and originality of the experience. The performances are raw, and therefore electric. The setting and physical proximity to the actors creates a perpetual toggling back and forth between awareness of the “play” and full descent into the fantasy of the performance.

What is exhilarating as a manager is the basic level of self-dependency which is required. Each of us involved has the sense of being a parent to the company- at the end of the night when the actors have taken their bows and received their applause, the chairs in the audience still need folded, the props put away, the costumes washed, and the stage reset for the next performance, of a different play (repertory theater) the following evening.

So, if I neglected my writing over the past few months, I am proud to have contributed on a fundamental level to another artistic entity this summer. Mulford is created and run by locals who decided there should be more accessible art in the community and simply created more. It was the basic idea behind HSF fifteen years ago. Actors act. Writers write. If you want more artistic opportunities, create them for yourself. It is a principal which deep down guides Mulford, could guide Guild Hall a bit more, and which I hope will guide me.

As I settle into life here in Durham, and look forward to more committed writing and experimentation with subject and form, I’d appreciate any feedback. I’m hoping I can use this blog to motivate me and keep me producing, outside of classes, from week to week.  For now, this entry will be my own pledge to stay active in writing.

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/08/07/nyregion/mulford-farm-repertory-theater-stages-plays-in-a-1721-barn.html?_r=1&scp=1&sq=mulford%20theater&st=cse