Arts Reporter

Playlabs at The Playwrights Center in Minneapolis is one of the most prestigious play development programs in the world. They keep their focus on the writer and his text. With the 2008 application deadline rapidly approaching (October 26) this is a good time to review some of the events that took place in 2007. The first is a transcript of my interview with Noel Raymond, co-artistic Managing Director of Pillsbury House Theater and the director in Playlabs 2007 of “Are You Now, or Have You Ever Been…” a fictional account of the dilemmas faced by Langston Hughes while writing a poem the night before appearing before the House Un-American Activities Committee, written by Carlyle Brown.

Nat: You wanted to be open to what the audience is experiencing right?

Noel: And just sort of watch it from that perspective because that’s the other layer that you get in a reading, is to see whether or not the choices that you’ve made in an intense but fairly short rehearsal process leading up to it, to see whether they actually worked, to see whether the story is clear. You know, you can feel whether or not the audience is following a story and getting all the things that you laid in there in the rehearsal process or not.

Nat: Yes, did they get what you thought they would get.

Noel: Yes exactly. And especially in this, a big part of what we’ve been trying to do is figure out, Carlyle had this vision of a play with spoken text interacting with projected text, so the idea that the audience had to see and hear and read all at the same time and to see whether all of those things came together in a coherent narrative or whether it was distracting and disjointed and all that.

Noel: So sitting in the audience for the first performance was all about did we achieve a coherent narrative, using all of those elements.

Nat: I did a play of mine in Los Angeles with a projector and one night the projector didn’t work at all.

Noel: Yea, so that would have been tragic in this case because the information that he needed and the process was really about the play and the playwright was to see those things realized and to see how they interact with the spoken text.

Nat: After you’ve seen the first performance, you come into the pick up rehearsal, are you thinking ‘ok, we need to do x, x, and y’?

Noel: A couple of things that watching it were clear to me that I saw that were choices that we had made that were unclear. For instance, when Langston tears the sheet of paper out of his typewriter he had been laying it on the top of the typewriter and then using the same sheet of paper the next time he has an impulse to write a line. When I was watching during the first performance what that said was he’s adding to the same sheet of paper. That’s not what we wanted to have happen. Ok, so I needed to think in between [performances] think of ok, what can we do staging wise to make sure that it’s clear that each one of those lines of poetry are coming separately and are fully realized in their separate way and it’s not until the end of the play that they accumulate and become a single poem?

Noel: There weren’t huge numbers of things. Carlyle had a few changes that he made. … We also added an actor because Carlyle had put himself in the show and then realized that because of the way he was staged he couldn’t see what was going on behind him and that’s not good when you’re the playwright trying to

Nat: Right, right.

Noel: so we worked another actor in. but it wasn’t really about specific picky notes at this point. And the actors are all unbelievable and did a huge amount of work

Nat: Sure

Noel: with very little time so there wasn’t much need to fine tune that. If we were putting this up we would get there.

Nat: It’s not like you have six weeks.

Noel: And as long we had the basic builds and enough nuance that the story unfolds as it should, then that’s what we’re going for.

Nat: So you’re done now here, are you going to continue to work with this play?

Noel: I hope so. That’s up to Carlyle, it’s his play, still.

Nat: Have you worked with him before on other projects?

Noel: Not directly in this capacity but we’ve been friends for a long time and talk about theater all the time and have similar aesthetics and ideas about stuff.

Nat: I was thinking that when you have an ongoing relationship with somebody, it can substitute for a lot of overt and quiet communication about ‘we should do this’, you know how somebody works and you can figure out…

Noel: Yea, the dance of how do I say what I want to say, we don’t have to worry about that because we’ve already got that figured out.

Nat: So how do you feel for what you’ve done, given the short rehearsal schedule?

Noel: I don’t give the credit to myself but I really like the piece. It’s beautiful, his idea about the projected text and spoken text and the images and all of that is a really fabulous idea. It’s really beautiful to watch it start to unfold and become itself. I was very pleased with it.

Nat: Good, well we’ll be watching to see what happens with the play. Thank you for your time.

Thank you.

Playlabs rehearsal process