What The Sparrow Said is the culmination of several years of finding the words to say what I feel about life. What you are about to experience in the Fringe this summer is the greatest piece I’ve created thus far and the product of the hard work of eons of people, many of whom are not involved in this production. Both in the play and the production, what we have begun creating is not only a story; it is a statement of purpose.
When I began to transition from “actor/director/artistic director/writer/waiter” into a playwright, I wrote a laboratory piece called We Carry On. I’m very proud of the play and its production (god bless Daniel Darwin, Paloma Wake, Kate Pistone, Justina Flash and the Mosh-ers for doing it with me) but I was never satisfied. There were moments of play – of fun – in the story, but the script was mostly an orgy of sadness, of problems not answers. Certainly a kind of theatre we recognize … just not mine. Not the one I wanted to write. Or was able to at the time.
Fast-forward one year later. I was on the cusp of completing my training as a Fitzmaurice Voicework teacher (so make that “actor/director/artistic director/writer/waiter/voice teacher”) and had to perform a piece for the beautiful Catherine Fitzmaurice herself. I had no fucking idea what to do. I wanted to write something but it all felt silly. What I ended up doing (by accident) was an improvised stand-up routine that slowly revealed those same questions from We Carry On – well, different ones because I was different, but the same in that they came from the same place – an honest realism.
It was then I discovered the power and need for comedy.
And not comedy in the Friends with Benefits kind-of-comedy. Comedy of “the funny of wonder.” Funny in how life is this … ball of detail and experience; that the details make us move forward, not big questions. I believe the details make us notice the characters’ “hairs” – their microscopic beauty – and those details make us think of our own hairs – and the hairs grow into thoughts of hope from there. Beginning with “the hope” (the big questions) leaves you with no where to go but down. And there is no hope in down.
All to say, what followed from my Fitzmaurice experience was a series of short plays that progressively zoomed tighter and tighter into detail (of language, sound, moment-to-moment experience) and wonder. I began to write from a happy place. And my, isn’t it funny that writing is fun when you’re happy? Or at least curious about where happiness comes from? All that Buddhist shit is true. Who knew.
The four proudest short plays to come from this sensation were the one acts What The Sparrow Said, The Room and a Richard, Refractions and The River Has No Water. Sparrow was developed with the unbelievable talent of Shannon Fillion, Matt Hurley, Blaze Mancillas, Ellen Joffred and Jay Jaski. The Room and a Richard with Ashley Kelly-Tata, David Klasko, Kate Flanagan, Caroline Prugh, Mo Zhou, Ian Harkins, Caroline Keene, Seena Hodges, Blaze Mancillas and Heather Oakley. Refractions with Jimmy Maize, Shai Trichter, Heather Oakley, and Sarah Todes. And River with Noah Himmelstein, Ian Klein, Paloma Wake, Julia Coffey, Patricia Hodges, Kathleen Butler, and Matt Hurley. From these beautiful and courageous people I found these short, tight canvasses of detail and possibility.
Earlier this year, I then realized it was time to take these miniatures and create a bigger canvass – a mosaic. Though they are seemingly disconnected, these plays are actually telling a large story, a grand arc of two estranged brothers finding each other – and since this realization, my task has been to bring these pieces together into one, final, all-encompassing thread of emotion, character, story and experience. That canvass is this summer’s production of What The Sparrow Said.
Beginning in June, our incredible captain (the wunderkind Jenna Worsham, our director) and I started to weave the plays together – with passionate discussion, late-night dramaturgy, and even a trip to West Virginia to do a reading with wonderful actors from the Contemporary American Playwrights Festival that Jenna was working with. Unlike the miniature pieces themselves, (which were written like sprinkler water shooting out in a rush of thought), this re-write process has been a steady process of “mowing the lawn” – making pass after pass after pass (sometimes with days or even weeks between each rotatation) to find the threads; to make the arc of the new play. My questions are always: what is essential from the previous plays that must remain? What is the larger story I’m telling now and how does the style of each piece mesh with this larger story? What are my actors telling me?
At first, the piece was four movements; essentially the four plays with minor changes. When I went down to work with Jenna in West Virginia, I began superimposing two of the plays (River and Richard) and found the beginning of the larger story. Since then, I began mowing the other side of the lawn (Sparrow and Refractions) and, with all honesty, keep running into an emotional block. Possibly because these pieces in particular hit a serious emotional string in my spine.
But finally when we started rehearsals this week, I saw and heard from the actors themselves under Jenna’s brilliant gaze and incredibly intelligent direction, how to end the play … something I’ve never experienced before as a writer. There’s a big difference between a creative workshop team telling you what they think the ending should be and showing you what it could be – with all the trust and faith in the writer’s process in tact. Jenna is the first director I’ve worked with who gave me confidence to re-write by committing 100% to a draft. This process has been incredibly rewarding and transformed my faith in collaboration, process and writing en totale.
When I stop typing this blog entry, I will set on the course to finish a piece I’ve been working toward for the past three years. With all the confidence in the world, I can say that what we’ve been developing (both in private over the years and as a team this week) is exceptional. Our actors, our producers, our company and our remarkable director are the team – the confluence of forces – I’ve been waiting for. I feel like I’m writing something important, not selfish or self-serving. I feel like I’m writing with artists, not for them. I feel like I’m making my way closer to home, every step of this journey, and with every detailed step – with every moment upon moment upon moment of process and story and larger picture in mind, I feel like I’m on to something big.
My apologies for the excited though scattered entry; writing about writing while you’re writing can only be jumbled, I suspect. All I can say is that what our artists are making is larger than us all. And I cannot wait to share it with you, on opening night.