From Brazilian Page to American Stage

It is not rare for theatre KAPOW to work with pieces in translation.  In fact, a quick count reveals that nine of our mainstage shows over the past seven seasons have been English translations/adaptations of pieces originally penned in a different language.  So, I think we’ve become pretty adept at interpreting foreign text for American audiences.  What we have never done, however, is play an active role in translating and adapting a piece for the stage.  That’s exactly the challenge we find ourselves facing with our current project, Uma Vida Imaginária (An Imaginary Life). 

How the text ever got to us in the first place is quite an amazing story.  Just over a year ago, our dear friend and collaborator Valentina Lattuada introduced me to Nick Farewell, a novelist currently living and working Sao Paulo, Brazil.  Nick, whose birth name is Gye Suk Lee, was born in South Korea and emigrated to Brazil when he was 14.  Nick’s parents were determined that he would assimilate to his new culture so he started using the western name Nicholas.  He says he learned Portuguese by playing ball with his school friends.  After starting a degree in Mechanical Engineering, Nick changed paths and decided to go into advertising.  He is now one of Brazil’s most well-known authors.  His best-selling book Go was selected for inclusion in the Brazilian public school curriculum and is such a cultural phenomenon that it has led to young people throughout Brazil getting the book’s title tattooed on themselves.

It was another of Nick’s books (Uma Vida Imaginária), that Valentina told me renewed her own faith in the redeeming power of love.  When Nick agreed to allow us to adapt his book for the stage, Valentina and I jumped at the opportunity.   That process started in earnest in August 2014 when Valentina travelled to NH to lead some training as part of theatre KAPOW’s annual summer artists’ retreat.  Carey, Peter, Valentina and I worked with local Brazilian actor Rafael Marinho to start the arduous process of making Nick’s words performable.  This was some of the most rewarding work of my life in the theatre.  Listening to Valentina and Rafael work through the language and then working with them to help take the literal translation and make it sound more natural was invigorating.

That week of work in August provided us with a rough draft of a script, but we knew that it still needed a lot of work.  Our next step was to send the script to our good friend and well-respected NH playwright Lowell Williams.  Lowell went through the script for us and found all the things that he thought needed to be re-worked.  One scene that provided us with a particularly difficult time (scene 10 in the show for those who may want to keep track) just didn’t seem to work in English.  In the scene the two characters are having trouble communicating because one is misinterpreting what the other is saying.  We really thought that the only way to make it work was if we kept the joke in Portuguese.  Then we decided to turn to two more of our longtime collaborators Mark Marshall and Kyp Pilalas from Wax Idiotical Films.  Mark and Kyp are two of the funniest guys I know and their films have a trademark quick wit.  They puzzled over the scene and within just a few days sent us a re-write that is absolutely one of my favorite parts of the show.  They just did such a tremendous job remaining loyal to Nick’s words while also finding a way to make the scene work for an American audience.

Now we’re in rehearsal for the show and every night we find little things we want to tweak.  It’s a process to be sure and one that likely isn’t going to be finished until the lights come up on opening night.  We are anxious to share that moment with you and especially excited that Nick will be there to share it with us.  From Korea to Brazil to New Hampshire I can’t imagine what it will be like for him to watch his words come to life on stage at the Opera House.  Man, now I’m psyching myself out.  There’s lots of work left to do before you and Nick arrive. Gotta go.

1. ~ Matt Cahoon

Instant Acting and Kismet

Just add water...and a script, a director, a castmate, copious amounts of coffee.... a couple of slices of pizza won’t hurt.

Walking into the kickoff meeting of the 2014 24 Hour Play Festival, I really had no idea what to expect, but I thought I did. I knew there would be about 30 people there. I knew that five playwrights and five directors would be paired up by the luck of the draw and that the rest of us would be assigned to a cast by lottery.  But I did not know the sweet moments of kismet, or the confidence in my ability to work fast….really fast, and pretty well.  I’m hooked.

I knew two people in the room, Debera Lund and Olivia Dodd, a director and an actor with whom I’d just worked for a week last month. I secretly hoped I’d work with Deb, because I liked her process and didn’t get to work with her nearly long enough. The first playwright, Patrick Cleary got to pick a card from the “director” group. He drew Debera. After the other playwrights randomly chose their directors, they got to pick their cast size. Patrick drew a cast of two.

Then, Debera was the first director to “cast” the show by blindly picking cards with the actors’ pictures on them. Suddenly, the picking-teams-in-gym-class feeling washed over me. I thought, “Please don’t let me be the last kid picked. Please don’t let me be the last kid picked”, until I realized that having a card with your face on it picked at random is more like being part of a card trick than being chosen (or not) for a dodgeball team. Debera picked my card first. Hooray! First kismet moment. By the end of the evening, our team included Patrick, Deb, myself, and a young actress named Jasmine Roth, who also happened to be one of the playwrights for the Festival.

The playwrights then chose a prompt in the form of an image or a quote. Our prompt was a picture of the M. C. Escher elephant. He chose a genre: Drama. There were a few minutes for the four of us to get together. When I meet new people, I fight an urge to talk. It is my job to make everyone in the group comfortable. Or uncomfortable, as the case may be. Even when it’s not. Somehow, I blurted out something about having a wicker table in the shape of an elephant. Because, you know, elephant is sort of random. It seemed like a team-building statement. Well, guess what? It kind of was. Because Patrick said he sometimes likes to approach things literally, and what did the elephant table look like, exactly? So I described it. Second kismet moment.

After the kickoff, the actors and directors got to go home to re-convene in the morning. The playwrights were challenged to write a play before 7:00 AM, while the rest of us slept. Although, I am not sure sleep is an accurate description. My mind was “on” all night. Would I get there in time? Would I be able to get my son to his cross-country team breakfast at approximately the same time I had to be at the theatre? Who was going to braid my daughter’s hair for her own theatrical performance that night? Would John, my husband, encounter any crazy theatre-dad issues he was unprepared for? Would everyone have enough to eat? (That last question is always there...I am probably the reincarnation of somebody’s zaftig ethnic grandmother….but I digress).

8:00 AM. On time. And Deb is already here. And there are scripts on the table for us to read. And there’s coffee! And a wifi password! Oh, this has already surpassed my expectations.  Jasmine arrives. Patrick is having some well-earned sleep. To me he has become an elusive fairy-godfather who worked through the night to deliver us an incredibly crafted play to bring to life. The script is entitled “Possession”. And, yes, it does involve an elephant-shaped wicker table. And the conflict between two women, a hoarder and her well-intentioned family member, at odds over the inherent value of stuff. And whether the table is, in fact, a table, or an elephant sculpture. I read it. I love it. It’s 10 pages (not, 17, thank you Patrick!). It’s about people I’m related to. You see, I have the I-break-at-yard-sales gene. (That’s a thing, right?)  I fight that gene tooth and nail, but I have it. Third kismet moment.  

In the script there’s a squabble over an opal ring. An opal ring, really?  Fourth kismet moment.

And we began. In spite of having Debera Lund as our director, I was certain this would have to be a day of blocking and memorizing. How can you possibly find the depth and soul of a character whose ink is barely dry in 10 hours? How can you create a backstory and undercurrents to the character relationships before lunch with a story that has just been read for the first time. Well, you can. You SO can! And, all of a sudden, I recalled days of working summer theatre twenty years ago….when ten days seemed more than sufficient to work on a full-length musical and fill a 1,300 seat house for two weekends.  It’s called total immersion. We had a day. But we had that WHOLE day. There was no world outside to attend to. Yes, we took breaks. Yes, we ate lunch. But those were the moments when the things we worked on took the time to seep into our limbic centers. There were no distractions. No one needed us to make their lunches. No one needed a ride to a friend’s house. No one needed to take over the kitchen with three friends to make cupcake sans recipe. And not a single person brought mud potion into the rehearsal room and accidentally spilled it.

We blocked. We formed relationships between the characters beyond the story at hand. We got to know these two women Patrick created literally overnight out of a prompt and a commitment. Debera was there to share her metaphors, to guide us, to push us to change up our approach, and change it back, and find the sweet spot. She calls it “whiplash” directing. I call it brilliant.

Jasmine and I got to know each other pretty well, in an “I’m-sorry-I-have-to-grab-you-and-throw-you-on-this-pile-of-hoarded-stuff” sort of a way. (The director made me do it.) In spite of the fact that she was up most of the night writing a play for another team, she was good. She was quick. She was a lot of fun to work with. My character was sort of obviously nuts. Her character was more difficult, I thought, walking a fine line between being a supportive and loving family member and just having-it-up-to-HERE already!

We teched at five. Our show opened at 7:30. First up. And we did it. We formed characters out of Patrick’s well-placed words on a page and adrenalin and coffee and water and trust and thought and repetition. Fifth kismet moment. And I want to do it again.

~ Deirdre Hickok Bridge

Cats and Cats and Cats

Driving from Massachusetts to New Hampshire Friday evening, my girlfriend and I started joking about the sort of play I'd end up writing for Theatre KAPOW's 24-Hour Play Festival. 

"Maybe it'll be all cats," I said.

"How would that even work?"

"Like, adult cats have to tell their kittens that they're all famous Internet memes. It's my play Going Viral but with cats. I could just change a few words and be in bed by ten. Call it Going Meowral."

"Going Feral," she joked.

Fast-forward to the part of the evening where I randomly select my prompt, and what is it...?

This. Only this.

Tempted as I was to pen the genre-shattering (and, let's be honest, award-winning) Going Meowral/Going Feral, I decided to use this prompt to write something new. But what?

The playwright Chas Belov gave me some great advice: Have your actors improvise a bit and write your play around that. While I didn't end up transcribing their improvisations (maybe I should have! they were really funny), what I observed did help to inform my brainstorming process. 

I noticed that Kelly Litt was very, very good at physical comedy. He's a tall dude and can really impose himself in hilarious ways. Ben Bagley, I thought, would make a great straight man: earnest but also funny. Jackie Marcoux told me that she'd never done comedy, but in the two scenes they improvised she was really funny, though in a different way than the two boys.

So what to write with all of this?

Kelly and Ben had similar comedic sensibilities and played really well off of each other. Jackie's comedy was more understated, and I knew if I didn't give her character significant power in the scene I risked losing her voice. 

And then I had to include the line "You did what?!" And something about seeing yourself as more than you are. Or just cats. It wasn't too late for just cats, right?

I don't want to spoil the surprise of what I ended up writing, but I will tell you this:

• Kelly is responsible for an Oprah Magazine reference that may or may not make it into the production.
• I started writing around 9:30pm and finished the first draft around 1:18 am. It clocked in at eleven pages. As I wrote to a friend on Facebook (because there was much Facebooking throughout this process): The only muse I've ever known is a gun pointed at my head. (Or a ticking clock. Whichever.)
• I was told that both Ben and Kelly could sing and play the guitar. Ben also knew how to play a tiny coconut-shaped piano. All of them were proficient in stage combat. I could have done amazing things with this, but I used none of it. (Except maybe the guitar. We'll see.)
• The director, Jamileh Jemison, said that she finds dead bodies to be a source of great hilarity. I was unable to include a dead body in the script, unfortunately. But I did call the police, and they agreed that I was right to be concerned...

In any case, it's mostly out of my hands now. I can't wait to see what Jamileh and the actors do with it!

—Brandon M. Crose

www.brandoncrose.com

Capturing a Feeling

Wax Idiotical Films has been a long time partner with theatre KAPOW, providing video promo’s for their shows. When Carey first announced they were mounting a 3 person production of Macbeth on Halloween… at midnight, I immediately was excited. Not only for the inevitably spectacular performance, but I knew it would be a perfect opportunity to do something new with the video. We had found a tried and true equation for the promos, which all consisted of “talking-heads” and images of the rehearsal, but while they were often times informative it didn’t capture the feeling of a tKAPOW show (this usually was done more successfully in the montage/trailers during production week).

So as I brainstormed on how we could make this new video different, I made a mental list of things that I wanted to highlight. I kept going back to what Carey had said at the announcement, “Shakespeare. 3 Actors. Halloween. Midnight. Macbeth.” These words perfectly got the point across, and told me what I wanted to highlight. The brilliant language of Shakespeare, the fact that 3 people were playing every role, and that the performance would be at midnight on Halloween. I wanted something playful, but in a dark way, and oddly enough the idea struck me late at night while laying in bed.

Cars were driving past my house, and I’d watch the headlights shine through a small gap in my curtains, and they would go across the wall, and light up just a sliver of the room at a time. The idea of sweeping a light across the 3 different actors as they recited some of the lines from their different characters was an easy connection. Then came the tricky part. How? When I arrived to film I tried a few different lights; I knew I wanted to be able to wrap it with blackwrap and cut just a small line in the wrap, but also I needed it to be BRIGHT. Matt was kind enough to direct me to an “inkie” or par 15 light. Very small, and VERY bright.

After filming several lines with the light sweeping back and forth for each actor, I dove into the editing process. This was where I got to play a little bit more. I took some of the background noise of the cast whispering, and layered it over itself. I reversed one of the clips so there weren’t any words, just this whispering that made the hair on the back of my neck stand up. Visually, the footage looked great, but too bright. Through some color adjustments and desaturating of the footage, I was able to get an “almost” black and white look. I wanted there to be SOME color, but to make the look of the video match the tone: Dark. Mysterious. And most importantly - Creepy.

~ Mark Marshall, Wax Idiotical Films
Watch the trailer here