The FAULT/LINE Work Station (or, my “Beautiful Mind” moment)

Tags

"Devised" (Alternative Play-Making), CIA, Collaboration, Czech Republic, Dramaturgy, Fault/Line, Playwriting, Travel

After the initial round of rehearsals wrapped, I set in to work on the FAULT/LINE text. It took a while to get going, but I found that once I started writing stuff – any stuff at all – down, it really helped to get a handle on the process. The challenge, of course, was making sense of all the stimuli I had taken in, not just in rehearsal but in my research. I also had to try to lend some sense to what has been a messy and misguiding – purposefully and otherwise – 12-year-long (or more) conflict; certainly, no one will ever be able to put it all together cohesively, but it was still important to find some sense of structure that would translate to the real-time constraints of the stage. Getting all of that anxiety out on the page and building a sort of collage out of photos, drawings, charts, and, of course, words helped me create a visual structure of sorts that then translated into a textual structure. It is definitely a process I will carefully consider for later projects, particularly complex ones like THE PROPHET DARLA.