Week One at the Orchard Project and an Interview with Barbara Pitts McAdams

By Rachel Karp

Members of Orchard Project’s Core Company after a day of Moment Work

A Moment:

We Begin. Sia’s Chandelier plays, Queen Mary stands center in a green dress with long ribbons attached; two attendants dressed in black tug at the ribbons, controlling Mary’s every move. Mary locks eyes with Queen Elizabeth, enveloped in a red and gold cape. They circle. Elizabeth turns her back. Mary struggles. She is forced to her knees. The sound of a foot stomping, attendants make a harsh gesture with their hands, Mary slumps, beheaded. We end.

Week One:

I spent my first week at Orchard Project this summer doing ‘moment work’ with members of Tectonic Theater Project as well as other members of Orchard Project’s Core Company. ‘Moment Work,’ coined by Tectonic Theater Project founder Moises Kaufman, is a method of devising theater in which creators make moments surrounding a central theme, question, or ‘hunch’ using costume, props, sound, lights, design, and sometimes text. Eventually, moments are re-contextualized and strung together to create a narrative. This method has been used to create all of Tectonic’s pieces, including Gross Indecency: The Three Trials of Oscar Wilde, The Laramie Project, and 33 Variations. Tectonic company member Barbara Pitts McAdams and writer Mina Samuels were at Orchard Project to develop their new play Because I am Your Queen: A Feminist Fantasia (Working Title). The piece explores notions of womanhood and power by placing various queens from history and literature onstage together at a spa retreat. While the best way to understand the work that Tectonic does is to be thrown into it, that is not always possible. So, I sat down and talked with Barbara Pitts McAdams in order to share with STLN readers as much as possible about Tectonic’s work.

Four Big Questions (and Answers) with Barbara Pitts McAdams:

1. Why moment work? What do you think moment work offers that other forms of writing or devising a play can’t provide?

I think, for me, what makes moment work a little unique from other devising techniques is that we’re really curious about two things.  First, we always try to lead with the non-text elements of the stage. So we’re asking performers not just to move, to make shape with their bodies, but to think about narrating with lights, costume pieces, prop pieces, spatial relationships architecture, and with all the words that come to mind when you think viewpoints. [We’re] really learning how those elements communicate meaning from the stage: Do they communicate viscerally? Do they make sound? Do they evoke memory? Do they create joy? Really figuring out how they are reading from the stage and how they can carry part of the story. Especially because when you’re working with non-theatrical source material, that stuff is really dry and boring. So how are we going to use that which is theatrical to make that a stage event and make that riveting? Even if it’s just how you’re moving across the stage and where you’re putting the chairs. That can all be epic if you’re rigorous about it.

Second, the moment work form of framing exploration with the brackets “I begin.” Something happens. “I end.” Within the brackets of “I begin” and” I end,” there’s a moment. It’s very freeing to go into a process going, “You know, this text or this hunch, whatever the hunch of the play might be, is making me think of X, Y, Z and I just want to make a moment about it.” You don’t have to know where it fits, you don’t have to worry about that. It’s very open ended in the beginning. So I think those are the things that really have appealed to me about moment work.

2. How does working with fictional or historic source text, as with the project you are working on now, compare to interviewing real people, as you did when creating The Laramie Project?

With The Laramie Project, we didn’t know what the ending of the story would be when we started because the two perpetrators hadn’t been prosecuted. So we had to wait until the second trial to premiere the show because there was no ending yet. We showed up at the Denver Center for a longer rehearsal period than normal, but the trial had just concluded so we went to Denver with no Act Three. Sometimes, with moment work, we talk about working quickly and having that exquisite pressure that Anne Bogart refers to when you have not quite enough time. Act Three feels like that, it feels very expressionistic; it’s a year’s worth of events in a 40-minute act because we had so much to cover that hadn’t been written yet.

Here, at the Orchard Project, we are working with some existing source material from these great old plays. Some of these plays are pretty musty. You’d be like, “Ew, why would you ever want to work on that?” But we’re pulling out the central queen figures in each of these plays and figuring out if there’s a way these queens can talk to each other. And does that have something relevant to say, especially as we look at our first female nominee for president, about women and power? So the trick is that we don’t know what the story is. That poses a different kind of challenge than telling the story of the trials of Oscar Wilde or what happened in Laramie, Wyoming after Mathew Shepard was killed. I think in both cases though, what we’re looking for with moment work is how the elements of the stage help us shape our narrative. Like in this current play we have an idea of what we think the environment might be, so we brought those tools with us here, we brought costume pieces, and our designer, who’s both a costume designer and a set designer. It’s really important to us that we have those elements here in the process.

3. How did you first get involved with Tectonic Theater Project?

I had been working with company member Leigh Fondakowski on a different piece of hers and for their first workshop of The Laramie Project, Leigh said to Moises “well, what about Barb, you liked her in my show,” and he said “yes yes yes bring her.” And I knew that that was the room I had been waiting to get into. That was the room where it happens . You know? So I had to move some things around in my schedule. Cause I had seen their first big success Gross Indecency: The Three Trials of Oscar Wilde and was so taken with what Tectonic was doing formally, with storytelling, using found text, historical text, Oscar Wilde’s own words, some of his works of art, and weaving that into a really compelling theatrical narrative. I had made a show that was similarly about a turn of the century feminist Charlotte Perkins Gilman and people kept saying “oh this play is so much like Gross Indecency,” and I thought, “well I guess I better go see it.” I think the lesson in that is when you want to make a certain kind of work you don’t have to invent the wheel. You have to find out “well, who can I model myself after?” And likeminded people will kind of eventually find each other.

4. If you could go back in time and give your college-aged self one piece of advice, what would it be?

Well my college aged self… I went to school at University of Oregon, so I moved to Portland, Oregon and I thought to myself, “You know, I want to see if I can get cast in this local community and do some plays here, see if I can hack the lifestyle.” And then after a year and a half…someone invited me to go to Philadelphia and develop a theater company there. First for love, but then I stayed for art. I feel like even though I think of myself as a fearless person, I was inching my way toward New York,which is a very pricey place to live. I don’t know that everybody needs to be in New York to make a career happen. But when I got to New York I was 29 and I felt like maybe I had spun my wheels two years too long in Philadelphia. So if you feel like New York is your ultimate destination, or LA is your ultimate destination, just do it. You know, like, yes…obviously use your own judgment about what you’re ready for. But I think I was playing it a little safe. Maybe if I had arrived a little earlier, where I ultimately wanted to end up, then things might have happened a little sooner. I mean, I’m pretty happy with where things are now. But sure, it was really, really, hard in those first five years in New York and I think getting here a little younger might have given me a little head start. So don’t be afraid. Go for it now! What is more worth doing than what your heart is telling you and your soul is telling you to do? There’s no banking career that is going to make up for that if you don’t do it, so just do it now. You know?

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Rachel Karp ’18 is a blogger and Co-Editor in Chief for The Skidmore Theater Living Newsletter