Won’t You Be My Neighbor
There is an old joke I’ve heard many reincarnations of, which goes something like this:
- “Hey, did you hear that the guy who moved in next door used to be in prison?”
- “Yeah, the judge ordered him to go door-to-door and tell the whole neighborhood.”
There’s also a great exchange in one of my favorite movies, The Big Lebowski, when Walter assures The Dude that the local (and very intimidating) bowler, known as Jesus, shouldn’t be feared for his bowling prowess because he is a convicted pedophile:
WALTER
He’s a sex offender, with a record. He did six months in Chino for exposing himself to an eight-year-old. When he moved to Hollywood he had to go door-to-door to tell everyone he was a pederast.
DONNY
What’s a “pederast,” Walter?
WALTER
Shut the fuck up, Donny.
These quotes shuttled through my brain as I, too, made my own awkward journey to my neighbors front doors to inform them of the latest Sandbox Theatre project.
At STP we pride ourselves on our ability to make great theatre in unexpected places. We’ve asked our colleagues to stand on bar stools and shout into crowds of onlookers, we’ve made a good friend run on a treadmill for nearly an hour without pause, we’ve asked perfectly talented local actors to make complete costume changes on the corner of Sheffield & Webster for six straight weekends. For us, making theatre exciting and alive requires a huge risk – and it always starts with the space we inhabit for our play.
When we began our preliminary talks about producing Week 34 of the 365 Days/365 Plays Festival, we knew we wanted to do something outdoors, but basically nothing more than that. That was the germ of the idea. Of the seven plays assigned to us, almost all of Suzan-Lori Parks’s daily riffs had something to do with torture, war, entrapment, a victim’s fascination with his/her punishment. And, to us, that meant outdoors; where one’s relationship to his/her surrounding world is so obvious. Honestly, at first I was lost in her plays. STP always starts with a space and builds a play around it, and for the first time we found ourselves seeking a space to fit the words. We were completely turned around in our process. And then, one line jumped right off the page and practically hit me in the face:
SONGSTRESS
In good times the bars are far apart, in bad times they’re close, but I’m telling you, oh, all the world’s a cage, Mac, can’t you see?!
I understood that this woman, this Songstress character, was trapped, and that it was the space that was trapping her. And that she needed to get out, she needed to run away from it. There needed to be a door to some place outside. She needed to slam it right in someone’s face.
As we always do, all four company members got together to discuss how we could possibly envision these plays working in a literal space. Slowly but surely we came to the realization that the alley and back courtyard behind my apartment was the best choice. There were three-stories of wooden steps and planks, a maze of chain link fences, and more importantly entrances from four sides. It was perfect. For me, it was that “I’m telling you, oh, all the world’s a cage, Mac” line and the chain link fence that meshed in my head. It was unanimous. We would do the entire production in the alley and courtyard behind my apartment. The only problem was. . . it was in the alley and courtyard behind my apartment! I would have to tell, to ask, to beg the indulgence of each and every one of my neighbors.
Talk about risk.
If we weren’t convinced this space was the perfect environment for these plays, we wouldn’t have been able to do it. As we began rehearsals for Week 34, it became quite clear to us how well this space was working. A prisoner character would deliver his monologue from a dumpster. If a domestic squabble between father and daughter over a night out bowling were to occur, it would be outside of an apartment. And, of course, there was that issue of the Songstress and her caged world.
Some of my neighbors actually attended. From all accounts, they enjoyed themselves too.
Audiences came, as they always seem to do, and had so much to say afterwards. The whole thing – the announcements to the neighbors, the mass of people sharing thoughts in the courtyard of an apartment complex, the 16 other hub theatres producing the same plays at the same time in different cities across the country – it all seemed to be indicative of the same issues: community, communication, communal space.
Had Suzan-Lori intended her plays to be produced outdoors? Did we have to shape and shift her words to meet the demands of the space? These were the hot topics I found myself discussing with audience members after the show. To that, I would always come back to our issue of the Songstress and her need to escape. Since we were mere steps away from an actual back alley, it occurred to us early on that we could have a honest-to-goodness car pull up in the alley and take her away. . . luckily for us, Suzan-Lori gave us a stage direction that made a whole lot more sense once we were in the space:
(She runs out, locking him in)
MAC
Where are you going? Ginger don’t go! I love you! Please!
(Sound of a car roaring off. Then crashing horribly. Mac buries his face in his hands as the music swells.)
Suzan-Lori had written the risk right into the script. How awesome is that?
As far as I know, I haven’t been evicted (yet).
(all photos by Alex Miles Younger)
