A glimpse into fight choreography

From Paul: Richard Gilbert, one of the members of R&D Choreography (with David Bareford) our fight designers for the show, weighs in with his excitement and thoughts on the process.

A long while back, I got a call from Paul, the director.  "We're doing an adaptation of Neverwhere.  Rob is adapting, I am directing.  It is going to be a while, and we can't talk about it publicly until we get some details worked out, but would you guys be interested in designing the violence?"  OK, I am making up pretty much everything after the word Neverwhere.  Because, you see, I didn't really _hear_ anything after that over the screaming "YES!!!" that was trying to escape my brain.  I hope that's what he said, because I did, of course, say yes.  And I didn't tell anyone for a few days.  Well, except my fiance, who I swore to secrecy.  She tried to make it clear that she was more excited for me than jealous.  With remarkable success, considering.

So that went on for a while.  I reread the book.  I got the first draft of the script and read that a few time through.  And then David and I started talking about the design.  There is so much to consider for this, and it ranges pretty widely.  And of course it interfaces with the other design elements - weapons are also props, so decisions about what someone fights with says a lot about who they are.  Blood - it is so intrinsic to the story ("lovely, wet blood, Mr. C") but it does funny things on stage - it can overshadow an important moment, or it can reinforce it beautifully as it drips quietly from a nostril.  But costumes are the most likely to be affected by blood.  Lights, Set, Puppets and Projections - all of these are interdependent with the violence.  

How the actors move will influence those decisions, but then once choreography is designed that will come back around and inform some of the actors' choices.   So we start out asking the questions and waiting to see what sticks.  Are the bodyguards' 'knacks' magic?  How do Croup and Vandemar move so quickly without appearing to rush in the live theatre?  If we figure that one out, how do we apply it in their fights?  Hunter's weapons should be simple, because she is practical.  Or they should be ornate, each one a trophy from some distant land where she killed a great beast.  Vandemar is a big guy - he needs a big knife.  Or wait, maybe a tiny little knife?  I can see him explaining, "People think its how big the knife is that matters.  It's not."  The spear....ok, the spear is a big deal.  It appears relatively briefly, and it is in exactly one fight...but it is a powerful artifact, so it should look cool...  Oh, right...that one big fight.  The one with the beast.  How do we make that look cool and scary?  It was already scaring me - I couldn't bear it if it looked weak and goofy in the end, and my favorite seat in the house is going to be six feet from the beast's death!  

At the first couple production meetings we saw so much beautiful thinking from every corner, and that started shaping decisions.  We brought a big bag of weapons to the second meeting and looked at what various choices would mean.  Some of it is obvious - the quarterstaff fight with Brother Sable is a quarterstaff fight.  But Hunter's staff should be a little different - maybe shorter (which will give us more room in tight quarters, and will also mean a more oriental style than Sable's European stick fighting). 

Here was an interesting evolution: for the bodyguard fight we were seeing machetes - I love the shower of sparks, and the ferocious brutality of a machete.  On the other hand, the fop should, by all rights, have a smallsword.  On the other other hand, as much fun as the fight in Rob Roy is, I don't want the fight to be about the superiority of one weapon style over another, but rather of one fighter over another - so I want the weapons to match.  Paul solved that problem - he loved our WWI bayonet.  It looks and could be held like a smallsword...and it is definitely a wicked shiv... but if has the meat to stand up to a machete blow for slashing blow!  So there, that does that.  But wait - every choice informs other choices...and look what we just did.  The Fop has this Bayonet that he thinks of as a sword, but when the fighting starts, he abandons his 18th century stance and starts hacking away... so the foppishness comes across as a thin veneer.  Lets see what the actor does with that!

Well, enough for now - so many things to work out!

A decade-long journey nears an end (and a beginning)

From Paul: I asked our award winning adaptor Robert Kauzlaric to contribute some insight into his process for this blog. 

There’s so much to discuss about this project, and Paul and Maren have already done an amazing job of that here. As the adaptor of the show, there are load of things on my mind I’m hoping to blather about on this blog, in particular: the rewards and challenges of working with such well-known and well-loved material – what do you cut? what do you keep? how do you stay true to the story while transposing it to a new medium with an entirely different set of restrictions/challenges/etc.  But before I attempt to open that can of discussion-worms, I thought it might be appropriate to share a little background on how I arrived at this point.

It was over 10 years ago that a friend first handed me a copy of Neverwhere with an off-hand, “This seems like it’d be right up your alley.” Indeed it was. I devoured it in a couple of days. Then I read it again. I had to put it away for a while out of necessity, but it kept churning in the back of my mind for months. I couldn’t get the insane notion out of my head that it would make for an amazing piece of theater… I just couldn’t figure out what company would be willing to tackle it, much less let me adapt it for them.

Then, in early 2000, I saw Lifeline’s production of The Two Towers (the first MainStage show I ever saw here) and knew I’d found a place that would be insane enough to do it. And that they’d do it right: with love and respect for the source; with love and respect of the audience; with heart, humor, danger, and passion.  Later that year, I was cast in The Silver Chair, and I got my first exposure to the Lifeline process, from an early reading of the script, through auditions, rehearsals, tech, and production… and I knew it was exactly the kind of process in which I would like to see it develop.

So, without any reason to suspect that my secret plan (known only to me) to have my hypothetical adaptation of Neverwhere get produced at Lifeline would, in a million years, actually, possibly, maybe, ever happen… I got right to work on my script.  I had no idea if rights were available. I had no serious hope that anyone would actually produce it. But that didn’t really matter to me. I was feeling wildly optimistic. Not even a beating from Mr. Vandemar could have stopped me.

I finished my first draft and sent it off to some close friends who were willing to give me feedback and help me wrap my head around what I’d gotten myself into. Several months later, draft two was read aloud by a circle of friends, and I got more valuable feedback. Rinse and repeat with draft three. I’m so indebted to those friends of nearly a decade ago (circa 2001) who helped to nurture this project even when it didn’t have a hope of ever getting produced (except in my mind). Some of those friends have since moved away from Chicago, but their influence is still felt by me every time I pore through the script. (Thanks to Chris, John, Dan, Gail, Cath, Tom, Matt, Mark, Mark, Elise, and everyone I’m forgetting.)

Then I sent the script around to some director friends, and some companies I had closer relationships with at the time. The feedback was positive, but I heard a lot of, “This is cool, but seems a bit impossible. Good luck getting it produced!” Heartache ensued. The script idled on my computer as I turned my attention to other projects for a while.

In 2002, I attended one of Mr. Gaiman’s readings on the American Gods tour and was blown away by the sheer awesomeness of the experience (if you haven’t seen him read his own work yet, DO SO). I got my book signed, shook his hand, chatted with him ever-so-briefly, and wondered if my dream of adapting Neverwhere would ever happen.

In 2003, nursing a broken leg, I finally found DVD copies of the original BBC miniseries and devoured all six hours and all of the commentary. Trapped on my sofa with a full leg cast and my cats for company, I lost myself in London Below once more and began, admittedly, to mourn my dream of adapting the piece for the stage. The possibility seemed such an unattainable long-shot at that point. Perhaps the painkillers were making me excessively maudlin, but I started to fear my secret little dream would never be realized.

But by early 2005, I had appeared in six productions at Lifeline, and had finally established an actual ongoing relationship with the ensemble. The time was right to formally submit the script to the theatre. My hopes were high. I got feedback from more friends about the script. I re-edited the script. I sent off the script. And waited.

And waited.

Finally, as it turns out, the rights weren’t available. And, in any event, the timing wasn’t right for the ensemble to get behind it. The company only knew me as an actor. I hadn’t made a strong enough push to establish myself as a writer in their eyes. Nor (in retrospect), had I truly attempted to convey the full extend of my excitement about the project to them. I was hugely disappointed at the time, but I get it now.

Later that year, I was honored to be asked to join the company and got my first direct exposure to the script-selection process from the “inside.” About a year later, I got my first writing opportunity with the company: a KidSeries musical adaptation of The True Story of the 3 Little Pigs! Time passed. Paul and I tackled The Island of Dr. Moreau. I dove into the world of Oscar Wilde with The Picture of Dorian Gray. And by mid-2008 or so (if I have my timing correct), I re-introduced the company to my Neverwhere idea and by this time there was interest, trust and solid support. And in Paul, I had the perfect director-partner committed to seeing the project through with me. All we needed was to get the rights.

And then last year, they came through.

And there was celebration.

So, in January of 2009, nearly 10 years after I first started working on my script, I dove back in. We held a reading with the ensemble and with their invaluable feedback, a brand new draft emerged. This past summer, we cast the show. In early December, we held another reading with the cast and ensemble, and brought the production team in on the discussions. Again, everyone’s insights were invaluable. And Paul and I met repeatedly for a month to discuss character, direction, tone, theme, style and all that other great theatre-type stuff.

Now, here I sit in February of 2010, a mere two weeks away from the beginning of the rehearsal process. We’ve got an amazing cast and design team, all geeked to the gills about working on such wonderful source material. The long, SOLITARY portion of my journey is over as the project now gets placed in the capable hands of a massive TEAM of people, all working to tell the story, hone the production, and realize the theatrical vision of the piece.

And I, for one, couldn’t be more excited to see how it all turns out.

Character Study: Hunter

I wanted to pause and explain the brief character studies that I am posting. When you read a book you take the characters as they are written. When an actor brings a character to life on stage there is additional material that may help the actor create a convincing portrayal of a character that is not on the page. If a character is a historical figure then there are biographical accounts to help a character construct a role but when the character is fictional it is more complicated.

In the case of the characters in Neverwhere, Paul and I have been discussing the fairy tale or mythological figures that inform the some of the characters as source materials for the actors.

Hunter: The name itself is shows the simplicity of early naming. In which person was defined by a job such as Miller, Smith, Wright would have referred to the miller the smith and the wheelwright or cartwright. (Hammmersmith, another character in Neverwhere is similarly named and as Hunter is a hunter he is indeed a metal smith).

In addition to the simplicity of her name Hunter feels ancient and her motivations seem very primal, taciturn and therefore mysterious. She has excellent mythological predecessors the Greek/Roman goddess Diana/Artemis, a virgin dedicated to the hunt. The Diana of Anet by Goujon is shown above.

The Amazons, known more as warriors than hunters but recognized for their fierceness in battle and apocryphally for cutting off one breast to make it easier to string their arrows. Penthesilea and Hippolyta are perhaps the best known of the Amazons the former having been involved in the Trojan War and the later appears in the labors of Hercules and later revived by Shakespeare as a character in A Midsummer Night's Dream.

There is also an early Briton analog in the warrior queen Boudicca (sometimes written as Boadicea) who led a rebellion against Roman occupiers. The Anglo-Saxons had a belief in the fundamental danger of nature and an afterlife that consisted mostly in the praise and after-singing of the people who still lived and would sing of your great deeds. Pictured above is a statue by Thomas Thorncroft of the warrior queen which is, appropriately, in London. Which seems to fit with Hunter's valuing most highly her deeds.

That she is hunting the beast of London also evokes various mythological references. In the Mabinogion (I know I keep referring to this it really is a fantastic source - sorry) Culhwch kills a boar as one of the tasks he must fulfill to win his bride Olwen. Hercules kills the Erymanthian Boar. A unique twist on on the boar in mythology is the Norse goddess Freya, who is sometime portrayed riding the boar, Hildisvini, into battle rather than attacking the creature. This is not to say the beast of London is necessarily meant to be a boar but to give just a few examples of the monsters that must be killed by a hero or the relationship of a beast to some sort of immortality. The beast leads me to the reluctant hero Richard Mayhew but I will save him for another day.

What's in a Name? The Marquis de Carabas

This is the first in a series of posts on the characters of Neverwhere. In early emails with Paul, the director and Rob, the adapter, we discussed how the name the Marquis de Carabas appears in the Charles Perrault fairy tale Le Maistre Chat or Le Chat Botte known to us as Puss in Boots. Briefly, in the story, the third son of a miller that, being a third son, his only inheritance is a cat. The cat however is no ordinary cat and through various ruses passes off the third son as the fictional Marquis de Carabas and helps him successfully wed the King's daughter.

The story in the Andrew Lang translation in English is available at Project Gutenberg here:

http://www.gutenberg.org/etext/503

The original French version is here:

http://books.google.com/books?id=5K3fL6CHP-UC&pg=PA137&lpg=PA137&dq=Le+Maistre+Chat,+ou+le+Chat+Botté+original+text&source=bl&ots=fI3PWPqI4e&sig=pRLWylmEMPz8fVhAeSwh45mBDe8&hl=en&ei=7-czSurfA5mMtgeemdj4Dg&sa=X&oi=book_result&ct=result&resnum=10#v=onepage&q=&f=false

What interests me about the resonances of using the same name for the Marquis in Neverwhere is that he has all the elements of self made man and the ambiguous morality of self advancement that is actually more like Puss in Boots than his namesake (not to mention his nine lives and cat-like moves). Perrault wrote his stories in the 17th century and they show the era's value for courtly appearance and behavior as well as unabashed social climbing. The story is also remarkably more complex than other children's stories. Rather than clearly good and evil figures the cat and his methods of trickery, flattery and out right lying is serving his master well.

It is a fairy tale but it is also much more like real life and given the competing motives of some of Door's companions in London below it seems appropriate to invoke a more complicated and morally ambiguous fairy tale. The descriptions of the Marquis' dress and behavior (like other characters who seem to come from a variety of time periods) seem more like the 17th or 18th century. Also the history of the Marquis is obscure and his title could easily not be his own. If there is anyone who has learned to manage in London below through a mixture of flattery, cunning and hidden dangerous skills it would be the Marquis.

Note: there is another Gaiman short story about the Marquis. I have not picked it up yet but hope to add it to the list of character materials soon.

Dislocation, Magic Places and Non Magical Reporting

There are moments in the rehearsal of a play where an actor will simply stop to make sure they understand what a word means in a particular context. Unlike when you are reading a book and speed by a word you sort of know without pausing to lug out the dictionary, it becomes much more important to know what those words might mean when an actor must interpret them on stage for an audience.

I have been thinking about the title, Neverwhere. It is a place, a new adverb, a coinage and yet because we are familiar with both never and where we have an intuitive sense of what it means. To not be in a place. implies a dislocation in both time and space. But this is stronger than the no in nowhere is never as it it has never been. The other half of the word is also ambiguous. Where is an adverb used for questions. It is not neverthere but neverwhere. Where implies uncertainty.

This is further complicated by the way language develops. I looked up neverwhere in the Oxford English Dictionary. (A wondrous multi volume dictionary which gives not only definitions but also etymologies and usage in sentences from various time periods, I highly recommend perusing it.). There was a time between about 1400-1500 that neverwhere or rather newer whare or newyr quhar or neuer where was used interchangeably with nowhere. Of course where and there and that and what were all sort of interchangeable for a time. My favorite example being from the circa 1580 Towneley Plays "If thou com agane to nyght, look I se the neuer in syght, neuer where in my land." (Roughly "If thou come again tonight, look I see thee never in sight and neverwhere in my land.") This jives well with the ambiguous time period and social structure of London below.



Door uses the words "fiefdom" and "duchy" and asks Richard to whom he swears allegiance. The social structure of London Below seems to be feudal rather which is just one more incongruity which further displaces Richard.

There is a long history of displacement in fantasy. Of course when looking at the title, Neverwhere. One must also think of J.M. Barrie's Never Never Land in the Peter Pan books (in which there is a surprising hint of menace for all that the books are children's classics). The lost boys are lost. They have slipped through the cracks of their London with the real risk of never returning.

Similarly in the Welsh epic the Mabinogion, which feels akin to Arthurian tales, the knights slip in and out of magical realms without realizing it until they encounter a magical person although the shift from ordinary to magic is often signaled by the hero seeing a puzzling event like a sheep crossing the river and changing from black to white and back again.

In Shakespeare, characters often enter a wilderness and encounter the magical and are transformed. The lovers and mechanicals in A Midsummer Night's Dream enter the forest, King Lear wanders in the wilderness, Rosalind flees to the forest of Arden in As You Like It, Prospero and the infant Miranda are shipwrecked on an Island in the Tempest.

These places that are outside the normal social order provide a place for magical encounters and more importantly transformation. Being outside the normal social order allows a character to reflect on that social order and see it with the perspective of an outsider or find that he or she has changed and no longer fits within that social order.

So both the place name and the place itself are dislocating. It is interesting however that the inhabitants of London Below call it London below. Neverwhere is not used as a place name. The place is real to those that inhabit it.

Which brings me to one other meandering thought about fantasy or more specifically the genre often called magical realism. I don't know whether those who make book classifications identify Gaiman's work as magical realist but he does share something with magical realist author Gabriel Garcia Marquez- a grounding in journalism.

The magical in Neverwhere is simply reported, in a matter of fact journalistic style. In fact the only person to whom this world is odd is Richard Mayhew so explanations are not forthcoming. It is part of what makes the world so plausible.

We are familiar with slipping into magical worlds and the honest way the events are reported is useful for actors in performance as well who are always in search of authenticity in performance. The world has to be real for the actors and the audience even when it is paint and flats.

Chicago Below

Last week while getting my cell phone back from a good samaritan I parked in a loading zone that I thought was appropriate but apparently was not and my car was towed by the City of Chicago. Now most of you who have had the pleasure of having a vehicle towed by the city know that the various impound lots are always in strange, vaguely dangerous and difficult places to get to. Mine happened to be at the lot on lower Wacker drive and as I was heading there I started thinking about Neverwhere and the hint through Hunter that all big cities have a city underneath. Certainly Chicago had Fort Dearborn and conflict between white settlers and American Indians that displayed as manifest destiny in bas relief on various buildings around the City. There were the gangsters, prohibition joints and strange tunnels and all kinds of layers of seediness to the city, as any city always has. It seems to be part of the definition of its city-ness. Chicago also has streets under other streets of which lower Wacker is one (more familiar perhaps to non-Chicagoans as the stand in for Gotham city in recent Batman movie chase scenes).

My journey to lower Wacker started by trying to look it up on an online map with walking directions and the on line map said directions were unavailable. It never bodes well when the place you are going is not on a map. I got off the bus I checked with a policeman and a homeless man who were standing together chatting. The directed me to an underground passage to the train station and but that I should go through the train station and out and I would be on the underground level. The underground passage to the train is one of those glittering and disorienting and rather pungent food courts with unflattering overhead lighting. I have lost enough of the rural girl by living in the city that I adopted the city practice of walking briskly and looking as if you know where you are going even when you don't. I made it to the train station crossed the platforms and exited into what was certainly the bowels of the city. It was almost entirely concrete and asphalt with huge pipes, strange six headed spigots, and engineer's hieroglyphics on the walls in yellow and orange spray paint that were surely indicating gas mains or electricity or monsters.

I started walking in the direction that I was told and then the sidewalks ended completely. Occasionally there seemed to be sidewalk but it was entirely enclosed by bars and gates and could not be used. I saw a woman walking purposefully down the island that divides traffic and decided to follow her since she looked like she knew where she was going. She seemed nervous that I was walking behind her. I saw a man moving a large dumpster down an underground loading dock and asked him if I was on the right track and he told me I was.

Along a wall of heating vents there were at least half a dozen homeless encampments, There carts and bags and sleeping bags in neatly defined areas but the homeless who were there were either absent or tucked away in blankets.

I finally saw the little hut that served as the station for the impound lot complete with flickering overhead lights and disaffected employees carrying out personal calls on cell phones.

I found myself thinking about both the disorientation of being underground. I discovered that the lot ran right by the Chicago river but couldn't picture where. I also saw, through a gap in the streets above, the flickering lights of the ferris wheel at Navy Pier. It had no idea it would be so close and yet it was also a world away. I also thought about what it is to be lost or dispossessed. The homeless people I passed, what were their stories. Then I thought about the lack of identity in a place as impersonal as an impound lot. I found myself thinking about Richard's loss of identity after helping Door. He has slipped through the cracks and for him to be ignored by the people he knew is a profound loss of identity. However, the threads of identity are so tenuous anyway. Friends family, possessions, surely these too once belonged to the homeless now sheltering on lower Wacker. We all fear of losing the things that we hold dear and even the not so dear things that help give us definition, that makes us identify so strongly with Richard's disorientation.

Ultimately, it would have felt petty to be annoyed about a car, or a towing, or an unhappy employee, when I got to drive out (the wrong direction of course) from lower Wacker into a world that was safe and familiar, at least on the surface.

Of course, I also just found out in my random research that Gaiman did a walking tour of a mysterious Chicago neighborhood. I may have to pick up a copy of A Walking Tour of the Shambles before my next ramble on Lower Wacker Drive.

http://www.amazon.com/Walking-Tour-Shambles-Neil-Gaiman/dp/0961035269/ref=pd_ys_home_shvl_48

"Designing a set is like trying to find your keys: when you find them, you can stop looking."

Last week's production meeting was chock full of inspiration.  From collages of magazine clippings and sketches of various costume possibilities to the sounds of Savage Aural Hotbed (google for samples) and a discussion of how machetes make sparks when they hit each other. We are all in the inspiration stage, taking in sources that initiate thought and discussion of the practical realization of how we can make this world feel right theatrically and do justice to the storytelling.

Scenic designer Alan Donahue provided some early conceptual ideas for what we will do with the space we stage NEVERWHERE in, addressing right off the bat that there is a conundrum of making both London Above and London Below co-exist while creating a visual cohesion that fits on our "postage-stamp sized" stage.  We also need to make sure there is a large enough playing area for the combat to take place and ensure that the set can be struck back in a reasonable amount of time and effort between shows for our KidSeries production of THE BLUE SHADOW that runs in repertory with NEVERWHERE for the first few weeks.  A herculean task to be sure.  Alan was inspired by materials - black industrial palettes - and the architectural element of doors.  He showed a few sketches of ideas and even made a quick miniature of what basically looked like the inside of a black cube, made of doors, skewed at an angle. These were very much thoughts for incubation, and we agreed we needed to meet just the two of us to talk through the functionality of these abstractions.

Alan and I met Friday evening and again yesterday.  Friday night had us breaking down the elements into individual pieces. He considered columns, doors big and small, platforming and catwalks.  By the end of that meeting we had kind of settled on something actually quite spare with three tall (12'-15' high) doors upstage center with perhaps some platforms in front and behind.  Honestly, Alan didn't seem very settled and nether was I.  We set up a meeting for Sunday afternoon, only about 36 hours later, to talk again. 

You should know Alan has a lot of irons in the fire right now.  Two of the other shows I know he is currently designing, Les Liaisons Dangereuses and Dancing At Lughnasa (directed by my good friend Elise Kauzlaric, Lifeline Ensemble member and our Jessica/Lamia/Anesthesia) are coming up soon and I wasn't convinced he would have the brain space, let alone the time, to spend working on NEVERWHERE.  How he did it, I don't know, but when I met with him yesterday, he showed me something completely different and really exciting.

Alan went back to his early sources when he was searching for pictures of underground tunnels.  He landed on a few specific images that really spoke to him. Tunnels reaching away to unknown depths and some very intriguing vertical elements, connecting the Above to Below. He recalled a Shakespearean design of discs of playing space in layers, representing earth and heaven, and considered how they would help create this sense of verticality in the structure of tunnels and add to the above/below relationship. It is a sculptural approach to the space that doesn't overwhelm the stage but creates a true sense of where while allowing a variety of entrances and exits, ups and downs, ins and outs. Lighting designer Kevin Gawley requested areas of the set where lights could be planted so that lighting sources could be very focused and intimate and Alan has possibilities all over the place.  And while it isn't formally, logistically designed, there is now a sense of arriving at a place of agreement and mutuality. Something's here we are both interested in getting our teeth into. 

Alan teaches at my alma mater, The Theatre School at DePaul University, and occasionally gives me examples of how he speaks to his students. He said to me "I often say designing a set is like trying to find your keys: when you find them, you can stop looking."  As a director I get to witness a lot of individual creative processes and sitting in on Alan's fascinating depth of research and creative thinking is exactly the kind of thing that makes me excited to work on this project. Here then are some of his sources, for you to get excited about it too.