Silk Road Theatre Project

We recently announced a new and unusual project here at Silk Road–a collaboration with Adler Planetarium, and AT Adler Planetarium–a brand new play only recently titled Dragon/Sky.

Here’s a little window on the making of a new play:

In this case, Adler and SRTP enjoyed long conversations over the course of many months about what a collaboration might be for a live theatre piece in Adler’s newly renovated theatre.  To join the Chicago-wide Year of China (2009), the conversation focused into a play on Chinese astronomy.  SRTP then commissioned Elizabeth Wong, a playwright also under commission for The DNA Trail, and whose play China Doll has received a staged reading at SRTP, to write a new play.

Since last spring, Elizabeth and I have corresponded and shared research on star legends and astronomical history via email between Chicago and her home base in California.  When she came to Chicago in July she visited the Planetarium.  Eventually, an inspiration about video games emerged.  Then came the title: Dragon/Sky. The first time the designers met, we didn’t even have a script.  Such is the life of the new play.

Now we have the first draft.  This week, Elizabeth and director Tom Arvetis and a workshop cast are spending five days reading and listening and talking and re-writing.  All for a play that won’t happen until the summer.

When it’s warm, come out to the Adler, see a dragon, and think: what a long gestation these play-creatures have.

There is an article taught in college dramaturgy classes that presents and then takes apart the idea that the dramaturg sits behind the director and to the side.

In the rehearsal for the reading of Into the Numbers I’ve been sitting behind director Joanie Schultz and playwright Christopher Chen, which is a delightful place to sit.  Not only do I get to see the writer’s reactions to his own play, but I get to watch the two passing notes.

Passing notes, a practice so denigrated in junior high, is quite effective in the context of a rehearsal, where silence respects the actors working through scenes, but instant communication is necessary to to tweak and shape that work.

Meanwhile, behind me sits Stephen Ptacek, our sound consultant, typing notes into his laptop.  A sound consultant is an unusual beast to have in a rehearsal process for a staged reading–but because Christopher Chen takes his audience into a disintegrating world, discussing the actual theatrical means of representing disintegration is key in understanding how to make the play work.

Now our work is a series of questions, deconstructing a play that deconstructs the fictional internal world of an author who tracked down the details of history long buried in dusty archives.

We are lucky and grateful to have had a visit from Monica Eng, a Tribune reporter who wrote about and crossed paths with Iris Chang, and Paula Kamen, the author of Finding Iris Chang: Friendship, Ambition, and the Loss of an Extraordinary Mind, who were both kind enough to share their personal and professional knowledge.   If you are intrigued about Iris Chang and Nanking, you can find Paula’s book in paperback this month.  And the film Nanking is available on DVD.

Interviewer: And so now, back to… the number of Tutsis killed by the Hutus in Rwanda.

Iris Chang: Around 800,000

Interviewer: The number of Huguenots killed in the St. Bartholomew’s Day massacre.

Iris Chang: Around 70,000.

Interviewer: The number of children under 5 that die from Asthma in the United States.

Iris Chang: Around 100.

Interviewer: The price of a package of chicken breasts at Safeway.

Iris Chang: $3.50 for a package of 3.

Despite the irony of the excerpt above the tragic death of author Iris Chang, explored in Christopher Chen’s play “Into the Numbers,” is far from humorous. Last night we began work on the staged reading, which will have public performances later this week. Though the first few moments of rehearsal were filled with smiles and embraces – exclamations of “I haven’t seen you in so long!” and “how did your show go?” – the mood shifted as soon as we began to read.

The play goes inside Iris Chang’s mind in the last days before her death by suicide in 2005. In an article that appeared this week in the Champaign-Urbana News-Gazette, Chen said of the play, “I made it more of a fantasy than real biography. I kind of go along with the idea that she was trying to wrestle with the unknown, the unthinkable…” That struggle leads Iris into what our sound designer, Stephen Ptacek, described as a “vortex” of her mental illness and the horror of the genocides she had been researching.

As shown in this image the structure of a vortex is bigger at the top – the circumference wider – and narrows over distance to a single point. Ptacek and Jennifer Shin, who is playing Iris in the reading, riffed on the idea that early in Chang’s career, when she was first conducting research for her bestselling book, The Rape of Nanking, the “cycles” between her times of clarity and her times of mental illness (Chang suffered from bipolar disorder) were longer. As the pressure of her job mounted, and the horrors she was discovering grew, she cycled faster and faster, until she was alone at the base of the vortex. Even the structure of the text spirals to a point, leaving the character of Iris spelling “bayoneted them” one letter at a time as the interviewer counts down the minutes to her death.

The team is rounded out by director Joanie Schultz, cast members Yosh Hayashi, Devorah Richards, Erik Kaiko and Brent Barnes, dramaturg Jen Shook, and stage manager Kefah Crowley. Performances are Dec. 6 at 8pm and Dec. 7 at 1pm in the Silk Road space at the Chicago Temple.