Silk Road Theatre Project

Love em or hate em, few childhood memories are as strong as those of the family road trip. Sometimes the destination matters, sometimes what you find along the way is more memorable, sometimes who you drive with defines the journey, and sometimes you just take pictures of funny signs.

To celebrate Durango we want you to share road trip stories and especially photos. Post your road trip stories and photos as comments to this post or email them to me. –Lee

We pulled out a bench from furniture stock and put it in the down right corner of the stage. Far up left three rolling office chairs signfied the “car.” Together, the pieces created our theatrical representation of the space between the parking lot and ticket office for the Durango and Silverton Narrow Gauge Railroad. But what did that space look like in real life? The cast, crew and director gathered around curiously as I pulled up the internet on the laptop I use in rehearsal and typed “Durango ticket office” into Google.

The best link by far was from someone who had been to the city recently and posted pictures from his or her trip (though in the couple of days it’s taken me to make this blog entry I can’t find the link any more). The City of Durango Web site, and the D&SNGR site (everyone’s got a Web site these days!) were both helpful for pictures of the city as it is now and as it was in its historical past.

Content with what the vast internet had to offer, I journeyed to the SRTP Google Group - a site we created internally to post pictures and share research and production materials in the show creation period. There I found pictures from our company member Lee Keenan’s family trips to the southwest, including this great dinosaur running over the red hills and - of course - the Durango ticket office!

The amazing technology of the World Wide Web was invaluable to the folks in rehearsal that day for helping us grasp the landscape of where our characters had landed. Seeing the images of the Durango region - particularly the candid family snapshots - really put us in a wonderful mental place for visualizing and understanding the world we were creating. And all this with the click of a few quick search buttons!

On March 24 on the stage of the still-running Our Enemies, the actors, designers and technical team for Durango met for the first time. The assembled included playwright Julia Cho and director Carlos Murillo, as well as company members Carol Blanchard (costume design), Rob Steel (sound design), Rebecca Barrett (lighting design), Isaac Sernoffsky (associate producer), and Jen Shook (literary manager). We were joined by guest designers Marianna Csaszar (set design) and Dan Katz (prop design), and a collection of other staff and crew folks. As always with first rehearsal, it was a wonderful experience to finally see everyone face to face.

After a round of introductions and a lot of business and paperwork, we got to the point of the evening - the text. More than a few of us were giggling out loud at Julia’s hillariously tragic story of the secrets and misconnections between an aging father and his teenage sons on a road trip from Mesa, Arizona to Durango, Colorado. For example:

Isaac: Are you telling me this stupid train is in COLORADO?

Boo-Seng: SO?

Isaac: YOU DIDN’T TELL US THAT!

Boo-Seng: I SAID DON’T YELL. Durango is in Colorado, everyone know that.

Isaac: WE didn’t. We didn’t know that we wereembarking on a trip that actually crossed STATE LINES.

Boo-Seng: LINE. State LINE. Arizona, Colorado. Thassit!

The cast that will bring the piece to life on stage this spring includes Joseph Fornonda (Boo-Seng Lee), Erik Kaiko (Jimmy Lee), Dawen Wang (Isaac Lee), Walter Brody (Ned/Jerry) and Austin Campion (Bob/The Red Angel).