Silk Road Theatre Project

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.

History, in the grand scheme, can sometimes get a bit dry.  Sometimes it becomes about statistics, mere numbers.  With the history of atrocities, sometimes those numbers bear great resonance–memory, controversy even–and on the other hand, sometimes it is difficult to relate the numbers to the people involved.

The Al Kasida Staged Reading Series gives us the opportunity to explore more plays than we can produce in a season.  More plays means more ideas, and more communities, and more histories.

At any given moment, the theatre is working on many projects that are not yet near the stage.   One of these upcoming projects in Christopher Chen’s play Into the Numbers, which will join the ranks of the Al Kasida readings on December 6 and 7.  This play enters a conversation on a specific point of history, the 1937 Nanjing Massacre, through its main character: the author Iris Chang, whose book The Rape of Nanking brought this incident to mainstream U.S. attention.  Yet the play also enters Iris’ own mental space, bringing its audience into a world of attention to atrocities, a world where personal depression and world sadness meet and unravel.  It is a play precisely ABOUT talking about and living with history.

This week many blog posts are being written about what we’re thankful for.  I’m thankful for plays that encourage and promote difficult and necessary conversations.  Here’s a toast to courage.

Bringing Gilgamesh to its second incarnation at the MCA reminded me a bit of my San Francisco Mime Troupe days.  Those too were shows that has to be deconstructed and packed in a truck.  (Or, in this case, a Chevy Malibu or Honda Accord.)  But unlike political satires put up in Delores Park, Gilgamesh now has theatrical lighting (thanks to Sarah Hughey).  Like SFMT, we have music.  In fact, Rob Steel and ensemble’s symphony of hand-held instruments rings even more clearly.  Still though, we had the challenge of adjusting to a new space, with completely different acoustics and sightlines and exits.  We’d spent the second week of October asking the actors to BE LOUDER.  Suddenly, in the MCA theatre, the beauty of quiet revealed itself once more, and Komunyakaa’s poetry bloomed.

One of the things that theatre and poetry have in common* is the distillation of complicated ideas into crystalline images.  Being an ancient epic, the tale of Gilgamesh is rife with epic symbols: the forest of the gods, the snake that sheds its skin, the life-giving plant…

Komunyakaa’s body of work traffics fearlessly in these touchstones, creating and re-creating his own versions into a fresh vocabulary.  Gilgamesh’s mother questions his humanity with “When is the last time/ you gave your mother flowers?”  And when his friend dies, our hero/anti-hero repeats simply “and I sit here and I sit here and I sit here” … until “a maggot drops from Enkidu’s nose.”  In both this piece and his others, the poet paints the ugly beautiful and the beautiful with its ugliness.

From “Poetics”:

This Saturday, November 1, Silk Roaders will gather for the second presentation of Gilgamesh, the ancient epic adapted by poet Yusef Komunyakaa and dramaturg Chad Gracia. This time we’re at the Museum of Contemporary Art, a beautiful space that prompted the “wow! A real theatre!” comment more than once from the cast as they filtered in for the brush up rehearsal.

To get you in the mood for attending, here are a few pictures from Sunday! Top: Procession into the theatre, Middle: Gilgamesh talks to the Scorpion People, Bottom: the Council of Elders

On Saturday, Silk Road will present Gilgamesh, the “world’s oldest story,” in a recent version by Pulitzer-prize-winning poet Yusef Komunyakaa and dramaturg Chad Gracia, at the Oriental Institute in partnership with the Chicago Humanities Festival and the Poetry Foundation.  Among its treasures, the Oriental Institute houses a mummified body roughly the age of the story, Mesopotamian prayer statues, and clay tablets with cuneiform writing that may depict Gilgamesh standing on the head of the vanquished monster Humbaba.

For those who don’t remember or never encountered this epic in their early education, it’s the tale of a king of Uruk (a man who actually did live nearly 4000 years ago), who according to legend was a cruel and corrupt king, until the gods created a man to balance him.  They battle, they become friends.  They take on monsters.  The friend dies.  Gilgamesh, having just learned how to care about another person, undertakes a wild quest to find the man who survived the great flood, who might share with him the secret of immortality.  Frightening creatures block his journey (Komunyakaa’s scorpion people rehearse in the photo, below).

Yet Gilgamesh does find the immortal plant.  And then, suddenly, after all the trouble, he puts it down for just a moment, and a snake comes along and eats it.

At the first rehearsal of this staged reading, the cast asked: what’s the message for us today?

The question of Gilgamesh is quite simple: We must go on epic impossible quests.  Through them, we learn humility, we learn to care for others, and we learn, and relearn, and teach one another how to live in the world as humans, with other humans.

More information about the reading, and about Komunyakaa’s remarkable work, here:

http://poetryfoundation.org/programs/events.html