Lost and Found Study guide by Ariel Mitchell, Jenna Hawkins, Jessica Spencer, Alec Harding, and the Fall 2012 TMA 315 class.
Creating Documentary Theatre
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All Dramaturgs at Heart
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Finding Our Play
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Bibliography
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Fun Facts about Lost and Founds 10
Creating Documentary Theatre
All Dramaturgs at Heart
Gone Missing is a devised piece created by the New York based theatre group The Civilians. The company, created in 2001 to break the boundaries between actor and audience, chose the name Civilian after the vaudevillian slang term referring to people outside of the world of show business. Founder Steve Cosson describes how he sees the work of the company, “The [Civilians] exist to make a different kind of theatre possible. We would create original shows, and each project would begin with some sort of creative investigation into real life.” They begin with a concept, interview people who are knowledgeable about that subject, and create theatre from the monologues based in real life interviews and characters. To summarize, The Civilians outline their mission as “. . . tackling complex and under-explored subjects, enabling artists to enrich their processes through in-depth interaction with their topics, diversifying artistic voices and audiences, and integrating theater with new media. Development often involves community residencies, travel, face-to-face conversations, and extensive research.”
As devised projects based in site-specific interviews, Gone Missing and The Cleverest Thief are plays for the people by the people. For The Cleverest Thief, BYU students went out into the community of our city and gathered the stories to make up the play. Through this play and our process of exploring people and their relationship with loss, we have created a beautiful cross-section of our city and the people therein.
So far the company has written and produced twelve shows and has three more in development. Topics range from divorce (Tales from My Parents’ Divorce) to life in a development project in Brooklyn (In the Footprint) to the Evangelical movement in Colorado Springs (This Beautiful City) to a post-modernist commentary on today’s American pop-culture (I Am Nobody’s Lunch). All are original works with songs and words written from interviews in a mosaic style where monologues are placed one after another, evoking a feeling and a message rather than telling a traditional linear narrative story (with a protagonist, inciting incident, rising action, etc.). Gone Missing, workshopped in 2003 and performed off-Broadway for six months in 2007, is about loss in New York City. Inspired after the events that transpired on 9/11/2001, The Civilians sought to get the people of their city talking about how that loss and others had effected them by interviewing passersby about what mattered most to them: material objects. Structured around a fictitious NPR broadcast of Fresh Air, a PBS radio talk show, with Terry Gross, Gone Missing helps us to understand what it really means to lose. Inspired by the company, our ensemble sought to do the same thing for our city: create a play based on their stories. This is The Cleverest Thief.
Acting
Text
Blocking
Lights
Music
Diagram of horizontal (devised) theatre by Moises Kaufman.
Music Lights Acting
Now, in production, we return the stories and lives we’ve gathered to you, the people of Provo. Here are some thoughts from our performance writers about the devising process:
“I liked being able to build everything to make it better. Like being able to say that an interview or idea was cool but maybe this would work better. It was a great experience to see what we ended up with.” —Jason Hawkins, composer, actor, and performance writer
“At BYU we tend to stay with BYU people; it was nice to branch out into the community.” —Rebecca O’Connell, performance writer
“The biggest thing that struck me about the project was how open our classmates were and how little we judged each other. No one’s ideas or suggestions were slammed down or ridiculed.” —Alec Harding, dramaturg and performance writer
Performance writers: Devising is a process of writing a performance horizontally (creating the production and physical performance, at the same time as the text) instead of vertically (building off of a finished script). Because of this unique process, all members of the production (writers, designers, actors, composers, etc.) write the performance together through action and trial and error instead of sitting down in front of a computer screen.
“The thing that I learned the most [from devising] is that everyone has a story and that story affects me even if I don’t know what that story is. Community is like an interaction of stories because our stories are our personal experiences and define who we are. It makes every single member of the community important. Each story affects another making everyone a vital part. I see people differently now. Not just as stereotypes.” —Sarah Porter, composer, actor, and performance writer
Blocking For more information about devising or horizontal theatre, visit our blog: >>http://4thwalldramaturgy.byu.edu/horizontal-theater
Set Text Diagram of vertical (traditional) theatre by Moises Kaufman.
2 Department of Theatre and Media Arts
Looking back, we’ve grown from a collection of students lost in the basement of the Harris Fine Arts Center to a unified working body of actors, playwrights, designers, and dramaturgs with a newly discovered community identity. Through our process, we not only learned about our city and how loss affects us, but we also unified as a class in the way only diligence, hard work, and collaboration can bring people together. We found more than objects. We found ourselves, and we found friendships. The Cleverest Thief and selections from Gone Missing 3
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4. Choose Our Favorite Moments
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Moments: Units of performance in which interviews with similar themes are combined and theatricalized, a basic building block of the production.
æ After presenting our many moments, we, as a class, vote on the ones that would fit under our organizing principle. Moments that work together are bundled into units, sorted into a logical order, and the backbone of the play is discovered.
æ Want to see some of the cut interviews? >>http://www.youtube.com/ user/BYUCleverestThief
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æ For more information check out our blog! >>http://4thwalldramaturgy.byu.edu/howto-make-a-moment
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Emily Ackerman Bio: >>http://thecivilians-artist.blogspot. com/2009/12/emily-ackerman.html
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We go into Provo to break out of our comfort zone to interview people to get a feel for the city and who lives here. The next class, we act out their answers, accentuating their speech pattern, body language, and creating a character.
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Civilians member Emily Ackerman visits our class. She introduces us to The Civilians’ specific process of devising and taught us the etiquette of interview. We choose our specific interview question: What’s an object you’ve lost?
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æ Once we have a variety of interviews, we sift through the pile to find trends in how our interviewees deal with loss. Our organizing principle, the main theme of our play, emerges and acts as an anchor to help us combine interviews into moments.
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1. Workshop
2. Interview
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Devising is discovering, whether it is interviewing someone you don’t know about a subject you are unfamiliar with or presenting the stories in class and shaping them into a production. As a company, we went into this process knowing what we wanted to discuss: Loss in Provo. We just had to find the story.
3. Look for Themes
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“My image of our process… no longer appears to me in architectural, but rather archaeological terms… The piece is made and shaped by the digging itself: it is both unpredictable and utterly preordained... We have all felt the palpable presence of the text entering the room. My job is to open the door.” —Mary Zimmerman, theatre practitioner
5. Separate into Groups
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Finding Our Play
Backbone: a structural concept used to tie interviews together. In Gone Missing, it is Terry Gross and Palinurus’ “Fresh Air” interview. In The Cleverest Thief, it is the setting of the lost and found.
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æ Once we find the pieces of the play, we divide into two groups: designers and writers. The designers work on ways that the play could make use of media. Meanwhile, the writers workshop units with the aid of the actors and…
6. The Play Is Found!
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For a more detailed description of our process check out our blog: >>http://4thwalldramaturgy.byu.edu/nailingdown-the-script-otherwise-known-as-killingbabies
4 Department of Theatre and Media Arts
Bibliography on The 4th WALL For a full bibliography and resource guide, scan the QR code or go here: >>http://4thwalldramaturgy. byu.edu/gone-missingcleverest -thief-bibliography
The Cleverest Thief and selections from Gone Missing 5
Lost and Found: What You Never Knew
“Lost Properties” in Britain
“Rudaí Caillte” (Ruh-tee Cal-tuh) or “Lost Things” in Irish
“ɛɸɪɨғ ɧɚɯɨғɞɨɤ” (Duh-rhone had-uhk) or “Lost and Found” in Russia
“Personalberatung” (Personal-bear-a-tongue) or “Executive Search Firm” in German
“Lost Articles” in Canada
“Förlorade föremål” (Fuh-lor-te Fal-de-mal) or “Lost Objects” in Swedish
“Lost and Found” in America
“Nawala ang Bagay” (Nah-wah-la Ang Bah-gay) or “The Thing was Lost” in Filipino
“Objetos Perdidos” (Ob-jet-os pear-dit-os) or “Lost Objects” in Spanish
“Oggetti Smarriti” (O-jet-ee Smar-ee-tee) or “Lost Property” in Italian
“Objets trouvés” (Ob-jay true-vay) or “Found Objects” in French
Napolean Bonaparte created the first lost and found in 1805, when he had his police forces create an office on Ile de la Cité for lost objects. Lost items in the United States currently: (According to www.lostandfound.com) 105,463
How many things our ensemble lost over the course of this semester: 116
Lost items in the world currently: 126,554
How many things our ensemble found over the course of this semester: 72
Found items in the United States currently: 48,661 Found items in the world currently: 53,442 Most Commonly Lost Objects: 1. Keys 2. USB Flash Drives 3. Mobile Phones 4. Sunglasses 5. Gloves 6 Department of Theatre and Media Arts
The most common thing lost in Provo? Water bottles!
Polish lost and found symbol
“Verloren voorwerpen” (vey-laur-en foor-reyvehr-pen) or “Lost Property” in Dutch The strangest things our ensemble and interviewees lost this semester: æ Some rosemary æ A Beanie Baby Squid, æ A human skull æ A tree æ A right eye The strangest things our ensemble and interviewees found this semester: æ A sewing machine in a toilet æ A fossilized hip bone of a Jurassic pig Bones æ A map to the pyramids in Egypt æ A cat skeleton æ A petrified human footprint æ A skinned frog If you need help finding something, check this page out! >>http://www.wikihow.com/ Find-Lost-Objects
A little from “Make an Effective Missing Pet Poster” on wiki: “Use a photo of the pet whenever possible, color is best, but even a black and white one will do. Do NOT put a photo in with a child, that is NEVER a good idea! Put up your posters in a 6–10 block radius around your neighborhood… Be prepared for some nutty calls, that happens. Once your pet is found, make sure you remove the posters, you can, if you like, leave one or two up, and put the word ‘FOUND’ on them in big letters, but take them down after a week or so, everyone loves a happy ending!” For more check here: >>http://www.wikihow.com/ Make-an-Effective-MissingPet-Poster
The Cleverest Thief and selections from Gone Missing 7