This August a group from our theater community will travel for the second time to Scotland to perform at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival. Led by director Jess Chayes, ’07, the six-member cast will attempt to top their previous entry, Joyce Carol Oates’ “Tone Clusters,” which they adapted into a theater/ visual-media piece.
It will be a tough act to follow. The Fringe Report, a London-based theater publication, awarded “Tone Clusters” Best Play at the 2005 festival. “Mesmerising performers Mike James [’07], Hayley Stokar [’06], [and] Eric Wdowiak [’06] created a horribly compelling epic of drama,” they wrote. “Directing, management, production, musical, sound, video and graphic excellence form a supremely gifted backstage team produced a highly original and effective staging. Together the company showed how a complete play can be done magnificently in just 45 minutes.”
Can cast and crew outdo themselves? Energized by newcomers Edward Bauer ’08 and Annie Bodel ’08, they intend to find out. The group will return to the 90-seat Bedlam Theatre at Edinburgh University, a space they fell in love with last year. The finished production will feature light design by Greg Malen ’07, sets by Nick Benacerraf ’08, sound by Jeremy Marks ’07 and costumes by Erin Smith ’06.
This year’s entry, “We Can’t Reach You, Hartford,” tells the story of the Hartford Circus Fire of 1944, a national tragedy almost totally obscured in the turmoil of World War II. Chayes’ choice of the circus fire as the subject of this show, which may become her senior thesis, stemmed from distaste for conventional “documentary” theater of the bare-stage-and-music-stand variety. Instead of eschewing theatricality, she set herself the challenge of creating a non-fiction piece without sacrificing physical movement.
Like the staging, the script for this six-person show is still very much in progress. With the assistance of Steve Aubrey ’06, who “did a ton of research” into the Circus Fire, Chayes is making use of a wide array of texts, from the 1944 Hartford Courant to a 2000 History Channel documentary ominously called “The Wrath of God.” But the most interesting sources may be the ones closest to home. There are “a lot of living witnesses still in Middletown,” says Chayes.
What the group really needs, say all, is money. The total cost of sending six actors to Edinburgh was around $10,000 last year, and with a larger production team this year the costs are increasing. Chayes has applied for an Olin Fellowship and has received funding from the President’s Fund. Still, little has come through yet. While taking the show across the Atlantic will be the group’s ultimate glory, it is also—for now at leas—ts major obstacle.
Financial problems aside, the production’s theatrical foundations are in place. The fifteen-minute workshop presented on Feb. 27 revealed the early fruits of rehearsal, filled with movements and tableaus that instantly evoked the world of the circus. This is exactly what they are going for, says Stokar, explaining, “the circus lends itself so well to visual aesthetics.”
The rehearsal process for “Hartford” is similarly worth noting. As a jumping-off point Chayes provides the cast with a text culled from witness accounts of the fire, combining this with actors’ personal memories of the circus to build movements and vignettes. While actors are currently playing multiple roles, the goal is for each actor to commit to one character. It will be fascinating to see what is discovered as a result of this process.
“The stories that come out of the fire are just incredible,” Chayes said. “Everyday people became these strange heroes. There is so much to be found, and we’ve only just scratched the surface.”
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