When Tadd Gero ’08 becomes a rat, he first contorts the muscles around his eyes. Next, he sucks in his cheeks and thrusts his entire body into convulsions of feeding and cleaning.
“I visually consider home to be where I am,” Gero said. He spoke in between bouts of rat activity.
Wednesday night, the six students who participated in a three-day workshop run by The Civilians theater troupe performed a group project for the members of the company. The performance alternated between independent interview, character work and rat-like squirming and writhing.
Director of The Civilians Steve Cosson described the practice of conducting interviews and interlaying text as a crash course in the process that The Civilians undergo when creating a show. The Civilians troupe surveyed residents of New York City asking if they had ever lost anything important, then created “Gone Missing” from the stories that they collected. Since the creation of The Civilians, the troupe has worked with several casts. According to its website, the troupe is “a production company that develops original projects based in the creative investigation of actual experience.”
Although the six character pieces differed wildly, all of them felt alienated from their surroundings, which the workshop participants displayed through tortured movements and continuous activity. Through constant eye contact and one relatively still moment where four participants huddled close together, stealing rat food from each other and gnawing at each other’s faces and ears, it was very clear that, within the timeframe of the workshop, they had found their own unique albeit sometimes bizarre way of creating a safe space for meditations on creating a wide range of characters.
On the first night of the workshop, nine participants brainstormed possible topics about what to ask their interviewees. They decided on “home” after eliminating “loss of virginity,” “sleep,” and “the effect of communication technology on relationships.” Their homework after the first night of the workshop was to conduct an interview with any person in the Wesleyan or greater Middletown community on the subject of their perception of the concept of home, and to use the material from the interview to construct their subject as a character in the second day of the workshop. They were not permitted to write anything down.
On the second and third days of the workshop, Cosson asked participants to perform a monologue from the perspective of their subject, then to answer questions from the subject’s point of view.
Gedney Barclay ’09 praised the spot-on skill of the actors.
“It was hard to differentiate at what point the person becomes a character in the play and at what point that person was the person that I saw,” she said.
The participants also worked on two short scenes that each used three lines from the interview monologues, brought scripts, and cut them into sections by subject. After a process of self-editing, the participants worked to combine each of their interviews as well as text from other scenes conducted in the workshop to create one master script, lining up the sections of text along the Zelnick stage.
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