@dramatistsguild @hfgerardo

The theatre scene is alive and well in Maine and New Hampshire in terms of bringing new work to the stage and in the presentation of conceptual art. Here is a sampling of this spring’s happenings in Portland, ME as reported by Dramatists Guild member Delvyn C. Case, Jr.: to coincide with Restaurant Week, The Snowlion Repertory Company in Portland presented The Maine Dish, a feast of twelve, short plays about food. The Company also hosts a monthly Playlab, in which selected plays were given a staged reading by rehearsed actors, and provided with constructive feedback from fellow playwrights. The Crowbait Club presented an annual, “King of Crows” production of twelve fully-produced works based on the winner of the monthly offering of theme-based plays presented as staged readings on the first Wednesday of the month. The Maine Playwrights Festival hosted by Acorn Productions presented six new plays by Maine-based playwrights, as well as the 24-hour Portland Theater Project, in which participating playwrights were presented with a line of dialogue, a prop, and a location, and asked to write a short play overnight, which was then rehearsed and fully produced the following evening.

As theatre becomes increasingly multidisciplinary in its presentation, it is instructive to dialogue with artists in different disciplines as a way to be introduced to new ways of approaching writing for the theatre. In this spirit of cross-pollination, at a Dramatists Guild gathering at the Main Street Art Gallery in Newfields, NH, visual artist Heather Park gave a fascinating talk, which introduced novel ways of presenting contextualized work to an audience of playwrights. Park described theoretical distinctions between art that is associated with a geographic location in this way: “I would differentiate ‘site informed’ work from ‘site-specific’ in that it is predicated by a location; an emotional presence or events set forth by a specific inspiration but may not require an explicit lineage between source and product. This way of working can draw on many inspirations at once, encouraging the artist to construct an alternate experience based entirely on personal expression which may not be tethered to the point of origin, but is no less impactful or descriptive of an event.”

Park referred to a kind of audience interactivity that comes about by allowing the audience to make associations between the object and its deliberate placement in a space. Here is a description of her process in the creation of a site-informed installation work entitled Memory Activated: The Crash at Elephant Mountain: “I drew upon the lingering evidence of an event that occurred 50 years ago to fabricate a video sculpture installation, thus relocating the original site of impact. The site of the event was now occurring simultaneously in a different section of space and time than the original act, engaging both sites in an invisible link and expanding the experience of the viewer in an intangible way. One cannot exist without the other.”

Park suggests that the deliberate placement of her work engages the audience member in a form of interactivity: “This transference of ‘site’ in no way negates the importance of the source site, but enables a greater audience to experience the artists’ expression designating a new ‘point of origin.’ This ‘activation’ by the viewer brings to life intangible sensations of time and space bending around the viewer’s perspective, adding to the importance of a site-specific experience.”

As a playwright who has presented performance works in non-traditional spaces, it was revelatory to consider that the location itself can be the generator of storytelling, not merely by creating an atmosphere, but also by subtly encouraging the viewer to make associations – conscious or otherwise – between what is being seen and where it is being seen, associations that may not necessarily be denoted in the narrative of a play. Sometimes the walls – and the lack of a fourth one – can speak. 

hgerardo@dramatistsguild.com

Elizabeth Michelman, Heather C. Park, Jim Masterson, Christine Williamson, Vicki Meagher, Hortense Gerardo, Joe Perna