Collaboration in Time: An Interdependent Production Process

“[A] theatre where a play for economic reasons rehearses for no more than three weeks is crippled at the onset.”

—Peter Brook, The Empty Space, 17

Although as academics we are not ruled by the same economic drivers as commercial theatre producers, Peter Brook’s words in The Empty Space encourage us to examine how self-imposed time constraints for rehearsing scripted plays in the academy reduces artistic collaboration and limits holistic learning opportunities. In this article we begin a discourse on imagining new processes for production and rehearsal, while also honoring the motivating factors behind the standard production process.

In a recent staging of Neil Labute’s Some Girl(s) at Western Washington University (WWU) we extended the duration, but not the actual clock time, of a standard production model, and by doing so discovered that these respites from the active processes allowed our collective subconscious to enrich the work by gaining deeper artistic quality through richer collaboration. Therefore we propose an alternative production process for our readers’ consideration: three two-week phases (Experimentation, Development, and Realization), each separated by varying lengths of time apart—incubation time, if you will—during which the artists do not meet collectively, but individually develop the work through self-rehearsing, designing, or meeting with the director. By writing this article we hope to entice the reader to question how we produce and rehearse scripted plays and to explore and experiment with alternative processes.

With only five characters and slated for our black-box theatre, Some Girl(s) provided a manageable-sized production with which to experiment with combining the commonly used six-week rehearsal process for scripted plays, with an often much longer devising process. Many questions guided our approach: How might we embrace time and space constraints in academic theatre while increasing opportunities for artistic experimentation and collaboration for students? How might we expand direct collaboration between actors and designers, as well as among the design team, to give students and faculty a more holistic and interdependent experience? How might our production calendar better accommodate the numerous conferences, festivals, breaks, and exams already scheduled into our academic lives?

Some Girl(s) was the second experiment with scheduling explored at WWU. Coauthor Rich Brown first began testing alternatives to an academic rehearsal process when he directed Dog Sees God: Confessions of a Teenage Blockhead.¹ When coauthor John Weise joined the university’s faculty as head of design, the discourse elevated from simply examining the rehearsal process to reimagining the entire production process.

Many refer to theatre as the “collaborative art,” but the standard production process contains numerous obstacles to collaboration, especially its hierarchical structure, time constraints, and specialized roles. Far too often in the academic setting the word collaboration is used but does not occur, often due to the “dominant conventions of hierarchical, vertically organized theatrical cooperation in the service of doing a playwright’s play ‘properly’” (Barton, Bruce, viii; emphasis added). Cooperation is different from collaboration. For instance, in a typical production process (aside from a few initial meetings for design presentations) the two relatively separate worlds of acting and design rarely meet in the same space. Although the director and stage manager bridge these worlds, the standard process engenders little-to-no actor/designer collaboration, and even limits opportunities for designer/designer collaboration. Additionally, in order to provide shops the necessary lead-time to construct sets and design costumes, production meetings and design deadlines normally occur before rehearsals begin. Due to this limitation, designers must rely solely upon their research skills to respond to the text; they have few opportunities to react to live bodies moving and speaking in space. Actors also often lack time for character physicality and language to settle deeply into their bodies and may resort to early choices as a result of opening-night anxiety. Finally, directors approve the visual language of the play’s world before they have the opportunity to make discoveries with actors and designers during rehearsals (fig. 1).

We believe that the creative potential for theatre suffers from this lack of direct actor/designer collaboration...