Moment Work: Tectonic Theater Project’s Process of Devising Theater by Moisés Kaufman and Barbara Pitts McAdams (review)

Finding a text that offers more than a collection of exercises or a survey of the processes of numerous companies can be a challenge for those who teach devising in their classrooms. Moment Work: Tectonic Theater Project’s Process of Devising Theater, however, fulfills that need for educators, students, and devising professionals who seek a book that explores one company’s methodology of creation in depth. Similar to Frantic Assembly’s excellent text The Frantic Assembly Book of Devising Theatre, authors Moisés Kaufman, artistic director of Tectonic, and Barbara Pitts McAdams, Tectonic company member, have invited their readers into the rehearsal space with them. Readers experience the creation of their best-known plays, such as The Laramie Project, Gross Indecency: The Three Trials of Oscar Wilde, I Am My Own Wife, and 33 Variations through the integration of theory and Tectonic’s evolving practice. As described in the preface, Moment Work is “in part a manual with exercises, in part a chronicle of our process, and in part an investigation of the theory that gave birth to our work” (viii).

The authors divide the book into three parts. “Part 1: Tectonic’s Antecedents, History, and Approach” sets the book’s frame by exploring the theory underlying Tectonic’s methodology. Here, the authors describe how their plays are created by simultaneously doing exercises related to content and form, which creates a dramatic narrative (content) in tandem with a theatrical narrative (form). Their plays live at the intersection of the two, meaning that form and content are inextricably linked throughout the devising process. This approach asks devisers to set aside their specialized roles as actors, designers, writers, and directors and enter the laboratory as play-makers.

The heart of the book lies in the second part, “The Moment Work Process.” It should be noted that Tectonic currently offers three levels of moment work training in New York; this section derives from years of developing a training manual for those workshops and is similarly divided into three levels. Level 1 introduces moment work and the elements of the stage (light, sound, costume, set, and properties), but also expands that list to include elements such as height, spatial relationships, breath, music, choreography, and water, just to name a few. “Elements” are everything used to communicate from the stage, to write performance. Readers learn how to use the elements to create moments, which are defined as “units of theatrical time, a building block of theatrical narrative, or a structural unit of performance. We think of each moment as a container that can hold the content we are exploring” (43). The book provides examples of single-person moments, two-person moments, and group moments focusing on specific elements of the stage from past Tectonic training workshops, as well as from its plays.

Level 2 covers the processes of sequencing and layering individual moments in order to construct narrative. Once devisers generate a number of moments, they look for form, or content-based conversations between these moments, in order to combine them into longer blocks of narrative. Sequencing consists of simply ordering moments together to investigate how the order can alter the context of each individual moment—similar to how the structure of a photography book can alter the meaning of a particular photo by what precedes or follows it. Layering consists of overlapping moments, again investigating how they recontextualize the theatrical and dramatic narratives within those moments by adding a moment on top of another moment. Part 2 also provides examples from Tectonic’s training workshops and plays to clarify the processes of sequencing and layering moments; some of these examples are illustrated by a helpful collection of full-color production photos found in the center of the book.

Level 3 integrates Tectonic’s entire process by describing, in detail, how moment work was used to create Gross Indecency, The Laramie Project, I Am My Own Wife, and...