I am sound designing Meg's New Friend, written by Blair Singer and directed by Mark "Mr. Excitement" Armstrong for his company, aptly titled, The Production Company. It was a great first rehearsal (what I was able to attend of it, anyway). It's always interesting as a director to get a sense of another director's process, and the way they do things etc.
I was really struck by a few things:
(1) Mark founded a company called The Production Company because he wants to keep the group's focus on Production. A similar thing to 13P's "We don't develop plays, we do them" approach. The idea being that he saw all this great writing around him and wanted to create a space where it would actually be produced instead of read.
(2) Blair Singer quote: "People are hungry to see good acting in small spaces". I think this is one of the comparative advantages of Off-Off Broadway theater that's relatively seldomly remarked upon-- the intimacy of the venue is important. When you have some really good actors (or as Blair put it, "truth tellers") on stage, the smallness of the space really heightens the experience.
(3) Meg's New Friend is a play about a woman in a long term relationship who begins to fall for her boyfriend's sister's new boyfriend. The new boyfriend is black. The other three characters are white. Part of what I really like about the play is that it is a play about relationships, not about race but it doesn't ignore race either. Race is in the mix, but it's not the whole conversation. It's one of the reasons why I really wanted to do the play. This has actually really informed the sound design. There's a way in scene transition music where you could make this play about race, or try to comment on the race politics of the play. And it doesn't need it.
(4) Blair's real talent is for creating plays that feature universally decent characters. They have flaws, yes, but they're decent people trying to do the right thing. And yet there's still stakes, conflict and drama. This is really hard to do. It's much easier to do plays about fundamentally not-decent people (Labute) or insert spoiler characters who do fucked up things (Rebeck) to create conflict and stakes.
(5) Similarly, Mark is very talented as a director at focusing on the human dynamics in a play. he really gets back to fundamentals like relationships, stakes, given circumstances etc. and is able to articulate those and bring those dynamics out in a show really well.
I'm really looking forward to this project! And looking forward to just being a sound designer. And to blogging about it, because as a designer i feel capable of writing about it in ways I don't when I'm directing plays.
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