Famous playwrights typically don’t plop their hot new scripts in the laps of theater companies they’ve never heard of. They also don’t make it a habit of hanging out with these less-experienced artists to talk shop — let alone give them the green light to debut their latest plays at cramped storefront theaters.
But two young Chicago troupes have managed to snare world premieres from two big-name playwrights. And the scribes even agreed to fly in to collaborate on the productions.
Tenacity and chutzpah paid off for three-year-old Naked Eye Theatre Company, which premiered New York playwright Timothy Mason’s “Cannibals” in February, and for the eight-year-old Dolphinback Theatre Company, which will unveil playwright Lee Blessing’s “Rewrites” March 19 at the Chopin Theatre.
Naked Eye’s literary manager Sarah Gubbins initially read “Cannibals,” a complex drama inspired by the disappearance in the 1960s of Michael Rockefeller in the jungles of Papua New Guinea, and pushed for Naked Eye to produce it. The troupe wrote to Mason’s agent and sent along a packet of information about their achievements.
“My agent called me,” Mason said, “and encouraged me to work with Naked Eye, a very young, very small and very well-thought-of company in Chicago. Then he added, `In fact, Tim, they’re hot.'”
Mason and Jeremy B. Cohen, Naked Eye’s artistic director, met for dinner in New York last year, and the two men developed an immediate rapport. And the thought of revising — and almost re-creating — an older work with actors intrigued Mason.
“I wrote the script two years ago,” explained Mason. “But I wanted to revise it during rehearsals because that’s when the good revisions come.
“Cannibals” originated as a one-act called “Two-Part Invention,” which refers to the musical idea of creating a central theme, then varying it. The drama jumps from the 1980s to the 1960s and back, following six interconnected characters (played by two actors) who are forced to examine their purposes in life.
Earlier this year, Mason attended Naked Eye’s initial rehearsals, and he came back to Chicago five days before the play opened and continued to revise his script.
“I realized we were on the right track when, at the end of three days of rehearsal, we all had this wonderful Sunday afternoon [discussion] at Cafe Boost, and I knew exactly what I needed to do to make the script more immediate. I worked on clarity and focus and finding the urgency in each story,” Mason said.
“This has been my dream,” said Cohen, “to be able to talk with a writer and have him ask me, `How can you and I work together to take the text and move it along?’ It’s not just about cutting and trimming but coming to an understanding of our intentions together.
“Tim, unlike some other playwrights, really came to support the play and the production. He didn’t come to protect it out of fear that we would ruin it.”
And as far as Gubbins was concerned, if nothing had been changed, that would have been fine — revising the work just for the sake of it was never their goal. “People seem to have the notion when you do a new play that there are going to be a lot of changes,” Gubbins said. “But we also felt a commitment toward the script. If every [letter] and period remained the same, that would be OK too.”
Since the fall, Dolphinback Theatre Company has been corresponding on-line with Blessing for the appropriately named “Rewrites,” which began in 1994 as a different play called “The Rights.”
“We’ve been moving in the direction of [premiering] original work,” said Matt Wallace, Dolphinback’s artistic director. “Our last project was a new musical written by our ensemble members. This is such an exciting step because Lee Blessing, who is so respected across the country, has chosen to devote much of his time to working on this play with us.”
“Rewrites” originally centered on a documentary filmmaker returning home to produce a sensationalistic film about his eccentric relatives. The current reality-based TV craze prompted Blessing to re-focus the comedy on a desperate TV executive who comes back his home — a Frank Lloyd Wright mansion — to exploit his mentally troubled family in a “Real World”-style show.
Wallace and director Ellen Bean Larabee, a Blessing scholar at the University of Illinois in Urbana-Champaign, have been corresponding with the writer via e-mail, and Larabee recently came to Chicago to share the writer’s latest streamlined scenes with the cast. She noted that Blessing tends to overwrite, then listen to the actors speak the words and hone from there, so when Blessing arrives in Chicago for rehearsals in March, more revisions will no doubt unfold.
During a telephone interview from Ohio’s Denison University, where he’s teaching a course playwriting, Blessing talked about his unusual give-and-take approach.
“We’ve all agreed that the artists will give me as much freedom as I need over the next few weeks to send over new scenes,” Blessing said. “So they will be getting pages as we go along.
“I look forward to being part of the rehearsals. I like to listen to the words being spoken. I usually don’t make huge changes at that time. It’s more about trimming and focus. I’ve always felt very strongly that, when a production is taking shape, the director has to be the clearinghouse for my inspirations.”
As Dolphinback prepares for rehearsals with the playwright present, Wallace reported that Blessing’s play is already going in a darker comedic direction, a development he and the cast are eager to explore.
And it’s a turn the play probably wouldn’t have taken if the playwright and the players weren’t, as they say, on the same page.
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“Cannibals” is at A Red Orchid Theatre through March 11. Call 312-409-9800. “Rewrites” opens at the Chopin Theatre on March 19. Call 312-409-7980.
