Long Division: Second Closing

Today's matinee is the last performance of this remount of Long Division. It would be wonderful to have a second week of shows, but I am grateful to have had the opportunity to revisit the work at all. The play is definitely stronger as a result, the actors have made new discoveries in the text and with their characters, and the work--especially Lauchlin's set and Lesley's choreography--looks great in the Annex space. Immense thanks to Richard Wolfe for making all of this happen.

Later this evening, after our strike, the cast and crew will come over to our place to celebrate. In the meantime, I thought I would share a response to the play by my friend Ziyian Kwan. I have enjoyed writing about Ziyian's work in this space over the years and it is a treat for me to receive her sensitive response to my own creative efforts.

P

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Dear Peter,

Rodney and I attended Long Division last night and thoroughly enjoyed it. So I thought it would be a fun exercise to do as you do and write about the experience the morning after. And to limit the writing to within 500 words, in a tone inspired by yours. Herewith:

On the day I saw Long Division, playwright Peter Dickinson’s partner Richard visited my husband’s bookshop, The Paperhound, to purchase a precious pamphlet. Later that evening, upon arriving at the Annex Theatre, I ran into David Kaye, an actor I haven’t seen for years, who lives in my building of 18 units. Then as I found my seat in the theatre, I realized that Jimmy Tait, whom I hadn’t seen since attending a showing of Misunderstood, was beside me. Hugs were exchanged.

All this to ask, what are the odds of running into people who are on the periphery of our lives – in places where we share common interests, in remote cities yet untraveled, or in our dreams? Are these collisions accident or fate? I think of times when the course of my life was changed as a direct result of such chance meetings.

Long Division invited me to consider the gravity and levity of encounters with people. I found myself wishing to remember exact lines that were pithy analogies of math and human exchange. The text, which was delivered by a fine cast of actors, was recognizably Peter Dickinson’s: the sing-song syntax and dry lyricism of precise words that captured potent questions about life. Throughout, the clever use of phrases such as “in addition” to describe events.

Whereas much of the play was a silky cocoon of existential inquiry, the story revealed a tragedy. This tension worked, yet I occasionally wished for a less emphatic treatment of human drama. But then, I know nothing about theatre….

I do know a little about dance and found choreographer Lesley Telford’s work bang on. Without being illustrative or literal, the actors moved through space to navigate circumstances in time. The dance, though abstract, seemed natural, and added texture to characters and scenes. And, the movement was styling!

I also liked the projection of mathematical formulas on a backdrop of Pythagorean 3D triangles. Coming from dance, where projections are often used but usually ignored, I appreciated that the actors actually looked at the projections to confirm that, indeed, complex equations attend the sum total of life’s many variables.

My favorite of the play’s many equations and corresponding metaphors was this: the empty set is a subset of every set.

Like many people, I often feel like the outcast quality in a mass quantity of digits that belong. But Long Division helps me with this affliction, suggesting that the nothingness of my empty set is part of a greater equation: humanity.  

This morning I woke up and thought about my life as an artist and realized that if nothing else, I have at my side and within me, the exponential prowess of zero.

Thank you for the beautiful work, Peter.

With love,

Ziyian

Long Division x 2

Since Tuesday I've been hanging out at Playwright's Theatre Centre along with the original cast and crew of Long Division as we prepare for a "refreshed remount" of the Pi Theatre show at the Annex on Seymour Street beginning next Wednesday. It is such a gift to be given the opportunity to revisit the work with this talented team. With a bit of distance from the first production at the Gateway in November, and in dialogue with director Richard Wolfe, I had made some cuts and tweaks to the script, which was distributed to everyone in March. In rehearsals we've been making some further adjustments, with a focus especially on smoothing out and making more organic the transitions between the choral scenes and individual characters' monologues.

Choreographer Lesley Telford, who is busy with her own show at The Dance Centre (on through this evening), popped into the studio yesterday to help adjust a couple of the movement sequences. The changes were exactly what was needed and it was fantastic to see not just how on board the actors were with the new material, but also how quickly they were able to absorb it into their bodies. When we started this second go-round on Tuesday I think everyone was a bit trepidatious about how much of the original movement score they'd remembered. But with the aid of video documentation and each other's kinetic memories, and with a lot of counted repetitions, the sequences came back incredibly quickly to the actors, and watching them yesterday during our first complete run through you would have thought they'd been doing this continuously since November rather than having had a hiatus of four months.

Generally we're trying to loosen things up with both the movement and the text, and to give the actors permission to play a bit more. Our costume designer, Connie Hosie, commented after yesterday afternoon's run-through that our efforts seemed to be working. Notwithstanding some dropped lines and a couple of starts and stops with respect to new movement and blocking, she said the piece was noticeably tighter and that all the actors were more clearly at home in their characters. That's great to hear, as we only have two more days of rehearsal before we go into tech. Getting into the actual Annex space will also be exciting, as we have a lot more room than we did at the Gateway's Studio B.

Tickets for the show can be purchased here. I probably won't be blogging again about the process until after we open. In the meantime, here's a selfie I took the other day in front of one of the bus shelter posters advertising the play around the city. Linda Quibell, who plays Grace, commented yesterday that the image is a bit CSI-y. That's perhaps not a bad analogy given the mystery that has to be unravelled in the play.

P.

Long Division: Closing

It was the closing performance last night. A good-sized house. I thought the audience was a bit subdued, but my parents--who are visiting from Ontario and who had already seen the show once, this past Wednesday--said they felt people were very responsive. I guess it's hard for me to tell as the lines I think will (or should) get a laugh, or otherwise elicit some kind of more embodied response, often don't. But of course that doesn't mean folks aren't engaged with the work. As my Dad put it to me this morning, mine is a play that rewards more than one viewing. Of course, he's biased, but it was a deliberate formal strategy on my part to construct a work whose patterns and layers of connection only fully emerge at a distance. To that end, it has been most rewarding for me to hear from friends and colleagues about how the work has stayed with them after the end. Perhaps we should use this as a marketing strategy for the April run.

Closing a show is always bittersweet, especially when the process has been so generative and one has had the privilege of working with such an amazingly talented and warm and funny and intelligent creative team. It was great to hang out with some of that team last night after the show and share a drink and gossip and talk about holiday plans (London for Anousha; Cuba for Kerry; Vietnam for Jay; Mexico for Melissa; Toronto and Israel for Shayna; Hawai'i for Richard and Connie). It was a long two-show day for the cast, so I was grateful that most of them came out. And parting at 2 am on Granville Street was less painful knowing we'd all be gathering again in a few months to dive back into the work. I was only half joking when I said to the actors that I'd like to double the length of each of their monologues. I could watch all of them on stage forever. But in actual fact, any tinkering with the script between now and April will likely involve cuts and maybe the odd finessing of the choral interludes. I know Lesley is dying to revisit and even add to some of the movement, but Richard will likely have to restrain her given we only have a week's worth of re-rehearsal. At the very least, Jergus and Lauchlin and Jamie will get to supplement the visual design of the piece given the added space and technical resources available at the Annex.

Funny last note on the technical front. I knew that the lighting board and other equipment at the Gateway's Studio B dated from circa 1985. But what I didn't know was that everything connected with preserving our work was similarly ante-diluvian. At the end of the night, along with his stage manager reports on yesterday's shows, Jethelo sent Jayson McLean, our production manager, a note about making sure to save all the lighting, video and sound cues. On the drive home I learned from Richard that the method for storing said data was a 3 1/2 inch floppy disk!

I feel like there's something strangely appropriate about said means of transferring the binary code of our play. Just like the image below--supplied courtesy of Jay (aka Reid).

P

Long Division: Opening

So we're officially open. Last night was a full house, there was a good energy, and the actors nailed it. Richard insisted I take a bow, which I didn't really want to do. But it did allow me to sneak backstage with the actors afterwards and give them each a card and little joke gift, as well as share a quick sip of prosecco with them in the dressing room before the public reception put on by the Gateway.

Richard had said the night before, after Thursday's preview, that he thought folks would either love the play or hate it--which we both agreed was better than a meh reaction. I had some great conversations with audience members last night who fell into the former camp, although it mostly seems the critics so far are firmly in the latter. Not sure why, when it's obvious from the beginning that the conceit of the play is lecture-performance you'd dwell on the fact that there's not enough conventional storytelling. I also wonder why it was the preview performance that got reviewed instead of the opening. Oh well.

None of the actors could go out for a drink afterwards, as they have a 2 pm matinee today. So before we all scattered from the reception I gathered them together to tell them about the dream I had had about the play the night before. I never remember my dreams, but this one was incredibly vivid. It involved the entire cast and crew passing around a bong (which was no doubt planted in my subconscious by the fact that on Thursday afternoon we had been joking about a version of the play called Bong Division). In the dream, the police suddenly arrive and decide they have to arrest someone--whether for getting high or doing so in the theatre is unclear. They settle on Jay Clift as the fall guy--likely again this was related to the fact that in the play Jay's character, Reid, talks about being a small-time weed dealer in high school. Then again, it could simply be because Jay is so tall and he was easiest to pick out of the crowd. At any rate, the whole production was thrown into a tailspin because of this, requiring us to find a replacement Reid at the last minute. The candidate turned out to be a whiz at memorizing his lines in no time, but when it came to the choreography he decided that the best thing was to improvise. Unfortunately his improvisation involved doing grand jetes and multiple pirouettes across the stage during everyone else's monologue. The last thing I remember from the dream is Jethelo, our stage manager, madly trying to write down all the new blocking as Lesley, our choreographer, sunk deeper and deeper in stunned bewilderment into her chair.

Afterwards, over still more drinks with Richard, Lesley, Jethelo, Shayna Goldberg, Pi's GM, Rob Maguire, President of Pi's Board of Directors, and my Richard, we all agreed that ours is just about the best cast ever. Given all we've thrown at them--10+ minute monologues filled with math jargon, complicated choreography--and given all that they've been through during the process, it's such a gift to see them embrace the material so fully. And we get to do it all over again in April.

P

Long Division: Tech Dress

So there were a few missed cues with the projections, and one of the lights blew at the top of act two, and not all of the actors had gotten the note about the revised exit at the end of act one, but otherwise it was a pretty fantastic tech dress yesterday afternoon.

It was amazing to see the actors in the vibrantly coloured costumes Connie Hosie has put together for each of them--and also to have Connie as an enthusiastic audience member. All of the actors nailed their monologues and were also pros with the new tweaks to the choreography Lesley had made only that morning. I also made one final cut and adjustment to the text that the women in the cast handled with aplomb.

I'm taking all of this--as well as Gateway AD Jovanni Sy's positive reaction and Richard's general calm--as a good sign. Preview performance tonight, then the opening on Friday. Three and a half weeks of rehearsal plus one workshop week on the script plus four odd years of writing and revising and dramaturging the original idea: all to get to this point. When you balance the run of the show (even including the remount at the Annex in April) against the length of time for its development, it seems an unfair equation. But I can live with the math.

Merde to all of us.

P

Long Division: Third Week of Rehearsal

Today is Q-2-Q day for the play. It's a long, twelve-hour day for the cast and production crew as they work to resolve and lock down all of the different sound, lighting, and video/projection cues in relation to the text and movement. Things are a bit more complicated than usual on this front for a number of reasons. First, there is the sheer number of cues (well over 80 for the video and projections alone). Then there is the fact that movement in Long Division is operating both on the level of traditional theatre blocking and in relation to an additional choreographic score. Richard and Lesley have been working hard, especially in the last week, to make the integration between the two as seamless as possible, but inevitably challenges arise with so much activity happening on stage--not to mention the sheer number of bodies engaging in that activity for the entirety of the play's 90+ minutes. Finally, there is the competition between the lighting and the video projections; despite the super-powered projectors video designer Jamie Nesbitt has borrowed for the production, as well as the decision to forgo any lino whatsoever in favour of the bare black stage floor, the word yesterday from the crew was that Jergus Oprsal's lighting was still washing out some of the images. (The fact that the Gateway's Studio B only has 24 dimmers for Jergus to work with isn't helping on this front.)

No doubt all of that will be resolved today (and possibly on Monday). For my part, it was just so exciting to see Lauchlin Johnston's amazing set installed yesterday, as well as a few of the designs Jamie has come up with projected onto it. Otherwise it was an intense day of grinding through with the actors and Richard and Lesley the finer details of both acts yesterday, especially with respect to the transitions between scenes. Part of me (the part eyeing next Thursday's preview performance) found the progress painfully incremental at times. But as Jennifer Lines said to me on the drive back into Vancouver, the minuteness and repetition of such drilling actually makes things go much faster in the long run. There is a moment, she said, when everything will click and fall into place for the actors and then the tech runs will seem like they are flying by. I certainly got a glimpse of this yesterday when we did full run-throughs of both acts; sure there were lines dropped and movement cues that were missed or late, but there was a definite sense that the actors were getting increasingly comfortable with the material and that things were coming together.

I can't wait to see a full run-through with tech to see all of the elements working off of each other. That will have to wait until Tuesday afternoon for me due to other commitments, including an interview with Radio-Canada about the play. I don't know who I'm going to talk about mathematics in French, but hopefully I'll muddle through.

P

Long Division: Second Week of Rehearsal

If you'd asked me on Wednesday how things were going in terms of building the show, I probably would have smiled tightly and said "We're getting there ... slowly." I confess I was a bit panicked by the incremental progress we seemed to be making in blocking the play and integrating this with the movement sequences. And then there were all the other production elements that had yet to be integrated, including sound, lighting and video. Richard had distributed a scene breakdown table earlier in the week, with columns for all of these things and by mid-week a lot of them still remained blank.

But what a difference two days away makes. In the interim, Richard and the cast had sketched the blocking for all but the last few pages of the play, Lesley had set the movement for the top of the second act and refined several other sequences, and the designers had held a production meeting in which much of the video had been locked down and a production schedule laid out for paper tech, lighting hang, set load-in and install, and Q-2-Q. Clearly I should keep clear of rehearsals more often.

That said, I was back at the Gateway yesterday to watch Richard set the remaining blocking in the morning, as well as Lesley teach the actors in the early afternoon what she had come up with for the part near the end of act one in which Mobius bands are discussed. Then it was time for a stumble through of the whole play. To this point the scenes had been built and rehearsed in fragments, often out of order, and so it was revelatory to watch the whole thing unfold from start to finish, hiccups included. I know Lesley was concerned with the execution of much of the movement in the second half, and we have yet to come up with a physical score for the ending, but I was so pleased to see where we were. Rough around the edges though it currently is, we at least have a structure. And as Richard reminded Lesley and myself, there was, relatively speaking, still a fair amount of time to refine and polish things.

And all of this was accomplished in the midst of some unexpected and deeply trying personal circumstances for one member of our team. This play is partly about dealing with grief and let's just say that it has been a bit of shock to have that theme hit so close to home. But it has also reminded me of what a strong and resilient tribe actors are.

P

Long Division: First Week of Rehearsal

Today is the end of the first week of rehearsals for Long Division. In fact, as I write this our amazing cast is still hard at it in Richmond, taking turns working on their respective monologues with director Richard Wolfe and Assistant Director Keltie Forsyth, while presumably also running lines from the choral group scenes under the watchful eye of stage manager Jethelo Cabilete. Having worked our way through the beats of those scenes and any lingering questions about them by the end of the day yesterday, I decided to knock off from today's rehearsals as I have so much else to catch up on.

Not that I regret for a moment being there the rest of this past week. It's such an exciting--and terrifying--thing to dive into the rehearsal process. The exploration and moments of discovery are so stimulating; at the same time, one is always in a bit of a panic about the steadily diminishing amount of time one has for said exploration and discovery. In our case, because there are so many different moving parts to the production--not the least of which is creating and learning actual physical movement--juggling available time is one of Richard's main priorities. Fortunately, choreographer Lesley Telford hit the ground running during the first three days of rehearsal, aided by the emerging dance artists from her Arts Umbrella class with whom she has been building much of the choreography for the show, and many of whom have very generously agreed to accompany Lelsey to our rehearsals to help teach the material to the actors. And in this respect, one of the delights so far has been to watch the dancers' and actors' mutual admiration for each other's specific performance gifts. The entire cast has done an amazing, and exceedingly fast, job of absorbing into their bodies some fairly difficult physical phrases. At the same time, they've also absorbed much of the text into their brains, with several of them already off book in terms of their very long monologues. Composer Owen Belton was also present to observe what Lesley was working on in relation to his music, and to get a sense of what he still needed to come up with to accompany the rest of her movement score.

Yesterday we also got a glimpse of Lauchlin Johnston's mock-up of the set, which blew me away with its elegance and beauty. The Gateway's Studio B is not a huge space and we're losing some of that to the backdrop that Lauchlin has created, and that will additionally serve as the surface onto which video designer Jamie Nesbitt's will project his images. One thing Jamie flagged for Lauchlin and Richard was the colour of the floor. If, as originally intended, it remained white, like the backdrop, then it would create a lot of bounce from the lights that would make it hard to see the projections. This would only be exacerbated if, as planned, lighting designer Jergus Oprsal used a series of shins to provide side light from the wings. So the lino floor will now be a light shade of grey. If everything goes accroding to plan the set will be installed by next Thursday, with the lighting grid hung soon after and the cue-to-cue happening much earlier than usual so that the performers will ideally have three full tech runs instead of cramming everything into one half day.

It was also useful to have Jamie at the table yesterday for our final beat-by-beat read-through of the text, as he asked a lot of tough dramaturgical questions about what exactly was going on in different sections, and how video might support them in some instances, or conceivably work against them in others. Combined with the cast's similarly probing questions from the rest of the week, the rigorous text analysis has really forced me to justify my choices, and to explain their relevance to the overall structure of the play and the respective inner worlds of each of the characters. It also required me to not be precious about material that clearly had to go, or about changes to specific lines, however micro or macro. I really appreciate the attentiveness of all involved to my writing, as it has indeed made the work stronger and, in one instance spotted by Keltie, saved me from making a pretty glaring mistake in the math!

Lots more work to do, of course, but so far the process has been thoroughly rewarding. The level of collegiality and collaboration on everyone's part has been inspiring, and that's in no small measure to the open and non-hierarchical environment Richard has worked hard to create. I can't be in the studio on Monday due to teaching commitments, but I look forward to being back at rehearsals on Tuesday.

So stay tuned for more.

P

Long Division on Roundhouse Radio

As we head into the first week of rehearsals today, I thought I would share the link to a segment I did this past Friday on Roundhouse Radio's "Sense of Place" show, with host Minelle Mahtani. All you need to do is go here.

Minelle was terrific and she seemed keen to have me back before the show opens, perhaps with some cast members to read an excerpt from the play on air. Stay tuned for more on that, as well as updates on the rehearsal process.

P

Long Division: In the Studio with Lesley Telford

Earlier today the choreographer of Long Division, Lesley Telford, invited me to drop by the studio at Arts Umbrella on Granville Island, where she was working with members of her new pilot research-training program for early career dancers to test out some possible studies for different movement sections in the play. (In fact, I invited myself and Lesley generously agreed that I could stop by.)

As I have previously mentioned, Lesley just happens to be working with seven amazingly talented dancers as part of this program, and they have each taken on a character in the play, drawing from the text (which was spread out across the studio floor when I arrived) to improvise and develop individual gesture phrases that may or may not eventually get set in some related form on our corresponding actors when we begin rehearsals next week (yikes!). Lesley asked each of the dancers--Aden as Paul, Corrine as Reid, Brenna as Jo, Maya as Lucy, Stephanie as Naathim, Caitlyn as Grace, and Katie as Alice (apologies for any misspellings)--to run through the solo phrases they had come up with and I was amazed at how bang-on their instincts were in terms of energy and tempo and line, as well as things like muscularity vs. flow, repetition, different levels and directional facings, and so on. I was also pleased to note that I could also read each character in the movement without reading the movement itself as telegraphing too obviously this or that character's psychology or profession. Which is to say that is the furthest thing from mimeticism or pantomime.

The dancers also ran through different group sequences that they had developed with Lesley, including a portion of what might become the opening walking pattern (there's a recurring falling into gravity motif that together with simple moments where the dancers just stop and acknowledge each other in space, or else let a loose arm swing back and forth that had me smiling the whole way through). Lesley has additionally choreographed a bit where the dancers move downstage as a clump, with each of them taking turns fading into the pack, which is a nice visual image for how the characters are connected to each other, whether they want to be or not. Another sequence Lesley tried in canon for the first time today, and despite the fact that some of the dancers were only just learning the movement, it was most effective. Ditto the moments when the dancers took turns manipulating each other.

It was all so exciting to see and it was a joy to share with the dancers some of my thoughts on each of the characters whose movement vocabularies they are helping to build. That vocabulary will necessarily look somewhat different (less dancerly, more pedestrian) when transferred to the actors, but the point is that no matter where it has come from, it has to be performed with intention. To that end, it will be an enormous help to have the dancers with us on Wednesday afternoons as we move through the rehearsal process.

I keep having to pinch myself that we have such a fabulous creative team.

P

Long Division Creative Meetings

So I submitted the rehearsal draft of my play, Long Division, earlier this week. We're at draft 17 by this point. While I know individual lines and maybe even whole sections of the script will inevitably change once we get into rehearsals, and potentially once we open as a result of audience response, and likely as well in the gap between closing at The Gateway at the end of November and opening at the Orpheum Annex next April (did I mention that part yet?), for the time being I had to stop tinkering--if only so that the cast can start to absorb their parts before we begin rehearsals.

Those rehearsals begin in two weeks, but in the interim our director, Richard Wolfe, has been holding a series of creative meetings at the Pi Theatre offices with various members of the production team. So, for example, last week Richard and I met with our choreographer, Lesley Telford, to talk about ideas for the movement score. We went through the script page by page and very intuitively and organically threw out potential ideas. If you'll forgive the metaphor, it was amazing to see how in sync we all were, fairly quickly deciding on a set of three conventions for each of the monologues that we could manipulate and play with over the course of each's delivery. Then, too, the choral sections, and the different math concepts described therein, seemed to lend themselves fairly easily to different kinetic frameworks, ranging from geometric patterning and canon structures and instances of retrograde, to changes in tempo and direction and the use of spirals and even moments of stillness. It was exciting to hear and watch Lesley (moving in her chair and every now and then leaping to her feet) begin to develop a gestural vocabulary for each of the characters based on my descriptions of their imagined psychic and physical states within the play, as well as her own mental notes on the actors' responses to her movement prompts during the last day of our workshop back in September. Because we don't have the luxury of infinite amounts of rehearsal time to devote to a more collaborative and improvisatory development of the choreography (which is the way Lesley is used to working), we are incredibly lucky that in the next two weeks Lesley will be able to test and develop her ideas for different sections with the aid of the students in her Arts Umbrella pre-professional class. By some magical coincidence, there are seven students in that class, and she has already distributed the script to them, with the goal that they will each take on one of the characters and, even better, be available during some of the rehearsal period to act as individual movement coaches to the actors playing their corresponding parts. This is just one of the many bits of extra resourcing for this production that has fortuitously fallen into our laps; another is Keltie Forsyth, a recent MFA grad in directing from UBC, who is doing an internship with Pi this year, and who will also be helping to get our show up.

I met Keltie last night at another creative meeting that Richard organized, this time so that we could hear some samples of the musical score that our composer Owen Belton has created, and so that Owen and Lesley, especially, could think through some ideas together. It's easy to see why Owen, who works regularly with Crystal Pite and Kidd Pivot, is such an in-demand composer for dance (simultaneously with my play he is working on commissions for companies in Switzerland and Germany); he creates music with so much texture and mood, and with so much room to move with and inside of it. What he played for us as a possible opening sequence, to which Lesley would add some more geometric and directional choreography, was absolutely perfect; ditto the underscoring he suggested for the opening bit of dialogue, which he has composed in two versions, once with piano and percussion, and once with just percussion (I think I prefer the addition of the piano). As someone who is not very musical, it was also amazing for me to instantly recognize where some of the samples Owen shared with us would go. For example, there was a cello sequence that immediately put me in mind of the God proof section of the play, for which Lesley had already been thinking of something quadrille-like that riffed on Beckett's square (Pascal's God quadrant is referenced in the text). Another bit of atmospheric piano underscoring I thought would work well with Alice's monologue. As Lesley said to Owen afterwards, "You make it so easy."

Of course the music is not just a support or supplement for the text and the movement. It is a key conceptual component of the work in its own right, and to this end Owen has even written a sequence based on the Fibonacci numbers. I thought it worked brilliantly and can see it providing a nice transition into the final section of the play, which is structured around the golden ratio, and which is where I see movement, music, text and video to be the most integrated.

It's all so exciting to see unfold--and we haven't even gotten to Jamie Nesbitt's video projections yet! Part of me would be happy just to see the creative process extend indefinitely, forgoing an actual opening. But I'd also be lying if I said I didn't also want to share the work with an audience. Working with such talented collaborators makes that prospect so much easier to contemplate.

P.

P.S. It's already been announced on Pi's website, so I can now also share it here: the news of who is in our cast. They are pictured below: left to right, Anousha Alamian (Naathim), Jennifer Lines (Jo), Melissa Oei (Lucy), Kerry Sandomirsky (Alice), Jay Clift (Reid), Linda Quibell (Grace), and Nicco Lorenzo Garcia (Paul). Photo by David Copper. Drawing by me!

Long Division Workshop

I don't know why it's taken me so long to announce on this blog that my new play is being produced this fall. I guess I didn't want to jinx anything. But after last week, one of the most intense and rewarding of my writing life, I think I can finally let Schrödinger's cat out of its box (bad inside joke).

My play is called Long Division and it is being produced by Pi Theatre in association with the Gateway in Richmond, where it will open on November 17 (get your tickets here). We don't begin rehearsals until October 24, but as part of the creative process our director Richard Wolfe had blocked off a week-long workshop with the actors in early September so that we could collectively dig our hands into the script, and so that I could respond to their comments and queries with rewrites as needed.

I can't disclose just yet who those actors are (I believe an announcement from Pi is imminent), but I can say that there are seven of them. For a long time I thought the size of the cast meant the play would never be produced. But now that I've met our actors--all of them amazing talents whose past work on stages across this city I've so admired--and heard them speak my lines, I can't conceive of having written the piece any other way.

The ensemble nature of the play is closely tied to its subject matter: a chain reaction of events that has thrown seven otherwise mostly disconnected characters into an enforced relationship with each other and, consequently, an accounting of what role they each may have played in precipitating--or not forestalling--said events. To do so, they use the language of mathematics, and the play has been partly constructed as an equation to be solved, with characters addressing the audience in a series of monologues that alternate with choral scenes that attempt to offer further lessons in what one of the books I consulted in the course of my research has called "the science of patterns."

One thing became immediately clear after Richard, the actors, our stage manager, Jethelo Cabilete, and several of the designers gave their feedback following the initial table read last Monday: some of the mathematics in the play had to be simplified and, more to the point, couldn't just be included in a "hey, isn't this cool" manner. It always needed to be in the service of the story and both the actors and the characters delivering the math lessons needed to understand what they were saying, and why. The actors' questions on what this or that concept meant forced me to explain things in more concrete, real-world ways, and often that very language found its way into the play.

As useful was the consensus note to create more of a balance between the cool and somewhat analytical feel of the math lessons and the warmer, more emotionally involving human stories that were being shared. I needed to find a way to make the structural dialectics of the play more compelling for the audience, to both suggest why these characters (only one of whom is a mathematician) might turn to numbers and geometry and the like as a way to abstract and make sense of an event that is still too painful to contemplate fully, and when and why the weight of that pain refuses to fit into neat and tidy patterns. In the course of these revisions, especially, I was able to begin refining the connections between the characters, tweaking each of the monologues to add greater individual clarity and depth, but also collectively to suggest how these folks are constellated as parts of a whole.

On this front, what was most exciting for me was to see how the actors responded to my new pages each day, discovering in my revisions added layers of complexity and vulnerability for each of their characters and, most thrillingly, bringing that out in their subsequent readings. It is such an amazing thing for a playwright to hear his or her words lifted off the page for the first time, and with this play in particular there are lots of choral moments where very conceptually and emotionally loaded lines have to be lobbed quickly and deftly back and forth between characters. Fortunately this crackerjack ensemble is more than up to the task.

After a shorter day on Thursday, which was mostly devoted to a publicity photo shoot with David Cooper (who is a wizard with the camera), Richard and I met with the dramaturg who has been working with me on the script for the past several years, my friend and colleague DD Kugler. Kugler's notes were, as usual, spot-on, and combined with what the actors and Richard had already given me by way of feedback, I had lots of material to attack in a more holistic way a comprehensive revision of the entire draft. This I undertook via a late night of writing on Thursday and some early Friday morning tinkering. Richard and I stopped to make some photocopies on the way to the Gateway and as I distributed the new scripts to the actors I held my breath a bit in anticipation of how this version would land. It was clear from everyone's reactions after the last line was spoken that I had definitely cracked a nut and that while there was still more work to be done, a corner had been turned and we were heading in the right direction (which is not just a metaphor in the context of this play).

We did one more reading on Saturday morning, this time with almost the entire production team present, including choreographer Lesley Telford, composer Owen Belton, costume designer Connie Hosie, lighting designer Jergus Oprsal, and set designer Lauchlin Johnston (only projection designer Jamie Nesbitt was absent). A great luxury of this extra workshop time is that it has allowed the entire team to bounce ideas off of each other and, what's more, to do so within the very space--Studio B at the Gateway--where we will be performing (a big shout-out to the Gateway's Jovanni Sy for making this possible). After the morning read and some time for the actors to do some movement exercises with Lesley, the production and design team then had a conversation of what might be possible to achieve within our space (which is intimate) and, as crucially, within the show's overall budget (also not huge, and with such a large cast, most of it needing to be allocated to human resources). Still, the ideas discussed--which I'm not at liberty to reveal--were so exciting. When I started writing this play, I conceived its visual design and movement score as being absolutely integral components--and ones, moreover, that would aid immeasurably in getting across or helping to supplement various math concepts referenced. I'm happy to say everyone else seems to agree.

So, now the ball's back in my court. Over the course of the next week and a bit I've got to turn around a new version of the script. I pretty much know what I have to do, and I'm anxious to get to work. Stay tuned for rehearsal updates beginning the end of October. And I hope to see you at the show.

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Pi Theatre's 2015/16 Season

I don't usually blog about theatre companies' season announcements. But Pi Theatre's 2015/16 season is of special interest to me--and not just because AD Richard Wolfe is directing the other Ayad Akhtar play in Vancouver this year.

Richard is also helping me workshop a little performance venture of my own! Details here.

P.