The Manhattan Experimental Theater Workshop

Two contrasts...

1. The form of theater most familiar to high school students is Naturalism.

Mainstream theater in America usually presents what is called "naturalistic" representations of characters caught up in stories that have beginnings, middles, and ends. Naturalism as a style of theatrical representation was developed in the late Nineteenth Century to focus attention on the inner lives of the characters in plays, because that was thought to be the arena of the most significant lessons to be learned in theater. This is the form of theater most often presented by and to high school students. It is the form most often studied in high school theater classes. And it is the form that (anachronistically) guides most reading in high school literature classes of plays from periods before the development of Naturalism.

What we do in the workshop is explore alternatives to this familiar style.

If the wide variety of avant-garde theater practices in this century have anything at all in common, it is a distrust of the effects and of the means of Naturalism. So, in the workshop we learn a variety of non-naturalistic styles of theatrical representation. We focus on techniques for dissecting, disassembling, and reassembling story lines. We learn to develop techniques for focusing upon things other than the inner lives of characters; for example, the characters' social situations, or their ideas, or their capacities for various kinds of expression. Part of our goal is to get a clearer understanding of the hidden motives and unconscious effects embedded in any naturalistic theatrical plotting of a series of events. An even more important goal is to increase students' own expressive powers by providing them with more, and more varied, tools of expression.

2. The production of plays conceived and written by others is the theater practice most familiar to high school students.

This practice is generally beneficial. It provides hands-on exposure to the variety of tasks and skills required to mount any form of art. However, it is obvious that two important skills are not taught in this mode of theatrical production: how to make a basic style choice and how to write a play within that choice. In fact, since these two skills control what plays are all "about", even in the best atmosphere of cooperative production of plays students subtly may be taught that the most important elements in a play are still not within their control.

In the workshop the students make all the basic decisions about subject-matter and performance. And they write everything they perform.

Each year the workshop participants choose what story out of our "popular mythology" they wish to subject to our theatrical investigations. Each participant chooses the style in which she or he wishes to work; and then, working together with three-four others also wishing to work in that style, drafts a script and makes the performance choices that will turn the script into a performance. This process generates astonishing confidence in performance. This confidence derives from the facts that the students understand exactly what they are doing and why and that they have invested themselves creatively in the most basic and detailed choices in the piece.

The process...

The workshop is a five week experience culminating in a performance presented on two evenings.

Weeks I & II

In these two weeks students go through a "crash course" in the experimental movements of theater in the Twentieth Century. We meet for three sessions each week for three hours per session. Together we read over 200 pages of theater texts, beginning with the Futurists and dada from the first two decades of the century, and going on through movements like The Women's Project in the 80s. We combine readings from the experimental literature with exercises and rehearsal practices like those developed for performing the scripts we read. The vocal and physical exercises provide a base and inspiration for non-naturalistic modes of expression. The rehearsal practices provide students with a fund of alternative theatrical conventions and ideas for developing their own conventions. We allow students to see that with any text, the essence of every performance choice is to ask, "Who says what (sentence, word, or syllable), where, and while doing what?" and to realize that no answer to these questions is predetermined.

The "big" decisions (end of Week II)

At this point participants are ready to choose which style of avant-garde theater they would like to continue to explore. They are formed into small groups of three-four participants, each group working in a different style with its own set of conventions.

Next, the selection of the "target story", together with a discussion of its themes and issues for more detailed investigation, is made by the entire group. The strategy of picking a common target story allows both the participants and the audiences at the performances to see more clearly the effects of the different convention-styles. Things we ask each student to think about in choosing a target story include:

- whether it is a story out of our "common popular mythology;" that is, a widely known story that has been used as a vehicle for teaching some of life's important lessons;

- whether it interests the participants, or has in some way been important to them or someone they know;

- whether it contains images that can be examined fruitfully by all of the convention-styles on offer in the readings we have done;

- whether the story involves choices being made that (a) could or should have been made differently and (b) are made to seem natural and right by means of the kind of story it is and the kind of "world" that is portrayed in the story;

- whether the story contains images of people (racial, class, gender images) that need to be challenged.

There are, of course, other factors that go into our choice of a common story (for example, manageability). But these are the main ones. Because the participants must think about what they and the others might actually do with the target story, this is the first fully creative choice the participants make. And because it engages everyone's creative capacities, it generates the energy needed to carry them into the work of the next three weeks. Target stories in past years have included Romeo and Juliet, Beauty and the Beast, Medea, Bambi, the Arthurian Legends, Dickens' A Christmas Carol, the first four chapters of Genesis, Peter Pan, Rumpelstiltskin, The Little Mermaid, The Pied Piper of Hamlin, and Hansel and Gretel.

From this point on, participants meet twice each week for three hours in their small groups and twice each week for three hours with the whole workshop company. The small groups work on their individual pieces; and the entire company continues to work on exercises and rehearsal practices and begins to build some moments which the entire company will perform together.

Week III

The writing process is a modification of a very traditional way of teaching styles. It was first developed for teaching Latin students how to appreciate the differences among the styles of Caesar, Cicero, Horace, and so on. We ask each group to study carefully the style they wish to work within by dissecting the example of that style we had read in the first two weeks. We call this their "resource text." Next they are to imagine what the target story would look like had it been written in the style and with the thematic concerns of the resource text. This produces a new outline of the target story, significantly different from the original. Each participant in the group is then assigned a segment of the new outline to draft in one or two days. The group reconvenes and goes over each participant's draft, rewriting as they go along so as to provide a working text as quickly as possible. Typically, a first draft is produced by each group in two three-hour sessions; and usually a third session is needed to complete the working scripts.

Week IV

In the next two three-hour sessions, most of the basic performance choices are made. A crucial choice is what passages in the piece must be memorized for the performance. Our philosophy is that unmemorized moments can be just as interesting as memorized passages if the group invents a convention that openly acknowledges reading as a performance choice. This choice must be consistent with the general performance-style in which the group has chosen to work. In many ways this week resembles standard rehearsal work that students with theater backgrounds have done before. For example, when we are asking where someone should be when saying a particular sentence/word/syllable, we are asking basic "blocking" questions. But there are also some important differences. We do not presume any predetermined answers to the performance choice questions. And our philosophy is that the main resources of the theatrical performer are the voice and the body--including the bodies of others. So participants are encouraged to think of ways to exploit these means first before resorting to the use of properties, costumes, lighting effects, electronically produced sound effects, and so on. By the end of the two sessions in this week, we are beginning to have a pretty good idea of what the pieces will look like.

Week V

This week is spent in solidifying what has been developed so far and drilling the pieces, just as one would with any other theatrical presentation. We bring in tech people who will set up and run what lighting and sound support we have chosen to employ; and we collect whatever must, after all, be had by way of props and costumes.

These pieces are put together in a very short time and are experimental in nature; they are always "works in progress." However, the participants are encouraged to drill their pieces so they will have solidity in performance and so the performers will be reliable for each other as well. These are, after all, theatrical experiments; and theater is a performance art form.

Who the players are...

The 2002 Workshop was the fourteenth annual running of the workshop. Over 140 high school students from Manhattan and the surrounding area have been through the workshop. Each year about 30-50 percent of the participants are repeaters. Participants are recruited from debate/forensics programs, music and dance, as well as theater programs. A number of participants have actually had their first experience of performing in front of an audience in the workshop. Several participants who have graduated have written original plays whose themes and styles were initially developed as a result of the workshop experience.

The founder and director of the workshop is Jim Hamilton. Jim is a professor of Philosophy at K-State. His research is in aesthetics, especially theater-aesthetics. He has studied avant-garde theater for over a decade, both on his own and with figures such as Herbert Blau, Robert Corrigan, and Richard Schechner. He was a performer in one of Schechner's "environmental theater" projects, in Dallas, Texas in the Spring of 1985. Of the workshops Jim has this to say:

I really enjoy my association with high school students. I respect their intelligence and the variety of knowledge that they bring to the process. It is clear to me that they have the capacity to do this kind of theater. I think it is rare in the high schools to find a program that challenges them in the ways this one does; and it pleases me to be a part of making the opportunity available to them.

Sponsorship and funding...

The workshops were originally sponsored by the Education and Outreach Committee of the Manhattan Civic Theatre. Now the workshops are sponsored by the Manhattan Arts Center, the successor organization to MCT. [In 1996, MCT merged with the Manhattan Arts Council to form the Manhattan Arts Center.] The first two workshops were underwritten by a grant from the Southwestern Bell Foundation. The workshop has always been partly funded by a small workshop fee charged to each participant. (Scholarships are made available.) Since 1991, much of the cost of the workshop has been underwritten by solicited donations and by donations from the audiences on the nights of the performances. Since 1995 additional funding for the workshop and several other MCATC classes has been provided by the Manhattan YES! Fund, a project of the Robert R. McCormick Tribune Foundation of Chicago, Illinois. This has made it possible to offer small honoraria to the technical and administrative staffs. Jim Hamilton has taught and directed on a volunteer basis.