ORIGIN OF SERIOUS PLAY THEATRE ENSEMBLE & TRAINING

Since my graduation from Smith College with a Master’s Degree in Theatre, the ending of the grant funding for my 3-year theater-writing residency program with women in Massachusetts prisons, and the last presentation and tour of our originally scripted production, created and performed with female inmates, Ain't No Man Dragged That Moon Down Yet, I have been developing a Serious Play physical acting training process with a focus first on young adults 15 -26 years old. The work with these early ensembles organically grew into training and creating with actors of all ages.

It was the women with whom I worked so closely, collaborating with poet Margaret Robison in state prisons (1986-1989), while researching my thesis and compiling the book, THE WORLD SPLIT OPEN-Theatre and Writing With Women In Prison, who urged me to work with young adults first! The inmates felt that my theatrical process and style of dramatic self-expression could serve that population and help save lives. I often created work through personal narrative as a starting point. As Richard Schechner had said to Spalding Gray, learn to play yourself first. Then I would stylize our work, incorporating the original written text with physical images, first behind a shadow screen, and later in front of the screen while reading or speaking text, moving, and always singing. 

Following my graduation from Smith, I continued developing my ensemble process regarding teaching acting, leading workshops with young adults through the Drama Studio in Springfield, with the TEAM Players Project in residence in area high schools in the Pioneer Valley, and through a MCC YouthReach Project at StageWest in inner city Springfield with Eric Hill.  There I first met actors Ellen Lauren, Kelly Maurer, Will Bond and Celia Hilson, some of whom I would encounter later in Anne Bogart’s SITI Company.

Eventually, many of the young adult artists whom I encountered in these projects wanted to further explore in-depth the art of physical theatre. Their desire for a more regular and rigorous physical actor-training program led to the creation with movement artist Lisa Enzer of Serious Play Intensive Theatre Training (SPITT). The program began in 1992 as a summer explorative theatre program on the Smith College campus.  In 1993, I was pleased to be accepted into the Artists Event and Residency Program of the Mass. Cultural Council, continuing my long-standing relationship with the Council through the non-profit arts organization, Cultural Images Group Inc., formed in 1985. The summer workshops on the Smith campus were popular with interested high school actors.  In 1995, Serious Play Intensive Theatre Training was invited by Gordon Thorne to establish a year-round residence in the APE/Third Floor Arts Space, Thornes Marketplace, Northampton and the SERIOUS PLAY THEATRE ENSEMBLE was created. Here we could train, experiment, devise, research, stage and present our physically-based ensemble theatre. Robin Doty, Managing Director, and myself became part of the APE Board of Directors, made up of experimental collaborators in dance, movement, visual and theatre arts and all based in Northampton. In 2006, Serious Play organically transformed from an adolescent-focused ensemble, into a diverse multi-generational theatre ensemble with their original production MATERMORPHOSIS, adapted from the Kafka story, by Lenelle Moise.

Having trained as an ensemble actress in the late 1970's at Stage One Theatre Lab in Boston where we worked with the physical acting theories of Jerzy Grotowski, the Polish Theatre Lab, and Joseph Chaikin's Open Theatre, and after using large scale shadow screen techniques to involve prison inmates in gesture and physical performance, I became interested in the stylized theatre training of Japanese director, Tadashi Suzuki.  I received grants for workshops in the Suzuki method with Anne Bogart's SITI Company NYC and with Eric Hill at StageWest. I trained in workshops with Kristin Linklater and the Company of Women in Boston to explore the actor's voice-body connection. All of this learning, I continued to share with the Serious Play Ensemble acting company.

Through my contact with Jonathan Croy, Kevin Coleman and Tina Packer’ Shakespeare and Company, Lenox, and combined collaborations, I found the Suzuki physical training to merge well with the Linklater vocal training, and I have used both in my work with the Serious Play Ensemble.   I find the Suzuki work is very accessible to beginning actors restoring the wholeness of the body as a tool for theatrical expression.  The Linklater process deepens the actor's interior work discovered in the connection of voice, body, breath, and emotional release.

Since theatre director, Anne Bogart, and I are colleagues, having met here in Northampton on a collaborative theatre project through ABIA Theatre in 1982, I have kept abreast of the development of her work with the VIEWPOINTS (first identified by Mary Overlie), an improvisational vocabulary and a compositional theory.  These Viewpoints are a set of names given to basic principles of movement and experimental theatre (space, body shape, time, tempo, duration, repetition, kinesthetic response, gesture, spatial relationship, architecture etc.)  These names make up a language for talking about what happens onstage and resonates with the ensemble. It allows actors and directors and designers to collectively create together.

For the Serious Play Theatre Ensemble, the process of theatre-making is not an intellectual exercise, but a physical discovery.  We work collectively toward the replacement of scene-centered theatre, with a theatre of sound, space, movement, and text interpretation, which calls upon an actor's total physical expressiveness. Serious Play is committed to preserving ensemble theatre as an art form.