Theater of Place Workshop

This past Thursday night I attended a “Theater of Place” workshop with Gerard Stropnicky of the Bloomsburg Theatre Ensemble. Talk about an inspirational evening!

First, what is “Theater of Place?” It’s a theater piece intimately rooted in a specific geographic location. What Gerard and his playwright collaborator Jo Carson do is travel to rural communities in the U.S. where they develop plays with the community based on community stories, very frequently stories of communal trauma such as a long-since-passed child-molester, or lynchings in the South. Gerard’s workshop gave us a taste of how they collect and develop these stories:

After we did a big warm-up to get everybody laughing, he split us into pairs and “pods” of pairs. In each pair we told each other a story about a time that we, personally, felt supported. Then, we told the story back to the original teller in the first person. We picked one of these stories to present to our pod, and then the pod as a whole picked one of the stories to tell to the whole workshop. Then we had 10 minutes to turn it into a little skit.

Afterwards, he read us a transcript of one of the stories he and Jo have gathered in their professional work. It dealt with childhood sex-abuse. He only shared one transcript with us, but apparently they’d gotten the same story from 5 different women in this community. Then we read the script that they developed from these stories for the community to perform as a way to confront and hopefully begin to heal from this social wound.

What did I learn? First, I was reminded of the importance of improvisation and allowing the group to work semi-democratically to devise a way to enact stories. I was reminded of the importance of warm-ups to get the group laughing together. And I was inspired to bring some of these techniques (or versions of them) home to the River with me to help tell our stories with my People.