BLOG

Our Process

Posted by DCA Theater on March 16, 2010 in January-June 2010 Season, INCUBATOR Series: The New Colony

by Andrew Hobgood, The New Colony Artistic Director and Director of Sordid Little Story

Our process is grounded in the idea that there are three fields of creative expertise in any production:

The actors are experts in who the characters are and how they think and feel at any given moment. We believe that since the actor will be immersing themselves in the character every rehearsal and every performance, then they will inherently understand these characters on a level that even the playwright will never know. So that means that the actors actually have the authority to let the playwright know when they have written something that isn’t true for their character, or to give the playwright information that may help make scenes more true.

The playwrights are the experts on the story. They know what is being told, and how to shape it. As information is generated by the actors, they are able to pull out what they need to create the script. Similarly, they know what they don’t know and can utilize the actors’ deep understanding of their characters to fill in the holes in their story and script. Ultimately, the playwright becomes a sort of fictional historian. Using the actors, their research, and their characters, the playwright is able to pull together the data and reconstruct the events of the story in a way that will best be communicated to the audience.

The directors and designers are experts on the audience experience. They are the only ones who get to truly see the project from the outside. Their feedback and input is all based on how the experience would feel for the audience. For the director, that means helping the playwright to tell their story in a way that is compelling to the audience. Similarly, the director helps the actors to fully realize their characters on stage. So the director ends up being the facilitator between the story teller and their characters, moving back and forth between the two parties to help fuse them into the best audience experience possible. The designers then take on the role of finding non-verbal holes in the story, and using their own expertise to help the playwright’s story come to life in ways that even dialogue cannot express.