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The Displaced

Posted by DCA Theater on August 20, 2010 in July-December 2010 Season, INCUBATOR Series: Thirteen Pocket

by Anthony Nikolchev, playwright for The Displaced script as part of XIII Pocket Incubator

I wrote The Displaced - starting writing it - in 2005. Since then, the play has taken many turns, developed with new characters and new ideas, while, simultaneously, I have changed as well. I just returned to Chicago and its exciting theatre scene after 14 months of doing my own searching for theatrical growth abroad, mainly in Wroclaw, Poland.  During that time, I was inundated with many different forms of theatre. Sure, there is still the ever present get-audiences-in-seats more standard idea of productions, but Poland stands out in its willingness and enthusiasm to explore the unknown in theatrical expression.

This exploration manifests in a form encouraged by a master of experimental, laboratory theatre - Jerzy Grotowski. His is not a method, nor a style that can be emulated, but rather a way to approach the work for the theatre creators. That being a rigorously disciplined focus on what the actor is capable of. It is asking that question, “What IS the actor capable of?” How does one find that out? Thus the naming of his and his followers’ theatre as “experimental.” Like scientists experimenting in a lab. Also: Laboratory theatre. It can take years to find the way that a certain text must be read, or a movement be performed that makes the creator and the audience understand what truth is. So for me to be getting more and more addicted to this line of questioning over the last 14 months makes it a challenge for me to enter a play that I starting writing 5 years ago. How to go back?

I wish I had a nice, insightful and illuminating answer. I don’t. All I can say now is that I want the physical exploration of The Displaced to be an equally important - if not more important - aspect of how the play grows into a production. So for now, as we are tearing apart the text, finding where it is too dense or without action, I am constantly trying to find ways to write the script leaving inspirational notes that will trigger exploration. Leaving questions that must be answered later in the process. I am not trying to be ambiguous, only suggestive. A successful outcome of this workshop would be to leave with a play that encourages revelations at every step of its development, from first reading to closing night.

But how do we do that when the script can be so binding? How do we unite the linguistic arguments present in the science fiction world present in my text with physical expressions that enable us to realize that language is only a fraction of the way we can understand each other and the world in which we live?