The Imago Blog

Okay, we’re at it again.  After 30 years of creating creature-theater haven’t we had enough?  Apparently not.  This holiday season we open “Cats.”  No, it’s not your Andrew Lloyd Webber version – far from it.

In Imago’s ZooZoo we’re not trying to recreate the animal world.  We’re looking at the human condition and the animal is our vehicle.  This is not anything really new to our culture – Disney and Pixar have been doing it for decades.  What makes Imago stand out is the minimal style we bring to the stage and the use of mask theatre.

We have created over 30 original productions.   They have ranged in scale from massive multimedia to mixed forms with giant budgets and ones with small budgets for one-person plays, however nothing compares to the difficulty of creating the short form.   By short form, we mean a piece that last 3 to 5 minutes with the intent of capturing a universal slice of life.  It is painstaking and difficult work.  It is no wonder that our basement at Imago Theatre is stuffed with over half million dollars of creatures - our editing room floor.  Those creatures, however wonderful never quite found their place on the Imago stage.  A giant 25’ caterpillar that transformed into gigantic butterflies, however spectacular, couldn’t compete with a simple creature like the “Larvabatic” a worm that performs incredible acrobatic feats.

Let’s hope the “cats” find their place in the Imago world.  Only hours and weeks and months of trial (which began last spring) will determine that.   Or we might get lucky as we have with a few pieces.  The “Larvabatic” which took six months in design to create, only took three hours in rehearsal before it stole the show.

ZooZoo opens (with “Cats”) on December 8.

When I walk into a museum and find an abstract work with elements of realism I enjoy it on two levels. The first is a purely abstract one. I open my eyes wide to let the form, color, and textures invade me. It fills me with something I have not experienced. I sense from the artist a view, an attitude, an emotion that is not communicable in other way.

The other way I look at abstract work is by trying to determine from where it was abstracted. I take the word abstract to mean the art was abstracted from life. It began with something in the real world: a landscape, a still life, a portrait, an emotion, an event.

In my upcoming production Zugzwang I work in both these realms. I have in the back of my mind a very simple story – a man’s battle with life, and at the same time I am working on abstractions from this story.

Years ago, I was sitting in an office of a very famous artist director in a large theatre in the United States. He was criticizing me very harshly for my lack of concrete vision in the production I was staging at his theater. In one scene I had an actor raise his arm to a 45 degree angle. It was purely an abstract gesture. The artistic director said to me, “What the **** does that mean!?!?” At the time I was unsettled by his anger and the confrontation and didn’t know how to respond. In retrospect I could have given him about three reasons (metaphors in the theme of the play) for why the abstract gesture was included. But looking back on the conversation, the correct answer was simply: “because it’s the right thing to do”

So much of my theater work in abstract form is that. You build content, conflict, resolution – but the bits and pieces, the looks and gesture, the moves and dances are included simply “because it’s the right thing to do.”

Zugzwang plays from Sept 29 to Oct 22^nd.

Jerry interviews Carol about Splat

Jerry -Splat turned out to be a music-theater caper con piece.  Did you ever intend to end with that?

Carol - I intended Splat to be some sort of musical. I like songs because lyrics can have an emotional state that spoken words can’t. I didn’t start with a caper con piece. I started with something dark like noir but it just morphed into comedy noir.

Jerry - Your writing process for this show was a bit different.  You began with a rather non-sensical piece that eventually become more and more linear.  Can you talk about the process you went through?

Carol - I do like to write dialogue and try to fit it into the story and I guess that’s why sometimes my shows seem non-sensical because it doesn’t always fit, but real life is always going off topic. And to tell the truth, I do try to have an understandable story. Sometimes I just get caught up in the sound of the dialogue that sends me astray. And again I try to keep in within the frame of the original story line, but again it depends on my straying off topic because of those light blub ideas that flash in my head, I just can’t control them. Or I just don’t like where the story is going. I like to have some fun with the audience.

Jerry - Like your previous plays, maybe more for this one, some of the lines were in place even before the actual story was in place.  What makes you write a line to begin with?

Carol - That’s not completely true.  I did have a slim frame of a story. But it’s true I do write dialogue sometimes just for the fun it and hope that it can work out in a play. It’s funny how people talk to each other and how situations are sometimes universal. You can hear the same lines in a dramatic play or a comedy.

Jerry - When you write a line, are you listening for its rhythm, its tone, its meaning, its humor, what is most important for you?

Carol - I think all those are important. You’re starting to sound too smart for me. I do think of all those things but I don’t have guidelines to write by.

Jerry - When writing, how do you know what should become a song?

Carol - When I write a song, I think of the words musically.  When I write dialogue, I think the way people just talk to each other. And then I re-write and edit about ten or more times.

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Splat plays from May 19 to June 4 at Imago Theatre

Jerry Mouawad interviews Carol Triffle about her show “Splat”

Jerry:

You designed the set as you have with all your recent productions, can you talk about what you are trying to achieve and how it ties into the play?

Carol:

The set is a 1980’s suburban ranch style home. I designed the set to ground the play and the main character Cinder. Since sometimes the script jumps around in time at least the place remains constant. I want Cinder to seem to be an ordinary homemaker but in reality she is not.  She is a con artist out to steal and doublecross even her collegues. On the surface she is innocent by-stander but in reality she is the mastermind of the whole hoax.

Jerry:

This is your most accessible play to date.  Did you intend this? And if so, is this a new direction for you?

Carol:

I used to try to turn things around.  Now I let that happen naturally and not intentionally. This show is like watching old movies and TV shows.  It has a little of sit-com,  Jerry Lewis, the Honeymooners, Film Noir and Westerns. I think when you access your history with these it gives the writing more substance so then it’s feels more accessible and understandable.

Jerry:

What part of the process are in at the moment?  Seems like you are still trimming a few lines here and there, but generally the script is in place and the actors are starting to find some shape to their characters - talk about where you are in the show from a director view point.

Carol

Lines give information but are also like music. If they don’t sound right it is like playing a bad note.  Get rid of it. I believe your character happens without words and words begin to make sense when the character state is developed. Sometimes I can sense that when actors are having a hard time saying the lines. It’s usually because they haven’t developed their character state.  Sometimes they just need time to physically envelope that state and then the mental will just kick in.

Splat opens May 19 and plays to June 4

imagotheatre.com

Imago Theatre has billed Stage Left Lost as an Othello that takes place onstage and off the stage – but that is just marketing, a way to catch the show in a phrase to sell tickets. Stage Left Lost is not Othello. It began as an exploration of an Othello but it has become its own thing. What is that thing is something about shifting perspectives, endings becoming beginnings and beginnings that are endings.

It’s difficult for me to say why Stage Left Lost is sort of a puzzle that shouldn’t fit together yet it does. It’s the kind of intellectual toy that you know shouldn’t make sense but it does. It reminds me of paintings by Magritte but it is not surrealism.

Frankly, I don’t know what this play is. I can tell you how I began with an ending and tried to find a beginning.

An actor friend was working on an original show and we would cross paths during rehearsals. As all director/writers we were both struggling with our work. He was having a difficult time finding an ending, and my problem was the opposite. I knew where  I was ending but did not know how to get there.

Stage Left Lost begins with the death of an actress accidentally or intentionally killed by her co-lead. I return to this same scene at the end of the play. The end is both a flash back and a flash forward. In looking at the play it seems like the end scene took place before the beginning and the beginning scene took place before the end. In a linear world this impossible – yet in the world of theatre it becomes not only possible but a reality.

Stage Left Lost opens Nov 4.

As I worked on the production, George Cukor’s A Double Life immediately came to mind. In the film, an actor playing Othello is obsessed with jealousy when he suspects his wife of an affair. The jealousy consumes his life onstage and off. I was intrigued by the layers of possibilities but was ultimately disappointed that the film did not deliver all possiblilities.

There are three different realities I see in this concept – the stage, the off-stage and the world outside the theatre.  As the form began to reveal itself to me I discovered that I could fashion a piece that would travel in several worlds - actors playing actors, actors playing characters, actors playing characters who are playing other characters. Layers upon layers.

Yesterday I blogged that I tried to dismantle any meaning when meaning began to arise in a scene in Tick Tack Type. I wrote that doing this was to free the play and not have it land in a didactic world. Today I will contradict my thinking saying that for every action in the play (or for most) I tried to find meaning in it.

Is this a contradiction? Yes and no. I think it’s a fine balance between an abstract work that has no means of a handle and an abstract works that resonates for audiences. I am not interested in pure abstraction, if I was, I would imbed the work in pure movement and dance and not try to create theatre of it.

So to get back to my opening statement, for every action I tried to find meaning yet at the same time dismantle it. (I hope this blog makes sense to someone, cause writing about movement is not easy, if it was easy, then I would assume the movement theatre has little merit.) In its simplest terms, when I had a character execute an action I tried to find one level or several of dramaturgical importance.

I assume this blog is vague since I am not divulging any of the action of Tick Tack Type. I apologize for this, but I am doing this for your sake (that is if you plan to see the work.) By discussing the action I am robbing you of the experience of it. What I see in an action may not be what you see. I can say this about Tick Tack Type, in many way it’s about “seeing” or “not seeing.”

Tick Tack Type plays March 11 to 14. All tickets are free. Go to www.imagotheatre.com for info.

In my last two productions APIS, or The Taste of Honey and The Cuban Missile Tango I kept my cast in the dark for several weeks and then revealed to them the narrative structure of the play. For example in APIS I worked on movement and character development before I revealed to the cast that their prison was a beehive - those inside were honey bees and those outside were bee keepers. In my next play Tick Tack Type (TTT) there is nothing to reveal to the cast. TTT began as an abstraction and will end that way.

In TTT, I have a hierarchal structure and there is narrative. There is a typing instructor (ruler) and typists (who serve the ruler.) There is action, for example a typist performers badly and is punished. Yet despite the presence of a narrative the work remains an abstraction. I intentionally worked to insure that no symbolism or didactic context was present or at least I tried to subdue those directions. I tried to dismantle meaning when TTT started to lean in ‘meaningful’ directions.

Where am I heading or what it is, is not as important to me as to what qualities or situations arise. I think it was Godard that said that a film must have a first, second and third act but not necessarily in that order. Tick Tack Type must have dramatic builds, releases, peaks, valleys, scenes, acts and resolutions – but it needn’t have clear precise meaning.

Theatre can create a world that defies a tangible lucid reality. If I have create a completely cognitive world then I have missed the ‘other stuff.’ That ‘other stuff’ is when our explanations don’t meet and we see something else. Can I create a convincing universe that exists on its own merit? A world that does not fit our common understanding of reality then perhaps I have created a new world, one in which I have not visited.

I was in New York last week. Saw over 250 actors auditioning for FROGZ, Biglittlethings and ZooZoo – Imago’s signature works of mask theatre. It’s exciting to see young actors who were not yet born when Carol and I first launched FROGZ who will probably be cast in the show – this work is certainly generational.

In 1992, we had decided to not venture further into mask theatre because we had explored it for over 14 years. One day back then, Carol and I walked into our agent’s office in New York and announced we were closing FROGZ, he nonchalantly said to his assistant “Ok Beverly call and cancel those $250,000 of contracts” His gambit worked. We went back to our hotel, thought about it and then called him back and told him not to cancel. I don’t regret that phone call. At the time I wasn’t sure.  I had believed I knew all there was to know about mask theatre but after another 16 years I’m still exploring.

Last week Carol and I met the folks at our new agency Opus 3 Artists. www.opus3artists.com We’re honored to work with this prestigious group and who knows what the future holds.

I am entering my third act with mask theatre. I don’t know where it will lead. I certainly thought Imago’s debut on Broadway in 2000 with FROGZ was the apex of my mask theatre career. Now I’m thinking more is to come.

Biglittlethings opens Dec 11.

www.imagotheatre.com

I designed the set for No Exit which tips with each actors’ step. The inspiration for the set came from Imago’s mentor Jacques Lecoq.

The year is 1977. The place is Portland, Oregon.  I’m in enrolled in The Hayes-Marshall School of Theatre Arts, a year-long course based on the teaching of Lecoq.  We are studying a Lecoq concept called “Balance of the Stage.” The thirteen students in the class stand around the 30’ perimeter of an imaginary plate. The plate floats on an imaginary vat of oil. The instructor asks one of the students to step on the imaginary plate. The student is asked to imagine the plate sinking slowly with his weight. Now at the right moment (Lecoq work always seeks the right moment, not to soon, not too late) another student is coached to step onto the plate 180 degrees across from the first student. The two students move like gunslingers in a western facing one another to balance and imbalance the plate on the vat of oil. The movement is mesmerizing.

In 1997, I transplanted myself from the conventional theatre department at University of Oregon to The Hayes-Marshall School . At U of O, I was trying to be other people on stage - characters in the playwright’s mind. How to be other people? I didn’t even know how to be myself. I am to be Henry IV? Theatre confused me. I was lost. But now here in a Lecoq class – I’m not asked to be anyone but myself.  Just be me standing on a plate on a vat of oil.  I can do this. I can see this. This I could visualize. I understand. Yes! I feel the plate sinking. Yes, I sense the balance tipping and the balance restored.  In Jacques Lecoq’s world, my world changed. And thus, my life in theatre began.

It’s been over 30 years, and Lecoq’s teaching continue to unfold. The journey hasn’t stopped. In 1998, I was fortunate to take Lecoq’s concept and make a physical realization of his concepts of balance when I was designing No Exit.  Mr. Lecoq died in 1999. I wish he could have seen our production of Sartre’s play. I would have been grateful to get his notes on the show (but I would have been very nervous.)

No Exit opens October 16 (Oct 15 is a preview)