From the Director 

Every director relies on actors. From the first moment of the first rehearsal through the last beat of the play on the night it closes, a director banks her understanding of a play, and all the hope and intention that led to the decision to direct it, within those who will bring life to the book. The rehearsal process becomes important business, where memorization of lines and the determination of action, though critically important, become secondary to the work of mining the text and learning together  “how a play means”. The willingness to dive into the core of the play, combined with the daring to create real beings out of the clues and ideas the words provide is the grit of playmaking. And the depth and resilience of the contract created between a cast and a director determines to a large extent how much meaning they can derive for their production.

In this Primary English Class, our every rehearsal presented us with opportunities to accept or reject our contract. Because the “stuff” of this extraordinary play is, by almost any standard, complex in its thought and demanding in its articulation, the students in this production could not have known from the start everything about what being in this play would ask of them. Out of fairness and respect, the audition process incorporated shades of the kinds of language dilemmas the actors would face, and revealed the styles and forms of comedy that would be explored, learned, and eventually delivered, but really, this little play possesses stealth challenges that revealed themselves only after it was too late to turn back! The actors knew it would be challenging to perform in seven languages, but the presumption of performing gradually shifted to include a realistic and appropriate respect for committing to memory a language one does not speak. And memorizing dialogue that was triggered and cued by lines in a still different language made the prospect of ever really performing the play without script in hand a potential crisis.

Seasoned actors know that their craft ultimately has something to do with saying “yes” to a whole array of challenges. Yes to physically demanding work, yes to outrageous changes in their everyday appearance, yes to potentially difficult emotional exploration and vulnerability. By trade, actors take risks.  This production, a piece that would daunt most adults, presented these young actors with a chance to handle a master work of the contemporary American stage and put their mark on it. To do this well, however, required them to say yes every day to a set of challenges that could well have stopped us in our tracks.

When Debbie Wastba wonders aloud whether or not old Mrs. Pong is “cut out for a stiff class like ours”, she may well be asking the playwright’s question. Who is, after all, cut out for the kind of learning the students in the Primary English class are in for? And what kinds of actors are cut out for the kind of play Horovitz has written?

What’s true on the stage is also true for the process. It isn’t impossible for non-native speakers to learn a new language, but it can be difficult and painful. There is always more at stake than proper pronunciation and excellent grammar. Language holds meaning in the head as well as the heart, and the gaining of a new tongue suggests a potential loss of the familiar, of the comforts of being known and understood beyond words. This play, and the process of creating this production, began by robbing students of much of their prior experience. Without the facility a common language provides, the students in this production were placed squarely in their characters’ shoes. Not impossible, but difficult.

Ultimately, if our production is successful, it will expose some nagging little nugget about our own assumptions and beliefs about “others”. Who they are, what they want, why they are here—whomever they are. There’s something else, though. It provides an open window into the classroom that matters most—the one students create when they arrive every day bringing with them their questions and the reliability of the actor’s word: “yes”. 

TGS