Gorilla Theater

A Practical Guide to Performing the New Outdoor Theater Anytime, Anywhere

Christopher Carter Sanderson

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781135870737
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Acting & Auditioning

On a warm evening a man is crying Howl, howl, howl as he carries in his arms the body of a young woman. This isn't urban violence, it's Gorilla Rep's production of King Lear. There are no sets. The action uses available space: a parking lot, a pedestrian mall, a field. The audience - students, theater lovers, passersby, homeless people - move along with actors, from a tree to a fountain to a bench, and the audience may follow a portion of the performance or all of it. This is one of the most radical, and yet most easily available, concepts in theater: make the world the theater, make the world the audience. Christopher Carter Sanderson is the creator of an alternative theatrical concept: live free performance in public spaces. Featured in the New York Times, the Gorilla Rep productions are praised both for their acting and for the startling ingenuity of the concept. In this new book, Sanderson explains how theater can be made to work in any free space. He provides specific and practical advice for any performer or director, and relates stories from his own Gorilla Rep experience that show what the most unorthodox of theatrical techniques can achieve - without a theater, without a stage, and without a ticket to be sold.

chapter one

Concept and Location

Inspiration

I have often said that the beginning of the process for me comes with the simultaneous realization of the play and location. The often-related story of the “Eureka Phenomenon” is one that plays well in the papers. However, on sober reflection, it is clear that an ambient, multilevel creative process is also at work. There is a lot of vocal warm-up that can be done, so to speak, before one shouts “Eureka!” from the rooftops.

Have ideas for multiple shows and sites milling around in your mind if possible. As you read plays and tour potential environments, partly formed notions should crop up in your imagination. Even one scene that erupts perfectly formed in your mind's eye as you walk around a park or other public place is a breakthrough. You are thinking gorilla style! Once a string of such scenes becomes clear, you probably have a full-fledged concept ready to talk about with your friends and collaborators.

Many creative notions start with one interesting bit. Andre Mistier's funky, enigmatic songs start with a lyric, even a phrase, or a few bars of succinct melody. Chris Barron's fantastic funk often starts with a memory or a person in mind, or a situation. Rob Hightower's brilliant, modern sculptures and evocative, spare paintings start with the most basic fascination with a technique or even a color. Each of these men, like a modern Mozart, Lord Byron, or Rodin, builds works of art that immediately take up residence in one's soul. This is my goal for gorilla theatre: a lease on the soul of this troubled culture. True, some concepts for gorilla theatre may leap from your brain fully formed like Athena from the brow of Zeus. Not every one will, though, and the clear, interesting idea should be seen as the tip of a mountain whose slopes lie under the sea, waiting to be discovered.

Also, it is worth noting down your play titles and sites as you go along. With each pair that has even a little “ah-ha” to it, something may develop later. They say that fortune favors the brave. I can say that fortune has favored this particular loudmouth by dropping the building blocks for some wonderful work right into my lap. But, each time, I had a play in mind and a site just perfect for it, so I could lay claim to what-ever resource happened to present itself.

Macbeth at Fort Tryon Park is a fine example. I had been journeying up to the Cloisters in New York City's Fort Tryon Park for years. It is up north on 190th Street and has a wonderful view of the river. It was a place where I could go for just the price of a subway token and still feel like I had been out of the city for an afternoon. One day, thinking and walking around the park, I happened to wander up to the side of the battle monument, and the witches leapt into my mind, speaking down from the battlements over the archway. I walked through the arch to hear Duncan and his warlords discussing the battle, and then the witches led me down the hill to a tree, and the rest of the play flowed right along to the final claustrophobic constraint of Macbeth and the titanic battle on the nearby hill. When staged, the battle became truly titanic, as the 1K floodlights cast the shadows of the combatants onto the underside of the towering oak foliage canopy. It was like watching giants battle against the trees and evoked the impact of these moments on the history that would follow. It was three years before I could convince the Gorilla Rep board to set to work on this show, now one of our best known. The resource that dropped into my hands was in the form of a donor who, on hearing the idea, liked it enough to donate the funds we needed to get the job done.

Similarly, Richard III by the lake in Central Park had been knocking around in my mind for some time when the resources and personnel made themselves available. It was an easy call to make, as everything appeared to be present to make a gorilla-theatre show. The show spawned a whole new company to make gorilla-style theatre, which they did from time to time for a few years after that.

Talking about concepts is a way to make them take shape and grow, both in your mind and in reality. I have often launched a production with full force on the strength of one brilliant actor who is perfect for a role agree that it would be an exciting project to work on. So, talking to actors is important. Also, not every question about a show is a threat—thinking up the answers will help to flesh out the concept. The essential truth about directing is that selection is as creative a process as generation; you must select the ideas that enhance your concept with truly focused artistic concern. Think of what is best for the show from the perspective of the audience.

Of course, once you've fallen in love with the concept for a production at a specific site, you should nurture this feeling. Talk about it, especially at parties, although I recommend that you keep it to a three-sentence summary at first. Those who want to know more will ask, and this will sharpen your ability to communicate clearly and in a moving way just what is so exciting about your concept. This, incidentally, prepares you for offering short, punchy answers to the media when you're interviewed. People who love theatre in any way who are together for drinks, dinner, or whatever reason are an ideal group on whom to try out a concept, in measured doses. After all, if the idea isn't provoking anyone's imagination but yours, even you might wake up one day and realize that it was a bit limited or overly facile. It's all right to fall out of love with a concept; it happens. You never know—elements of that concept might help to flesh out a future plan.

Read Plays, Shakespeare First

Shakespeare's plays don't need further recommendation from me. They are beyond praise. They tell their stories strongly, clearly, and with wonderful layers of meaning and nuance—especially the ones done most often. What I do want to say is that Shakespeare, almost without exception, is the playwright whose work commends itself the most to outdoor, environmental, gorilla-style production. Although new plays are important to the form, I suggest that you perform a Shakespearean production first if you are pursuing this aesthetic.

Here are a few practical reasons for working with Shakespeare first. These reasons will give you a good framework for making decisions about directing new plays later. Shakespeare wrote plays for an unamplified environment. The texts, therefore, are seeded with devices specifically designed to be taken advantage of by an unamplified production. There is often restatement of key plot elements, often immediately following each other in the text. If you have an audience of more than a hundred people, you will quickly find that an actor can face a different direction for each of these expositions and get everyone well along in the story. Of course, the next layer of complexity is to weave and circle the actor back and forth between these areas so that every audience member gets every point clearly, but in a different order. This goes for scenes and their staging as well.

The often-cited fact that Shakespeare writes the scenery into his plays helps out too. Although this device has been used to advantage by minimalist scenic designers on empty modern sets, for your gorilla production these words can suggest far more to an audience. They can reveal that the skyscraper an audience is directed to look at is a castle, that the few sparse trees of your urban park are a magnificent forest, and so on. In short, Shakespeare's words can act as your scenic paintbrush to transform an entire environment many times during the play. Reread the prologue of Henry V, if you have not been lucky enough to see Jeffrey Kitrosser's effervescent performance of it, and think about a park. This should evoke the aesthetic very clearly, and in Shakespeare's words. The dedicated storytelling of a well-rehearsed gorilla-style actor will do more for your scenery than a fleet of bulldozers and landscape architects could.

Iambic pentameter supports acting; it gives an underlying pace not only to the flow of the story but to the very breath of the actors. You can put in breath marks the same way you would with a piece of choral music. That the characters think as they speak their lines and not during pauses allows the actor to look right into an audience's eyes and involve them in the story. The plays lend themselves to multiple casting of roles, and this, well done in the park, can be breathtaking. I am reminded again of the Gorilla Rep's Henry V in Northampton, Massachusetts. The audience members couldn't believe that we had only six members in the cast—they thought there were at least eighteen!

Other authors have proven durable and useful in gorilla-theatre shows. My personal bias against the ancient Greeks may be supported by noting that they are very short on action. You may be able to commission an adaptation of an ancient Greek tragedy or comedy, but I have yet to see one that really works. Beau Willimon's dramatic adaptation of Beowulf seems ideal for gorilla-theatre production. Perhaps, along these lines, you could create an adaptation of the Iliad or the Odyssey, Leah Ryan's adaptation of The Cherry Orchard for Gorilla Rep was a brilliant success, and I believe that other Chekhov plays, especially those in which the outdoors is an important part of the action, like Ivanov, could be well adapted for gorilla theatre.

Bottom (Bill Migliore), right, makes a friend. Photo by Lynda Kennedy.

In my experience, a playwright who hasn't seen a gorilla-theatre production is less likely to understand the needs of one than a playwright who has often been in the gorilla-theatre audience. Much like the gorilla actors, playwrights well suited to the work will usually enjoy a gorilla performance, and will later think, completely benignly, that what they saw was fun but that they could do it better. Still, I've been hotly approached by playwrights who have insisted that their work was perfect for the gorilla-theatre style who have then shown me plays that baffled me completely. The art of choosing a play for gorilla theatre is just that: an art.

Since premiering Talia Field's The Celibate, I have not directed a non-linear or “language” play. I directed The Celibate as an interior, environmental, or “action theatre” work, using many elements that would later become hallmarks of gorilla theatre. Chapter 12 contains a fuller description of this staging. My point is that I believe that gorilla theatre is not exclusively for producing “classic” dramatic material. I know otherwise, in fact. Perhaps classic material has been an easy choice, or a very practical one made to introduce gorilla theatre to the world. The future of the form may determine that it premiered classic work: contemporary work that became classic due to its widespread enjoyment and acceptance of gorilla-theatre audiences.

At first, a new play will need to be evaluated for relevance. Why would this play be better staged outdoors? Do the transitions between scenes—and hence from location to location—make sense? Why are they occurring? Shakespeare couldn't move his wooden “O” from place to place, and if we are going to move our audience around a park or through a city neighborhod all evening we should have good reasons for doing so. The audience must believe that the scene-location changes are logical textually. The Zoo Story, for example, is a play that has often been suggested as a Gorilla Rep production. But is it possible, really? I think to be truly gorilla, it would have to move from park bench to park bench, and I am not sure the playwright's text would support or be supported by this notion. One of the most amusing uses of the form to date has been “returning” to a location in the story that is being represented by an entirely different real site in the staging. Simple, but fun, as it can be used to underline the way that we look at the “place” that is represented in the story. What is the function of “place” in a language play? How does it fit the mise-en-scène, and what makes it work with dynamic moves from place to place? I believe that the future of gorilla theatre includes new plays, but not just any new play.

That's why it's essential that we work with playwrights right from the beginning of a project. “Support playwrights, not plays,” as Ellen Stewart, founder of New York's La Mama, once said to me. When you find out that a playwright whose work you enjoy is interested in this form, it's time to think about commissioning a play.

List Plays

Keep a list of plays you have seen that have provoked you. Where, why, and how would you do them outdoors?

Your goal in gorilla theatre is the same as in any theatre in that you want to transport the audience into the world of the show. You want it to live around them, and for them to live in it. That's not to say that gorilla theatre is analagous to a scripted improvisation at a Renaissance Fair; in gorilla theatre the literary aspect of the text is key. The words are really important, and I don't want to lose sight of that, to use a Bottom-like malapropism. You use a behavioral metaphor to help carry the hearts and minds of your audience along the language that the playwright has provided, building durable characterizations and pointing up the dramatic action as you go.

The term site-specific is on e that is often confused with gorilla theatre. Anne Hamberger and her famous, now defunct En Garde Arts organization in New York City brought the process of “site-specific theatre” to prominent and successful use. It was very specifically defined. It would begin with finding an exciting nontheatrical space such as an old hospital, or the Federal Building on Wall Street. Then a playwright would be commissioned to write a new play specifically for performance in that space. The history and character of these contemporary sites informed the plays, even when they were not exactly linear stories. With few exceptions, En Garde would build theatre-style seats into their sites, making possible the standard theatrical practice of charging for tickets before the performance, which of course is not the way gorilla theatre is done. So, when we talk about commissioning plays for gorilla theatre, we're not necessarily talking about “site-specific” work. If it moves from place to place as it goes from scene to scene, and if it has a particular depth of direction and facility of performance without pause or condescension, it may well be gorilla-theatre-style directing.

The “site-specific” aesthetic's goal, and it is a laudable one, is to point up the nature of the actual place that has been chosen for the play. An old hospital or a prerenovation theatre, the Bow Bridge in Central Park or wherever, the play pointed at the place. With gorilla theatre, the effect of pointing up the beauty of the location occurs, but we are interested in transporting the imagination by transforming the location into someplace fantastic and other than what it is. Fort Tryon Park starring in the role of Illyria, or New York City featured in the role of ancient Athens, Scotland, or the Russian countryside, is one way of thinking of the role of the place in gorilla theatre. Camp Shohola's soccer field becomes both the city-state of Athens and the haunted grove nearby as easily and magically as the armory in Scranton does. It is a valuable way of thinking when you are conceiving a gorilla-theatre production, because it will help you place your show with care and with a fully articulated vision. It is also a notion that has, happily, occurred to professional critics writing about Gorilla Rep.

With this idea in mind, you can be the first to look at a particular public space in a new way: the way your gorilla show will guide many people to see it. The sign of a good, clear vision is the feeling, fully sup-ported, that you have been to the show and enjoyed it, after paying close attention to the performance. This feeling should be evident weeks or months before the show opens. As I have noted, the essential technique is to project your mind through time to the performance and look around with as much clarity as you can conjure until you have a clear idea of what you are building, no matter how unlikely it may seem to the world at large. It will be interesting and novel when it finally happens, no matter the intervening exigencies of day-to-day life.

All of the true principles of real, living theatre are alive and well in the scene-sites of a gorilla theatre layout. In the production of Cymbeline that I directed in Riverside Park, for instance, natural slopes provided great and varied sight lines. These sloped areas had natural frames of foliage in different formations that could be pointed up for the action. Even the cave area was a little more sharply raked, as Brian O'Sullivan will confirm if asked. It was also well carpeted with thicker hillocks of grass that, as Brian had the audience writhing in laughter, helped to cushion their manic gyrations. If his characterization could have been any more fun, I'm sure I don't know how, and this funny, funny character bounding around in the remote cave was accentuated by the higher hill. The slope helped speed Jo Benincasa's exit after brandishing the sword he had just taken from Tom Staggs's Cloten, and there was darkened foliage right there to muffle the screams of the comic death “offstage.” And there was much ruffling of that foliage in death throes’, to add to the hilarity. The rocks were a literal aid, but I believe it was the steep rake that really brought a masterful stroke to the isolation of the place in the story.

What fantastical environment do...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• Foreword
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction: About Gorilla Repertory Theatre Company, Inc.
• 1. Concept and Location
• 2. Scouting
• 3. Establishing Corporate Culture
• 4. Casting
• 5. Rehearsal Techniques
• 6. The Paratheatric Rehearsal Technique
• 7. On-Site Directing and Operational Practices
• 8. Organizational Approaches
• 9. Documentation Practices
• 10. Design Issues and Aesthetic Practice
• 11. Indoor Environmental or Action Theatre
• 12. Moving a Show
• 13. Notes and Observations
• 14. Spirituality
• Bibliography
• Index