Tuesday, December 21
Here’s a dialogue between Bronwen Prosser And Kathryn Walsh as they work through the play, The Make-Out Queen. Some ramblings…
Bronwen:
Writing it: what is it? Katy wants to know why i say the first line of my play. I DON’T KNOW. damn. I already WROTE it- now I have to tell the director why I’m saying it out loud? I mean really Katy?
Katy knows where the play is from. She has seen my home town. She has kissed there too and seen glowing water, she knows some elements of the piece and this comforts me.
It’s a golden fleece identity quest story, and watch out! I meet myself. SO I wrote a story about why kissing is important and how we all need to do more of it and how kissing has shaped my identity and then I get into a rehearsal space with Katy and she kindly asks me to please help her make it a really clear story for everyone to come alone. After all it is direct address. We’re all here in the room, or the theatre, I’m looking at all of you and how my story is told is, in some aspects, dependent on how how the audience decides to be involved. Katy and I have work shopped this piece twice before…once in my very own hometown. She’ll talk a little about that: Katy? In this piece it is important to me to have a female director. This really is a girl’s story. As in it is totally universal and guys relate to it all the time which is just to prove even further that a TRUE girl’s story does not leave out half it’s viewers. I play guys after all. And i think the smartest shit that’s said comes from my male character of the fisherman. But I wrote it. All of it. We need to incorporate our genders more. embrace all aspects of ourselves that simultaneously want to throw beer bottles and smash them, and also want to be caressed and held and kissed just like a real princess. These are not warring internal elements. Humans are so diverse! Love, and the quest for it, is an area where many of us can unite. Many of us can also unite around kissing. UNITED KISSERS FOREVER! It’s a simple physical act repeated many times throughout our lives. Something we do with varying meaning and passion. Katy? Am I rambling?
Kathryn:
Rambling? You? Never. Okay, so I guess you want me to talk about doing the play in your hometown, well, that’s not a huge task or anything. Alright, alright, I know why you don’t want to have to talk about that — I saw firsthand how crazy a ride you were on that night, and I know very well you don’t have any distance from it to try to talk about it. But that’s what’s so fun, I think, about reading your “rambling” on The Make-Out Queen AND that’s what’s so fun about the show itself — we get your inside perspective. You take us not just along with you on the story, but inside with you. We get to participate. After all, we are the ones who help you to that place where you meet yourself. For whoever is reading this blog, you will get that when you come to see it.
Watching Bronny do her play in her hometown — a play about making out with all sorts of people, a play that is a quest for magic through romance and sexuality(!) in front of her oldest friends, her family, a whole town-full of people who watched her grow up (including salty old fishermen-types, and more than a few grandparent-types) — how to explain? Well, you won’t get to see that, exactly, at Ars Nova. First of all, there won’t be 175 people who all know each other stuffed into a Community Hall in the middle of hot summer night with the ocean a stone’s throw away. It was a magical experience, and it vibrated with all the energy of those people’s shared history with Bronwen. Plus pretty much everyone in that room knew what it is like to make out in the bioluminescent water. Maybe that will be true in New York as well? Who knows. But I do know that what you will see is completely informed by that experience — both for her and for me. As we come back into the rehearsal room, I know exactly where the few remaining fault lines are, the only places we aren’t grabbing you by the hand (or the throat, or the… you know) and taking you with us. And one of those places is the first moment of the show, which is why I’m sticking to my director guns, why I end up barking at her, “You’re being totally unclear!” because she’s all “I wrote it, I just say it.” Until we work a little more and realize we really already know why it is the first line of the play — we just need to make sure we capitalize on that when we do it.
Bron? You got more to say? Want to talk at all about the fun reactions that you got back home? Or about what a pain in the ass I am in the rehearsal room?