By Christian Fernandez
Suitcases piled around a dark room. Silent ship passengers focused on little tasks that
engage their full interest. An occasional song pierces the stillness, but hardly disrupts the delicate environment.
Thus is the structure of the Motley Player’s Devised Show, which had two performances
September 3rd and 4th. Set on a ship in trouble, the show directed audience members to a room where the audience witnessed various connected vignettes starring characters from the five shows of the company’s season: As You Like It, Doctor Faustus, The Winter’s Tale, The Knight of the Burning Pestle, and Pericles. Unlike previous devised shows, the Motley Players structured the vignettes to tell a story, unified by The Winter’s Tale at the beginning and end. Despite only having three weeks to plan, devise, and rehearse, the group put on a seamless performance.
The show centered around the theme of waiting. Consequently, directors Doreen Bechtol
and Molly Seremet instilled a slow pace. Whereas previous devised shows balanced the use of text and movement, the Motley Players relied mostly on movement. Bechtol and Seremet chose to focus on movement to challenge the actors, who are particularly excellent at textual performance but had little previous experience with devising. To accomplish such growth, the directors had the actors reduce each play to three minute compositions, which were then stretched out into an hour and a half show.
“Since we devised our material around the theme of waiting, I found that the process demanded quite a bit of patience from us,” noted Motley Player Katie Little. However, as Bechtol and Seremet intended, the quiet, tedious pace forced the actors to focus more on the essence of the characters divorced from the text. The actors had to discover ways to depict key events and essential characteristics from each play without dialogue. The Motley Players reminded the audience of events in the plays by reducing each play to a single gesture (e.g. rocking a baby for The Winter’s Tale) and displayed characters’ personalities based on how those characters interacted with suitcases meant to symbolize the characters’ memories. Since the Motley Players focus heavily on the five elements (earth, fire, air, water, ether), different suitcases bore each element.
To keep the narrative progressing, while still focusing on the incorporation of the elements, the show utilized nine pieces of music. Little sang a Hungarian folk song about wandering during a vignette from The Winter’s Tale, and a vignette from Doctor Faustus used the song “Fire & Rain.” The actors incorporated the music during vignettes when their characters were in the midst of a task. “What may seem tedious is actually engaging,” says Bechtol, “since portraying feeling is not as engaging as watching someone engaged in something.”
Though tiring and slow, the Motley Players concluded their shows with a success.
Seremet praised the Motley Players as a “treat” to direct. “They are constantly supportive,” she said, “and always start from a place of joy.”
