I've been very lucky part of this
Rolling World Premiere from the National
New Play Network first premiered at the
Olney Theatre Center outside of
Washington DC and then it went to Mixed
Blood Theatre in Minneapolis. And now
here it's at the Dallas Theater Center
and I've been been able to be a part of
at least part of the rehearsal process
reach of the production so that's been incredible.
You know one of the benefits of the
Rolling World Premiere is that you get
to continually refine and revise the play.
It's sort of like an ongoing
laboratory in the best possible way.
There's all the pressures of opening.
There's all the pressures of wanting to
put the best possible play up, but it
takes away the idea of, I have to get this right.
I have to create a definitive production,
which I've never really believed in anyway.
I believe a definitive production is the
production that's right for this
community and this moment in time.
So what
happens when you take a play into a
community into a theater that's
different is the responses change.
It's one of the great treats for a
playwright because they get to sort of
actor proof, audience proof, community
proof, their play if they want to.
We've had writers who totally change the
end of the play.
We've had writers who cut a character.
The program began as a way of being able
to share the work our member theaters were doing
in their own communities with the country at large.
We were finding that many of our theaters had great writers
in their own home towns that they've
been working with. And world premieres
were happening but then not a second or
third production, so we wanted to be able
to both share the work of the writers we
were all in love with and to be able to
share the plays that were being produced
by member theaters with larger
communities across the country.
When Andrew first came to Dallas that very first time when I met
him and I just read his play, he walked
into the theater space, and I said, this
space, this is the perfect space for your
play and I still believe that that's true.
Colossal is at the center of the type of
work that we do here at Dallas Theater Center.
It's a new play, we do a lot of new work
It speaks to immediate
contemporary themes that are relevant in
our community today. It does so in a
boldly theatrical language with
aggressive physical sequences and loud
music and theatrical surprises.
The very first thing that I love about
the play, the second that I read it, is
the size and scope of its ambition.
So for instance the piece demands a
complete original modern dance at
half-time, so that means you gotta go out and
find a modern dance choreographer.
In our case that's Josh Peugh, an outstanding
modern dance choreographer who doesn't
choreograph musicals or plays, he works
exclusively in dance.
Josh Peugh: And then the leading off the balance...shifting that weight.
yeah don't let it, don't let it come up
too high.
Make sure your head keeps showing acceleration. Yeah, that's better. Yup.
The cast for Colossal is very diverse.
We have real football players.
We have professional dancers and we have
actors and they all participate in the
middle section of the play which is a
sort of concert dance performance.
[mumbling music]
When I'm working, when I'm choreographing, I'm always looking for
things to be authentic and to be
truthful and so taking from the dancers,
from the actors, from the football players,
choices that are instinctual and
building that direction instead of
trying to make them fit into what my
idea of what it should look like is
He builds a movement vocabulary very
organically based on what he sees his
dancers doing. The vocabulary for this
particular piece because it greets
modern dance into a play that's a kind
of about a person who is a football player
but who is also a modern dancer.
Ok let me know who else is down there.
Lots of people don't know exactly what a
stage manager is, some kind of puppet
master of the whole show. I make the
technical things happen, I tell other
people to push a button which is how the
lights and the sound cue happens.
I'm in charge of all the communication from
pre-rehearsal period to the end of the show
making sure everyone's on the same page
and communicating clearly and openly.
I contacted the stage manager from the
Olney Theatre Center which was the first place
this premiere this season and kind of
asked just a few initial questions about
her experience on the show; If there was
anything she thought maybe I needed to know.
Can we just look at that that....
Joel, can we just do your exit a couple
lines back?
I would say that we have made some
definite changes from the script that
was used in the last two places. Mainly
around the fact that we have a
quadriplegic actor instead of a
paraplegic actor playing the role of
Mike, so we've changed some things in the
script and some movements in the show
to kind of better reflect the needs of
our specific actor playing Mike. That's
been one of the unique challenges of
this show.
Zack: Of course I have direct parallels
between what happens in this story and
what happened to me.
Of course. He suffers a spinal cord injury.
I had a spinal cord injury in my neck
in his neck, same thing.
Father: You're almost there Mike, you're almost there.
You're doing great just a few more inches.
[Young Mike grunts]
Mike: Jesus, stop!
Father: Ok I got you.
I'm preparing for this like any actor really
prepares for role you, have experiences
from your own life that you can relate
directly you have things that you have
to make up and imagine through because
that's what this creative processes is.
It's just great to be doing the work.
Actor: It's okay, it won't hurt you.
It has been, quite an interesting journey with all of the
testosterone that is in the room all of
the time. The testosterone is large and
in charge, and I have to somehow manage
the testosterone and the boys and keep
them as calm as I can.
There are some hotheads at times and
some wrestling around and a kind of
pushing each other. I often have to step
in and calm things down.
It's always interesting figuring out how
to be their boss, gain their respect, and
still be their friend and a person they can
talk to you.
I have never been around so
much testosterone and so much alpha male
aggression and attitude in my entire
life. I'm a theater geek. This is really
intense for me.
[singing]
This cast we also have legitimate NFL prospects that have that
expertise in the room every day to say
we want to make sure these drills are right.
We want to make sure these moments
where the play is asking to be very
literal and how it represents football.
That we do that not only correctly, but
it because we have these bodies in the room.
we can embody the ferocity of football,
the grandeur of football, the size of it.
In a way what Andrew's done is taken that
reality and made it very hyper theatrical.
When you see a real football
player out there and you're seeing
an actor who has no choice but to be in
a chair and you see those amazing
dancers that we've had in a few of the casts,
it starts to break the line between what
is acting or what is theater and what's
really happening in these people's lives.
[chanting]
Football is a different form of theater.
You come to an arena to
watch a game you don't know what the
outcome is going to be. They're primed to
be actors because they have been
performing in that theater.
Marcus is the lover of Young Mike.
He's also a team captain on the football team
that Mike is on and he's struggling with
his identity as a homosexual man while
being in a very masculine driven
testosterone ridden world, like the football world.
One more set.
It's very very true about the way that
men dialogue with each other, especially
in emotional ways.
We're not taught to
outwardly emote. We're not taught that it's
okay to do that.
One of the themes in the play touches
on homosexuality. It's a big theme in the
show and it's important that this is
being talked about that it runs through
this place especially in a play that is
so male driven, testosterone aggression driven.
Young Mike: That we say exactly what we told them. That we're captains of his team and that
captains can't get caught in a strip club.
Marcus: And no one's gonna notice that we're sharing a room?
Young Mike: That's what teammates do.
This is a conversation about homosexuality, about how free we can be
to express that within ourselves in our society.
It's a conversation that's
happening nationally. One of my favorite
lines in the show, and it's not mine, is
that "these things are changin but
changin ain't changed."
The play sets up for us a really deep and profound question
about, do we choose to live in a past
that can no longer exist?
Or do we choose to look honestly at what has been
and choose how to move forward into an unknown?
Young Mike: I can't. I can't feel my fucking legs.
Marcus: It's alright it's ok.
Young Mike: I can't move my fucking legs.
There are a lot of coming-of-age kind of themes becoming a
man what it means to stand up to your father.
I think that in any young man's
relationship, there's always a
bit of a struggle of trying to, um, I don't know,
break out of your, your father's
idea of who you should be and become yourself.
My father wanted me to play football.
He wanted me to go to University to play football, but
I didn't want to. I wanted to do me in theater.
So I had to follow my dream and
me and my parents didn't talk for a long
time about it.
My goals, my aspirations, other things
it was kind of that elephant in the room
And just recently, they've accepted the
fact that I made a wise choice and that
I'm happy and that I'm doing what I love
to do, and when I saw that in the script,
I wanted to be a part of that story.
What you get with this Rolling World Premiere
is it's not only that you get a chance to sort
of figure out oh I got it I got that
scene wrong now I'm gonna try to get it
right in this production, which has
happened certainly as well. But also you
get a sense of what is the elasticity of the play.
How much can it be flexible to suit the
specific needs of the room and that's
really exciting because that's just a
core belief of mine as a theater artist
that it shouldn't just be the same
production that's planted into a
different city because that doesn't
engage with the liveness of the form.
You know every play was new at some point
and every play is new for any audience
that sees it for the first time. But what
happens with new work and the work that
we're supporting is that playwrights are
responding to the issues of our times
even if it's not a dramatic play or a
play about a specific issue.
They're being able to respond to what's
happening in their lives now.
I once famously said in a meeting, "Oh we don't
have to worry about how much money we
raise for this program we'll never get
three artistic directors to agree to anything."
And now here we are.
It's changed how we do theater, how we
share theater, how plays move across
this country and more more around the world.
[End Credits]