A Topography of WordBRIDGE

Posted by Krista Knight, Playwright '11

a stately pleasure-dome decree:

I had the most amazing time at WordBRIDGE Playwrights Laboratory these past two weeks. I was led into a theater Xanadu between Baltimore and the river Alph where an extremely talented group of actors, directors, dragmaturgs, resource artists, company members, and student artists helped me create from a place as foreign to me as Mount Abora to Khan. I ventured in holding tight to safe ways of working and wielding a play that resisted my attempts to force it into something other than what it was - something WordBRIDGE fed it to be. I am happy and so grateful.

A Topography of WordBRIDGE

On the first floor you find a theater stage set with round tables and breakfast banquet. The company members toast raison bagels, pour soy milk into fresh coffee, and share war stories. Down the hall the script office buzzes with research requests and hot copies of new pages for rehearsal. Another turn of the rectangular hallway brings you to the rehearsals rooms—wide and bright and open, with two story windows overlooking the green trees of Towson’s campus. Around the tables, the playwright, director, dramaturg, stage manager, and actors insert the fresh pages into their scripts. As the actors highlight their new lines with one of the stage manager’s coterie of yellow, green, and pink highlighters, the dir/dram/pw triumvirate create a game-plan to investigate the new material. The resource artists orbit the circle with their own stations of investigation particular to their discipline. The computer visualization programmer with his laptop, the book artist with her sketch pad and charcoals, the psychologist with his proverbial pencil and pad. The drummer somewhere in between poised to improvise the drumming sequences with the actor whose monologues they underscore. Another pivot down the rectangular hall leads to a studio theater where Guest Artist Hours are populated by resource and visiting artists and the members of the company and outside community hungry for their expertise. The Green Room rounds out this first floor with couches, baskets of apples, T-Shirts of WordBRIDGEs past and fresh coffee, fresh coffee, fresh coffee.

One floor below is nestled the Playwrights Lounge—part work space, part rec/dressing room, den, snack repository, discotheque. Strategically placed speakers, mood lighting, and lava lamps catalyze not infrequent playwright dance parties that lift our spirits and our skirts on break from the catacombs of our scripts. Around the bend the Resource Artist Room aptly inhabits a converted chemistry laboratory, where mathematical, visual, musical, and tactile experiments build the sensory worlds of the four plays.

On each floor, at every bend, in every room—the future of American Theater is being ecstatically, elastically, actively made.




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Krista Knight's plays have been produced by The Ontological Hysteric Theater, The Ashland New Plays Festival, The Hangar Theatre, Brown University, LiveGirls!, Harvest Theatre, Goshen College, The Attic Theatre, The New Perspective Festival, The Pan Theatre, and The Bus Barn Stage Company among others. Commissions include The Assembly, LiveGirls!, and Class Act. Krista has been in Residence at New York Mills, the Atlantic Center for the Arts, Interplay in Australia, UCROSS, the Santa Fe Art Institude, Yaddo, and MacDowell. Winner of th 2011 KCACTF Musical Theatre Award from the Kennedy Center. 2007 Page 73 Playwriting Fellow. After WordBRIDGE, Krista will go to Berkeley Rep to write two plays for young adults and then will begin the year-long Shank Playwriting Fellowship at the Vineyard Theatre in New York. BA: Brown University. MA: Performance Studies from NYU. MFA: Playwriting at UC San Diego. www.KristaKnight.com

WB First: The Actor's Perspective

Posted by Darlene McCullough, WordBRIDGE 2011 Actor

"Do not try to write a story while you're still in it," Bill Harley cautioned at his performance to benefit WordBRIDGE this past Saturday night. Sage advice; given from a gracious and powerful storyteller. Advice that I'm choosing to ignore as I shore up to my keyboard to type these paragraphs. I'm in the middle of my first WordBRIDGE Playwrights' Lab – a process I can claim to grasp but generally wonder if I can really understand until the closing readings when I am freed from the awe-inspiring responsibility of being an actor in a 'baby play'.

That's the metaphor that we've been passing around: that these four playwrights have entrusted us as a company with the care and growth of their children. Their fresh-born baby ideas that we, as a company of actors, dramaturgs, directors, designers, resource artists, drummers, and clowns (yes, we have a clown on staff these 2 weeks!), have been asked to nurture and give ourselves over to. (One writer referred to her play as a 'preemie' the first day since her first draft was finished 15 days before the lab.) And with great power comes great responsibility. Much of our process is protected from the 'outside world' to shield our writers so they may take big, bold risks.

As an actor, I find this simultaneously harrowing and terrifying. We take on the unknown; not only with respect to the new challenges we face as actors (as I am), but also the unknown in the sense that these plays are unfinished. Much of what I've worked on in the past 10 days have been questions about these plays that cannot be answered in text – because the text doesn't yet exist. Joining me on this journey have been not only a great company of actors, but a generous director (I've been blessed (cursed?) to have the same director and a few common actors in both pieces I'm working on here).

So we risk. But what does that mean to someone who's never been to WordBRIDGE and seen what we do? Well. It means exploring dark corners of possibility within the world of the play as the playwright tries to learn what her own play is really about. Sure, these explorations are structured through improv and exercises, but I've never improv'ed quite like this before. It means being ready to come in one day and be working on a draft that isn't just changed; it could be completely different. It means checking your ego and your agenda at the door and believing, as much as you can, that anything that happens has no reflections on you and yours. It's about the play. And, as an actor living 99% if the year in the New York market (where it so often seems every actor is hyper-focused on themselves) it's nice. And it's scary. And it's exhilarating.


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Darlene recently made her Off-off debut at the Notes From the Underground Festival premiering the role of Leslie in 'Carbon Based Life Form Seeks Similar', as well as wrapped production as the goddess-turned-super-villain Galatea in the upcoming web series 'Team Allies'. Regional credits include 'REVELATION' at Baltimore Theatre Project with Generous Company (Rebecca), 'Funy As Hell' at Yale Cabaret (Three), and 'Magnificent Yankee' at Monomoy Theatre (Mary). For more information on Darlene's other projects visit DarleneMcCullough.com. Darlene holds a Bachelor of Arts, Acting Concentration from the University at Albany.