Geva Theatre Center

The Company We Keep

Geva’s production of Company, directed by Mark Cuddy, is about to head into the theatre for technical rehearsals, and since I’m not on the creative team for the production, I’ve only heard snippets of music from the rehearsal room. But what I’ve heard has me incredibly intrigued! As I look forward to seeing the production onstage, I’m also thinking back to the history of this piece, and its relevance today.

Stephen Sondheim wrote the music and lyrics for Company, collaborating with George Furth who wrote the book, and it first appeared on Broadway in 1970. It was one of the first “concept musicals” in American musical theatre, a collage of scenes and songs organized around exploring an idea – in this case, marriage and commitment. The legendary director Harold Prince directed that first production, and together, the three men agreed on what Sondheim called a “secret metaphor” for the production.

The show compared the 1970 definition of marriage with the island of Manhattan, which Sondheim called “the handiest local for the inhumanity of contemporary living and the difficulties in making relationships.” Scenic designer Boris Aronson’s set (which won a Tony Award in 1971) conveyed the attitude of Manhattanites – emotionally detached, efficient, and gleaming. Throughout the performance, slides were projected onto the set, highlighting the emotions in the scenes or suggesting specific locations. With over 600 different images projected onto the set, most audience members were probably unaware of the nuanced changes throughout the play. However, moments like the one below, in a nightclub, surely made an impression.

Critics immediately picked up on the “secret” metaphor that Sondheim referred to, the comparison of marriage to the island of Manhattan. One critic expanded on the notion: “Company makes Manhattan a metaphor for marriage. Manhattan is an island of anguish and delight; so is marriage. Manhattan is an incessant roar of competitive egos; marriage is a subdued echo of the same. Manhattan is a meeting of strangers; marriage is a mating of strangers. Manhattan is a war of nerves; marriage is a ferocious pillow-fight battle of the sexes. The links do not stop there. The tempo of Manhattan is a kind of running fever; modern marriage runs a fever and the partners are always taking its temperature. It simply is not the placid old heaven-ordained, till-death-do-us-part, for-better-or-for-worse institution it used to be.”

Company‘s opening song was written AFTER Sondheim saw Aronson’s design for the set, rather than the song inspiring the design, as future productions would work. This first set allowed the married couples to each have their own spaces up above Bobby, and to comment on his contemplation of marriage, all the while remaining oblivious to each other.

There have been numerous revivals, including a 1995 revival at the Roundabout Theatre and another the next year in London at the Donmar Warehouse, which was notable for its casting of Adrian Lester, the first black actor cast as Bobby in a major production of the show.

The most recent Broadway revival, however, was in 2006, directed and choreographed by John Doyle. Doyle’s approach to Company was similar to his 2005 approach to another Sondheim musical, Sweeney Todd, the Demon Barber of Fleet Street. In both productions, Doyle employed the actors themselves as the orchestra – the actors sing and play instruments throughout the performance, which gives them all a kind of voyeur status. The set for the 2006 revival, designed by David Gallo, is almost the exact opposite of the 1970 debut – it feels intimate and loft-like. We feel like we are inside an apartment, and maybe even Bobby’s thoughts, rather than outside. (Should you be interested in more about this, the production was filmed for PBS and is available for instant streaming on Netflix.)

So…what will Geva’s production look like? Our set, designed by G.W. Mercier, also takes inspiration from Manhattan, but not in such a direct way. It also builds on the notion of compartmentalization and isolation – if only we can keep different parts of our lives boxed up, we can keep ourselves separate from others and attempt to disprove the notion that we need people to share in our lives. In this illustration here, you can see both of these inspirations at play – the boxes, when taken together, suggest the skyline of New York City.

And at Geva…

Having sketched out a little bit of the historical context, I want to take a brief break and give you an inside glimpse at what Geva Theatre Center‘s production of A Raisin in the Sun will look like.  The production, directed by Robert O’Hara, will have set and costumes designed by Clint Ramos, lighting by Japhy Weideman and sound by Lindsay Jones. Our first rehearsal isn’t until next week, but the set designs have been submitted and our scene shop is in the process of building.

Robert and Clint were both really impacted by the images of Chicago’s Southside in the 1950′s, which brings to light a side of A Raisin in the Sun that isn’t often fully depicted onstage – the visceral desperation that the Youngers deal with throughout the play. This family – Mama, Walter Lee, Ruth, Travis, Beneatha and (until his death sometime before the play) Big Walter – have been living in a tight, crumbling one-bedroom kitchenette apartment for over 30 years. As the family grew, the living space became more and more cramped, and the privacy dwindled until it was practically nonexistent. With the family living literally right on top of each other and the absolute absence of breathing space, tensions rose until, as Walter says to Ruth, “How we gets to the place where we scared to talk softness to each other. Why you think it got to be like that? Ruth, what is it gets into people ought to be close?”

According to Clint, this feeling of desperation and the horrible state of most apartment buildings in the Southside was the starting place for the design. He wanted to create “a space so cramped and desperate that moving out really becomes a life and death situation.”

Clint Ramo's model

So he has created a space that leaves no room for romance, no room to imagine that this space could possibly have anything but a negative impact on the Younger family. What does a space so small do to a family?

Personally, as I look at this space and try putting myself in the shoes of any of the characters in the script, I feel my chest constrict with hopelessness and frustration. It reminds me of something Lorraine Hansberry wrote in a letter to a young college student who wanted to know her views on Civil Rights, or, as he put it, “the Negro question.” As part of her response, she said, “In the twentieth century men everywhere like to breathe: and the Negro citizen still cannot, you see, breathe.” This is not the point of her reply – but it hits on the head one of the problems with a space like this. There is not even room to breathe.

Courage and Honesty

Contemporary productions of classic dramas often try to capture something of the essence of the original production.  As a dramaturg, I want to know how audiences and critics responded to earlier productions of the plays I work on, to better inform my work and give me the ability to offer an historical perspective.  So one of the first questions I asked myself in preparing for the rehearsal period was:  In 1959, when A Raisin in the Sun premiered on Broadway, what were the reactions?

Clearly, the show was well received – it won the New York Drama Critics’ Circle Award, and Columbia Pictures immediately requested a screenplay from her for the film version of the play, which was released just two years later.

Sidney Poitier and Ruby Dee in the 1959 production of A Raisin in the Sun

Brooks Atkinson, then the critic for the New York Times, reported, “The play is honest.  She has told the inner as well as the outer truth about a Negro family in the Southside of Chicago at the present time. Since the performance is also honest and since Sidney Poitier is a candid actor, A Raisin in the Sun has vigor as well as veracity and is likely to destroy the complacency of anyone who sees it…That is Miss Hansberry’s personal contribution to an explosive situation in which simple honesty is the most difficult thing in the world. And also the most illuminating.”

But beyond critics, what were the reactions?  Years later in a theoretical journal, Douglas Turner Ward claimed “It is Walter Lee – flawed, contradictory, irascible, impulsive, furious and, most of all, desperate – who emerges as the most unique creation for his time and ours.  It is his behavior throughout the play – his restless impatience, his discontent with the way things are, his acute perception of societal disparities, his fury at status inequities, his refusal to accept his ‘place’ – which gives the play prophetic significance, for these traits are not embodied in an exceptional prototype but are the properties of an average person, a typical member of the broad black majority.  Most of the 1959 audience, encountering this anger within such a prevalent type, felt threatened.  He made them uneasy; he raised unsettling doubts; he was difficult to identify with.  Where would all this raging frustration lead? Despite his fixation with America’s pragmatism and dreams of success, he was, in his energy, an omen.  That energy was soon to erupt into American reality with a vengeance.”

And what of the play’s impact on the field of theatre? Immeasurable.  Woodie King, Jr., artistic director of the New Federal Theatre and a pioneering African American theatre artist, concurred.  ”A Raisin in the Sun opened doors within my consciousness that I never knew existed.  Here is was in Detroit’s Cass Theatre, a young man who had never seen anywhere a black man express all the things I felt but never had the courage to express – and in a theatre full of black and white people, no less!…The power of the play had made us all aware of our uniqueness as Blacks and had…confirmed that our dreams were possible…The effect all this had on the current crop of black artists is tremendous…To mention all of the artists whose careers were enhanced by their encounters with Hansberry and A Raisin in the Sun would read like a Who’s Who in the black theatre.”

So clearly, a production today needs to capture that honesty, the sincere glimpse into a family struggling against the inequities of 1950′s America.  It needs to make us feel uneasy, as we witness Walter Lee’s rage and its impact on his family.  We need to understand the vital necessity of all that followed in the Civil Rights movement – and by extension, the struggles of any group of people to be treated humanely. And it if we succeed, we too will be inspired by the courage of the Younger family to stand up and fight.

Welcome to Geva Journal!

Welcome to Geva Journal, a new place for conversations about the work at Geva Theatre Center, inRochester, NY. My name is Jenni Werner, and I’m the director of literary and artistic programs here at Geva.  This is my first season here, so I’m learning new things about Geva, Rochester and the five county area almost every day.  Here on this blog, we’ll talk about the artistic process of creating the work on Geva’s stages – and maybe about some of the work that you never see, the conversations in our conference rooms and rehearsal hall.  I won’t be the only blogger, but I’ll be your host here on Geva Journal, and I look forward to hearing your thoughts.

My background is in dramaturgy.  As a dramaturg, my main responsibility is to help paint a full picture of the world being created onstage.  Dramaturgs do this for artists primarily by sharing information about the context of the world – the historical, biographical and social background. And we do this for audiences by creating opportunities to more fully engage in the world of the play – through lobby displays, articles online and in print, and conversations.  And we ask questions.  Lots and lots of questions.

I’m working, as we speak, on preparing to serve as the production dramaturg for our production of A Raisin in the Sun, by Lorraine Hansberry, directed by Robert O’Hara, and for the next couple of months, this blog will follow our creative process.