25 Jan Resident Playwright Spotlight: E. Hunter Spreen
E. Hunter Spreen just finished a reading of her new play Care of Trees. First produced in 2011, her play has been in constant development. We caught up with her busy schedule to give you an inside look of what the process of rewriting the play was like for her.
Q: What was the inspiration/defining factor for you to start writing this piece?
E: I had a daydream about a woman who left a trail of leaves.
Q: How long have you been working on it? Describe what that process was like.
E: Initially, this piece was written quickly (over 9 months). Following the production, I did a drastic rewrite, cutting the play down to six pages. I let it sit for a few months and worked on rewrites while I was writing other plays. Eventually, I set it aside because I’m in process of writing an epic performance piece called Dumb Puppy. In 2016, I was contacted by a company in Chicago and so I went back in and rewrote the play, between development work on the Dumb Puppy cycle. I tagged along on a BAPF retreat and spent the weekend in my room blasting out a new draft—mostly focused on structure and character development. Care of Trees is a well-loved play—so as much as of the work has been about rewriting, it has also been about translation. I’ve worked to preserve what people respond and connect to deeply, at the same time I’ve corrected structural/dramaturgical issues. It’s a hard world to be in because of the emotional undertow, but it’s also a beautiful, fantastical world and so amidst the hard work, it’s been a pleasure to revisit. The chance to do some development with with PF and the Rough Reading series comes at the perfect time, I’m doing the last rewrites in preparation for a fall production with Enso Ensemble in Portland OR.
Q: Your style is experimental and poetic. How do you approach your plays in writing it and in rehearsal?
E: For Care of Trees, I created collages of images and text on paper and large pieces of torn cardboard, and created long strands of words (word trees) in my notebook. The structure and some of the content of the play emerged from these projects. Each play evolves and is structured differently, so a lot of my practices is listening and taking in impulses, then making decisions about how to capture what I’m receiving in writing. I work with images, thousands of images in some cases, and I also heavily research and read for inspiration. My work falls into two general categories—1) sitting down and writing and 2) devised work that involves physical exploration and composition. Rehearsals can vary, I might invite a few artists to come play in the studio in the initial stages of a piece when I may not know anything or I’m still working with images and random bits of text. Care of Trees was commissioned and produced by Shotgun Players for their 20th anniversary season in 2011. Susannah Martin directed the piece and because we’re long time collaborators, we have a shorthand and set of practices we established when we had a company together. She did physical explorations and Viewpoints work with the actors, Liz Sklar and Patrick Russell (who we’re lucky to have for the Rough Reading!) Susannah also took some of the images I used as inspiration and put them on the walls in the rehearsal space. Even though my work is experimental, it still requires performers to do the basic work of understanding how the story operates and creating the reality of the play through characters and playing their actions.
Q: What did you work on for the rough reading?
E: I’ve introduced new characters and/or expanded the role/function of existing characters, so I’m interested to see how this lands with an audience. One of my goals has been to refine the structure, and there have been some insightful discussions in rehearsal around what is happening in each of the four sections of the play. Finally, I wanted to push the two main characters, Georgia and Travis, into a space of unexpected honesty. I’m working on creating moments where they flip the script on the familiar boy meets girl story. I’m asking myself, who’s story is this at any given moment? When we’re living our lives, we are the center of our story, so I’m trying to balance the script to reflect a perspective that allows for multiple points of view. We may be seeing shared memories, or one persons’s version of a shared memory.
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