Empty Space, pt. I

It's the end of September, and despite the blazing heat here in Los Angeles, the cycles of the academic year are kicking in and it is starting to feel like fall. After a rejuvenating eight days at Director's Lab West, I find myself refreshed and ready to dive into production work at Caltech, writing at home, and, of course, the job hunt across the nation.

Working on Big Love marks a new experience for me: this is the first show that I am repeating. I directed it several years ago at De LaSalle High School in Minneapolis (a production I still adore), and I am now dramaturging it at Caltech in Pasadena. This isn't my production, it's being performed with an entirely different set of actors in an entirely different context, and yet I was concerned that I might simply attempt to recreate what I had already done, and in that attempt, create something deadly.

Last night at auditions, reading as one of the sisters on stage (we are short of women right now), I looked out across the bare stage at the unpopulated auditorium and was struck by just how empty Brook's Empty Space is. The stage seemed immense and without structure. Which is always how it is, I realized, when we start on these creative journeys.

With my DLS ensemble, we had together constructed an edifice, an architecture in which our story was told. That building is gone (as it should be, since it was of that moment), and now a new one must be raised. Those collective handholds are gone, and maybe it is because they once existed so tangibly for me, and now do not, that I was able to notice their absence.

But this is always how it is: an empty, somewhat terrifying space that we come together to fill. We build so much through our doing theatre.