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With a simple set, no props, no furniture, and a whole lot of language, Lungs is a high-wire act for the two actors playing the central couple; The Washington Post calls the piece “smart and stimulating”. Actors Brooke Bloom and Ryan King spoke to us about their initial reactions to the script and the process of developing their characters and relationship.

Brooke Bloom:
I loved Lungs when I first read it—I knew performing it would be an undertaking, but it’s the kind of play you want to hear out loud. There’s something that’s so complex and so true about the ways people communicate in this play—it’s smart and funny and quick. I just wanted to have this dialogue with another actor.

Rehearsing the play and performing the play feel very different—performing something that’s so intricately and wisely put together is really freeing and instinctual, and you can be flexible in performance, always finding new things. But rehearsing something that’s so specific can just be exhausting. In any rehearsal process there’s a moment when your understanding of the character outpaces the technical requirements of a role—getting all the words in, or understanding how one scene builds on another and leads you to the next place. So rehearsing a scene in the middle of the play is a lot harder than getting to that scene and playing in it, especially because it’s just one long conversation with all the colors and complexities of a real relationship.

Duncan’s given us a structure that can just feel effortless to perform, once you’ve got the text and you live inside its rhythms. It’s just got a flow that carries you with it, because you and the audience don’t have a chance to second guess it; you’re just on to the next thing.

I love working with a playwright in the room, and Duncan’s put a tremendous amount of trust in Ryan and me. It’s fantastic. It’s intimidating. It’s crazy. Lucky me.

Ryan King:
I had a really visceral reaction to Lungs when I first read it—it made me really excited. A lot of the plays I read about people in relationships in their 30s let their characters off a little easy. This play felt like it was really, really honest about the difficulties and complexities of relationships. It hit on something more than what I usually see.

Rehearsing the play has been a lot like any other play I’ve done—I read the play over and over before rehearsals, I get into rehearsals and start figuring out your character, the ways he is and isn’t like me. But there are some differences, totally. One of the things that Duncan does in the play is just jump from one scene into another, which is tough as an actor—usually you have at least ten seconds as the lights change or there’s a music cue. So physically, we’re both thinking about the play a little different than we usually do.

And the language is…it’s real but it’s not the way that naturalistic dialogue is usually written. So it’s harder to memorize, because it’s just really exact. You also have to stay on top of the text, if that makes sense—you’re always about to talk, there’s no sitting back and listening to your scene partner. But once it’s all in your head, it’s also easier to remember in a way. It’s like second nature; once it’s inside your brain, it makes a lot of sense coming out. It’s a little like verse in that way—when you’re memorizing verse it’s hard, because it’s specific and unforgiving. But once you’ve got the language, it does a lot of the work for you.

—adapted from interviews by Adrien-Alice Hansel

‘Lungs’: Breathing fresh new path at Studio Theatre
By Peter Marks, Published: October 3

Studio Theatre embarks on an exciting new path with “Lungs,” a bracingly dramatic walk through the thicket of couples communication that proves an auspicious start to the company’s ambitions as midwife to original plays.

The inaugural offering of the Studio Lab series, the world premiere of the two-character play by Duncan Macmillan, is at once beguilingly modest and rewardingly polished. Director Aaron Posner ably guides his actors, the outstanding Brooke Bloom and Ryan King, to charmingly recognizable portrayals of young people convulsed by the conflict between their boundless desires and the realities of an age in which dreams of big things — or dreams of any kind — seem a foolhardy affront to nature.

Macmillan, a London-based writer and director, intends these characters — identified as W (Bloom) and M (King) — as composites, enlightened emblems of an emergent generation that considers itself the first to seriously face the Earth’s extinction. (Cold War babies might reasonably dissent.) The play’s torrent of words is laced with allusions to a dying planet and the preoccupations of the sorts of conscientious citizens who keep obsessive track of their carbon footprints.

That’s part of the reason the play’s first utterance resounds throughout the 90 minutes that M and W share a bare stage, designed by Luciana Stecconi from a pile of thin wood panels. (No doubt they’re recyclable.) “A baby?” M suggests hopefully, unsurely, as W, dumbfounded, tries to process a half-question with both seismic and cosmic implications.

In all their hip, unmarried, consciously unconscious stylishness, M and W begin a halting, circuitous dialogue, rife with muddled thoughts, complaints, rants, digs and apologies, as they try to figure out what each really wants, separately and together. Their musings form a kind of word-cloud portrait of that contemporary romantic malady: ambivalence.

The relationship between W and M comes out of a cute-comedy convention stretching back to the likes of Corie and Paul, the married if temperamentally mismatched love birds of Neil Simon’s “Barefoot in the Park.” The updating here has to do both with fast-forwarding past marriage — a child is the lasting proof of their commitment, it seems — and the peculiar weight of worldly concerns that might figure these days in family planning: Does one want to bring new life into a landscape under so much strain already?

Bloom’s PhD candidate W is a congenital worrywart who uses her hyper-awareness of impending ecological disaster as a cover for her real terror: that having a child confirms you’re a grownup. “If you really cared about the planet, you should kill yourself,” she declares, in one of her many manic dodges. It’s the more conciliatory and grounded of the pair, King’s M, who tries to force his partner to temper her neurotic, contrarian impulses and consider her real feelings about him and a future together.

At times, the ferocity with which Macmillan portrays W’s haranguing of M might make you wonder what he sees in her. But the appealing King is thoroughly convincing as the kind of guy attracted to someone with a lot more scary, hairpin turns of personality than he. And that desire for a challenging partner eventually unmasks the weaknesses in songwriter M, who will show that he cannot consistently live up to the image of the stand-up fellow that he cultivates.

Bloom’s turn as W is admirably flinty; Posner elicits from her a performance just this side of unlikable. The actress, however, wears W’s thin skin with such galvanizing flair that you hang on her every funny way of putting things. If at least once during “Lungs” some exchange between M and W doesn’t strike you as a snippet of one of your own conversations, then perhaps this wasn’t the evening for you.

Others will find this a smart and stimulating eavesdrop on the modern vocabulary of intimate negotiation. Studio is doing the city a favor, expanding its palette to include plays not previously produced elsewhere. The company had made a few tentative forays in this direction in years gone by, but “Lungs,” it seems, augurs a regular platform for new drama on 14th Street NW. If it’s all of the caliber of “Lungs,” then by all means, bring it on.

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Synopsis

When a man asks his girlfriend whether she wants to have a child, she’s thrown. Would they be good parents? Did she picture him as father material? Should anyone be having children anyhow, what with the rising sea levels and extreme weather they’ve been having? They’ve got ideas about their adult lives, but so far they’re just ideas. What begins as a couple’s intimate conversation soon takes on epic overtones, as this chamber drama follows them through the surprising lifecycle of their relationship. This couple grapples with questions of family and change, betrayal, optimism, happenstance, and the terrible pain that you can only cause the people you love.

Some Thoughts on Lungs, Duncan Macmillan

A few things happened last year. I turned 30, I got engaged, I got a mortgage, and I got a proper job (lecturing in Creative Writing at Kingston University). The baby conversation was next, and this is something that I was very conscious of at the time of writing. We have a cat now, who we occasionally refer to as either “baby practice” or “baby substitute.” Time will tell which she’ll ultimately be. She is asleep on my lap as I write this.

I’d been struggling for a long time to find a way to write about some of the bigger issues facing our species, unable to distill my research, concerns, and questions into a pinpoint, compelling dramatic metaphor. I’d also been working on a large-scale play for the Old Vic Theatre for about three years, a six-act epic called Transatlantic which begins in a wheat field in Norfolk on the eve of the US joining the Allied war effort and ends in the present day with the estranged family returning to the farm for a funeral. It’s an enormous project with lots of huge themes and a cast of about two hundred characters. I wanted to take a break from that and write a play that was direct, clear, fast, fun, and most importantly, stylistically more pared-back.

I wanted to write something for two really good actors where they could tell a story unmediated by props, scene changes, costume changes, mime, lighting or sound queues, just two bodies in space, letting the audience fill in the gaps. It seems appropriate somehow that the play is as “carbon-neutral” as possible. I also felt that the playfulness of the form would help to make some of the more troubling issues more palatable. I wanted the audience to feel as if they were eavesdropping on a very private conversation between two thoughtful, educated, middle-class people who are struggling to do the right thing. I wanted to write a play which was dramatically active but where the narrative isn’t compelled by unraveling a lie or a secret. For me, drama is about live decision making. There are no secrets, everything pours out of them, uncensored, impulsive, raw.

Although it’s not a true story, I’m sure writing Lungs was a way for me to articulate a number of anxieties I was subconsciously having about turning 30, considering parenthood and the state of the world. I wrote the first draft very quickly, I started first thing in the morning and by midnight I’d got to the end. I read it out with Effie (my wife-to-be) then we spent the rest of the night (and much of the time since) having a very intense conversation. The play was written very quickly and without any planning. The play felt bigger than I’d intended it to, going beyond just the central question of whether or not to become parents. Only when I heard it read back did I realise all the research I’d been doing, particularly to do with climate change, had made its way into the play.

Tips for a Healthier Planet

“There are no passengers on Spaceship Earth. We are all crew.”
—Marshall McLuhan

“and we could plant trees, entire forests, make something pure and and and oxygenating, so”
—Lungs

When replacing your computer, consider purchasing a laptop. They save space, go anywhere, and use five times less energy than desktop models.
Instead of sending old rugs to the landfill, check with local animal shelters to see if they can use them. Old towels, blankets and sheets are also useful.
Washing clothes in cold water eliminates 2 lbs. of CO2 per load. Also, wash clothes less frequently—only when they really need it.
Electronic devices use energy even when they’re switched off. Unplug all electronic devices when they’re not in use or use power strips to cut off energy to several electronic devices at once.
Paying bills online saves time, postage, and trees. If everyone in the US were to switch to online banking, it would cut 1.6 billion tons of waste and 2.1 million tons of CO2 a year.
Properly inflated tires roll easier, last longer, reduce engine wear, improve gas mileage, and prevent 250 lbs. of CO2 a year from entering the atmosphere.
Plant trees. Plant lots of trees. Every tree you plant absorbs one ton of CO2 and becomes a life-affirming gift to the birds, your home, and your community.

—adapted from positivelygreen.com

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