Bryony Lavery’s ‘Dirt’ at Studio Theatre: Genesis of a Lab Series production

By Nelson Pressley, Published: October 11

British playwright Bryony Lavery begins to explain “Dirt,” her world premiere play at Studio Theatre, with a rat story.

Several years ago Lavery, best known for the U.K.-U.S. stage hit “Frozen” (a chilling portrait of a child murderer), took her niece to a film in New York City. Naturally, plenty of people bought big bags of popcorn. Just as naturally, Lavery says, a ripple of screams and frantically lifted feet indicated that a rat was scampering down the aisle.

“Why wouldn’t there be a rat?” the London-based Lavery said. “It’s like a restaurant for them.”

In “Dirt,” which deals with a young woman about to die and the toxins she (and we) encounter every day, restaurants are key. (So is a rat.) But that’s not the whole story of the show that opened Wednesday at Studio Theatre, the second installment in the company’s ambitious Lab Series, which offers world premiere productions for $20.

“I’m not sure writers ever tell the truth about this,” says Lavery, who has been writing plays since the 1970s. “If you say, ‘Where did it start?,’ there are always about 50 answers. And you never know where you really started.”

The answer for what brought her to Washington, though, is more direct. “David Muse,” Lavery says simply of her “Dirt” director (even though until recently her brother lived here).

Muse, now in his third full season as Studio’s artistic head, directed an acclaimed version of Lavery’s “Frozen” for the company in 2006. Although Lavery did not see the show, she says, “I was always hearing people talk about it in the oddest parts of the world. So, I thought he was probably worth working with.”

The writer and director first met briefly on the street in 2004 as “Frozen” was opening in New York. Last year they bumped into each other again during the U.S. run of Lavery’s acclaimed boxing drama “Beautiful Burnout.” When “Dirt” fell into Muse’s hands — he can’t recall exactly how — he called Lavery. He was pleased to hear that she didn’t think the play was quite right and that working on it through a Lab Series residency was appealing to her.

Lavery, sitting in one of Studio’s upstairs lobbies, talks about her plays not by saying “I wrote,” but “we made.” Over the past two years, Lavery has been working with the London troupe Frantic Assembly, “who hurl people off walls,” the playwright says. “That was a huge epiphany, just thinking, ‘I haven’t been using bodies enough.’ ”

Thus was born “Beautiful Burnout,” currently touring the U.K. in the production directed and choreographed by company directors Scott Graham and Steven Hoggett. (Hoggett was nominated for a Tony Award this year for his choreography of the Broadway musical “Once.”) The same team also collaborated on “Stockholm,” a physical depiction of a romantic relationship claustrophobic enough to evoke the Stockholm syndrome.

Lavery also recently completed a submarine play called “Kursk” with a sound-design-oriented company called Sound & Fury. “We made an entire submarine,” Lavery says of the show that has toured as far afield as Australia. “So when you’re in the submarine, and they [the characters] go under a Russian submarine and look up, and you can hear it — I can’t tell you how fabulous it is.”

“Dirt” had been in the works since 2005, when Lavery received a Sloane Foundation commission from the Manhattan Theatre Club. Sloane, inspired by an early success supporting David Auburn’s Pulitzer-winning “Proof,” commissions plays about science, but for Lavery progress was slow.

At one point she considered turning the project into a film.

Studio’s Lab residency gave Lavery a week with actors here in July before arriving to extensively reshape the script through rehearsals before the October opening. The show was already announced as part of the coming season, and for Lavery, the deadline was excellent pressure.

“It had to be made,” Lavery says. “That makes it very exciting, if slightly terrifying. So we had a lovely week.”

Muse estimates that the script has changed another 50 percent since summer and says that in early October, Lavery turned in “a significantly new second act.” That intensive progress, capped by production, is the program’s goal.

“We’ll commit to produce it before it’s done,” Muse says of the Lab Series approach, adding that last year’s inaugural production, Duncan Macmillan’s “Lungs,” has already gone on to post-Studio success.

“The difference is that this lab commits to a production,” Lavery says. “And if you ask any playwright what they want, it’s a production.”

Another of the many starting points in “Dirt” is a frequent Lavery theme, mortality. Lavery’s adaptation of “Dracula” was recently published with Lisa Evans’s “Frankenstein.” Lavery tells of an exchange with Evans: “ ‘Your plays always have dead babies in them.’ She said, ‘It’s true. And yours always have dead bodies.’ It’s true. I’m always having people killed off in my plays. But that’s because I always think play-writing is hard. So you might as well tackle the hard stuff, the serious stuff, and investigate that.”

The “serious stuff” includes Lavery’s own one-two punch several years ago of illness and an injury abroad that left her on crutches. Lavery, now in her 60s, says, “I am coming to the reluctant conclusion that I may be mortal. And I’m still not convinced that I will die. But things like the body not being quite the strong thing — I think there’s something in there about that.”

Indeed, popular Washington actress Holly Twyford spends the second act on stage as what Muse calls a “dead presence.” Though Twyford and Lavery had never met, they consider “Dirt” a reunion, since one of Twyford’s earliest stage appearances was in Lavery’s “Her Aching Heart,” a cheeky lesbian romance that Lavery describes as pastiche, in the early 1990s.

“When I wrote that play, I thought that the worst thing that could happen to me was to have a broken heart,” Lavery says. “And then of course, life intervened, and got darker and harder.”

The complexities had already included a marriage that ended with Lavery’s coming out as gay. (Lavery now says, only slightly drolly, that she is celibate, married only to her work.) In the late 1990s, Lavery’s parents died a year apart, a marker that she says changed her writing.

“I lost people,” she explains. “And that somehow released me. It wasn’t presumptuous to try to do serious subjects.”

Making the play with the company at Studio is allowing Lavery to refine another interest, her nose for laughter in dark moments. Even though it deals graphically with decay, “Dirt” is shaping up to have funny bits, especially, Muse says, as the playwright responds to Twyford’s presence in the central role.

“It’s lovely,” Lavery says, “trying to work out how to move an audience and then give them the release valve where they know they can laugh. Bit of a tightrope.”

 

Cast

Holly Twyford (Harper) most recently appeared at The Studio Theatre in Times Stands Still. Additional Studio Theatre productions include The Road to Mecca, The Internationalist, Black Milk, Far Away, The Shape of Things, The Steward of Christendom, The Desk Set, and Betty’s Summer Vacation. She has appeared in more than 50 productions with many of the area’s theaters including Ford’s Theatre, Woolly Mammoth Theatre Company, Theater J, Round House Theatre, and Arena Stage. She has performed at theatres in Boston, Philadelphia, Santa Cruz, and Milwaukee. Ms. Twyford has been nominated for 16 Helen Hayes Awards. She received the Outstanding Lead Actress Award for her portrayals of Juliet in the Folger Theatre’s production of Romeo and Juliet, Diane in The Little Dog Laughed at Signature Theatre, and Evelyn in The Shape of Things at Studio Theatre. She received the Outstanding Supporting Actress Award for a variety of roles in The Two Gentlemen of Verona at the Folger Theatre. She was the recipient of the Shakespeare Theatre Company’s Emery Battis Award for Acting Excellence for her portrayal of Anna in Old Times. Ms. Twyford made her directorial debut last season with No Rules Theatre Company directing Diana Son’s Stop Kiss.

Carolyn Mignini (May) is making her Studio Theatre debut. This year, she performed Off Broadway in Hereafter at Theater St Marks, I Married Wyatt Earp at 59E59, and co-produced and acted in Kindling, a new film. Broadway highlights include Tintypes (Drama Desk Nomination), Fiddler on the Roof, One Night Stand, and A History of the American Film. Additional Off Broadway credits include Christopher Durang’s Sister Mary Ignatius Explains It All For You, Middle Ages by A.R. Gurney, and A View from the Bridge at The Berkshire Theatre Festival. Ms. Mignini is also a long-time member of Ensemble Studio Theatre. Her television credits include The Good Wife, Lights Out, The Practice, Chicago Hope, Murphy Brown, Days of Our Lives, and Touched by an Angel.

Natalia Payne (Elle) makes her Washington DC debut in Dirt.  Her recent New York stage credits include Edward Albee’s Me, Myself & I at Playwrights Horizons, New Jerusalem at Classic Stage Company, Jailbait at Cherry Lane Theater, Aliens with Extraordinary Skills at Women’s Project, Novel at Summer Play Festival at Theatre Row, The Wikipedia Plays at Ars Nova, and deathvariations at 59E59 Theaters.  She has also performed in readings and workshops for Manhattan Theatre Club, Primary Stages, The New Group, New York Stage and Film, and the Eugene O’Neill Playwrights Conference.  Regionally, Ms. Payne appeared in Sarah Ruhl’s adaptation of Three Sisters at Yale Repertory Theatre and Berkeley Repertory Theatre, Trouble in Mind at Yale Repertory Theatre, and Memory House at Vineyard Playhouse.  Her television and film credits include Law & Order: SVU, The Loss of a Teardrop Diamond, The Word, and Crazy Love.  Ms. Payne has also narrated numerous audio books.  She trained with Soulpepper Theatre Company in her hometown of Toronto and holds a BA in Theatre Studies from Yale University.

Matthew Montelongo (Matt) was last seen at The Studio Theatre in Black Milk, Far East, and Far Away. He has appeared in numerous New York productions including the Broadway revivals of A View from the Bridge (Tony Award Nomination and Drama Desk Award for Best Revival of a Play) and The Ritz. Off Broadway, he has been seen in This Backstage Life at Atlantic Theater Company, His Daddy at Ensemble Studio Theatre, Whore at Summer Play Festival, God’s Ear with Vineyard Theatre/New Georges, Five Flights with Rattlestick Playwrights Theatre, The Mineola Twins and Arms and the Man at Roundabout Theatre Company, and Tartuffe with Shakespeare in the Park/Public Theater. Regionally, Mr. Montelongo has performed in productions at Hartford TheaterWorks, Lyric Theatre of Oklahoma, Westport Country Playhouse, Alliance Theatre, St. Louis Repertory Theatre, Shakespeare Theatre of New Jersey, and the Old Globe. He has appeared locally at Woolly Mammoth (Helen Hayes Nomination for Best Ensemble in Vigils), Signature Theatre, and Folger Theatre. He can be seen on television in episodes of Gossip Girl, Law & Order: SVU, All My Children, One Life to Live, The Guiding Light, and Late Night with Conan O’Brien.

Ro Boddie (Guy) is pleased to be returning to Washington where he was previously seen in Angels in America at Forum Theater, for which he received a Helen Hayes nomination, and Stop Kiss at No Rules Theater Company, directed by Holly Twyford. Recent credits include The Caucasian Chalk Circle with Sonnet Repertory Theater, and Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom with CENTERSTAGE and Philadelphia Theater Company. Mr. Boddie’s television credits include The Good Wife, Unforgettable, and Person of Interest.

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Director and Designers

David Muse (Direction) has been the Artistic Director of The Studio Theatre since September 2010.  For Studio and 2ndStage, he has directed Bachelorette, The Habit of Art, Venus in Fur, Circle Mirror Transformation, reasons to be pretty, Blackbird, Frozen, and The Intelligent Design of Jenny Chow. Previously, he was Associate Artistic Director of Shakespeare Theatre Company, where he directed six productions, including Henry V, Romeo and Juliet, and Julius Caesar. Other recent directing projects include Frankie and Johnny in the Clair de Lune at Arena Stage, The Bluest Eye at Theatre Alliance, and Swansong for New York Summer Play Festival. He has helped to develop new work at numerous theaters, including New York Theatre Workshop, Geva Theatre Center, Arena Stage, Ford's Theatre, and the Kennedy Center. Mr. Muse has taught acting and directing at Georgetown, Yale, and the Shakespeare Theatre Company’s Academy of Classical Acting. A five-time Helen Hayes Award nominee for Outstanding Direction, he is a recent recipient of the DC Mayor's Arts Award for Outstanding Emerging Artist and the National Theatre Conference Emerging Artist Award.  Mr. Muse is a graduate of Yale University and the Yale School of Drama.

Debra Booth (Setting) returns to The Studio Theatre where she has designed Bachelorette, The Golden Dragon, Reasons to Be Pretty, Adding Machine, Moonlight, Blackbird, and My Children! My Africa!. Other Studio Theatre productions include The Pillowman; Red Light Winter; Caroline, or Change; Fat Pig; A Number; Afterplay; The Russian National Postal Service; Far Away; The Shape of Things; and Privates on Parade. International work includes premiere operas Marco Polo (Tan Dun/Martha Clarke) and The Hindenburg (Steve Reich/Roman Paska). Regionally, Ms. Booth’s credits include Lost Boys of the Sudan for the Minneapolis Children’s Theatre; Marisol for Hartford Stage and the New York Shakespeare Festival; Trying, The Illusion, and Happy Days for Portland Stage; the New York premiere of Angels in America for Juilliard; The Game of Love and Chance for the Berkshire Theatre Festival; Broken Glass for the Philadelphia Theatre Company (Barrymore Award nomination); and Moon for the Misbegotten at Yale Repertory Theatre.  She has also collaborated with Estelle Parsons and Al Pacino on Salome for the Actors Studio. Ms. Booth is the recipient of the National Endowment for the Arts Design Grant, a graduate of the Yale School of Drama, and Designer in Residence at Studio Theatre.

John Burkland (Lighting) returns to The Studio Theatre, where he has designed Souvenir and multiple Studio 2ndStage productions, including The Big Meal, Mojo, Sixty Miles to Silver Lake, A Beautiful View, The Intelligent Design of Jenny Chow, Frozen, TempOdyssey, and All That I Will Ever Be. He has also designed locally for Theater Alliance, Longacre Lea, MetroStage, The Bay Theater, Washington Shakespeare Company, Rorschach Theater, and the Kennedy Center. New York credits include productions at  Lincoln Center Institute, La MaMa, New York Musical Theatre Festival, Manhattan Music and Movement Center, Sonnet Repertory, HB Playwrights Studio, Guggenheim Arts in Process, Jazz at Lincoln Center, the Skirball Center, the New York Fringe Festival, and Summer Play Festival. Regionally, Mr. Burkland has designed at Williamstown Theatre Festival, Paper Mill Playhouse, Opera Tampa, Bellingham Theater Guild, Actors Theater of Atlanta, Andrea Dance, Big Apple Circus To Go, and The Dance Gallery.  He is a graduate of North Carolina School of the Arts.

Frank Labovitz (Costumes) returns to The Studio Theatre, where he designed Astro Boy and the God of Comics, Mojo, and The Who’s Tommy for Studio 2ndStage. His local credits include Bengal Tiger at the Baghdad Zoo, Next Fall, and Pride and Prejudice at Round House Theatre; The Religion Thing and Something You Did at Theater J; Mr. Burns: a post-electric play, Gruesome Playground Injuries, and Fever/Dream at Woolly Mammoth Theatre Company; Rapunzel and Junie B. Jones: Jingle Bells Batman Smells at Imagination Stage; Dying City at Signature Theatre; The Taming of the Shrew and Othello at The National Players; Omnium Gatherum at Olney Theatre Center; and Mad Forest at Forum Theatre. Mr. Labovitz holds an MFA from the University of Maryland, College Park.

Christopher Baine (Sound) recently designed The Elaborate Entrance of Chad Deity, Gruesome Playground Injuries, and A Bright New Boise (2012 Helen Hayes Award for Outstanding Sound Design) with Woolly Mammoth Theatre Company. Other recent credits include Heir Apparent and Julius Caesar (Free For All) with Shakespeare Theatre Company and Taming of the Shrew with Folger Theatre. He has also designed for more than 30 companies in the region, including the Kennedy Center Theatre for Young Audiences, Olney Theatre Center, Everyman Theatre, Forum Theatre, Theater J, Adventure Theatre, Imagination Stage, Synetic Theater, and Theatre Alliance.  Mr. Baine has served as a guest artist with the University of Maryland, Catholic University, and American University. He is a Kenan Fellow at the Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts.

Adrien-Alice Hansel (Dramaturgy) is The Studio Theatre’s Literary Director. At Studio, she has dramaturged Invisible Man, Sucker Punch, The Golden Dragon, Lungs, The History of Kisses, and The New Electric Ballroom, among others. Prior to joining Studio, she spent eight seasons at the Actors Theatre of Louisville, where she headed the literary department and coordinated project scouting, selection, and development for the Humana Festival of New American Plays. She also served as production dramaturg on roughly 50 new, contemporary, and classic plays there, including premieres by Naomi Wallace, Gina Gionfriddo, Kirk Lynn and Rude Mechs, Rinne Groff, The Civilians, Charles Mee, Anne Bogart and SITI Company, Jordan Harrison, and John Belluso. She is the co-editor of eight anthologies of plays from Actors Theatre and three editions of plays through Studio. Ms. Hansel holds an MFA from the Yale School of Drama.

Erin C. Patrick (Stage Manager) is pleased to work with Studio Theatre for the first time.  Locally, she has worked with the Kennedy Center, The American College Dance Festival (National Festival 2010), Adventure Theatre, Gesel Mason Performance Projects, and PERARSONWIDRIG Dance Theatre. Regionally, Ms. Patrick has worked with Iowa Summer Rep and Chester Theatre Company (Crime and Punishment and The Betrothed). Ms. Patrick previously served as the Production Coordinator for the Dance program at the University of Maryland School of Theatre, Dance, and Performance Studies. She holds an MFA in Stage Management from the University of Iowa.

About the Playwright

Bryony Lavery is best known for her play Frozen, commissioned by Birmingham Rep, which won the TMA Best Play Award, the Eileen Anderson Central Television Award, and was produced on Broadway where it was nominated for four Tony awards. Her play Stockholm, which she wrote for Frantic Assembly, toured the UK in 2007 before a run at Hampstead Theatre, London in May 2008. Lavery won the Wolff Whiting award for the play in 2008, which premiered in Spring 2010, in a touring production by the Sydney Theatre Company. Her latest play for Frantic Assembly, Beautiful Burnout, toured the UK in late 2010 before a run at St. Ann’s Warehouse in New York in Spring 2011. Her play Cesario will premiere at the National Theatre in London as part of the World Shakespeare Festival.

Synopsis:

Harper is about to die. Elle is her waitress. Matt will eventually sleep with them both. May tries to get through a lecture in quantum physics without her cell going off. Guy is a healer and, well, a guy. As these five lives sprawl and intersect, Bryony Lavery builds a stylish, sexy, and unnervingly funny exploration of the ways that modern life is suffocating us emotionally and physically.

 

Harper cleans her apartment and body, getting later and later for her date with Matt. Matt sits at the “health-checked, hygiene-ticked” restaurant, calculating the precise number of minutes he’s spent waiting for Harper in the past three years. Elle is the actress brand of waitress, full of facts from the documentaries she voice-overs, which she offers to the audience along with a running commentary on the not-so-great date unfolding before her. The date ends in an ugly exchange of words, so when Matt doesn’t hear from Harper for five days afterwards, it never occurs to him it’s because she’s died.

 

The procedural questions that amass in the aftermath of Harper’s death—who done it?—eventually unfurl into a complex examination of what connects humans to the cities they live in, the soil they live on, and the people they share their lives with. As Guy and May’s connections to Harper, Elle, and Matt emerge, Lavery’s play explores dirt in its most intimate and cosmic scales: as debris; as the catch-all for basic human impulses of attraction, sex, and revulsion; and as a signpost for the ways that modern life ignores the universal processes of decay and regeneration.

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Dirt: Context for the Particles That Give Context to Us

“Picture a juice glass sitting on a porch railing in the sunshine. It may look empty, but churning inside that glass are twenty-five thousand microscopic pieces of dust—at least. And these dusts are a little bit of everything on Earth. One minute, they are tiny crumbs chipped off Saharan sand, and invisible shreds of camel hair. Then the wind shifts, and there are spores of forest fungi and fragments of desiccated violets. A bus stops nearby to take on passengers, and invisible flakes of human skin, mixed with miniscule specks of black soot momentarily dominate the mix. Every time you inhale, thousands upon thousands of motes swirl into your body. Some lodge in the maze of your nose. Some stick to your throat. Others find sanctuary deep in your lungs. By the time you have read this far, you may have inhaled one-hundred-fifty thousand of these worldly specks—if you live in one of the cleanest corners of the planet. If you live in a more grubby region, you've probably just inhaled more than a million. 

Some of the dust that swirls around us was knocked off distant, colliding asteroids eons ago. Some of it boiled off comets that may have passed our way a few years ago or a few centuries ago. This stuff, still holding its ancient grains of primordial stardust, settles on Earth at a rate of one magical speck per square meter per day. Whenever a dust scholar is able tease out the chemical fingerprint of a grain of space dust, she comes a little bit closer to understanding the origins of our world. That is the secret of our past.”

—Hannah Holmes, The Secret Life of Dust

 

“Dust, once recognized, becomes a cultural marker and is used to create social order. If dust seems at first glance to be mere natural detritus, human actors, comfortably and easily give its presence a wide array of interpretations. Dust comes to stand for divisions of gender, class, occupation, and nation. In a world in which the small is becoming increasingly visible, the realm of dust stands for other microscopic worlds: bacteria, radioactivity, nanotechnology, and DNA codes.”

—Gary Alan Fine and Tim Hallett, “Dust: A Study in Sociological Miniaturism”

“Dirt is essentially disorder. There is no such thing as absolute dirt: it exists in the eye of the beholder. If we shun dirt, it is not because of craven fear, still less [because of] dread or holy terror. Nor do our ideas about disease account for the range of our behavior in cleaning or avoiding dirt. Dirt offends against order. In [its] final stage of total disintegration, dirt is utterly undifferentiated. Thus a cycle has been completed. Dirt was created by the differentiating activity of mind, it was a by-product of the creation of order. It started from a state of non-differentiation; all through the process of differentiating its role was to threaten the distinctions made; finally it returns to its true indiscriminable character. Formlessness is therefore an apt symbol of beginning and of growth as it is of decay.”
—Mary Douglas, Purity and Danger

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