Question 2:  LOCATION OF FIRST ROMANTIC ENCOUNTER

Question 3: LOCATION OF FIRST SEXUAL ENCOUNTER

Question 4: TIME BETWEEN ANSWERS TO QUESTIONS 3 AND/OR 4 BEFORE THIS EVALUATION

Inspired by real-life “Love Clauses” that dictate the nature and extent of office relationships, Contractions questions what people might willingly surrender for job security, and how much humanity one can really trade for profitability. In one scene, Emma’s manager asks her a series of increasingly personal questions about a relationship she’s started up. Studio Theatre Literary Director Adrien-Alice Hansel spoke with stage manager Eric Arnold about creating the form the actor fills out during the course of that scene.

What, in general, does a Stage Manager do during rehearsals?  How does that change when a show is in production?
In general, a Stage Manager serves as the link between the cast, the director, the designers, and the production staff. They maintain the rehearsal room and keep the director on schedule throughout the process. Whether collecting props or costumes for rehearsal, the Stage Manager does whatever he or she can to facilitate an environment where the directors and actors can flourish. When a show moves to the production phase, the stage manager calls all the light, sound, and backstage actions. In addition to setting the stage every night, the SM is also tasked with maintaining the quality of the production. Shows evolve over long runs, and the SM needs to keep a watchful eye and make sure all the moving pieces of a play stay in the same line they were in when it opened.
 
Can you talk a little about developing the “Preliminary Official Dual Employee Relationship Filing” and “Scoring” sheets? Did you work with the actor who has to fill them out?

In several of the scenes, the Manager is taking notes about Emma's answers. Since the company is so heavily reliant on efficiency, I thought it was important that her paperwork be specific as well. Since there (hopefully) isn't a document this extreme in real life, I wanted to give Holly [Twyford] something close to what it might be in our world. I came up with the original design after a few conversations, and Holly's given a lot of great thoughts about what would be most helpful to her.

What other choice props have you crafted while in the line of duty?
The creativity a stage manager needs is one of the most important qualities in rehearsals. While I'm always trying to think ahead and anticipate where a director's thoughts might go, it's impossible to anticipate everything. There are times when a director wants to try a prop idea out immediately and it's up to me to whip something up to simulate the real thing. Extra sheets of paper from a legal pad, a pair of scissors and some tape can go a long way. While paper props give an SM the most ability to have a little fun with the writing, it's important to know where the line is. Writing something too funny or out there might become a distraction. I worked with an actor playing a tailor recently. When he decided his character would always wear a thimble and I didn't have a real one in the rehearsal space, I crafted one out of paper and tape. He wore it for the rest of the rehearsal process, even after I offered him a real metal one.
 
What is the most rewarding part of your job?
I would say the most rewarding part of my job comes once the show has opened. For me, calling the light and sound cues, especially a complicated sequence, is the most rewarding. Getting the timing of button presses between two and sometimes three different people is a tough thing to nail. Audiences may only notice lights and sound subconsciously, so a timing error or missed cue is incredibly noticeable because of how it disrupts the flow. Bloody Bloody Andrew Jackson [at 2ndStage in Summer 2012] was some of the most rewarding nights as a stage manager I've had. Each song had its own set of cues that needed calling not only on the right line but also the right beat in the music. Shows will have a sequence that seemed impossible to call on the first day of tech, but with repetition and knowledge of the cues and what they do, it becomes easier and more rewarding as you see how a cue called a fraction of a second later has a drastic effect on the look of the show. An average audience member might never notice until I make a mistake, and that's why I find it to be so important and rewarding.

Artistic Team

Director: Duncan Macmillan
Set Design: Luciana Stecconi
Lighting Design: Colin K. Bills
Costume Design: Brandee Mathies
Sound Design: James Garver
Stage Manager: Eric Arnold

Cast

Manager: Holly Twyford
Emma: Alyssa Wilmoth Keegan

 

 

 

 

About the Playwright

 

Mike Bartlett is an acclaimed British playwright. His plays include the Olivier Award-winning Cock (Royal Court Theatre, 2009; Off Broadway, 2012); Love, Love, Love (Paines Plough/Theatre Royal Plymouth/Royal Court); 13 (National Theatre); Earthquakes in London (National Theatre); Artefacts (Bush Theatre); My Child (Royal Court); and his new stage adaptation of the Academy Award winning film Chariots of Fire. The play opened at Hampstead Theatre in May 2012 to critical acclaim. Contractions premiered at the Royal Court in 2008.

 

Mike Bartlett wrote Contractions on a bit of a dare. He and fellow playwright Duncan Macmillan formed the writers’ collective The Apathists in 2006 with the express purpose of pushing themselves to write pieces they might not be able to in other environments. At one meeting Duncan suggested Mike write a longer piece: a full one-act play. Contractions—receiving its US premiere at Studio under Duncan’s direction—is the result.

Here’s how Mike tells the story of their collaborations:

I’ve known Duncan since 2004 when we were participants of the Royal Court Theatre Young Writers Programme. We subsequently both became members of Kevin Spacey’s inaugural New Voices company at the Old Vic Theatre. Duncan and I formed a writers’ collective, The Apathists, with four other playwrights from the Royal Court and Old Vic. The Guardian called The Apathists ‘one of the most important groups of the period’ and said that we ‘had an immediate impact’.

The creative purpose of the group was to challenge ourselves and each other to write in a way we otherwise wouldn’t. One of those challenges was to write a one-act play, for which I wrote Contractions. The play was subsequently performed on BBC Radio, under the title Love Contract, before being produced at the Royal Court Theatre.

Being a member of The Apathists collective has had a significant impact on my writing and if it wasn’t for the group I wouldn’t have written Contractions. So it feels appropriate that the play will be receiving its US premiere under Duncan’s direction, and at the theatre which staged the world premiere of Duncan’s play Lungs to great acclaim.

This will be the latest in a series of collaborations between Duncan and myself, first at the Old Vic and for The Apathists, and then for Paines Plough’s LATER series at the Trafalgar Studios in the West End where Duncan curated and directed short pieces of mine and for which we collaborated on a full-length stage play, An Object. We’ve also become trusted first-readers for each other’s plays.

 

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In His Own Words: Mike Bartlett

People being awful to each other is very entertaining.

When I got to university I would read plays and go ‘but these are about the past. Where are the plays that I love about now?’  I couldn’t find them, so I started writing…Whatever the world is, that’s what I’m after.

Theatre will become popular and less elitist is if we stop thinking of the audience in theatre as being in some way different or of a different class or of a different intellectual capability and we realise that actually the best theatre that we see is often the one that appeals to the most people. Brecht has said the same thing. That’s what I think, that’s always what I’m going to aim for.

 Plays, in order to be political, need to strive to get people to think about the systems that are behind our life. And you don’t do that by showing the whole system. I think at the moment this is what I’m thinking; you do it by showing the problem and then encouraging the audience to work back themselves and not presenting you as a writer as either left or right, as that inevitably then gives you a safety net. You think that despite what the characters say, or what the play does – this is coming from a left perspective or this is coming from a right perspective. I think it’s far more interesting and it trusts people’s intelligence much more if you don’t let them know what, as a writer, your perspective is. But you encourage the characters to be absolutely political in what they’re doing and in the way you set it up, you encourage the thoughts about the play to be political. To me, that encourages people to perhaps work towards political change better than just saying ‘here’s an ideology – that’s what I think.’ Or ‘here’s an ideology that I don’t agree with.’ That doesn’t give any room for anyone to do any thought, and they’ve got to think – that’s got to be what’s going on.
 

About the Play

Emma’s boss is concerned that she is in breach of contract. Good jobs are scarce. How far will Emma go to keep hers? The US premiere of an ink-black satire from one of Britain’s most provocative writers.

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Mike Bartlett

Inspired by real-life “Love Clauses” that dictating the nature and extent of office relationships, Contractions questions what people might willingly surrender for job security, and how much humanity one can really trade for profitability. This mordant satire is a sharp and near-plausible look at the effects of eroding privacy whose ultimate target keeps shifting.

Bartlett considers his work political, but not on a polemic level. Instead, his work finds theatrical ways to embody the absurdism and ambiguities of contemporary life. In the words of Ben Power, an Associate Director at London’s National Theatre who served as a dramaturg on several of Bartlett’s plays, Bartlett “is interested to an almost unique degree in how you can make political theatre theatrically vibrant.”

Or as Bartlett himself puts it: “Plays, in order to be political, need to strive to get people to think about the systems that are behind our life. And you don’t do that by showing the whole system; you do it by showing the problem and then encouraging the audience to work back themselves. I think it’s far more interesting—and trusts people’s intelligence much more—if you don’t let them know what, as a writer, your perspective is."

“So you encourage the characters to be absolutely political in what they’re doing and in the way you set it up,” he explains. “You encourage the thoughts about the play to be political. To me, that encourages people to perhaps work towards political change better than just saying ‘Here’s an ideology—that’s what I think.’ Or ‘Here’s an ideology I don’t agree with.’ That doesn’t give any room for anyone to do any thought, and they’ve got to think—that’s got to be what’s going on.”