In mid-spring, after Studio had programmed Bryony Lavery’s play Dirt as its Studio Lab production of the 2012-2013 Season, Artistic Director David Muse—who is also directing the play—received an email from British writer Lavery. The two had already been in conversation about a pair of characters in the script, sisters who were late additions to the draft that Studio read for season planning. The email read in part, “April and May? I’m still havering. I am very sure I need to have a major brilliant idea on it if they are to stay. Here’s what I’m wondering at the moment. Is there more heat and drama in considering two new characters...a Mum for Harper? ...And a woman/man who has some sort of relationship with Elle...a therapist? So...the dirt of Harper’s death is contained and therefore spread within the existing lives of our first three?”
When Studio committed to Lavery’s stylish and sexy exploration of the mess people make of themselves and their relationships, the play featured five characters: a woman who was about to die, her increasingly frustrated boyfriend, the waitress who served them on their last date, and two sisters whose story ran parallel to the other, and whose argument about the deserved fate of the human race laced through the unfolding action. But following Lavery’s email and this summer’s week-long workshop, the play now features a slightly different line-up—the couple, their waitress, and two entirely new characters: May, now a scientist who is also Harper’s mother and Guy, a massage/energy therapist.
Artistic Director David Muse conceived the Studio Lab to support exactly this style of experimentation. “We’re definitely embracing the laboratory nature of the process,” says Muse. “Making a play is a matter of getting very talented people into a room and meeting the questions of the play with a spirit of curiosity and discovery. The actors are ready and game. Designer Debra Booth has created a set that has room to evolve during our rehearsals. Bryony is an incredibly smart writer. We’re ready to learn what this play wants to be.”
For her part, playwright Lavery couldn’t be more excited to make more discoveries about the play on its feet. Along with raising two new figures from the ashes of the sisters, she has tweaked the language and tone of some exchanges, spiced up an affair (look for the new arugula scene in the restaurant basement), shifted the placement of the discovery of Harper’s body in the second act, and woven the two newest characters into the thematic fabric of the play.
Ultimately 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—and, in Lavery’s hands, sublime—processes of decay and regeneration. And it’s in this collision between the human impulse towards invulnerability and the inevitability of nature’s cycles that she locates the core of what it means to be human. “At root,” says Lavery, “Dirt is about what of us is base and corporeal and messy and what is…soul—the interface between our external, messy, decaying bodies and our internal souls and minds.”
—Adrien-Alice Hansel