Playwright Zora Howard goes over the script with Peter Gerety and Trevor Long during a rehearsal for Chautauqua Theater Company’s New Play Workshop ‘The Motions’ Wednesday in Roe Green Theater Center.
SOPHIA ROOKSBERRY
Staff Writer
Last year, Zora Howard arrived at Chautauqua Institution with a draft of a play called The Motions in hand. After spending some reflective weeks on the grounds reworking the script, she returned this season with the version that will be presented as the summer’s second New Play Workshop.
At 2 p.m. today in Bratton Theater, three characters will bring the script to life from behind music stands, allowing the audience to engage with and react to the story while Howard continues to refine her words.
Playwright Zora Howard goes over the script with Peter Gerety and Trevor Long during a rehearsal for Chautauqua Theater Company’s New Play Workshop ‘The Motions’ Wednesday in Roe Green Theater Center.
“There’s a lot to be learned in getting [The Motions] on its feet,” Howard said. “As much work as I can do on the page, it gets to a point where it needs to be animated, needs to be realized, and I think that’s what this week is going to be — a lot of discovery, a lot of playing around, a lot of figuring it out.”
The process of workshopping a play does not end with actors reading the words aloud for the first time. As the script is presented over the course of three days, the audience will also have its say in the version of the script that leaves Chautauqua at the end of the run.
“It’s not a production, so the audience is part of the development,” Howard said. “We gain intel, we learn what they respond to, where they lean in, where they lean back, where … their attention may wander. All of those things are bits and pieces of information that eventually find themselves in the fabric of the piece as I continue to refine and work on it.”
Joining Howard in this process of discovery is Keenan Tyler Oliphant, a former collaborator and the play’s director.
“It’s so sparse, but so full,” Oliphant said. “[Howard] is really trying to put life on stage in a way that is sort of observational and not necessarily plot-oriented … It’s only three characters, and not a lot is said, but a lot happens between the three of them.”
With few words, Howard’s script tells the story of a son who returns home to care for his estranged and ailing father, who already has an established rhythm with a home healthcare aide, played by Darlesia Cearcy.
“It’s a very attractive medium, the way that [Howard] has really emphasized the scene work,” Cearcy said. “There are motions that are repeated several different times. However, my … interactions with the fellow characters on stage can be exact or emphasized or different, and all of the choices are really unique from moment to moment, so there is so much latitude there and yet it is also very specific. There’s also a tremendous amount of silence, and I find that very interesting, too, because how do you convey the story in silence?”
This question is also what drives Oliphant as he approaches the directorial challenge of staging a reading that contains more silence than it does dialogue.
“As a director, that’s a fascinating prompt, to be able to create a language that exists outside of spoken language, and how that tension and that language develops over the course of the piece,” Oliphant said. “… I love a question. I love something that feels slightly impossible.”
The brevity of spoken word in The Motions is not only Howard’s way of encapsulating the dynamic of the characters and the weight of their specific moment, but it is also the space in which Howard anticipates the audience finding the most relatability.
“There are no big monologues in this one,” Howard said. “There’s no point where everybody is like, ‘This is the climax of the piece.’ It’s really just about these small, mundane, intimate moments between folks, which makes it quite universal, and … I think there will hopefully be some resonance with the audiences that come.”
Oliphant said he believes the audience will connect with the story through these moments of silence and also through the broader throughline of the play.
“It’s about grief and how we deal with grief and what grief does to us — preemptive grief and then actual grief,” Oliphant said. “… We as a society … need to spend more time investigating grief and what it means for us and how we notice it and what we do with it.”
This weekend, Chautauquans are invited to go through The Motions alongside a dedicated team of new play developers, in hopes of infusing feedback into the work while also experiencing some moments of introspection.
“I hope that the audience feels like … they are really able to understand the experience or identify with it, and I think that they will walk away with some highlight or a new perspective on the moments of our lives … [and] how pertinent they are,” Cearcy said. “Each moment is a very important moment.”
