“The Bone Wars” Director Liz Fisher speaks with fellow theater professionals during a networking event for Chautauqua Theater Company’s second annual Industry Weekend Saturday in 2 Ames.
SOPHIA ROOKSBERRY
Staff Writer
Saturday boasted the most robust schedule of Chautauqua Theater Company’s Summer Season programming to date. From 10 a.m. to 10 p.m., CTC hosted four productions in Bratton Theater and Roe Green Theater Center to be enjoyed by members of the community, as well as theater professionals who were on the grounds for the second annual Industry Weekend.
“We have an annual festival down at our theater company that offers full productions and readings at the same time, so there was a similar element, but what’s interesting is [CTC] is doing these … enhanced readings where they are staging them,” Matt Stabile, producing artistic director for Theatre Lab at Florida Atlantic University, said. “We just launched into that with our festival last year, so I was curious how they were making that work and it gave me a lot of ideas to bring back to our theater.”
Chautauqua Theater Company Guest Actor Jo Lampert and Managing Director Emily Glinick converse outside 2 Ames.
The Theatre Lab in Boca Raton, Florida, is entirely focused on new play development, which made a weekend dedicated to the new work of CTC an intriguing place for Stabile to brainstorm and engage with other innovative industry members.
“I think new work is always exciting, and I think the way this community was embracing new work was super exciting for me,” Stabile said. “All three performances I saw today were full, and … that’s really great, for a community to be investing in plays that aren’t completely finished yet … but they are excited about where they’re going.”
The three productions Stabile saw on Saturday were The Motions by Zora Howard, The Bone Wars by Sarah Saltwick and ERASERS: A Bloodthirsty Comedy by Jenny Connell Davis. Stabile also saw the world premiere of Best for Baby by Sharyn Rothstein on Friday night, allowing him to witness the entire new work life cycle at CTC.
Another Industry Weekend visitor who was in the audience for all four productions was playwright and performer Joanna Castle Miller. In a mere 24 hours, Castle Miller gained a holistic understanding of CTC and said she was captivated by the workshopping process.
“What was really impressive to me was that it was so bespoke to what the project needed,” Castle Miller said. “It felt like some people were able to put in a lot of time with something that was a very early draft, all the way to working on something that seemed more or less where it needed to be, and then they made massive changes very quickly. It depended on what the playwright needed and what the show needed. That was really exciting because most places have a set way of doing things that does not necessarily work with the playwright’s process.”
Ashley Olive Teague, founding artistic director of Notch Theatre Company, returned to Chautauqua this weekend after directing projects with CTC in 2017 and 2020, which all came after her first summer as a directing fellow in 2016. Teague’s experience with the fellowship occurred before the company’s relationship with Drama League expanded it to include a playwright partnership.
“The main way that I, as a director, get work is through my relationships with playwrights, so getting to foster that and have space to cultivate that, and for all the actors here to have access to playwrights … feels like a really important aspect of professionalizing for the students here,” Teague said.
Although Teague had not yet seen the season’s first mainstage production, she was nevertheless struck by the scope of the readings she saw on Saturday.
“[The pieces] really span quite broad genres,” Teague said. “… I was saying to someone after the second show, ‘I forget that the shows here are so smart, because the community just loves to think and be in discourse … I forgot that I was going to be thinking so much.’ You don’t get to just sit back and let it wash over you. Even the third one I saw, which is a farce [and] high comedy and very silly … is also trying to have an important conversation.”
These conversations also extend to the relationships built among professionals visiting for the weekend. Teague said she met nearly half of the actors who contribute to Notch Theatre Company while working at Chautauqua, so she was excited to return and continue meeting artists whose creativity was supported by CTC and the Institution as a whole.
“It’s so important to have those spaces where people can try things in early stages and write new pages and get feedback on them,” Teague said. “There’s not a lot of spaces that do that while also offering the production value … It’s really impressive that [CTC] has both the resources of the literary process and dramaturgy, as well as the design and the production support to really honor the work and to let people really see it, because if you just have one or the other, you’re not really getting to fully envision what it could be, so that’s really special.”
