Chautauqua Theater Company Producing Artistic Director Jade King Carroll, left, works with Tell Me You’re Dying (or the trial of millicent bonhomme) playwright C.A. Johnson during a table read Thursday in Turner Community Center.
Since 2005, Chautauqua Theater Company has endeavored to develop and produce new work; at the center of that endeavor are the New Play Workshops. At CTC’s first Theater Chat of the season Thursday in Smith Wilkes Hall, Producing Artistic Director Jade King Carroll pulled the curtain back on the work going on behind-the-scenes, both with CTC’s first NPW of 2024, Tell Me You’re Dying, and with the broader mission to develop new plays and offer growth opportunities for playwrights and directors.
Carroll sat down with Tell Me You’re Dying’s playwright C.A. Johnson, the play’s dramaturg, Otis Ramsey-Zoe, and Britt Berke, a directing fellow collaborating on the workshop, and explored the play’s development process, explained the importance of audience feedback, and answered questions from Chautauquans. There will be a Theater Chat at 12:15 p.m. every Thursday at Smith Wilkes Hall.
When Carroll was appointed head of CTC following the 2022 season, a grant from the New York State Council on the Arts provided a chance for CTC to commission a playwright, and she immediately thought of Johnson. A Brooklyn-based playwright originally from Louisiana, Johnson spent several days on the grounds last season writing her play and finished it after six months.
Her play is the first of three New Play Workshops this season; the remaining performances are at 4 p.m. Saturday and at 2:30 p.m. Sunday in Bratton Theater.
“This season and next season really gives the audiences a treat of a sneak peek, and it gives the playwright something that’s so necessary in being able to play with how it’s staged, how it looks, and how some of it might be designed before committing to what that full production is,” said Carroll, who is also directing Tell Me You’re Dying.
This season, CTC is also partnering with The Drama League, a theater company based in New York City focused on training rising theater professionals, and allowing three directing fellows and four design fellows to experience hands-on training in a professional theater setting.
“We’re really meeting plays at every stage of their life cycle, and I just think that is thrilling,” Carroll said. “So many companies have shuttered in the past few years since the pandemic, from The Lark, to Sundance’s playwriting, to Humana, to more recently SPACE on Ryder Farm. So many others across the country are getting rid of or scaling back their new play development. It is an honor, and I think a necessity, that we fill what is becoming a void in new play development.”
In past years, NPWs were staged, produced with design and technical support. With Carroll, CTC is using a more fluid, less-produced model, focusing more on the text and the needs of each playwright and project.
Johnson, who feels privileged to work directly with CTC guest and conservatory actors to workshop her play, said the best part about the development stage of a work is letting the audience in.
“I think that when you’re in that developmental stage, when you’re trying to figure out what the work is, the best audience is always the audience of people who want to be a part of it, and want to be able to ask questions of it and help me move it, and so I’m really excited,” Johnson said.
She first met Ramsey-Zoe, a dramaturg and theater arts educator, while working on a project at Sundance Institute in Morocco, and the two have collaborated on Tell Me You’re Dying throughout the writing, rehearsal, and workshop process.
For Ramsey-Zoe, the continual workshopping process has been rewarding; though he said a script is never fully “done.”
“What excites me about dramaturgy is that it is always an opportunity to inquire and an opportunity to collect information,” he said. “Then, the sort of unfinished or undoneness of that play is information, and then that information, even if you never get to come back to that play, goes into the next one.”
In the past two years, CTC has started running preview performances for each mainstage production, like many regional and professional theaters, to allow audiences to respond and give feedback at the end of the show. Carroll said including audiences in the conversation is crucial to theater development, and she has put a rehearsal in between each NPW performance so the cast can adjust to the audience’s reaction.
“What you see on Friday very well might be different than what you see on Sunday because we’ll learn something from where you laugh, where you don’t laugh, where the audience starts shifting, where they lean back or lean in,” Carroll said. “We’re watching (the audience) in relationships and listening to you in relationships, and I think it is an integral part of the process.”
This work, as NPWs have been for years, is possible through support from the Roe Green Foundation — and in order to expand new play development even further, the Roe Green Foundation has made a $4.5 million commitment for a new, centralized, and state-of-the-art CTC facility. As the theater season continues on with its workshop and mainstage productions, Carroll said she is honored to bring the community together with new plays.
“It is a year of returning and community, and I think it definitely feels good and I think it’s meeting the moment,” Carroll said.
