Tuesday, April 21, 2009

Interview with Lauren Brotman: Erna (Part I)

How did you go about developing your character? Did you do any research?

My approach to my character was in some ways similar and in some ways very different to my usual approach. In preparing for a role, I always seek to find out as many specifics about the world and the character as possible, to make it more real for me. This process began with reading the book, which is a luxury that one doesn’t normally have, and also a challenge. What presented a challenge was that the book was mainly told through the perspective of Nini so I really had to translate her experience into my own for Erna, and make as much out of the details as I could. The novel is filled with rich imagery and details about the Karpel family and their Viennese/Shanghai experience. The world became very clear and real for me. While reading the book, I took about 10 pages of notes, of things that may become useful to me later.

The next thing I did was read and re-read the script, marking down any initial impulses I had about the scenes and character. Then, I began my character work. I went through the script line by line, writing down the lines I say about other characters, the lines I say about myself, and the lines others say about me (about 13 pages). This gave me a huge amount of insight into my character—her values, beliefs, fears, wants, needs, and her relationships with every single character in the play. After that I created a timeline of Erna’s life, from the time she was born, until the end of the play. Some of these were things I gleaned from the book and script, others were made up so I could make her real for myself as an actor.

Next, I began text work which involves writing down all my lines, paraphrasing them into my own words, and writing down their subtext—that is, what Erna really means when she says each line. I then asked myself what are the needs and wants of Erna for each line, and what does she want to do the person she is speaking to. These 36 pages gave me even more insight, and it’s also a great way of becoming familiar with the lines! From here, I will breathe it all in, trust that the work is in me, let it go, and discover new things in the moment I get into the rehearsal space with the rest of my ensemble.

What did you get out of the process of developing the script? Can you describe the workshop process so far?

I love the workshop process. My experience is much different than the rest of the Ten Green Bottles team because I only came into the process last month for a one day workshop. I felt like I had a really thin essence of the play compared to everyone else who had been with the play for months. As well, the characters had been mainly developed through improvisations, and the text I had to work with came from someone else’s experience. This made the experience more like a traditional rehearsal period where you’re given a script, which is great because you have a bigger resource pool of choices, but also presents a challenge because I felt the character was so far from who I am as a person. She is thoughtful and quietly passionate, while I think my choices may have been much more explosive—but what a wonderful opportunity for me to play someone so far from who I am, and make her my own!

The one workshop day I took part in brought us all onto the same page; as an ensemble, and as characters. The cast and director and the rest of the Ten Green Bottles team made me feel incredibly welcome, and as though I had been part of the experience from the first day. We did some text work, which gave me a much richer connection to the material and we did some improvisations, which allowed me to contribute my own voice to Erna, and with the other characters, and solidified even more my relationships to the ensemble, both in and out of the play. We explored the movement vocabulary of the piece and of our characters, which I think is essential when telling this kind of a story, where we don’t have the time to tell a 30 year story with words only.


Tuesday, April 14, 2009

About the Author

Vivian Jeanette Kaplan was born in Shanghai. When she was two years old, her family immigrated to Canada, settling in Toronto where Vivian studied English, French and Spanish. Ten Green Bottles, which tells her own true family saga, is her first book.

Monday, April 13, 2009

Interview with Vivan Kaplan, Award-Winning Author of Ten Green Bottles: Part II

Why did you choose to tell the story from your mother’s perspective?

Right from the start, the words came to my mind through thoughts of my mother as if she were reflecting on the pivotal events of her life. I began to write in her voice, and in the present tense, not as a story that she might tell me, but how it would be to really relive the years from 1921-1949. How did she feel when those many experiences befell her? Only by projecting myself into her skin and her mind, delving into her senses, could I begin to understand what she had endured. I knew about her life to a great extent, from family stories and anecdotes over my lifetime and I knew her, the motivations and reactions that she would have had in various circumstances. In order to flesh out the events and bring the images to life, I researched considerably into the historical timeline, incidents occurring around her that impacted on her actions and I spoke to others worldwide who had had similar experiences to verify different aspects. As my mother was still alive at that time, I was able to ask her for specific descriptions and details that were unclear to me, and she obliged with her recollections. Then in my own style, I imagined one scene at a time and did my best to recreate it in words as precisely as possible. For dialogue, I created the reasonable expressions of the characters whom I personally knew with added insights that I, as author, wanted to provide.

What kind of reception has the book received since it was published?

I think that it is important to mention my husband, Barry Kaplan. His involvement was crucial in the amazing reception and success of Ten Green Bottles. After the book had been published in Canada by a small press, Robin Brass Studio, in 2002, he decided that the book had significant literary merit and appeal and took on the role as agent for me. He was able to have it republished as a new work in the U.S. by a major publisher, St. Martin’s Press, and also in translation in Hungary. As a result the book was catapulted onto a broader international scale. It then was translated again and published in Germany and Italy.

In 2003 Ten Green Bottles won the Canadian Jewish Book Award. In 2007 the Italian edition won the ADEI-WIZO Literary Award which I received at a lavish presentation in Florence. The world premiere of the stage adaptation will take place at the Al Green Theatre in Toronto in May 2009. In the interim I have had the opportunity to speak to many groups of people, now in the thousands, in numerous venues around Canada, the U.S. and internationally. Book sales are steady and interest in the story and the creative aspects continue to expand. I receive a regular stream of emails in praise of the book and I am delighted to say that both professional and personal reviews have been excellent. I could not have possibly asked for a better response to this first book and I am grateful to all who have helped in its continuing success.

Interview with Vivian Kaplan, Award-Winning Author of Ten Green Bottles: Part I


Why did you decide to write a book based on your parents’ experiences during the war?

Many stories have surfaced regarding Holocaust experiences, full of struggle, loss and survival. I did, however, realize that my own family’s story was not at all widely known. Most people whom I had encountered were completely unaware that about 20,000 Jewish refugees had fled from the Nazi demons in Europe, escaped from the terrors and pending death in concentration camps and gas chambers, and found a bizarre hiding place in Shanghai, China. My family was among them. When my mother reached the milestone of eighty years, I decided that it was time that her unique and compelling life story should be recorded. It was up to me to fulfill that legacy.

When I started to put the words on paper, or actually on the computer screen, I realized that her biography, tied together with my father’s experiences and other close family members, was a tale that had more significance than I had originally imagined. As the poignant and powerful images unfolded through my writing, I felt that the world at large should know about their lives. I was determined that the book should be professionally published.

Can you describe your writing process? Can you describe the process of now seeing their story adapted for the stage?

The writing, including intensive research, was a long and mostly solitary endeavour that took six years. The book materialized page by page, image by image until I felt confident that the story was told to the best of my capability and as engrossing as possible. It was an emotional roller-coaster for me as I sifted the young days of my family while flipping through albums of sepia photos. My father had already passed away before I began to write and it was, to a great extent, memories of him, his words and insights that spun in my mind and presented me with a muse. His life and my mother’s were separate threads that eventually intertwined into a stronger rope that would keep them together throughout many tribulations. With smiles and tears I was able to recapture the tumultuous episodes that I had heard about in my childhood and upbringing. As the story developed, I "met" my grandparents who had died before I was born, and learned more about the personalities of all my family members than I had expected.

With the stage adaptation of Ten Green Bottles, the book has taken a life of its own. Now the real people, who are the central characters, are gone, but their memory and spirits will live on in a new way. The audience is transported back in time to the gaiety of pre-war Vienna, the lilting strains of the waltz, bustling cafes and snowy ski slopes. But Vienna changes as the Nazis take over and fear becomes tangible. Then they are flung into the mysterious, heavily pungent world of Shanghai, replete with opium dens and rickshaws, an exotic land where law is non-existent and survival is a daily challenge. Through the skill, creativity and imagination of the director, Mark Cassidy, and cast of highly sensitive and talented actors, new aspects continue to evolve. Themes expressed in the book have become springboards to other thoughts. The dramatization brings the saga of the protagonists to realization beyond the words that I wrote. It is a tribute to the actual lives and memories that is at the heart of this thrilling development.

Thursday, April 9, 2009

Mark Cassidy's Bio

Mark has a reputation for creating adventurous, thought provoking theatre. As co-artistic director of Threshold Theatre, Mark has devised and directed a number of innovative projects including, As I Lay Dying, In The Language of Love, White Buildings, Beautiful Losers, That Time, Howl, The Hairy Ape, Forms of Devotion, Terror and Kafka and Son. Collaborations with other Toronto companies have included Five Fingers, Tunnel and Whitewash (Platform 9), The Lost Supper (Shadowland Theatre), Borderline and The Dershowitz Protocol (DMT Productions), The Secret of Gabi's Dresser & The Shop on Main Street (Te-Amim), The Demonstration (Theatre Direct), The Pirate Widow Cheng (Puppetmongers) and Crush (Optic Heart). Mark recently directed: The Misfit, written and performed by Anita Majumdar at Theatre Passe Muraille. Upcoming projects include: i don't want to be inside me anymore, based on the writings of German autistic, Birger Sellin, being performed May 22-28 at Artscape Wychwood Barns (Threshold/New Adventures in Sound Art) , The City in which I Love You, part one of Threshold's SPRAWL and, Swan Song of Maria: A Tragic Fairy Tale by Carol Cece Anderson. Last year, Mark was nominated for a Dora Mavor Moore Award for Outstanding Direction, and for the Siminovitch Prize for excellence in Theatre Directing. This year, Mark was nominated for the John Hirsch Award in Directing.

Wednesday, April 8, 2009

Interview with Mark Cassidy (Playwright/Director): Part II

The script was in development for over a year. Can you describe this process? How did the actors contribute to the development of the script?

I did a treatment of the book on my own which I brought to the team for our first script development workshop. I described my goals to the actors at this point as follows: to begin the work of creating a dynamic ensemble for this show, to create three dimensional characters for the play - both individually and as a family, to discover what the essential story of this book is for us as a group, to explore different ways to best express this story, to collectively research the period of the story and process it through discussion and improvisation. And that is pretty much how the first week unfolded. We did a series of movement, improvisation, and character exercises building the sense of ensemble and creating possible scenes. As a group, we wrote out scenes and images on cue cards then improvised freely on them in various sequences, experimenting with theatrical forms, the dream-like possibilities of the work. Each actor was put through an intensive solo interview by the group to allow them to create subtext for scenes which were not fully described in the book. I also asked the actors to each prepare their own idea for how to bring a scene from the book to life, with surprises in it and each actor directed the others in these scenes. At the end we strung everything all together in one crazy improv of the whole book, which of course was hugely complicated and epic, but also inspired and filled with possibilities. Some of the verbal and physical improvs were recorded for future reference.

Then I went away and did some more work on the script myself. Many different versions. The second workshop we continued to work physically but did more around the table hashing out of scenes... we each took scenes home and worked on them and presented them to the group engaging in energetic discussions and debates on what was working and not. With the help of assistant director, Esther Jun, I continued to transcribe scenes from actor improvs, preserving the character rhythms but boiling them down to the most important conflicts. Since this second workshop, the script has gone through lots more revision on the computer with many helpful comments from entire creative team, including the author of the book, Vivian Kaplan.

Why did you decide to focus on the story of the four siblings and Poldi? We frequently hear them discuss Mama, for example, but we never actually see her. What other artistic decisions did you make, and why?

I made this decision early on, in response to the question of what or who, is essential, in our stage version. With a film obviously you can include everyone, but in plays, you need to explore how many people are really needed to tell the story. It doesn't bother me when I don't see a character who is always being referred to. Sometimes the limitations of theatre allow an audience's imagination in, rather than doing all the work for them. I am a firm believer in the quickness of an audience's intelligence and look for ways to engage and intrigue without spelling everything out. Another artistic decision which was made in terms of the adapatation was to make all the text active, dramatic. As tempting as it was to tell the story in the same way Vivian does in the book, ultimately it felt right to allow the audience to experience the story along with the actors, not just have them telling it after the fact.

The events of the play happened over 60 years ago. Why was it important to you to tell this story? What do you hope that young people will learn?

Whether you are dealing with events a thousand years or two weeks ago, to me, theatre is always about now. It it is about the reality unfolding between the audience and presenters in relationship to the source material. I am in theatre because I have faith that it can make the world a better place, that, however consciously or subconsciously, it can help promote imagination, empathy, and a sense of community. Theatre invites the question, where am I in all this? I will never forget reading a book by Samantha Power called "A Problem from Hell: America and the Age of Genocide, during which the global community's persistent failure to act on genocides occuring in the world, was described as a failure of the imagination. In situation after situation during the twentieth century, neither people nor their politicians, could fathom, imagine or empathize with, the pain of others being targeted for nothing other than their creed, skin tone or culture, so did nothing to stop murder on a mass scale. I believe theatre encourages us to better understand certain events and therefore make better choices in the ongoing improvisations of our own lives. War in general, and the Holocaust in particular, are aspects of history many people would rather ignore. But as individuals, and as a civilization, we really can't afford to not go there. We need to struggle with what humankind is capable of, both in our evil acts toward each other as well as in our acts of great compassion, courage and love. As I said above, Ten Green Bottles is a story about life against death... a family struggling to survive as the dark clouds of fascism and terror gather over them, testing their resourcefulness and powers of endurance again and again, as they dream of a better future. For me, that makes it an important story to tell.

Tuesday, April 7, 2009

An Interview with Mark Cassidy (Playwright/Director): Part I


What are some of the most interesting/important aspects of the story for you?

Thematically, I am interested in the whole notion of survival - life vs. death. I am drawn to the mystery of what allows some individuals to pull through an experience while others do not. One part of this formula, which I hear survivors refer to again and again is fate, luck. But what else?.... inner resolve, faith, imagination, courage? How is it that "bottle" after "bottle" of a family's world, what they hold dear, can be shattered and yet they endure?

Another really important aspect of the book for me is the notion of family - that somehow the whole is greater than the sum of its parts. Lately, a question I have been reflecting on in developing the script is, is it necessary to shut down your own sense of vulnerability or open-ness, in order to make it through your struggle with dark forces. How hardened, how bottled-up emotionally, must you become? And once you have come through the oppressive experience and regained your freedom, is it ever possible again to express these feelings you've been holding in? Is it possible ever again to trust?

What elements of the novel were challenging to adapt to the stage?

The book is very strong on plot, visual description and evoking the inner thoughts of the narrator, Nini. The contrasting worlds of Vienna and Shanghai create an amazing backdrop for the story of the Karpel family as they struggle to survive the situations thrust upon them in wartorn countries in Europe and the Far East. What we needed to do to turn it into a play was get inside each of the main characters and focus on the drama of the events which are being depicted. Throughout the process of adaptation, we asked what is potentially theatrical here, what is essential, can this be expressed more effectively through text, movement, set, sound, music, lighting? Being truthful to the book was not a question of simply cutting and pasting chunks of narration and having characters utter it on stage but rather absorbing the story and reinterpreting it with our own style and sense of theatrical truth.