The creative process – behind the scenes of Ripening
We have been so fortunate to be recipients of the Kingston Arts Cultural Development Fund, from the City of Kingston, to develop our new play Ripening. This play had its first development last year, which culminated in a staged reading directed by Melanie Hillman at La Mama Theatre as part of the Explorations season. It is a transformative, timely new play about what it takes to become a mother.
As a Kingston local, I have really enjoyed being able to work locally with my team to develop Ripening ahead of its premiere season at Gasworks Arts Park at the end of May. The actors and I have been working in the Kingston Arts Centre to further refine the script and explore the characters, as well as tighten the rhythm of the writing and experiment with staging ideas for scenes.
One of the areas that can be hard to explore and develop, yet has a huge impact on the shape of a new work, is the set design. However, the KAC grant program allowed us a rare opportunity to undertake a set design workshop to explore our ideas in a theatre space. This has allowed us to ensure we are on the right path, before spending money and investing too much time in a design idea that might not work.
Because I have written and directed this play, I am able to respond to the ideas of my collaborators, which sometimes means if a designer comes up with something that is really strong, I can edit or adjust the writing to allow the idea to grow. But, like with writing for the stage, this sort of exploration requires time and space to workshop. It’s a risk to mess with the script once in rehearsal (particularly for me because I am trying to leave the writer behind when I’m directing or it can become difficult to stop writing and rewriting in the room). In the case of Ripening, as the writer I had put in place an image of an apple tree hanging upside down and a couple of moments of apples magically dropping into the hands of the lead character. As a director, I was nervous about how to bring these to life. Luckily, the set designer Sarah Tulloch came up with a design concept that not only made these images unnecessary, it also potentially solved problems later in the play that required very theatrical staging.
The idea Sarah came up with involved some light, white gauze curtains hanging from the grid. I loved the idea and what it could offer us – with the right light, it could create angular lines and shadow, it could also look very warm and womb-like, but could also transform to a clinical feel instantly. Then we started to dream about how the actors might interact with the curtains and use them strategically to highlight moments in the story, and choreographically to depict some of the heightened aspects of the story, as well as creating architecture and specific locations.
There was an issue though: if we had to wait until tech to see if it would work, would that be too late? And what if it didn’t work the way we imagined? We knew our tech time at Gasworks would be incredibly tight, so we needed to be absolutely sure we wouldn’t be wasting time on ideas that might be full of the wrong kind of surprises.
Luckily for us, we were able to gain access to the theatre at the Kingston Arts Centre to explore Sarah’s beautiful set design idea. With the support of the theatre staff, we hung some light gauze curtains in the theatre space and had a couple of hours to see what shapes we could create, what images and symbolic ideas we could generate. Something that often helps when there are endless possibilities is to create some rules – this workshop time allowed us to do just that. We experimented with how the use of the curtains could help mirror the stages of labour, with the movement of the curtains increasing as the play went on, reaching their most heightened usage during the labour and birth scene for the central character. This workshop allowed us to uncover the dramaturgical function of the set and explore how it could give the audience a sensorial experience of what the central character was going through.
These kinds of workshops are very rare and a huge gift. We are very grateful to Kingston Arts for supporting artists to explore and develop ambitious new work through the Arts Development Grant program. Having the opportunity to work in a theatre space to workshop design elements means artists can innovate and experiment more boldly, and ultimately create something that is compelling and new for audiences. Because these themes – becoming a mother, birth trauma and empowering births – are rarely depicted on stage, it was important to us to find innovative ways of exploring them that would help audiences get inside the experiences of the characters. Good design hopefully provides a portal for the audience to enter into the world of the play, but I feel that great design provides a portal for the audience to experience the heart of the play. In the case of Ripening, Sarah’s design helps us move beyond the objective facts and statistics about the play’s issues and takes us deep inside the experience, to help the audience understand what the play is really about.
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