The Mill 6 T Plays: Behind the Scenes Video

Barlow Adamson who, by the way, read brilliantly for the part of JP in the Boston Playwright Theater's Ground Floor New Plays Series reading of Highland Center, Indiana, put together this video about the process that goes behind making The T Plays. This is really it. For those of you who somehow have the notion that theater is all glamor and Hollywood, this might change your mind. Although you still don't get the sense of the butterflies the size of wombats in your stomach, the mind-numbing fatigue that you usually have to push through due to sleep deprivation, or the bad food that usually accompanies putting together a show.

Mill 6 Collaborative's The T Plays run for two more nights. I'm heading in this evening, meeting my daughter, Allison, at New York Pizza first (no one works at The Factory Theater without making a stop there; I forgot who said that) and then off to the show.

Break a leg Derek Fraser and Matt Chapuran. Here are those two talented actors, courtesy of Meg Taintor Photography, playing in Striking Out the Peanut Man, a play that takes place on the D line of the T.

The Mill 6 T Plays: Like a Song Stuck in My Head

I can't seem to turn it off. It's like when a song gets stuck in your head. I get on the T and instead of just sitting back and enjoying the ride, I immediately look around and try to match people up with stories. Or try to figure things out. Like tonight, why the guy across from me with the religious medallions kept periodically sucking his teeth. Or what was up with the kid a few seats down from him, dressed in what I'm sure he thought was business attire--electric blue shirt too big for him and a tie the size of a lobster bib. Put them together and...

Wait. I don't have to do that anymore. As a matter of fact, that's not the way Striking Out the Peanut Man came about anyway, even though for a couple of weeks before I had to write a play for Mill 6's T Plays I would play that game on the T. For anyone who's going to it next year, in the end I didn't find that helpful. It was more helpful for me to know my actors and write for them, imagining them in the situation, than it was to imagine them as real people on the T. And now I know all that worrying was for nothing. It's like anything: You just have to trust your talent that it will come through.

I did a bit of rewriting, just tweaks to lines. Meg Taintor, the director, tonight said it wasn't working for her, and frankly, with Meg, she didn't have to make much of a case. It wasn't working for her, and that was enough for me, and we took them back out.

I'm not even sure when I'm going to see the show now. It opens Wednesday--really a preview, I think--and it's really all up to the actors and the tech people--all of those talented people. Break legs, everyone.

Day 3 of Mill 6's T Plays

More on Mill 6's The T Plays.

Yesterday was the killer for me. Friday night we all were matched up: playwrights, directors, actors, and oh yes, the T line we'd be dramatizing. Just to get everyone up to speed, Meg Taintor, the artistic director at Whistler in the Dark and who I'm finding out to be a very crazy, very dear, very wonderful human being is the director. The actors are Derek Fraser and Matt Chapuran, who I still haven't met but did see a video of him at work with ImprovBoston. Kind of like Wallace Shawn, wouldn't you say? Oh, and we're working the Green Line.

Friday night Meg, Derek, and I talked for awhile. I particularly was interested in the actors, and I kept asking Derek everything I could think of: What would be his plum role? Where was he born? Just listening to the cadence of his voice. One little gem I gleaned from him was he someday wants to play the part of Cliff in the The Woolgatherer. I kind of knew the play because a few years back I used a monologue from that play for a StageSource audition.

Anyway, Friday night I was a wreck. It seemed everyone at Doyle's knew each other, had worked together, was so accomplished, and man was I feeling the pressure.

As I said, yesterday was the killer. Get on the T, get some inspiration, find a story, and write it by 6:00. Here's how it played out. I got up and got caffeinated. Read the news. One thing that didn't necessarily stick but is important is that there is a Red Sox-Yankees series in Boston this weekend. It sounds crazy and it all happened so fast but the series of events went: D train, hey wait, there's a Fenway stop, empty train, why would two Red Sox fans be on an empty train going outbound during one of the biggest series of the season, oh wait, one of them got them kicked out of Fenway, one is like Cliff the other is like Wallace Shawn, turn around and write it.

That's really it.

I tried to make it easy on the actors (no three-page monologues), I tried to give Meg a lot of action to work with, and I tried to make it funny. In the end, writers write what they know and they write about that bone they like to pick. For me, comedy is a lot of cuss words. I think the words fuck, fucking, and Jesus fucking Christ, spoken just right by the right character can be so funny. And for me, comedy is based in class. Someone in the "lower class" poking fun at someone in the "upper class." (It's easy to think "upper class" on the D line what with all those Newton stops.)

And so, that's how Striking Out the Peanut Man was written.

Derek asked me last night how I was doing, and I replied, A lot better than I was doing twenty-four hours ago. Yeah, he said, you definitely had that deer caught in the headlights look about you. 

Last night all the teams sat together and read. I am so impressed by all the work that was presented. Today, we start the part that I love. Meg, Derek, and Matt will start rehearsing at noon. I'll swing by around 1:30. It's the collaboration. All the people working together to make something bigger than the whole.

That's where we stand today.

Oh, and you can learn more about this project and get tix here.