The New York Theatre Workshop will bring the East Village to Hanover for the 14th consecutive year this month, showcasing six works-in-progress at the Hopkins Center. The workshop will present six plays in various stages of development at the Bentley Theater.
"Each project is at its own place," said Associate Artistic Director Linda Chapman.
Presenting the works at Dartmouth will give the artists a chance to do some preliminary work on their projects before producers pick them up in New York.
The first play, "There Are No Strangers," was presented last week. The one-woman play is an autobiographical retelling of the playwright's own struggle with recovery after she was brutal attacked in her Los Angeles home.
"It is a spiritual quest to make meaning out of the incident," Chapman said. The play also showcases the unexpected kindness she encountered after the attack -- when a plastic surgeon offered to reconstruct her face for free, for example.
In "Modern House," a recently widowed doctor commissions a famous architect, whom she meets at a Dartmouth faculty party, to design a home for her. Like "There Are No Strangers," this play is also modeled after real events; the titular house is the famous Glass House in Chicago's suburbs.
"The woman who lived there said it was like living in a fishbowl," Chapman said. "It's about modernism and what exactly makes a home."
The play itself revolves around conflicts between the widow and the commissioned architect.
"El Conquistador" is the story of a Colombian peasant who gets a job as a doorman at a swank Bogota high-rise. Thaddeus Phillips, one of the most important figures in Colombian TV and theater, is the only actor in the play -- the other characters only appear via videophone. The soap opera-like plot is a vehicle to showcase the lives of those living in Bogota -- a place where most people are either very poor -- like the doorman -- or very rich -- like the celebrities.
"If nothing else, it's a cultural exploration," Chapman said.
"Teach" revolves around the character Adam, who graduated from an Ivy League school and went to work as a teacher at a Bronx high school. Three years ago he pushed a low-achieving student, Jamey, into winning a poetry contest. Now, working at Burger King and going to community college at night, Adam's former student comes to see him again.
"The play deals with things like race and class and what is possible for a teacher to do," Chapman said. The performance this week will be the first time the newest draft of the work will be read.
In "The Man Who Outgrew His Prison Cell," writer and performer Joe Loya explores the human soul via the monologue of an incarcerated man.
Loya has actually been incarcerated for petty crime in the past. The play is an adaptation of a book he wrote on his own spiritual transformation while in prison. Loya has never actually acted and is using NYTW's residency at Dartmouth this term to develop his performance skills, according to Chapman.
"All That I Will Ever Be" explores the relationship between two young men in contemporary Los Angeles. The work is written by Alan Ball, who wrote the Academy Award-winning screenplay for American Beauty. He is also the creator and producer of the HBO series "Six Feet Under."
"It's a play about identity -- about how we view the other," Chapman said.
The workshop is interested in developing all six plays, but is not necessarily committed to producing all of them.
"These are artists we believe in, but we develop more work than we are ever able to produce," Chapman said.
The workshop uses "Liz Lermen's Critical Response Process" to help determine which plays to produce. In the process, the work is presented to several people called "responders." Each play goes through four steps -- responders state what was interesting about the work; the artists asks questions about his or her own work; responders ask neutral questions about the work; and finally responders state opinions about the work.
"It allows the work to develop the way the artist wants to develop it," Chapman said.
NYTW's relationship with Dartmouth began when Esther Cohen '79 came to work at the workshop after graduating. When she became general manager of the organization, she used her contacts at Dartmouth to initiate the current residency program in 1990.
Chapman said the workshop's experience with Dartmouth has "only been positive" and that the organization has appreciated the intelligence of the audiences of Upper Valley residents and Dartmouth students.
"If anything they're a little more appreciative than New York audiences," said Chapman. "This kind of thing is rarer here."
The New York Theater Workshop is headquartered in the Village district of Manhattan and has worked with playwrights to develop such commercial successes as "Rent" and "Dirty Blonde."
