Chris Jones recently wrote about the Broadway production of “A Steady Rain” in his blog on the Chicago Tribune site.

This play, written by Chicago playwright Keith Huff, premiered at Chicago Dramatists in 2007. It received rave reviews at the time and transferred to a commercial production at the Royal George. Now, the play is set to open on Broadway starring some rather famous Hollywood actors. And it’s raking in tons of money despite still being in previews.

The point of Chris’s blog post seems to be the promotion of Chicago theater, and maybe even the encouragement of Chicagoans to see more work in the city. His claim is that while you could pay $134 to see the play now, you could have seen the “same great Chicago play” two years ago for a fraction of that price. While I think I generally agree with Chris’s goal (which I assume to be an argument against needing Hollywood stars to sell the public on seeing theater), I highly disagree with the statement that this is the same great Chicago play, nor is it the “Broadway transfer” he states.

The director is not the same; the actors are not the same; the lighting, costume, scenic, and sound design are not the same. The size of the theater is not the same (and therefore the relationship between actors and audience is also changed). The only thing that is the same is the script.

So… is a “play” simply the script or is it the production? Clearly, a production is greatly driven by its script, and a poor script most often will yield a poor production. On the other hand, a great script only occasionally yields a great production. The details of how that script is brought to life and presented live in the theater are not incidental. When you plunk down your money to buy a ticket, and enter a theater, what is the “play” you are going to see and experience? All of the details of the production, including the script, go into making your experience.

Having seen neither the original Chicago production nor this new Broadway version, I can’t even pretend to say that one is better than the other. But I can say with certainty that they are not the same “plays.” This is theater, not a class in dramatic literature. “Hamlet” is a great text, but I guarantee we’ve all seen some terrible productions of this play.

The reason this stirs me up is that it is tied directly to the philosophy behind the Building Stage: “We believe theater is made, not written.” This belief is not against the value of great writing for the stage, but rather it is an acknowledgment that the script only makes up a fraction of what the audience experiences when they go to the theater.

I was reading this article in the New York Times today, which lead me to this website.

A real life hoard! How cool to see!

A recently discovered Anglo-Saxon hoard.

The word “hoard” in reference to a stockpile of gold, is not something I was familiar with until working on The Ring Cycle. The Dwarf, Alberich, uses the power of the ring to amass great riches, forcing the other dwarfs to mine gold and turn it into objects that he can hoard. One of the questions on our mind is: what are those objects? They could be jewels, but it seems so cliche, and identified with pirate booty. In one production the hoard was gold shoes. Perhaps the hoard is representative of the objects that we amass in our own hoards that we gather and cling to in our lives.

The issue with the hoard, is that although Alberich has great riches, those riches are worthless in his home, Nibelheim. They have worth in other places, however. What his plan is after he has all the riches is unclear, except that it will lead him to take over the world, amass an army and bring down the Gods, who sit on high while he lives underground.
The hoard is then stolen by the gods, who use it to ransom the goddess of love from the giants. Once the giants get the hoard, one kills the other, turns himself into a dragon, and spends the rest of his life sleeping on the hoard.

It seems that Wagner is trying to show us how trivial the hoard really is. Is it a comment on those who gather wealth greedily and then just sit on it? Is it a comment on the worthlessness that this treasure? The heroes of the story don’t care at all about this hoard.

It was exciting to see this real life hoard. Found hundreds of years later by a regular guy, and his farmer friend. I wonder what good this hoard did its original owners. And what led them to bury it.

The past couple of weeks, we have been diving into the script for the Ring Cycle.  Joanie and Blake adapted Wagner’s  German  libretti into a working English script. They fantastically preserved some of Wagner’s poetic style, staying true to the text whenever possible.

Still, there are moments which just don’t translate well onto the 21st century stage.  For example, you can only say, “Alas,” so many times in a show that’s not Shakespeare or Racine.  With the help of the cast and the rest of the crew, we’ve ironed out some uncomfortable antiquities, and will certainly continue to make changes over the next few months.

Though most of our rehearsals have been focused on table work,  the script demanded that the actors work through the scenes on their feet to make sense of important spatial relationships.  For example, earlier this week, we were working through a scene where Brunnhilde appears to Siegmund to warn him of his pending death in the second opera, The Valkyrie.  The way Darci played Brunnhilde drastically changed when she read the scene from a high vantage point, looming ominously over the ill-fated hero.

In another instance, during Rhinegold, we found that the spatial relationships of the Rhinemaidens, the lovely sea spirits, and Alberich, the hideous dwarf, needed to be explored to make sense of the opening scene to the Ring Cycle. Wagner originally staged this scene using elaborate machines (pictured below), while we’ll be having our talented Rhinemaidens dance in aerial silks.

Wagner's Rhinemaidens

So, two of our Rhinemaidens, Lindsey and Lucy, and Joanie (filling in for our third Rhinemaiden), got up on their feet to swim around like sea sprites.  The scene was transformed when the three lovely ladies starting running around the space, playing games, and seductively teasing Alberich, played by Billy (not pictured).

Our Rhinemaidens

The Rhinemaidens were certainly fun characters to explore, as were the Woodbirds.  While Wagner’s Ring Cycle contains only one Woodbird, our production has three, played by the same actors who portray the Rhinemaidens.  This doubling is hardly arbitrary; both groups of characters are spirits of nature, who are thematically linked in Wagner’s operas through the use of the pentatonic scale, to connote their ancient, earthly nature.

Hopefully other moments in the script will start inspiring us to jump to our feet in upcoming rehearsals.  The characters of this world are too fun to play sitting down!

Rehearsals for the Ring Cycle have officially begun.  We started last week with a meeting of (almost) the full cast, talking through the entire plot of the Ring.   Though the Ring follows classical models for its dramatic structure, a simple Freytagian pyramid would not do; Joanie and Blake took notes of our discussion, filling three entire white boards with a plot outline!

All Three White Boards

Rhinegold White Board

Valkyrie/Siegfried White Board

Twighlight of the Gods White Board

In addition to group discussions, and individual scene work throughout the last week or so, the group has also explored movement through viewpoints with Blake and Joanie.  In the photos below, the group investigates the movement and gesture of elements like fire and water (which play important roles in the Ring).

Blake discusses the movement of fire

Enacting Fire

Danse Macabre (Enacting Fire II)

Blake discusses the dynamics of water with the group

In just a few moments, this group will be a rushing river... I wish I took a video of this exercise, it was very cool!

The idea to do The Ring Cycle came to about a year and a half ago, but has been in the works much longer than that.  Blake had been thinking of doing a project at the building stage based on the Icelandic Sagas, and I had been just starting to work in opera.  That’s when we heard the Radio Lab program that I sent all of you, The Ring and I, about these people who are fanatic about the ring cycle.  Follow it around the world, obsess over it.  And we got to thinking that there are so many other people out there who are the opposite, they don’t even have The Ring on their radar.  And the story, the story, we realized was really exciting and interesting…and we wanted to adapt it.  The Building Stage has adapted novels, used film work to create plays, and made shows out of paintings, why not an opera cycle?

But because it’s not just a story we’re adapting but an opera, or not just an opera, but a four part opera cycle event, it asks specific things of us.

First and foremost: that the production is not just a play, but an event.

Wagner was heavily influenced by Greek theater.  The community created in the festivals of Ancient Greece through the course of the 3 days of performance were considered to be essential to society.  Wagner wanted to create such a festival with his Ring Cycle, to bring together the German people in a remote location and bond through the days of living the story of the Ring.  We believe that this is essential to the piece and the way it functions.

In fact, some of you were in attendance, but we invited people to our apartment to read through the entire libretti one Saturday, and the reading time was 5.5 hours, but we stopped in between each opera and had a snack, between the middle two and grilled food, and it was incredibly rewarding.  Both the community created by our bonding over being there reading so long, and to live through this story all in one sitting will be a memorable occasion for me, there’s a way the story slowly unfolds that wants to have time taken with it.

Our 7-hour event will take place starting at 3 pm, and ending at 10, complete with a meal in the middle, in which our audience is invited to stay and talk and sit on the set.  And through enduring the 6 hours of performance, we hope that our audience has that communal experience—creating for that day the community that the Greeks and Wagner envisioned—and that the experience of the event of this show will be a lasting one in their minds and lives.

The second thing that we need to keep in mind because we are adapting the opera is the music.  Our composer Kevin O’Donnell is working hard to deconstruct Wagner’s score and reassemble it for a five piece rock band that will be central to our performance.  For those of you who don’t sing, don’t worry, we’re not necessarily going to be singing.  But Wagner created the score for the ring with a series of leitmotifs, like short pieces of music that each symbolize different things.  The ring, for instance has its own music, and as we travel through the production our relationship to that music changes.  This will be part of the underscoring of our production, but it’s also something we need to keep an awareness of in our performance, and see where these themes are useful to us as storytellers.

And then lastly, because it’s an opera, there’s the libretto.  The script that we hand out tonight is a first draft, one that Blake and I derived from several translations of the libretti, and while it has small cuts from the originals, it is almost completely in tact.  There is a strange musical language to it, and one that should be embraced, until we find it doesn’t suit a scene or a character, our challenge is to see if we can make the text work on stage.

The challenge of putting Wagner’s great work on stage is an exciting one.  He is constantly challenging, in his story and his stage directions, the art of the theater artist.  His writing pushes us as creators to a new place by forcing creative solutions to his impossible requests.  He also challenges the audience, who must closely follow such an epic over lengthily performance, to make connections that withstand throughout the story and into our own lives.

But why this story?  Why has this story captured so many people, including us?

Myth, according to Wagner, holds the universal truth of all mankind.  And while the stories of the ring cycle may not be familiar myths, they are ones that we hold inside of us.  In this myth, we see gods who represent ideals, and foundations in which our society is built.  But they are false, their ideals no longer stand up.  Wotan’s power, derived from his staff which he has pulled from the life giving world ash tree, and can only keep through the power of treaties, defies his own treaties and self.  Fricka, goddess of matrimony cannot keep her husband from philandering and falsifying their marriage.  It is a time for change and new ideals, new laws, and in the story of The Ring we bear witness to the demise of a civilization.

And that demise begins with the essential choice between love and power.

Only the person who forswears love, the Rhinemaiden’s tell us, can make the ring of power from the Rhinegold.  From the birth of the world, where we begin our performance, this is the essential rule…that only without love can you have such power.  And the Rhinemaiden’s believe that it would be against nature to foreswear love…and yet it is done.  The natural world is interrupted by greed, and that greed, eventually creates the downfall of the universe, wrecking it to pieces so it must begin again.

The ring of power hurts everything in its path.  Alberich, Mime, Fasolt, Fafner, Wotan, Siegmund, Siegfried…and then Brunnhilde takes care of it.  I personally love that it takes a woman to set the world straight, to return the ring to where it should be, and to make the sacrifice necessary, the sacrifice that should have been made in opera number one, is not settled until the very end of the cycle.  We follow so many heroes in this story, all men, all fighting their way through their lives but then it takes the strong hands of a determined woman to set all straight.  There are many incredibly brave characters in this play but Brunnhilde possesses a moral courage, the most difficult one to have, and the one that we all need so dearly to possess.

Forswearing love to achieve power.  Breaking contracts to achieve power.  The perversion of nature to achieve power.  These stories remain with us because they are ones that we need, not just that we want, to hear over and over again.  They are food for our souls.  They remind us and inspire us to make the morally courageous decisions, the ones not focused on worldly power, but the ones focused on upholding what is right, what is best for the world, what is best for the other, and not just ourselves.  Brunnhilde makes the ultimate sacrifice at the end of this cycle, and it is only through sacrifice that this world can be wiped clean.

Our audience enters a blank slate.  We build a universe for them.  Our universe slowly unravels, it falls apart as each makes a choice towards power, until it must be destroyed.  Our audience is left with a blank slate, with their own lives and our world.  And their own daily choice of love or power.  We make this decision every day.

Chris, our Wotan, asked for some good Wagner resources on video. There are a number of good productions available on DVD, many of which you can find at the Chicago Public Library. Of particular interest are recent productions at Stuttgart, Copenhagen, Bayreuth , and of course, the classic Metropolitan Opera production.  Because these DVD sets can be expensive, the library is the place to find them.  However, if you decide to purchase a set, or even a single DVD from a set (some of them can be purchased separately), please let your fellow cast members know, so that we can share our DVD resources.

The Stuttgart Ring on DVD

There’s always YouTube, as well, which has a number of interesting clips from Wagner’s Ring.  One great video production to watch is Fritz Lang’s 1924 Die Nibelungen.  You can watch the entire two-part epic film on YouTube in high definition; Siegfried and the sequel Kriemhild’s Revenge.  Both videos are beautifully made, and draw upon Wagner’s original source material, as well as imagery and storytelling from Wagner’s Ring Cycle. They’re interesting to watch since they paint such a stunning picture of the world of the Ring Cycle.

A Clip from Lang's "Die Nibelungen"

Lastly, as a number of opera companies turn to the internet for marketing to new audiences, a number of videos are available from recent Ring productions.  Google around to find recent productions, and visit company websites to watch clips and see production photos.

Canadian Opera Company Ring Cycle

I’m enjoying my adventure into the deep sea of Wagner scholarship, and thankfully I have a little guidance from some Wagner specialists to help me steer my ship.  My area of expertise is Italian opera, so I’ve turned to Wagner experts Berthold Hoeckner and David Levine for some tips.  And, they both happen to live right in my neighborhood!

Some Wagner-loving relatives of mine just returned days ago from the Seattle Opera 2009 Ring Cycle; the company happens to specialize in Wagner, and performs a Ring Cycle every four years (in true Olympian fashion). I had the pleasure of attending Wagner’s Der Fliegende Holländer at Seattle in 2007, where I discovered that it has a well-developed Education Department, modeled largely after the Lyric Opera of Chicago Education Department, where I happened to be working at the time.  So, after hearing my relative’s accounts of the 2009 Ring, I eagerly visited the website, to find that Seattle has uploaded a ton of videos, pictures, and more.

Jonathan Dean, in Seattle’s Education Department,  published a very informative blog on the 2009 Ring, he and the other staff members of the Seattle Opera should certainly be considered some of the foremost experts on the Ring!  When I saw Der Fliegende Holländer, I attended Jonathan’s excellent pre-performance lecture, and then he generously gave me a private tour of the opera house (including a walk on stage) 20 minutes before curtain!  Months later, he was a great resource to me when I was working on materials for the Lyric’s recent Tristan and Isolde.  I think I’ll see how he can help inform our production of the Ring Cycle at the Building Stage, in addition to hitting up the Wagner experts right in Hyde Park.