Super Pal, Super Star: or, The Little Girl In "M" (part 2)

From Matt Chapuran, Institutional Giving Manager

To recap from the last post, the Huntington Theatre Company was looking for a kid to appear in a small role in Ryan Landry's "M," a wild new play that riffs on the Fritz Lang German film of the same name that gave us Peter Lorre as an obsessed child killer.

Mr. Landry, on set

A parade of my co-workers exited the conference room where they had been auditioning Eva, my seven year old daughter. She had charmed them all with her seriousness. Like taking the page from the script that explained her role and circling the words she didn't know. When the director  explained what she wanted her to do, she asked Eva if she wanted her to walk through it with her. "No, that's okay," Eva said. "I get it."

When the producer thanked her for coming, Eva was bold. "Am I going to get to be in the play?" she asked. When told that they'd love to have her, she silently nodded, as if to say, I'll think about it.

Later, I asked her if it was scary being in that room all by herself. "Oh, no," she said. "I mean, those were four beautiful and kind ladies."

The first weekend she was called, she had a ball. Her only complaint: When she arrived, there was a table with coffee mugs, one for each of the actors but none for her or the fourth grader with whom she was splitting the role.

"Probably, they just figured the two of you don't drink coffee," I explained.

"We could drink cocoa," she said. "I would bring cocoa."
Along the way, Eva visited our costume shop for wardrobe fittings and took part in a photo shoot that yielded this image, which eventually found its way into the Boston Globe.

I asked her one day if she liked rehearsal.

"No," she said.

"I love it. I don't like it. I love it."

One night, we got an email saying that Eva wasn't needed for the next day's rehearsal. When I told her that after she woke the next morning, she went back to her room and cried.

Going into tech week, she'd say things like, "Today is the best day ever because today is three days until the day before the day I go on stage."

Then the morning of her first preview performance, we woke to find out, the show had been cancelled for the night. I was sure she'd break into pieces when she got the news...

To Be Continued!

Super Pal, Super Star: or, The Little Girl In "M" (part 1)

From Matt Chapuran, Institutional Giving Manager

At the Huntington Theatre Company, we're taking on a wild adaptation of "M," the old German Fritz Lang movie that launched Peter Lorre in the role of a child serial murderer. Although in the hands of its playwright, Ryan Landry (who once wrote a version of Cat on a Hot Tin Roof titled Pussy on the House), it may look a lot different once it arrives at the other end.

The folks in our artistic department were having trouble finding a little girl to show up at the end of the play. That's when I ran into Ryan at our office. He called me a Queen and asked what was new. I was telling him about my new twin babies when he cut me off. "Wait a minute. How old is your oldest daughter."

Seven, I said.

"She should totally be in 'M.'"

The idea of Eva, our seven year old, appearing in a Ryan Landry play was beyond funny to me. But I promised Ryan I'd pass along his interest to her.

I did that very night but I resolved to undersell it to Eva. You'll have to audition. You may have a rotten audition. You may have a great audition and still not get cast. I won't be in there for the audition. I won't see the show more than once. And so on. And then, I figured, if she asked about it more than a couple days later, she was interested in she'd audition.

She was interested.

When I first laid out the whole project for her, she asked, "What's it about?"

"Well," I said. "I haven't read the script so I really don't know. But I think it's about a guy who kills kids."

"Well, that sounds interesting," she said. "Who would I be?"

"You'd, uh...you'd be a kid."

"He'd kill me?"

"Again, I haven't read the script so I really don't know but, um...yeah."

"Then I'd just go....uggghhh." You'll have to imagine a comically drawn out death face.

Eva Jean Chapuran

The night before the audition, she was so excited. She made up what she called her 'Huntington "M" packet.' It contained what can only be referred to as a self-evaluation. It was a page with five columns, each of which had five boxes, four small and one big. She explained that if she got a check mark in each box, then she could draw in a smiley face in the big box.

The columns had categories like, 'Was I pulite?' and 'Did I mind my own bisness?' Categories by which we should all measure ourselves.

The day of the audition, I brought her in. I gave her only two pieces of advice. One was, Shake hands with as many people as possible. The other was, They're going to be looking for someone to be scared, not someone to be happy.

"But I've never been scared," she said.

I asked her what's the scariest movie she knew.

Raiders of the Lost Ark.

And what's the scariest part?

When their faces melt.


So, just think about that.

The audition was in a Huntington conference room. There were four women at one side of this table and Eva at the other, her hands folded like she was addressing her board of directors. I made introductions and then left . . .

To Be Continued!

Producing Without a Net

Lisa Timmel,
Director of New Work

by Lisa Timmel

Last spring, in a highly unusual artistic leap of faith, Peter DuBois made an offer to Gold Dust Orphans mastermind and Huntington Playwriting Fellow Ryan Landry: the Huntington would give Ryan a production slot to do whatever he wanted. With little time to waste, Ryan got to work, handing in an early draft of the new project about six weeks later.

The resulting play (though the word "play" hardly seems to contain the exuberant clash of the ridiculous and the sublime happening on the page) is "M", a fantastically funny and astonishingly challenging deconstructed adaptation of the Fritz Lang movie of the same name.  Since this is a new play, we've scheduled a series of developmental readings and workshops where the artists working on the production read the play together and discuss what works, what doesn't, what should change, and what shouldn't. All last week, a cast and crew of twenty (including a puppeteer) spent their days in a workshop designed to help sketch out the free-wheeling, physical flow of the show.

It was a crazy week. 

Ryan's aesthetic trades in highly theatrical mash-ups of cultural touchstones. In his Gold Dust Orphans productions, the veddy, veddy highbrow meets the verrrry, verrrry low.  For five days, Ryan, director Caitlin Lowans, the cast, and a whole phalanx of dramaturgs worked scenes, listened to read-throughs, incorporated rewrites, and talked, talked, talked. True to Ryan's idea that "the lowest form of comedy and the highest form of struggling with our existence can come together on stage," these discussions have teased out the deep existential panic that underlies the more farcical elements of the play.

Best of all were the hours the actors were up on their feet, experimenting with style, timing, and physicality. Ryan's dramaturgy has deep roots in the high camp style of The Theatre of the Ridiculous, rather than the staid psychological realism of most new plays. This means that more than with most rehearsal processes, the actors have been finding the play with their bodies, transforming from one character to another via posture and voice. Landry likes to remind us that the world of the play "...is not an essay; it's music." 

"M" plays at the Huntington's Calderwood Pavilion at the BCA March 29 - April 27, 2013. Get tickets and information or call our Box Office at 617 266 0800.