‘Ushuaia Blue’: CATF play one of many featured in post-show discussions
SHEPHERDSTOWN — Every weekend during the Contemporary American Theater Festival, which is finishing its 2022 season at Shepherd University this weekend, a post-show discussion is held after at least one of the festival’s six plays. The discussions, which are led by CATF Producing Artistic Director Peggy McKowen, allow audience members to ask questions and give comments about the performance they just viewed to McKowen and many of those directly involved with the performance.
This Saturday, one such post-show discussion will follow the performance of “Whitelisted,” likely much to the delight of the performance’s introspective audience members. Over this past weekend’s series of performances, the “Ushuaia Blue” Friday night audience was given the opportunity to immediately get answers to the questions raised by the play.
“One of the things we like to do, to start these conversations, is to ask you what stayed with you from this performance. What are some powerful images that stayed with you, or lines or thoughts that came out in the play, that you’re still thinking about now?” McKowen said, at the beginning of the discussion.
The play, by Caridad Svich, was originally commissioned by the University of Alabama Birmingham and inspired by interviews with the university’s Endowed University Professor of Polar and Marine Biology James McClintock. And, while the play ended up experiencing its world premiere at CATF instead of UAB, it remained true to the environmental concern over glacial ice melting in Antarctica, at the heart of McClintock’s research. Even, to the extent of how the stage props were made.
“One of the things that Caridad asked of us, as the producing organization, is that this issue is so deeply imbedded in her soul and her mission on earth — she actually said to us, ‘Will you resource this set and do whatever you can at the festival to try and recycle materials, to resource and reuse, to be very conscious and intentional about the materials of this environment and this play, and also how you function in the festival this summer?’ So we really tried to honor that!” McKowen said, before pointing to the props surrounding her in the Marinoff Theater. “This is, in fact, trash that we collected from the company — so, there you go!”
A couple of audience member noted their mutual impression, that much of the play sounded like poetry.
“Caridad Svich, who is the playwright, is actually very well known for her poetry, and writing like that (poetry),” McKowen said. “When you see the script on the page, it’s actually kind of written like poetry.”
For some of the discussion questions, such as whether or not the play’s main female character, Sara played by Kelley Rae O’Donnell, survived, could not be answered, according to McKowen, as the playwright had left that fact up to interpretation. But for other questions, the play’s actors were more than ready to jump in and share their insight. Especially, when asked questions regarding their creative process, such as one about how they handled portraying the play’s nonlinear timeline.
“Caridad was only with us on Zoom for the last two or three days, and she and our beloved director, Jessi Hill, gave us permission to make choices about our own linear story, because Caridad chooses not to give stage directions. The way the play is written, it looks like a long-form poem, almost,” said Tina Stafford, who played the character of Sara’s cousin, Piper. “She was extremely generous, where that was concerned.
“We have to endow [our characters] with our own back story — she just lets us do that! It’s a wonderful gift, in a way,” Stafford said. “It’s challenging, and you hope you’re doing something that’s a juicy choice, and not a boring choice. It’s unlike any other playwright I’ve worked with.”
John Kissler, who played the character of Sara’s husband, Jordan, went into in-depth detail of how he constructed the play’s framework in his mind and translated that to the stage.
“In this essence, you grab hold of the structure within the scene, and you make the scene as potent and as alive as possible,” Kissler said. “I think we’ve all been just attacking the scene with as much as whatever we can put into it. And then you’re done with it, and you go on to the next moment. It’s pretty fascinating how she wrote it!”
O’Donnell agreed with Kissler’s description of how the actors handled the play’s unique construction.
“It was hard to learn the order of the play!” O’Donnell said. “Even with Jessi, our director, working with us, like John just said, we tried to take the Jordan and Sara scenes chronologically, the chorus scenes were figured out chronologically, the Pepa scenes chronologically — they’ve all happened in the past before Sara’s fall. But I was like, ‘Which one happens when?’
“It took a while [to get to the point where we understood this well enough to perform it for an audience],” O’Donnell said of the play, which took two weeks to prepare on stage more than any of the festival’s other plays, due to its complexity. “It was really hard!”