It’s not too often that we get a chance to see a production of student-written play here at Middlebury, but this weekend provided one of those opportunities. Noah Mease, a double major in Spanish and Theater (with a Playwriting focus), spent the fall writing Green Eden as his 700-level project, a process which culminated in a reading of the play followed by a discussion. It is not a requirement that 700 plays debut in an actual staged performance — in fact, it is unusual — but many who contributed to the reading were enthusiastic enough about the play to take it the necessary step further.
Green Eden, which is based on real but sparsely-documented historical events, tells the story of the brief time that Spanish poet Federico García Lorca (Willy McKay ’11) spent in Eden, in Vermont’s Northeast Kingdom, during his travels of the United States. The central figure is Philip Cummings (Matt Ball ’14), the friend with whom Lorca stayed in Eden, and the play delicately moves back and forth between Lorca’s time with Cummings and his mother (April Dodd ’13) and “present” interactions with a non-historical character called The Poet (also McKay).
It is a script that highlights themes of forbidden love, linguistic translation, memory, melancholy, the passage of time, writers’ block and the idea of “genius.” The performance, directed by Sasha Rivera ’12, delivered all these ideas with subtle power and quiet, gripping tension. The Campus sat down with Mease to discuss the process of writing and revising a 700 play, rehearsing a play’s debut performance, and the collaborative nature of theater at its best.
MC: How did the idea for this play first emerge?
NM: Well, the spark in the Fall of 2007, in Intro to Hispanic Literature with [William R. Kenan Jr. Professor of Spanish Roberto] Veguez. We were going to read La Casa de Bernarda Alba [a play by Lorca] and he showed us slides of Lorca’s family at Middlebury language school, because his brother taught here, and his parents were here when it was best not to be in Spain because of Franco and the Civil War. Then he mentioned that Lorca had been in Vermont, too — in Eden. I remembered that because I had been to Eden a lot when I was little. I liked the idea of a famous person in a place I knew — and why would that be one of his stops on his trip through America?
I found a couple of articles, just searching on JSTOR in my spare time. There was one by this guy named Kessel Schwartz, which turned out to be a pretty inaccurate article, but it was a good starting place. And then I kept finding just enough to keep going, like a fun sort of detective search. I wasn’t really thinking of it as a play at that point, more like some cool extracurricular research project. One of the first things I thought it might turn into was a very well-researched graphic novel that I’d work on after college or something. Then I had sort of thought about it as a play but I wasn’t really sure if it’d work, because it’s a pretty daunting thing to take on real people in plays. It just seems really limiting, especially at the beginning, trying to write around history, especially such a sparsely documented history. But this is the idea I went with when it came time to write my thesis proposal, so I spent the summer researching it and writing it, and the fall writing it, and J-term revising it in rehearsals.
MC: Did your Spanish major have anything to do with the story you chose to write about?
NM: Well I used to be a joint Spanish and Theater major, so I was thinking about ideas that could tie them together. But later I switched to double, and I’m kind of glad I never had to test that; I’m glad that I got to just write it for the theater and not have to worry about whether both departments approved of it.
MC: What was it like having to write a full-length play, for credit?
NM: Well I started with a proposal that included 15 pages of the play, and then in my research process I happened to meet Pat Billingsley, who is working on Philip Cummings’ biography, which was pretty crazy; she was such a lucky resource to have found. This is the first biography she’s written, but she got really fascinated with Cummings’ life, and started spending all of her vacations visiting places to find out more about him.
So over the summer I worked on drafts and sent them to [Visiting Assistant Professor of Theater] Dana [Yeaton] and he gave me feedback. By the beginning of the fall semester, I had a first draft, but it wasn’t a good first draft — I don’t know how people write a full play in a semester. The character of The Poet wasn’t even in the play yet; it was all this pretty awful stuff of an older Philip giving monologues to the audience in between flashback scenes.
The hardest part was making decisions about the characters, because so much of the history was ambiguous, and I really wanted that to come through — that’s something that I really liked about the story. But it’s really hard to do ambiguity directly onstage, because it just looks like you didn’t write it well.
MC: How did the reading end up shaping the final production?
NM: All the actors were sort of already busy for the spring semester — Willy is starring in a faculty show and his 700 project, and Matt Ball is in the other faculty show, and taking five classes, and Sasha is taking five classes. So all of these people were pretty overcommitted and said, sure, we can just do the reading. And then after the reading — I think partially because of the response to the reading and having spent some time with the play already, they all said “yes” to the actual production over the course of the next week.
MC: So you handpicked your ideal collaborators at first, hoping they would stay on board?
NM: Yeah, when I was thinking about it just for the reading, it was a matter of deciding “who are the best people to work with?” And then only asking them only to do as much as a reading, so I could have my dream cast. Luckily, I got a lot of my favorite production team people, like Liz [Davis ’12] and David [Seamans ’13] to help out as well.
MC: What was the process of collaboration at rehearsals like?
NM: The core group at rehearsals was Sasha, David, the actors and me. Our process was not like anything I’ve ever seen really done here at Middlebury, because we were revising while rehearsing. The play went through dramatic revisions in the first two weeks of J-Term. We’d rehearse a scene, do all those things you do in rehearsal to try to solve a scene, we’d talk about what wasn’t working and then I’d rewrite a scene trying to get rid of those problems. If we’d had actors that weren’t as good, I don’t think it would’ve worked, because they had to be really honest and never lazy. If something wasn’t working in the scene because they just weren’t making it work, then I might have ended up revising away from really good stuff that we just needed to work a little harder on. So Sasha and the actors had to really do their best on every version of every scene to see what was going to work and what needed revising.
I think it was a lot of fun for the actors, too. When a line doesn’t work in a play that’s published and you’ve paid for the rights for, you have to make it work somehow. But the direction of our play could change based on our discoveries in rehearsal.
MC: How do you feel the shows went, in the end?
NM: It felt great; I think we’re all really happy with how it came out. Watching the audiences every night was particularly fun and rewarding. I just feel so lucky that all of these people spent their free time doing this — I wrote this play as my thesis and the reading was the culmination of that. So everything that’s happened on this play since December, nobody’s been getting course credit for.
MC: Is there a potential future for this play, outside of Middlebury?
NM: I could submit it to professional companies around the country, but I don’t know yet. I’ve definitely been thinking about what we can do next; I think it would be great if as many of these people could be involved with it as possible, somewhere outside of Middlebury. But I simply don’t know yet.
Spotlight On... Noah Mease '11, Playwright
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