September 29, 2005
From UW to NY: A special play marks Sept. 11 in Big Apple
Without knowing it, the UW gave a gift to New York City to mark Sept. 11 this year. The name on the theater program was Pacific Performance Project, but every member of the cast and crew for The Water Station, performed Sept. 7–11 in the Big Apple, is or was affiliated with the University.
“We wanted to make an offering to New Yorkers, people who had experienced Sept. 11,” said Drama Professor Robyn Hunt. “We wanted to bring them a play that we thought was respectful — in the most profound and spare way — of what they had been through.”
Hunt and fellow Drama Professor Steve Pearson, who together constitute Pacific Performance Project, decided that the perfect play for the occasion was The Water Station (Mizu No Eki), a work by Japanese playwright Shogo Ohta that is completely silent.
Hunt summarizes the simple plot this way: Something quite obviously terrible has happened, off someplace in the distance, and people are migrating away from it. They discover a trickle of water running out of a spigot (the water station of the title). They rest for a time. There’s readjustment of some kind. And they leave. Hunt and Pearson had first seen the play in 1988 in Tokyo, and were so impressed that after using it off and on in their work with students, they presented it at On the Boards in Seattle in January of 2001.
Not surprisingly, the play received a mixed reaction at that time. Not only is it devoid of dialogue, but it is also performed in slow tempo, which Hunt explains is not the same as slow motion. In slow motion, she says, all motions are performed at the same slow speed; in slow tempo, there is variety in the speeds of different actions, but every action is slower than it is in life.
“When we saw the play in Tokyo, we figured it took between 11 and 15 minutes for the first character entering to move from the side of the stage to the center,” Hunt said. “At that point, we thought ‘we’re never going to make it,’ but by the time she had reached the water station, we felt we had shifted time and we were in a different perceptual space to receive the thing. It was just one of those performances you can’t forget.”
Hunt and Pearson became even more intrigued after rehearsing and performing the piece, which Ohta allowed them to do without charge, so they wrote to the playwright asking if they could come and study with him. Thanks to a UW Royalty Research Fund grant and another grant from the American Learned Society’s Contemplative Practices Branch, six people, including Hunt and Pearson, were able to spend a month with Ohta in Kyoto, Japan, where he now lives.
Then came Sept. 11, 2001.
After that, Hunt and Pearson pondered the question of what role the artist plays in times of crisis. Together with former Dance Program instructor Peter Kyle, they built a yearlong, multievent campus program called Myra’s War around that idea. But the notion of doing a special performance of some kind in New York kept popping up. So this year, when all three had agreed to teach at Marymount Manhattan College in August, they decided to stay on to produce The Water Station for Sept. 11.
They found a 99-seat performance space called HERE Arts Center, and then the UW connections began to kick in. Senior drama student Devon Smith volunteered to be the stage manager, and in that capacity negotiated rehearsal space at a good price. Third year graduate student Jeremy Winchester came on board as lighting designer and recent graduate Niki Hernandez-Adams as costume designer. Micky Place, who recently earned a BA in drama, called and asked to be in the cast. And the rest of the cast consisted of graduates from the Professional Actor Training Program, most of whom now work in New York. Hunt and Kyle performed as well, with Pearson as director.
Everyone involved agreed to work for free. “Many of the actors were in the middle of auditioning for or doing commercial work, and they felt grateful to be doing something we all believed in so much,” Hunt said.
The script, which consists entirely of stage directions, offers few details about the characters or their individual stories. Hunt calls it “offering just enough up, like a Picasso sketch, so the audience fills in with its own experience.” In this case the intent was to invoke Sept. 11, but for some people the plot brought to mind the recent images of Katrina, or the older ones of the Holocaust.
For an actor, The Water Station presents two obvious challenges — portraying a character’s motivations and emotions without words and moving in slow tempo. But it is the slow tempo that presents the most difficulty, Hunt said. First, on a physical level, people moving at an unaccustomed slow pace tend to wobble.
“You know that if you wobble, the audience’s experience will be lessened; there’ll be a seam in it for them,” Hunt explained. “So trying to execute this physically difficult thing automatically put the performers way out on the edge in terms of risk.”
But slow tempo also helps make up for the lack of words. “You must be able to experience fully that there is this moment, then that moment, then that moment, which sounds ever so simple but is harder to perform than one might think,” Hunt said. “And you can’t blur those things together. So I see you and I smile and that all seems like one thing. In Ohta’s tempo I have to have a sense that you’re there, I have to perceive that you’re there, I have to comprehend something about you and then have that reaction. It’s really interesting to explore that.”
A reviewer of the performance put it this way. “What we (the audience) see is a universe of human emotion condensed into a look over the shoulder, a hand drawn to the face, or a bit of hair pulled in distraction.”
Audience members were equally positive. Hunt said many stayed after performances to talk to the cast. The play sold out Sept. 11 and came close to selling out for three other performances.
For Hunt and company the experience was unforgettable. “To work on something that’s so stripped, to be so honest, so spare, without any decoration — it keeps clear in the forefront why you do this work in the first place,” Hunt said.
