Institute History
Description
Tectonic Theater Project is dedicated to exploring theatrical language and form. This includes creating new ways of developing text.
Our most recent full production, GROSS INDECENCY: THE THREE TRIALS OF OSCAR WILDE, is a good example of how we work. It was developed from original source materials over a period of two years through a series of workshops. We started with the transcripts from the Wilde trials and a few books from the period, staging moments that interested us. Sometimes moments departed from a text, sometimes from an image, a piece of music, or a relationship between two or more actors. All the theatrical elements were utilized, and in subsequent workshops, new moments were added and old ones edited out. This “tectonic” technique of constructing material (tectonic meaning the art and science of structure) resulted in a dialectical relationship between the stage and the text.
THE LARAMIE PROJECT is being developed in a similar manner. The idea for it originated out of Tectonic members’ reactions to the killing of Matthew Shepard in October 1998. At that time, the members of the company met several times during a two-week period and decided to go to Laramie to conduct research. Material would be gathered primarily in the form of tape-recorded interviews. Secondary material would come from journal entries, newspaper accounts and other found texts.
So it happened that barely a month after Matthew Shepard’s death, ten members of Tectonic Theater Project went to Laramie and conducted over 100 interviews. Later came the extremely labor-intensive work of transcribing audiotaped interviews, which we finally presented to each other. Tectonic produced a three-week workshop in January 1999, which culminated in a reading of about 90 minutes’ worth of material, more organized, more structured, and much more theatrical than the tape transcripts had suggested.
Whereas the January workshop was largely devoted to sifting through and editing the text of the interviews, our second workshop, in May and June, included other theatrical elements, including scenery, props, costumes, sound and video. Our work at Sundance is another important step in developing a theatre piece whose content, style, and aesthetic will have been developed on a stage.
The Tectonic Theater Project actor collaborators are listed in the Actor/Musician Ensemble section of this Lab Book.
—Moisés Kaufman