Photo Credit to Ryan Michalowicz.
“Four.” “Eight.” “Two.” “Seven.” 33 people gathered to present “In the Forests of the Night,” a play by Del Martin, immersing their audience in the forest, the game the characters play, and the unknown. Performances ran from Wed., Sept. 20 to Sat., Sept 23 in the Forbes Center Studio Theatre. Co-directed by seniors Grace Altman and Matt McPherson, the show took a new angle on the lesser-known script with original music and choreography, and a fresh take on what actually lies in wait for the characters in the forest.
Altman and McPherson had both directed before–Altman a workshop of a play she wrote, and McPherson “In the Forests of the Night” in high school–but to both, this collegiate-debut production was special. The duo worked to secure approval and rights, and then began rehearsals Aug. 20. These were “really, really productive,” Altman noted, with each first focusing on one facet of the performance (for McPherson, acting, and for Altman, choreography) and then devising it together.
The collaborative devising process allowed the show a much more multifaceted presentation. “I’m very thankful to have [Altman] along with me in the process,” McPherson noted, “because she added a whole ‘nother lens I didn’t even think about adding in this show”–that being the choreography and the original music developed by musicians Ben Brantley and Jim Clemens.
Over the summer, Brantley, a junior at JMU, and Clemens traded voice memos in preparation for production, “so even prior to the process we were bouncing stuff off of each other, and more or less we showed up to the same rehearsal ready to jam,” Brantley noted. “And in real-time, we improvised the prologue to the show–it stuck–and we wound up with these motific themes that we’ve been able to manipulate and bring back and forth to aid in certain parts of the storytelling.”
“Devising and creating a show with a whole group of people, and ideas, is unlike anything else,” Clemens concluded.
The cast and crew, made up of 17 and 16 people respectively, formed tight bonds over the course of the run. Sophomore Katherine Dee pointed out that, “the scenes are mostly just two people. I found that to be so exposing, that it was just kind of me and my scene partner, so there was a great challenge in building trust with one another and becoming partners onstage.”
Alyssa Minuto, junior, also remembers a degree of vulnerability in the process: with a background much more focused on musical theatre than straight plays, she has, “always used that music aspect as a comfort … onstage, so working with that vulnerability of just using [herself] and [her] voice instead of musicality … pushed [her] out of [her] comfort zone.”
Despite the emotional exposure in the production, they both commented on the importance of companionship in the play: “we all have fears and a lot of them are the same fears, and that there is more strength in being together than being apart,” Dee said. Minuto extended this to the audience, sharing her desire that the audience feels, “like they’re in the game with us, and they can feel like they’re experiencing the forest around them as well.”
Companionship was an immediately apparent theme in the show, which opened with an elegant, rhythmic ceremony: 13 students enter the forest–beginning the game–and pick coins from a bag to receive their number. 1-12 pair up, tasked with finding signals, while Thirteen sets the stage: “This is the Game of Thirteen. Twelve Participants. One Offering. I am Thirteen. I set the signals. Let the game begin.” While the script’s beginning might have been eerie enough, Altman’s choreography, presented by the forest ensemble, and original music by Brantley and Clemens added to the intentionally-designed lighting and costumes guided the audience immediately into the production’s atmosphere. “Half the stuff you’re seeing tonight isn’t in the script,” Altman shared at their invited dress rehearsal. “The music’s not in the script, the dance’s not in the script. A lot of stuff isn’t in the script that me and Matt added, and that’s really exciting.”
Though I haven’t seen a production of this play before or, for that matter, without these added elements, my experience in theatre allowed me a decent guess as to what it could have looked like without them, and thus just how much they added. To echo McPherson, to have the musicians, “working with the cast and the designers to make a complete world with the music,” added another visceral element, raising hairs and clueing the audience into certain emotional moments in a way both innovative and vital. To this end, Brantley contributed, “if we can just contribute to that atmosphere…the spooky forest at night…how do we contribute to that without overpowering? And I just hope that audiences can hear that, and how it contributes, and hear it in a way that supports the action onstage.”
Equally compelling were the choices of the performers, and the designers who enabled them. The fluid movement of the tree ensemble blended seamlessly with the actors, sometimes inviting them, sometimes attacking them, sometimes haunting them. The actors themselves skillfully presented the complicated story with clarity and raw emotion that can be hard to elicit in scenes so brief, living into the playwright’s instructions: “…figuring out exactly what [the game’s] rules are, is hopefully the least interesting aspect of this story.” Martin’s preface went on to emphasize that “what the characters are going through internally is more compelling than what the characters are going through externally…the story is not about the game, it is about the characters playing the game.”
yourstagepartners.com, a platform on which to read and purchase scripts, provides the following synopsis of the play: “Thirteen students are compelled by their dreams to play a game in the woods to keep a mysterious monster at bay. Not everyone gets to play it again.” Having done my research before attending, I was delighted to find out that another facet of the co-directors’ creativity manifested itself in the monster.
“[In other productions,] it is a monster who attacks them,” McPherson clarified. “Instead … we took it more as the future.” In this imaginative shift, the senior co-directors led their fellow students involved in facing the unknown that many undergraduates dread. “Maybe they graduate, maybe they drop out, maybe they get a job, they move on from the school,” McPherson said.Instead of the physical monster, it’s “more the unknown of the future.”
Though the characters are overwhelmingly confronted with uncertainty, all inevitably point to connection as the solution: the pairs made in the beginning of the play support and protect each other physically and emotionally. Even Thirteen, the odd one out, finds connection in the bravery of the other players. These moments reflect in the main message the group wants to share: “We want people to come away from this thinking ‘people might say I have to go at things alone, but that’s never the truth… there’s always somebody in your corner, there’s always some rooting for you, there’s always hope, and you’re not alone,” Altman shared. The production was truly an exquisite piece of theatre, both for the creative decisions on every level and the compassionate trust developed throughout the whole team. Readers who missed out on this production can still attend the remaining shows in the JMU School of Theatre and Dance season, and find more information at jmu.edu/theatredance.
