COLOSSAL
AUDIENCE CONTEXT GUIDE for Olney Theatre Center’s 2014 production
ow to Use This Guide
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In 2013, Olney Theatre Center became part of a unique artistic endeavor: the National New Play Network, a community of hundreds of theaters, each committed to giving new playwrights the tools and spaces necessary to foster their work. Olney has since presented Rolling World Premieres of three NNPN productions, including Colossal, Andrew Hinderaker’s visceral, poignant story about mental and physical fortitude, redemption, and healing.
rest of this world. These 16 pages provide a comprehensive overview of the cultural and historical world with which this play is in conversation; it contains statistics on sports injuries (page 5), a firsthand account of an NFL player’s struggle to harbor the secret of his sexual orientation (page 6), a wide-lensed timeline of how masculinity has evolved in American history (page 8), as well as interviews with two instrumental members of the artistic team (page 10).
One of the main goals of both the NNPN and Olney Theatre Center is to use new plays as conversation-starters within communities. We hope, through this Context Guide and other supplemental materials, to engage with our audiences by helping them broaden their understanding of a play and how it is in dialogue with the
For even more insight into the world of the play, including pictures, videos, and articles, visit our blog at www. olneycolossal.wordpress.com. If you have any questions or comments about this Context Guide, the blog, or the production itself, please send us a message at education@olneytheatre.org.
Table of Contents Introduction Defining Masculinity
The history of America’s manliest sport
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Football Injuries by the Numbers
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“Out on the Edge”:
Football culture and masculinity
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Timeline of American Masculinity
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Artist Spotlight
Andrew Hinderaker
Artist Spotlight Will Davis
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efining Masculinity
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The history of America’s manliest sport
of body-building and American football, competitive sports, a combination of Sports are a great and the emergence European football necessary catharsis, (soccer) and of iconic western rugby, arrived with indispensable to civilized fiction—and football. impeccable timing. man--a salutary purgation of Football embodied It began emerging the combative instincts which, what scholar in Ivy League Michael Oriard sports in the 1870s if dammed up within him, categorizes as two and quickly earned would break out in disastrous primary aspects a place as one of manliness, both of the nation’s ways.” — AA Brill, 1929 cited from early most popular and revered forms of entertainment. On a commentaries on the sport: more profound cultural level, however, a) “To bear pain without flinching, it evolved into something much more and to laugh at the wounds and scars significant than a college competition; at a hotly-contested game, is very almost immediately, it became a rite of good discipline, and tends to develop passage into manhood, representative manliness of character.” of the physical and mental fortitude that b) “The manly qualities which are defined American masculinity. necessary to the building up of a successful players call forth the best A “NECESSARY class of men, and the wholesome ROUGHNESS” attributes which the game itself American notions of gender and promotes are shown in the splendid sexuality underwent a period of profound examples of mental and physical transformation in the 19th century. As the manhood found to be among football industrial revolution displaced traditional men.” concepts of employment, patriarchy, With an inherent emphasis on physical and social relations, American men on strength and domination, football met all socioeconomic levels felt threatened: upper-class males lost influence in public America’s demand for masculinization life; middle-class males lost independence almost immediately. As it gained a foothold in the workplace; and working-class in colleges across the country, however, males felt their authority diminish both in the press was quick to pronounce both its praises as well as its dangers. the workplace and at home. Injuries and death were rampant during Cultural and artistic responses attempted the sport’s early years, amounting to as to offset this increasingly “feminized” many as dozens of fatalities a year. The society, championing the superiority of 1894 Harvard-Yale game, known as the the male body and arguing for stronger “Hampden Park Blood Bath,” for example, depictions of fathers, husbands, and Continued on Page 4 workers. America witnessed a brutally aggressive foreign policy, the popularity 3
Continued from Page 3 resulted in crippling injuries for four players, and the contest was suspended until 1897. Defenders of the sport argued that it called for a “necessary roughness,” as Oriard described it, claiming that the risks were much outweighed by its social and mental benefits. As J. William White explained in an 1894 journal: “To those who think that bloody noses, torn ears, blackened eyes, bruises or sprains, or an occasional scalp wound are mighty evils, the game must always be an objectionable one. But to those of us who believe that in the life of a boy the occurrence of injuries not severe enough to leave permanent traces is not necessarily an evil, but often even a good by encouraging fortitude, manliness, and high spirit, the question as to the danger of football in our colleges is only to be answered by absolute statistics.”
EARLY REFORMS As onfield injuries and deaths increased, the sport accrued an onslaught of criticism, and by the end of the century, only a few decades into its existence, football faced the threat of extinction. In 1905, the same year that 18 young men died on college football fields, President Teddy Roosevelt’s son was a freshman player at Harvard. Roosevelt, who advocated for and modeled a “strenuous” life of physical exertion, helped establish the forward pass, hoping to reform the sport enough to keep its young players alive while preserving the characterbuilding brutality that he and America so valued. The forward pass transformed football from a form of militarized rugby to something more like “contact ballet,” as Oriard describes it. This first reform began a decades-long trend of ensuring football’s survival by pacifying claims of physical harm while keeping it just dangerous enough to satisfy die-hard
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PICTURED: “The Twelfth Player in Every Football Game,” published in The World, 1897 as part of a sensationalist campaign against football violence. fans. From this, the modern game of football was born: the forward pass, the ten-yard first down, the lengthening of the line of scrimmage, a new emphasis on penalties and improving the quality of refereeing, and the creation of the predecessor of the National Collegiate Athletic Association. The movement to ban football faded, fatalities plunged, and the crisis temporarily settled down.
RECENT HISTORY The sport again ignited criticism as research illuminated invisible traumas beyond those stifled by padding and helmets. Between 1965 and 1969 alone, more than 100 players at all levels died of brain injuries, an average of about 20 per year—about the same number as died in 1905, but from brain injuries alone. The mounting number of head injuries led to significant equipment and rule changes
that altered the sport and made it profoundly safer, at least in the short run. Although visible injuries lessened, more recent research has revealed connections between football and longterm health problems, including memory and cognitive issues such as dementia, Alzheimer’s, depression and chronic traumatic encephalopathy (CTE). In 2012, a unified lawsuit combining more than 80 concussion-related lawsuits on behalf of more than 2,000 NFL players was filed in federal court, accusing the NFL of negligence and failing to notify players of the link between concussions and brain injuries. The lawsuit resulted in a 2013 multi-million dollar settlement, in which the NFL agreed to fund medical exams, concussion-related compensation, and medical research for retired NFL players. Although the game has evolved significantly on the field, it continues to attract criticism for perpetuating traditional gender roles. The NFL has been accused of homophobia, and some research links the sport with aggressive behavior off the field. Reports of sexuallycharged, homophobic locker room culture —what former Denver and Washington offensive lineman Mark Schlereth calls “false bravado and machismo”—have also provoked criticism. “I don’t think it’s intentional gay bashing,” said Schlereth. “That stuff has been around for so long, it becomes part of the common vernacular, locker room-wide, and it’s more out of ignorance than anything else. It doesn’t excuse it, it’s just the way it is.” Fewer than ten NFL players, current and former, have publicly come out as gay. In 2013 Michael Sam made national headlines by coming out, and he became the first publicly homosexual NFL player after his 2014 draft with the St. Louis Rams. Although his announcement attracted some harsh feedback— “At this point in time [football’s] still a man’s-man game... It’d chemically imbalance an NFL locker room and meeting room,” as one
Football Injuries by the Numbers 1,496 severe injuries among NFL players in 2012
256 concussions suffered by NFL players in 2012 $30 million
donated by the NFL in 2012, in support of research on athletic medical conditions, according to The Foundation for the National Institutes of Health
$765
million to a compensation fund, $75 million for medical exams, and $10 million for a research and education fund–all paid by the NFL as settlement for a lawsuit over football brain injuries
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out
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professional football players evidenced to have chronic traumatic encephalopathy (a neurodegenerative brain disease that can follow multiple hits to the head) after death in a 2012 study
841 spinal and neck injuries, on average among college football players per year $150,000, the average cost of surgery, hospitalization, medication, equipment, and care for a spinal cord injury patient during the first 100 days after the injury 55
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O
ut on the Edge”
Football culture and sexuality
Although Michael Sam is the first openly gay player in the NFL, a handful of former members of the league players have come out about their sexuality post-career. Kwame Harris, a six-season NFL player, was forced publicize his sexual orientation after being convicted of assaulting his then-boyfriend in 2012. This article, written by Danelle Morton and published in The ESPN Magazine in 2013, is Harris’ account of his professional career. Kwame Harris walked toward the showers the first day of freshman football camp at Stanford anxious and intimidated. He’d never showered with his high school team. Except for his brothers, he’d never seen another man naked, and he was about to be surrounded by them. He didn’t know where to look, how to look, how long to let his gaze linger. He was 18 years old. He approached the crowded tiled room with columns housing several showerheads where men clustered soaping down. “They looked like Greek statues,” he recalls. ...A player paused beside him. Kwame was 6-foot-7, 320 pounds, and the teammate, blue-eyed and blond, was about the same height but had a sexual swagger Kwame envied. “Dude, this would be a gay guy’s dream,” the teammate said. “Imagine how much fun you could have here.” “Sure, dude,” Kwame said. But he really was thinking: If he only knew. ...NFL offensive linemen are antiheroes, a role that binds them. They train together, eat together. They’re groomsmen at one another’s weddings, godfathers of one another’s children. They also keep secrets together. They keep their mouths shut about teammates who hide arthritic knees by icing in hotel rooms. They’d no sooner tell trainers about fistfuls of Vicodin 6 that older teammates toss down
than they’d tell wives the kind of fun they get into on the road. Still, Kwame knew that the NFL spotlight would be a klieg light compared with the flicker of scrutiny he faced at Stanford. If he turned pro, no code of football secrecy would save him from paparazzi lenses; he’d have to be more clandestine. ...NFL locker rooms, Kwame soon learned, are sexually loaded environments —all the more so when the sexual culture was one he had to pretend to share. There was preening before mirrors, the passing of porn mags, visits to strip clubs, teammates huddling around laptops watching porn clips on long flights home. Kwame laughs today about players who say they don’t mind if a teammate is gay as long as that sexuality “isn’t shoved in my face.” Heterosexuality is shoved in each face every day. “I had to worry about maintaining this mask,” says Kwame, whose relationships with men in his NFL days were often furtive and brief, at times relegated to vacations in distant lands. “If someone asks what I did on a weekend, I had to have a story, and I had to be consistent with that story. At the same time, football requires such complete devotion that I couldn’t get distracted.” The career of an NFL lineman typically takes several seasons to peak. Kwame’s, however, was notable for a slow and
steady decline. He earned a starting spot had a lot on his plate. “I asked him if maybe his rookie season and started 37 straight after all of this is done we could sit down games from 2004 to 2006. Still, by 2005 and have a beer and talk. I remember the cracks had begun to show in his game. alarm in his face. He turned me down. He His run blocking was reliable but his pass didn’t want to know.” protection spotty. He allowed 9.5 sacks When asked how he feels to have been and committed 15 penalties that year, outed not by choice but by chance, he says and he gave up 8.5 sacks the next. He only that he’s relieved to add his name to tried watching more film, went to LA to the list of former work with a Hall of pro athletes who Fame lineman, hired are gay. “I’m just a sports psychologist. I also had to spend energy Nothing helped. And pretending to be something a number now — and we need to through it all, Kwame I was not. Having secrets have numbers,” couldn’t shake the he says, noting takes something out of sense that part of the that any conflict reason for his decline you. ...When I had a bad with his sexuality was the pressure of game or if we lost or if I ended with his hiding that he was NFL career. “I did something awful, it was gay. felt those two because I was gay. It was “I was always on things were time, lifted weights, the easiest way for me to incompatible. watched film, beat myself up.” No one was hung out with my telling me not to teammates, built come out, but those relationships,” he says. “But I also the implicit rules are much stronger than had to spend energy pretending to be the explicit ones—the shame implied by something I was not. Having secrets takes secrecy. I don’t want other gay athletes to something out of you. If the world had feel this way.” been more comfortable with gay players Blessed and cursed with an analytical on the football field, it wouldn’t have been so consuming when it came up. mind, Kwame Harris is a man who works Everything would not have been filtered over questions until he finds an answer, through that, being gay. When I had a bad then starts all over again. And on this day, game or if we lost or if I did something he can’t get Willingham’s comment about awful, it was because I was gay. It was gay players out of his head: “What more the easiest way for me to beat myself up.” needs to be asked?”
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On the line, a 10th of a second can be the margin of success. A sharper focus, a stronger bond between teammates, provides an edge. In Kwame’s mind, that margin was compromised by fears that someone in football would find out he was gay—or that his fellow linemen already knew and secretly hated him for it. After one particularly frustrating game, in a meeting about his declining performance, he tested the waters with a 49ers coach. Kwame told the coach he
“That’s the perfect answer, right?” Kwame says. “Because what it sounds like is that your sex life doesn’t matter -which would be true if what supported that were tolerance, as opposed to denial and in many cases homophobia.” As we leave the stadium and walk past the practice fields where the current Stanford football team is running drills, we pause to watch the young men take laps around the track. When they near the bench where we are sitting, Kwame says aloud, “I wonder what secrets they’re keeping.” 7
a 1832
1845
NATION OF SELF-MAD A Timeline of Mascu
Henry Clay declares America “a nation of selfmade men.”
Henry David Thoreau ventures into Walden Woods, dunks himself in Walden Pond, and barely contains his urge to devour raw woodchuck.
“Every man is the builder of a temple, called his body, to the god he worships. We are all sculptors and painters, and our material is our own flesh and blood and bones.”
1930
1910
1848
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The first women’s rights convention draws 30 male supporters, including Frederick Douglass, who is denounced by newspapers as an “Aunt Nancy Man.”
1902
Social Lewis the "M checkli parents are i homose Signs in diary an
Under Hollywo Marion Morriso name t feminin
The Boy Scouts is founded “to rescue boys from the feminizing clutches of mothers and Sunday School teachers, and to get them out into the woods to learn how to be men.”
DE MEN: ulinity in America 1938 Superman arrives in his first comic book iteration, a much more violent, ruthless character than would be portrayed in later interpretations.
psychologist Terman invents M-F" scale, a ist that alerts s if their sons in danger of exual behavior. nclude keeping a nd taking baths.
“You’re dealing with an expert in guerrilla warfare, with a man who’s the best with guns, with knives, with his bare hands, a man who’s been trained to ignore pain... his job was to dispose of enemy personnel. To kill!”
1982
1994
the advice of a ood producer, n Michael on changes his to something less ne: John Wayne.
2013
Sylvester Stallone first portrays John Rambo on film, embodying the hypermasculine persona that would dominate much of ‘80s and ‘90s media. The word “metrosexual” is first coined, and comes to describe a man of any sexual orientation who knows “where all the best shops, clubs, gyms and hairdressers are” and “takes himself as his own love object and pleasure as his sexual preference.” The US Supreme Court dismantles the Defense of Marriage Act, declaring that couples in the 19 states that have legalized samesex marriage must receive the same benefits provided to heterosexual couples.
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RTIST SPOTLIGHT:
Andrew Hinderaker, Playwright
Talk about Colossal.
your
inspiration
for
On the most personal level, there’s somebody who is very close to me, a former athlete, who is currently dealing with a spinal condition. The question of this play, which follows a young man, a former star football player and former dancer who is now navigating a new physical reality in the wake of his spinal injury—it very directly corresponds with this person, so it has a personal resonance. On a larger scale, I am a huge football fan. I grew up in Madison, WI, which is gigantic college town and college football town. I think it’s astonishingly theatrical and exciting and visceral. But of course, as I’ve gotten older, I’ve come to appreciate the ways in which it’s also problematic, [certainly] from a physical standpoint in terms of what it does to the player’s bodies. There’s been a lot of publicity obviously over the past few years on concussions and also the general violence these players endure. I’m interested in what it’s psychologically and structurally teaching young men to become. I think that football is maybe our most prevalent paradigm of masculinity. Football’s the most popular thing that we’ve got in this country. It really lifts up a specific vision of masculinity that I think at times is really exciting and at times is really troubling, and this ambivalence that I have for football, this sense of being in awe of it and being troubled by it, is for me a really great place to begin a play. Why is this story important? Football is not only our biggest form of theater in this country, and it’s not just the biggest form of entertainment 10 we have, but it’s the biggest entity of
any kind, with over a 100 million people watching the Super Bowl and 30 million tuning into college football games. It is in the bloodstream of our country. It dwarfs other sports in terms of popularity. And yet I think very few theater pieces engage with it, because it demands a level of physicality. To get inside of football is to understand you are entering into something that is extraordinarily visceral and extraordinarily violent. I think one of the exciting aspects of this play is that if you’re a huge football fan like me, it’s going to trouble your excitement over it, and if you are someone who says “I’m not really into football,” I think this play is going to showcase just how exciting, visceral, theatrical, and alive it is. What do you hope the audience will
take away from this experience? I would love for this audience to leave this play extraordinarily excited, feeling like they were part of an uncommon theatrical experience, like what they had witnessed was less their traditional conception of play and something that felt more like an event. And I hope what the play does is situate inside each of us some questions that we have to grapple with, in terms of what we are lifting up when we define masculinity in this country, in terms of what we are lifting up when we celebrate football in this country, in terms of how often and how we engage with disability in this country. Why should audiences come see this play? Can you talk a bit about the unique development of this play? One of the interesting aspects of Colossal is that it is a play that evades traditional new play development. It is a play that is difficult to, for example, do a reading of, because half the play if not more is told through movement. So the play was developed through a series of physical workshops, the first of which was at the Kennedy Center, right near by here in Washington D.C. Greg Henry and Jason Loewith, then the head of the National New Play Network jointly, ran this MFA Playwrights workshop at the Kennedy Center, and they read at that time what was just the first half of Colossal. I sent them the first half and I told them that every time I was writing the second half, it became stale and static and just people talking, and I lost this physical, visceral dimension. And so Greg and Jason graciously invited myself and Will Davis, our director, and the whole team of ours—Michael Patrick Thornton who was with the production—to come to D.C. to workshop the play. When we walked into the Kennedy Center, there was a huge luggage cart with football pads and helmets, and there was a snare drum, and we had a choreographer, and we had space to move, and at the end of the week we had a play. The University of Texas in
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Football...is in the bloodstream of our country...And yet very few theater pieces engage with it because it demands a level of physicality. To get inside of football is to understand you are entering into something that is extraordinarily visceral and extraordinarily violent.”
Austin has a wonderful new play festival called the Cohen New Work Festival. Forty different plays are presented in some from reading to full production, and Will and I presented a rather elaborate workshop production that involved a cast of 15 or 16 members of the University of Texas drum line. Michael Patrick Thornton again flew in to play this role, and Steve Ochoa, who is playing the role of Damon, first played that role down in Austin. So we had the opportunity to really amp up the production elements and see the piece in a three-dimensional space with all the movement and sound and violence that it requires. The final piece of development was an intensive workshop with the Alliance Theatre in Atlanta. They invited Will and me to come down to Atlanta and again work with a team of dancers and football players with movement exercises that were led by a former NFL player. We’ve been extremely lucky, and I’ve been extremely lucky to develop this play with workshops that support its full life, the fact that it moves through space and time. And I feel very lucky because I feel like we’re in a great position now to enter its Rolling World Premiere here at the Olney. It really gives me faith in the way plays can be developed in the American theater.
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Continued from Page 11 As a playwright, what do you hope to gain from this Rolling World Premiere? I hope to have a very similar experience in the rehearsal process that I hope all of you will have seeing and experiencing this play. When I write a piece of theater, I always begin at the beginning and let the play guide me where it wants to go, and I’m always excited when the play can surprise me, when the play can become something larger than I expect, when the play takes an interesting turn or another angle. I find in this experience of discovery and surprise moments where I can connect emotionally to the—those moments where we’re in rehearsal and we’re running through a scene or we’re running through a piece of movement and something happens and you realize, “oh, that’s a moment we need to capture. That is something larger than even I envisioned or intended.” That is the result of all of us who are collected in the room interpreting and discovering this moment on the page. What’s the greatest challenge to achieving your vision with this piece? One of the biggest challenges in staging a piece like this is certainly the size and the scope and the grandeur of it. Immediately after writing Colossal, I wrote a very quiet two-person play set in a basement, because I think I was ready for a reprieve from so many moving parts. It’s a lot to coordinate. I’m very fortunate that Will is at the helm. Will, a former dancer and choreographer and thinks through movement, has a profound understanding of three-dimensional space. While the play has so many moving parts, it is extraordinarily precise in its scripting, in terms of what moments we need to see when, the exact rhythm of the dialogue. When you put up a play in a threedimensional space with a group of actors and a group of directors, in front of an audience, one of three things happens: one, you basically see the thing you 12 imagined and envisioned, which is
exciting; two, you experience something very different than what you envisioned in a way that doesn’t feel right, and those moments can be difficult and hard; and three, the greatest moment of all, without question, the greatest gift a playwright can have, is when you experience a moment that’s little different than you imagined, but it’s somehow better, somehow bigger, somehow more alive. You have the brain trust and the creative talents of a director and choreographer, and inevitably it’s something larger and more profound than one person can envision—and that’s theater. That’s why I do this. Is there a character to whom you relate the most? My gut response is Jerry, the main character’s physical and occupational therapist. Like Jerry, I’m a former athlete, but like Jerry not a particularly extraordinary one. Like Jerry, I have an ambivalent relationship to football. I absolutely adore it and find it theatrical and exciting, but at the same time I recognize what it does to the people who play it and the ideologies it lifts up. That said, there are aspects of the character that are deeply personal. Mike at his most fundamental level is a character who is struggling to move forward now that his present tense is completely redefined, and that is something I relate to on a profound level. A lot of my work looks at characters who are struggling to let go of the past, which is something that is constantly a work in progress for myself. And that’s really true across the board for all of the characters. While Young Mike is more of a Stanley Kowalksi figure and I’m more of an awkward self-effacing Midwesterner, the passion that he has for football is a passion that I have for theater. I just gave a playwriting class about how you draw from your own person, not just personal life and personal experiences, but personal emotions to create the worlds and characters. There is a piece of myself that is in every single one of the characters that’s on stage.
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RTIST SPOTLIGHT: Will Davis, Director
What does this play mean to you? To me, Colossal is a play about feats of strength, what it means to perform a feat of strength and what a feat of strength looks like. When I think of this play, I think about how we begin with this performance of a particular kind of virtuosic strength, of these boys in pads and helmets crashing at each other, dropping down to the ground and doing perfect push ups or whatever may be inside that virtuosic physical macho football language. And then at the end of this play, we have a
father and son trying to find some way to come together and heal a wound between the two of them— and between those two bookends, this play touches on every other possible permutation of that idea. Why is this play important to tell? I think Colossal is important in a couple of different ways. Colossal is a highly theatrical play, by which I mean it’s the kind of play that can only exist only in the theater. There are other plays that can exist in other forms, but Colossal is a play that requires a live audience. When I think about Colossal, I think about it as more of an event than a play. You’re coming to see the event that is Colossal. So I think it’s important in that way, because it lifts up our form as theater artists and theater practitioners. It requires the dialogue between performer and audience, and it’s the kind of play that is memorable because it is on stage. I think Colossal is also an important play because we’re in a very particularly moment in terms of homophobia in the NFL. There’s a line that happens later in the second half of the piece where Marcus, Young Mike’s love interest, is responding to something that Young Mike says to him: “Everything’s going to be fine. You and I can maybe enter into the relationship and everything’s going to be fine”; Young Mike says to Marcus, “Things are changing,” and Marcus says back to him, “Changing ain’t changed.” I think of that line of Marcus’, and I think about what we’ve just been watching through the last round of NFL draft picks and Michael Sam’s drama play out all across ESPN.
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Continued from Page 13 I think about what it means to have just a little bit of access and transparency to the idea that there is no way that you can gather a group of people that would constitute a football team and they would all be straight. It’s just actually impossible; the math of it’s impossible. To have just this little view in on one person’s particular drama, but to also see how that door swings shut on top of it immediately... There’s so much about the institutions of organized sports that have practiced systemic homophobia, how it’s part of how the game is played and part of the politics of everything. I really think Colossal is an important piece because I think it’s speaking to this pivotal moment, this pivot point that we’re on culturally in terms of what it would mean for more players to be openly out and what the cost of that might be, which is what the play deals with, but also how, perhaps culturally, it might turn out it doesn’t actually matter. So I think it’s an important piece in that way, because it gives us a chance to think about what the outcome of this particular cultural moment might be. What do you want audiences to take away from this experience? As a director, one of my main jobs is to curate the audience experience. The journey the audience goes on is very, very important to me, and that’s part of my job: to make sure that from frame to frame to frame, moving through the piece, I’ve made a choice about the audience’s experience. That question is key to what I do. For me, I think what the play wants is for you, as I was saying earlier, to feel like that you’ve come to watch an endurance sport that is called Colossal, that the experience of this play is one that tops itself and then tops itself and then tops itself. It is not a mistake that the play is called Colossal. That is
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When I think about Colossal, I think about it as more of an event than a play...It lifts up our form as theater artists and theater practitioners. It requires dialogue between performer and audience, and it’s the kind of play that is memorable because it is on stage.”
the experience that you should be having at the theater, a Colossal experience of the intersection of various physical languages—the language of football, the language of dance, the language of disability—and how all of those are in conversation with each other. I think you should be having a colossal experience of endurance and exhaustion. You have to train to perform this play, and that’s what we’re doing in rehearsal. We are training the actors to perform it. I want you to feel that epic frame, that you have had a very intimate and zoomed-in experience about love and loss and what it means to move forward in the wake of tragedy—I maybe want you to watch football. Can you expand a bit about the journey of this play, how it has evolved throughout your work with Andrew Hinderaker over the last three years? My collaboration with Andrew on this piece started with another play that he was writing, this piece that was about dancing and about what it means to try and inhabit the world physically in a new way when your primary physical language is taken away from you. That core idea is absolutely at the core of Colossal,
what it means to try and move out of a trauma loop, to move forward in the wake of a tragedy, in both the literal and the metaphorical sense. What does that do to your identity and how does it help or hinder you in moving forward? That core idea was there very early on and then, as Andrew says, he started writing Colossal, and it became the play that ate that other play. He scrapped it for parts and took those core ideas and started filling them into what is now this piece. I’m a director who comes from a movement background. My first lens into the world, not the only lens, but my first lens into a play is always physical. When I read a play, I have to sketch it as I’m reading in order to metabolize the information that’s on the page. When Andrew brought that initial piece to me, I said to him, “Let’s do a workshop and let’s do the dramaturgy of this play on our feet.” We spent a good little chunk of time in a room with a group of dancers and movers working through some of the core dramaturgical ideas of that play. That aesthetic of needing to get into three-dimensional time and space in order to investigate and interrogate and unpack what’s happening beat to beat is a ethos and an aesthetic that we have used in the development of Colossal. This play has had a lot of table work, but much of that table work has been in three-dimensional space. It’s very visceral, very physical, and it’s very cinematic. And I think that is a testament to our collaboration and the way we’ve chosen to develop the work. Andrew is a master tinkerer. It’s one of the things I admire most about him. We’ve been working on this play for three years, but we spent an hour this morning [in the second week of rehearsal] sitting together and talking about the minutia of a couple beats and some words we might want to change around, a new little beat here and there, whatever it may be. So certainly the development of this piece has been a process of tinkering through drafts.
…Andrew has said that Colossal is like a very intricate, tightly wound clock, and you can try to throw subplots, even just even beats, trying to expand things into this clock—but it just springs out. It won’t hold extra weight. If there’s anything soggy, Colossal says no and springs it across the room. I’m saying that because to that end there have been some other things we’ve been trying to pull in about relationships between Coach and Young Mike, relationships between Damon and Young Mike, other things where that sort of expansive second act monologue that you would maybe hope for, this play just will not abide by. A lot of the process has been about taking that information we want in a play and figuring out how to slot it in inside these more compact, charged, sometimes not textual beats that are happening between characters. What do you hope to take away from this experience? I’ve been now working on this project with Andrew for three years, and we’ve had a lot time and a lot of generous space and resources given to us by various institutions and residencies to develop this piece. In order to work on Colossal, you have to be able to work on it in a three-dimensional place. It’s a play that’s all about the drama of the body and how the body speaks, so premiering this work at the Olney is an incredible experience for me. It’s so important because we’ve been through so many different permutations of the work, and to be here and put it up on its feet and have an audience participate in that experience is actually kind of profoundly touching for me. I think what I want to take away from this is a sense that I left it all on the field. I’m trying to and I am bringing everything I can of my craft to this piece because I’ve been waiting a long time to direct this show and open it to the public. I’m just going to give you everything I got and leave it here. 15
Still curious? Read, watch, and listen more at www.olneycolossal.wordpress.com
This context guide was created by Maegan Clearwood, Dramaturgy Apprentice, and edited by Jason King Jones, Associate Artistic Director and Director of Education, 2014. Cover image: 1889 edition of Frank Leslie’s Illustrated Newspaper; back cover image: Missouri Tigers defensive lineman Michael Sam