Lab Report: how the Armory workshop went 🧪

Bringing CHANNELS to New York for a staged reading 🧑🏻‍🔬

A couple weeks ago, we were invited to workshop CHANNELS at the Park Avenue Armory. CHANNELS is a microhistory nightmare sketch-comedy dance-theater solo show I’m writing that Daphne Fernberger and I are directing. And I’m performing.

Since the workshop, I've been recuperating in my hometown of Juneau, Alaska. It was just Folk Fest week here, which is a singular kind of only-in-Southeast Alaska happening. Folk and folk-adjacent musicians gather from the rest of the state and beyond. Folk Fest even has a de facto festival fringe complete with alt-folk experiments in plant shops and honky-tonk fastgrass in outlying dive bars. All that to say: Juneau, and the week's imposed stillness and listening, have been great for processing the whirlwind of the Armory.

Gathering in New York to begin workshopping CHANNELS was one of those experiences that is too big to see at the time. This first sharing of the first draft felt like the scariest and most personally important thing I've ever done. Personally important in that I've never allowed myself to share or complete an original work without a school assignment, never asked for financial help to make a piece of art. I'm floored that we are able to pay the team for the whole workshop because of our patrons--thank you. 

Enough time has passed that I can attempt to piece together what happened. After a makeshift writing retreat in New Hampshire (generously donated by a friend), I took the train into the city the day before the workshop. Prep included lugging supplies down 5th Avenue* to my housing for the week (generously donated by a friend).

*Why don't I take cabs in these situations? Willful.  

Carrying a new monochrome laser printer past the imposing main branch of the New York Public Library, I thought of my Midwestern Danish-American great-grandmor, Frederikke, who had two books and one short play published. The play – Jul i Wisconsin – involves a girl who doesn't want to wear dresses, Christmas, and some meddlesome elves, if I remember correctly. There are only a couple copies of the published play in existence, and one of them happens to be kept in the basement of the huge lion-guarded library at Bryant Park. I don't think Frederrike had ever been to NYC, but I think I felt her presence outside that library. Look what we get to do! I thought, resting the heavy stack of printer and paper and ink against some scaffolding.

Of the next morning, Day 1, I don't know that I've been happier. Walking up Lexington with an armful of warm scripts, then walking up the steps of the Armory, wondering how it was possible my work was being workshopped there. For a healthy amount of time, I just reveled in the fanciness of the fact that my first solo show was having its first workshop at the Park Avenue Armory. 

For those of you not producing experimental theater, the workshop venue doesn't mean anything about future showings. However, that we were gifted that particular workshop venue I have decidedly taken as a sign that we're on the right path. From the beginning of creating this piece, long before Daphne got the Romeo & Juliet gig, I've been saying variations of "CHANNELS can't be at a normal theater--the pie-in-the-sky run of it wants to be someplace like the Park Avenue Armory."

On day one, I showed up with 118 pages and two hours of sleep. Five of us gathered in the pie-in-the-sky fifth floor dance studio of the Armory. Besides me, we had Daphne my collaborator, Deb the dialect coach, Cat the production coordinator, Anya the associate director, and Tori the producer supporting remotely from Los Angeles. Deb gave us a little warmup, and we started a readthrough. It was physically unpleasant to share (vulnerable, scary), but it was well-received and we came up with a plan for the week.

The days that followed went in a slow flash. We staged scenes, fiddled with lights, explored characters, choreographed. Cat built anglerfish headgear and stitched together our train tracks. Then I'd spend the evenings rewriting and condensing, the mornings wrestling with the new printer's feed tray. 

The time in the rehearsal room was such a breeze. Daphne and I hadn't gotten to work together this extensively before on generating actual staging based on actual script pages, so it was a kick to realize how aligned we are as collaborators. We had enough space and ease in the room that new ideas could emerge. Happy accidents of staging and timing presented themselves as perfect solutions; they just kinda showed up. 

And that we worked so well with Anya and Cat and Deb was unsuprising but lovely. I think I sensed in Cat at the Groundlings, and in Anya and Deb at Juilliard, kindred beings--curious, measured, and steady sources of kindness and competence who don't miss a beat. I like putting together a team! 

The showing itself went better than I could have imagined, though of course much went wrong and I fixated on dissatisfactions. It was an overambitious staged reading of the play, now down to 65 pages, blocked out in different quadrants of the space, using real props and practical lights effects and music on the soundsystem. I held pages in hand, hid them in briefcases and bags, pinned them to trays, taped them under tables. By the end, the room was a wonderful mess. Everyone I spoke to after had kind and effusive things to say about it. Half the people who came were strangers to me, so it was great to get to try out the experiment on people who hadn't known what they were getting into. My sense of what worked and what didn't work seemed aligned with these trusted eyes and stranger eyes. Paths to revision seem clear.