ELLEN LAUREN and ROOM
Ellen Lauren talks about Virginia Woolf and the creation of ROOM.
When did you first develop an interest in Virginia Woolf and her work?
My first encounter with Virginia Woolf, when I was a young girl in the 7th grade, was less then friendly. I lacked the patience, understanding, maturity, and/or sensitivity to allow her particular alchemy of feeling and words to work upon me. It was through Anne [Bogart] coming to me with the proposition of making Room – almost a year and a half before actually going into rehearsal – that I set about seriously diving into her writing. I was completely overwhelmed as I recall, staring at a stack of books almost waist high. What I did have, however, was the good sense to pick up her published diaries and letters to begin. I found in them such warmth, such dishy hilarious stories and descriptions, heartbreaking passages of courage as she articulated fighting bouts of pain and illness. There was nothing off putting, but rather a voice and mind more expansive, more modern, kind, and open and funny than I anything I hope to find in this life. A life line in some sense.
“It is so difficult to describe any human being.” This idea is repeated throughout ROOM and seems to inform the composition of the play, as you are not describing the character of Virginia Woolf, but rather distilling her process in a way. Is that an accurate assessment?
Yes. And despite her singular voice, her unique intelligence, what we are trying to capture, as she did, are the places that we all share as human beings. That the container of the body and “what one says and does” is in and of itself not the definition of who we each are. It is as if we are watching, as Anne says to me often, a wild mad scientist in the lab mixing and stirring chemicals together in a way that never had been done, in order to capture the universal, the quixotic, what it means to be human from the inside of us all. It is the artistic process, a mind in the act of creation, coupled with that rare sensation of deep reading. We are trying to capture in theatrical form, what it feels like to read, to follow someone else’s mind with one’s own. There are always other channels being played while we read, critical ones, practical ones. Deep reading is a revelation of self to oneself. I hope there are moments, flashes of that for the audience. It’s really about us being together in the room sharing that equally.
Woolf speaking to a room of women about the necessity of writing, reading and being in the world is a political act. Does “performing Woolf” feel like a political act?
Yes. One could say that about making, attending theater nowadays couldn’t one. It’s so hard as a cultural endeavor. But still, I have such hope being a part of it. It’s not so much a feminist statement to me, but a humanist point of view. That she was a woman with one of the greatest minds of the 20th Century is critical, of course. Such energy! Such heroism! But it’s this – she wrote, and I can say at the end of an hour, that “there MUST be freedom, there MUST be peace.” After all the journeys we go through together, the audience and I, at the end I can simply stand there alone and say this out loud. It is such a privilege. We’ve all earned it together by that point. The words are packed with their full meaning, their full weight. To believe in this, to encourage it, she was in the front line fighting for these things.
How did you find the physicality of the role?
Anne and I studied photographs and made a vocabulary of about 26 different physical structures from them. They formed a sort of alphabet. Then we learned the text, did deep study of the text, to speak it perfectly (I still haven’t achieved this…) to understand its loop de loops. Then we aimed our alphabet at the text intuitively, instinctually. The structures began to make a grammar. We also jettisoned more than half, more than two thirds of the specific structures, finding poetry in the minimalism. A strict adherence to recycling a limited language began to give the physical score a resonance and richer meaning.
The action of the play often seems to be the action of a mind unfolding (and a rather phenomenal mind at that). In developing the play, did that action inform your approach in any way?
I can hardly keep up with it, I can’t keep up with it, it gives me such joy, such agony to try. There is not a moment that this balance and contradiction isn’t being played out in me during the performance of this.
Does performing ROOM at a theater dedicated to women artists have a particular resonance for you or inform the work in any new way?
Well, we made the piece years ago and so I have performed it in many different spaces. What is important is that it has particular resonance for members of the audience. Perhaps it will enhance their experience, and that is what is most important. But I don’t look at it or perform it, honestly, through that lens.
I was thinking to myself the other night sitting in the audience at Women’s Project, that it is ironic that this space, in such need of care and funding and repair, is the space that is afforded for ‘women’s projects’. I thought it is the very thing Ms. Woolf was referring to in the opening section of A Room of One’s Own, when she describes the rich lunch and plush soft chairs at the men’s college, and in contrast the thin gravy soup and scraping hard backed chairs at Fernham. But of course that is just the physical environment. But theaters are empathic, they reflect the thinking inside them. The history of theater is the history of the relationship to the body and the performing space. Theaters are a reflection of thought in the three-dimensional.
Now I’m thinking how, if you came to see the SITI offices, you would think we were very careless, very chaotic. And that’s not the case. We’re very invested in being articulate and questioning. So I guess our space doesn’t show our thinking very well either.
Join Ellen Lauren & Mary Cregan for a post-performance discussion on Wednesday, March 16th.
Join Anne Bogart & Ellen Lauren for a post-performance discussion on Tuesday, March 22nd & Wednesday, March 23rd.
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