Lost and Found

Creating Documentary Theatre 6

All Dramaturgs at Heart 7

Finding Our Play 8

Bibliography 9

Fun Facts about Lost and Founds 10

Study guide by Ariel Mitchell, Jenna Hawkins, Jessica Spencer, Alec Harding, and the Fall 2012

TMA 315 class.

The Cleverest Thief and selections from Gone Missing 32 Department of Theatre and Media Arts

As devised projects based in site-specific interviews, Gone Missing and The Cleverest Thief are plays for the people by the people. For The Cleverest Thief, BYU students went out into the community of our city and gathered the stories to make up the play. Through this play and our process of exploring people and their relationship with loss, we have created a beautiful cross-section of our city and the people therein. Now, in production, we return the stories and lives we’ve gathered to you, the people of Provo.Here are some thoughts from our performance writers about the devising process:

All Dramaturgs at Heart

“I liked being able to build everything to make it better. Like being able to say that an interview or idea was cool but maybe this would work better. It was a great experience to see what we ended up with.” —Jason Hawkins, composer, actor, and performance writer

“At BYU we tend to stay with BYU people; it was nice to branch out into the community.” —Rebecca O’Connell, performance writer

“The biggest thing that struck me about the project was how open our classmates were and how little we judged each other. No one’s ideas or suggestions were slammed down or ridiculed.” —Alec Harding, dramaturg and performance writer

“The thing that I learned the most [from devising] is that everyone has a story and that story a!ects me even if I don’t know what that story is. Community is like an interaction of stories because our stories are our personal experiences and define who we are. It makes every single member of the community important. Each story a!ects another making everyone a vital part. I see people di!erently now. Not just as stereotypes.” —Sarah Porter, composer, actor, and performance writer

Looking back, we’ve grown from a collection of students lost in the basement of the Harris Fine Arts Center to a unified working body of actors, playwrights, designers, and dramaturgs with a newly discovered community identity. Through our process, we not only learned about our city and how loss a!ects us, but we also unified as a class in the way only diligence, hard work, and collaboration can bring people together. We found more than objects. We found ourselves, and we found friendships.

Performance writers:Devising is a process of writing a performance horizontally (creating the production and physical performance, at the same time as the text) instead of vertically (building o! of a finished script). Because of this unique process, all members of the production (writers, designers, actors, composers, etc.) write the performance together through action and trial and error instead of sitting down in front of a computer screen.

Gone Missing is a devised piece created by the New York based theatre group The Civilians. The company, created in 2001 to break the boundaries between actor and audience, chose the name Civilian after the vaudevillian slang term referring to people outside of the world of show business. Founder Steve Cosson describes how he sees the work of the company, “The [Civilians] exist to make a di!erent kind of theatre possible. We would create original shows, and each project would begin with some sort of creative investigation into real life.” They begin with a concept, interview people who are knowledgeable about that subject, and create theatre from the monologues based in real life interviews and characters. To summarize, The Civilians outline their mission as “. . . tackling complex and under-explored subjects, enabling artists to enrich their processes through in-depth interaction with their topics, diversifying artistic voices and audiences, and integrating theater with new media. Development often involves community residencies, travel, face-to-face conversations, and extensive research.”

So far the company has written and produced twelve shows and has three more in development. Topics range from divorce (Tales from My Parents’ Divorce) to life in a development project in Brooklyn (In the Footprint) to the Evangelical movement in Colorado Springs (This Beautiful City) to a post-modernist commentary on today’s American pop-culture (I Am Nobody’s Lunch). All are original works with songs and words written from interviews in a mosaic style where monologues are placed one after another, evoking a feeling and a message rather than telling a traditional linear narrative story (with a protagonist, inciting incident, rising action, etc.).

Gone Missing, workshopped in 2003 and performed o!-Broadway for six months in 2007, is about loss in New York City. Inspired after the events that transpired on 9/11/2001, The Civilians sought to get the people of their city talking about how that loss and others had e!ected them by interviewing passersby about what mattered most to them: material objects. Structured around a fictitious NPR broadcast of Fresh Air, a PBS radio talk show, with Terry Gross, Gone Missing helps us to understand what it really means to lose.Inspired by the company, our ensemble sought to do the same thing for our city: create a play based on their stories. This is The Cleverest Thief.

Creating Documentary Theatre

Acting Text

Diagram of vertical (traditional) theatreby Moises Kaufman.

Diagram of horizontal (devised) theatre by Moises Kaufman.

Blocking MusicLights

Text

Set

Acting

Blocking

Lights

Music

For more information about devising or horizontal theatre, visit our blog: >>http://4thwalldramaturgy.byu.edu/horizontal-theater

The Cleverest Thief and selections from Gone Missing 54 Department of Theatre and Media Arts

Backbone: a structural concept used to tie interviews together. In Gone Missing, it is Terry Gross and Palinurus’ “Fresh Air” interview. In The Cleverest Thief, it is the setting of the lost and found.

Moments: Units of performance in which interviews with similar themes are combined and theatricalized, a basic building block of the production.

3. Look for ThemesOnce we have a variety of interviews, we sift through the pile to find trends in how our interviewees deal with loss. Our organizing principle, the main theme of our play, emerges and acts as an anchor to help us combine interviews into moments.For more information check out our blog! >>http://4thwalldramaturgy.byu.edu/how-to-make-a-moment

4. Choose Our Favorite Moments After presenting our many moments, we, as a class, vote on the ones that would fit under our organizing principle. Moments that work together are bundled into units, sorted into a logical order, and the backbone of the play is discovered.

Want to see some of the cut interviews? >>http://www.youtube.com/user/BYUCleverestThief

5. Separate into GroupsOnce we find the pieces of the play, we divide into two groups: designers and writers. The designers work on ways that the play could make use of media. Meanwhile, the writers workshop units with the aid of the actors and…

6. The Play Is Found!

For a more detailed description of our process check out our blog: >>http://4thwalldramaturgy.byu.edu/nailing-down-the-script-otherwise-known-as-killing-babiesX

Bibliography on The 4th WALL

For a full bibliography and resource guide, scan the QR code or go here:

>>http://4thwalldramaturgy.byu.edu/gone-missingcleverest -thief-bibliography

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Finding Our Play“My image of our process… no longer appears to me in architectural, but rather archaeological terms… The piece is made and shaped by the digging itself: it is both unpredictable and utterly preordained... We have all felt the palpable presence of the text entering the room. My job is to open the door.”

—Mary Zimmerman, theatre practitioner

Devising is discovering, whether it is interviewing someone you don’t know about a subject you are unfamiliar with or presenting the stories in class and shaping them into a production. As a company, we went into this process knowing what we wanted to discuss: Loss in Provo. We just had to find the story.

1. WorkshopCivilians member Emily Ackerman visits our class. She introduces us to The Civilians’ specific process of devising and taught us the etiquette of interview. We choose our specific interview question: What’s an object you’ve lost?

Emily Ackerman Bio: >>http://thecivilians-artist.blogspot.com/2009/12/emily-ackerman.html

2. InterviewWe go into Provo to break out of our comfort zone to interview people to get a feel for the city and who lives here. The next class, we act out their answers, accentuating their speech pattern, body language, and creating a character.

The Cleverest Thief and selections from Gone Missing 76 Department of Theatre and Media Arts

The strangest things our ensemble and interviewees lost this semester:

Some rosemaryA Beanie Baby Squid,A human skullA treeA right eye

The strangest things our ensemble and interviewees found this semester:

A sewing machine in a toiletA fossilized hip bone of a Jurassic pig BonesA map to the pyramids in EgyptA cat skeletonA petrified human footprintA skinned frog

If you need help finding something, check this page out! >>http://www.wikihow.com/Find-Lost-Objects

A little from “Make an E!ective Missing Pet Poster” on wiki:“Use a photo of the pet whenever possible, color is best, but even a black and white one will do. Do NOT put a photo in with a child, that is NEVER a good idea!Put up your posters in a 6–10 block radius around your neighborhood…Be prepared for some nutty calls, that happens.Once your pet is found, make sure you remove the posters, you can, if you like, leave one or two up, and put the word ‘FOUND’ on them in big letters, but take them down after a week or so, everyone loves a happy ending!”

For more check here: >>http://www.wikihow.com/Make-an-E!ective-Missing- Pet-Poster

“Lost Properties” in Britain

“Personalberatung” (Personal-bear-a-tongue) or “Executive Search Firm” in German

“Oggetti Smarriti” (O-jet-ee Smar-ee-tee) or “Lost Property” in Italian

“Förlorade föremål” (Fuh-lor-te Fal-de-mal) or “Lost Objects” in Swedish

“ ” (Duh-rhone had-uhk) or “Lost and Found” in Russia

“Nawala ang Bagay” (Nah-wah-la Ang Bah-gay) or “The Thing was Lost” in Filipino

“Verloren voorwerpen” (vey-laur-en foor-rey- vehr-pen) or “Lost Property” in Dutch

Napolean Bonaparte created the first lost and found in 1805, when he had his police forces create an o"ce on Ile de la Cité for lost objects.

Lost and Found: What You Never Knew

“Lost Articles” in Canada

“Objets trouvés” (Ob-jay true-vay) or “Found Objects” in French

“Objetos Perdidos” (Ob-jet-os pear-dit-os) or “Lost Objects” in Spanish

“Rudaí Caillte” (Ruh-tee Cal-tuh) or “Lost Things” in Irish

“Lost and Found” in America

Lost items in the United States currently: (According to www.lostandfound.com)105,463Lost items in the world currently:126,554Found items in the United States currently:48,661Found items in the world currently:53,442

Most Commonly Lost Objects:1. Keys2. USB Flash Drives3. Mobile Phones4. Sunglasses5. Gloves

How many things our ensemble lost over the course of this semester:116How many things our ensemble found over the course of this semester:72The most common thing lost in Provo?Water bottles!

Polish lost and found symbol