Roundabout Underground

It is my pleasure to announce the first two productions at the Steinberg Center for Theatre in the 2010-2011 Season will be The Language Archive, written by Julia Cho and directed by Mark Brokaw at the Laura Pels Theatre, and Tigers Be Still, written by Kimberly Rosenstock and directed by Sam Gold in the Black Box Theatre as part of the Roundabout Underground.

Julia recently won the 2010 Susan Smith Blackburn Prize for The Language Archive. She has written a poignant comedy about a man whose life is devoted to the study of language, and what happens when words fail him just as he needs them the most. I am excited to have Associate Artist and Roundabout favorite, Mark Brokaw, at the helm of this wonderful play. The Language Archive was commissioned by Roundabout, so we are particularly proud to be bringing the play to a full production here.

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A conversation with Artistic Director Todd Haimes about the Fall 2010 season at the Harold and Miriam Steinberg Center for Theatre and new subsidiary rights for Roundabout.

Q. How do you determine if a play should be in the Roundabout Off-Broadway venue or a Broadway venue? What is it about The Language Archive that suggests it should be in the Laura Pels Theatre?

A. Each show in our season is given specific consideration as to which theatre would best suit the production as a whole in a process that includes the playwright and director of the play. I’ve always thought of the Laura Pels Theatre primarily as our home for new plays. Over the years, we’ve found that some more intimate revivals, such as Suddenly Last Summer and Streamers, have also been well-suited to that space. But overall, that theatre is meant to be the space for new plays by established artists. With The Language Archive in particular, the scale and feel of this theater will work beautifully. This is an elegant, deeply emotional play, and I think that it will benefit greatly from having an audience that is never very distant from the characters on stage.

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The other week, I attended a meeting at Roundabout’s education department. The staff was working with their teaching artists to brainstorm lessons they could integrate into the curriculum of students who are coming to see Ordinary Days.

It was a fascinating (if somewhat self-conscious) experience to hear a group of people develop ideas based on their own perceptions of this musical that I wrote.

For example: in Ordinary Days, a whole chain of events is started because one of the characters, Deb, loses her notebook. One group of teaching artists decided that an English class could explore the idea of cause-and-effect by having students write a play starting with the sentence “I lost my _______” and create a chain of events where losing something ordinary leads to something extraordinary.

Another group came up with a lesson that examined how shifts in musical tempo and rhythm illustrated differences between a character’s private and public personas.

And on and on and on.

What was so fascinating was that there emerged such a multitude of different perspectives on the material, and they all came from looking at the same script.

It struck me that the experience of previews, which we are in the thick of as I type, is a very similar exploration of looking at a show from new and different points of view.
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