Author: Mac MacDaniel
July 23 and 24, 1:30pm at Shakespeare & Company, the Plays in Process Series presents This Is It, by Tamara Hickey and Kate Kohler Amory.
When a woman’s life is interrupted by a catastrophic car crash, she is catapulted into an existential, heartfelt, and often funny quest for meaning and connection with the life she has lived. Landing in the Bardo, she discovers herself in the “in-between” space, a place between life and death. Using bold and inventive theatrical story-telling, this one-woman tour de force fills the stage with delightful characters, skillful movement, an autopsy, a pole dance, and an explosion of life at the moment of death.Shakespeare & Company took some time to ask Hickey and Amory a few questions about the play, and what they hope audiences take away with them.
S&Co: What stage of development is This Is It in? How does the development process work for the two of you as collaborators?
Hickey/Amory: We have been developing the play since September 2021 based on a first draft of a script that Tam wrote. Outside of a small sharing in January, the play has not yet been performed for an audience. We are in a very creative state, what is often called “working in draft” in the devising process. While we’ve solidified the basic structure of the play, we have been tweaking the text and the nuance of the story. We do feel we are at a point where we need an audience in order to better understand how things will land and where we need to go from here.
As collaborators, Kate has been facilitating an improvisational process as a way to flesh out characters and story and the various means of story telling we are using. We’ve had periods where we’ve developed the story purely in the moment and then periods where Tam goes back to the computer and writes based on discoveries made in rehearsal.
S&Co: After S&Co’s Plays in Process, you’ll be taking This Is It to New York. What are you hoping to gain from Plays in Process and how do you hope the play will look when you take it to NYC?
Hickey/Amory: We’re hoping to get a sense of how the play lands, how it makes the audience feel, and what elements or images from the story resonate/leave an impression for the audience. At the end of the process we’re hoping the feedback that will allow us to know where we need to dig deeper, add more, clarify the story, etc…For NYC, we are taking a stream-lined traveling version to a smaller venue.
S&Co: What do you hope that audiences will take from your play?
Hickey/Amory: We hope the audience experiences being with the unknown, the existential questions that are reverberating in this moment in history, and explores the space between this life and the unknown as two ends of a spectrum on a path of liberation.
Original Article: https://shakespeare.org/calendar/2022/07/23/plays-in-process–this-is-it
