The Tenant

Something else happening now that is really intriguing me is the work happening at rehearsals for Woodshed Collective's adaptation of Topor's The Tenant.  First of all, the level of intelligence and dramatic inquiry going on at these rehearsals is blowing my mind.  It's kind of a complicated story how it all works and where it's going, but what is so intriguing is the process.

Teddy Bergman (Woodshed Co-Artistic Director) and Stephen Brackett are co-directing a site-specific piece that involves peering into the worlds of the various tenants who share a building with the protagonist.  In the Polanski movie version, the lives of the others are just hinted at, and multiple playwrights have been employed to flesh out each room's tenants.  Sarah Burgess is writing our segment, and Jocelyn Kuritsky and Black-Eyed Susan are performing it with me.

A question that is immediately clear from our first investigations into a piece like this is how to dramatize the internal lives of literary characters and communicate their rich thought processes.  What is so wonderful about the source material is excavating the justifications for the characters' extreme actions, something which is fairly virgin territory.  We're blazing a mental path, but without an omniscient narrator or voiceover, how can we physically lead the audience along it?