Playing in Other People’s Worlds

“There’s a certain mystique about the weird, conceptual director,” says playwright Adam Rapp. “You see him walking down the street and wonder, ‘;What’s he thinking? Where’s he going?’ With Marcus I know he’s going home, he’s going to walk his dog, play some video games and stay up until five in the morning, working on a play.”

This spring’s Stone Cold Dead Serious marks the return of a fruitful collaboration to the Loeb stage. Last year Rapp and Marcus Stern, Associate Director of the A.R.T. and the Institute for Advanced Theatre Training, joined forces on Nocturne, a meditation on guilt and how one accident can shape the life of a man. In its final form, Nocturne was equal parts Rapp and Stern. The playwright envisioned the piece as a solo performance with the actor playing the son sitting in a chair, speaking to the audience. The director, along with set designer Christine Jones, opened up the text. He introduced other actors and set the action against a series of surrealistic images that captured the protagonist’s feeling of being trapped in his Midwestern past.

Rapp was delighted with the final product, but he does not characterize his relationship with Stern as primarily professional. “We have a personal connection. We hang out, play video games, he’s somebody I might go down to the 7-11 with. We’re just two regular guys who happen to do theatre.”

Stern agrees. “The first time I met Adam I was nervous. I had all these extreme ideas for Nocturne, and I worried that he would feel they were too different from what he had imagined. But when he came to Cambridge, I met this basketball-playing playwright, and I was immediately comfortable with him.” Stern’s fears proved baseless, as they quickly found their working relationship to be harmonious. “We lined up on everything: acting choices, music, visuals. I realized early on that we share an aesthetic.”

But what aesthetic could these two men, so different, share? Stern is notorious for creating dreamscapes that ride atop difficult, fragmented texts such as Mac Wellman’s The Hyacinth Macaw or Suzan-Lori Parks’ The America Play. Conversely, Rapp creates worlds that are fundamentally realistic. As a novelist, he relies heavily on an exploration of language and character. The visual components of his plays hide beneath his often baroque dialogue.

“It has to do with an immersion in pop culture,” opines Stern. “There’s a current vocabulary of aesthetics in art that both comes out of and influences music, photography, television, film, virtually everything that makes up popular culture. We share an appreciation for both the refined and the crude, the mature and the adolescent. We like the delicate poetry, the refined gesture just as much as the slick tune or the stupid joke. Good goofball antics that cut against ‘;the art’ give our work more life, more heart. We are both avid observers of culture, and we find ourselves drawn to the same kind of stories.”

It is fitting, then, that Stone Cold Dead Serious was originally inspired by television. According to Rapp, “I usually come up with a title first. For this play it came when I visited Dallas Roberts, who played the son in Nocturne, and we hung out in his apartment after a Saturday show. We were flipping around the TV and on QVC there was a baseball card special. It was the most bizarre, life-and-death sales pitch I’ve ever heard. This salesman kept repeating, ‘;If you don’t buy this card, you’re making the biggest mistake of your life. I am stone cold dead serious.’ Over and over. It became a door for me to walk through into this world in which a video game championship is a legitimate way for a son to try and save his family.”

But it’s not just pop culture that bridges the gap between these two artists. They both seek to illuminate the emotional centers of their stories. “We find ourselves drawn to the heart of the situations,” says Stern. “That which is sad, that which is touching, that which is sweet and difficult in human interaction, these are the things Adam and I strive to bring out. Nocturne and Stone Cold, for all their superficial differences, have an enormous reservoir of emotion balanced with well-carved humor.” “Marcus is a very visual, conceptual director,” holds Rapp, “but he doesn’t sacrifice intensity of feeling in any way. There’s a thriving emotional life to his work that he never spares for the sake of pretty images.”

But in this play, unlike , the visual concept, the “pretty images,” are not in the foreground. According to Stern, “In one sense, it’s a straightforward, realistic script. It’s almost film-like in its realism, and that’s not the ballpark I play in. I create a new world for every show I do, and that’s rarely a realistic world. There’s never a kitchen table, never a sink or couch. But in Stone Cold we have all of these.

“But simultaneously in the play, there are underpinnings of a larger order. Under this clear surface of realism there are tectonic plates of emotion shifting, and it’s my job to bring them out, to physicalize them,” says Stern. Part of the challenge for Stern is to bring out the deeper levels of the script, and he and set designer Christine Jones have created an environment that effectively brings this small, realistic world to life on the vast Loeb stage.

“I was a little worried when I heard that we would be on the stage,” says Rapp. “I feel like the scenes are incredibly intimate. As a struggling playwright, I started writing plays that could be done in a kitchen because I never believed I would be produced in a big space, and Stone Cold is in that vein. But once I saw the designs Marcus and Christine had worked out, I started thinking about the play differently. The stage is extremely wide, and the designs emphasize that. It began to feel planetary to me. My characters are standing on this little world that keeps changing colors, and it feels mythical to me. Perhaps the story is allegorical, perhaps it’s bigger than just these people from Chicago and their little lives.”

Stern too thinks of the play as a world, and exploring the worlds of new plays has been a lifelong occupation for him. “I’ve spent almost fifty percent of my career directing new plays, and it’s the undiscovered nature of a new piece that excites me. It’s a whole new world every time, and I have to find a new vocabulary to fit it. But with Adam, I know what the contours of that world are going to be. I’m always at home in the worlds he creates.”

Kyle Brenton is a second-year dramaturgy student at the A.R.T./MXAT Institute for Advanced Theatre Training.