Greetings from Baraboo!
Posted by Marisa Wegrzyn on 7/10/2006
Marisa Wegrzyn is one of the playwrights currently engaged in our First Look Rep. We asked her to post some thoughts.
First, a snapshot of how The Butcher of Baraboo came to be: In May 2005, Steppenwolf was kind enough to toss a few quarters in my hat and commission a play from me. I was thrilled. Joyful. Filled with enough adrenaline to lift a Volkswagen off a run-over person if I had to. Then I realized I had to actually write the play and that the dude under the Volkswagen had to find a new hero. I started typing and I watched, in horror, as the three story ideas I had pitched exploded, one by one, on the launch pad. Oh dear.
Sweep up the debris and move on. I started typing again and a scene took shape between a mother and her adult daughter having a squabble about coffee. The scene ended, as most arguments over coffee do, with an incident involving a meat cleaver. I’m not ruining a surprise; it’s one of the tamer things that happen.
Last month, the play had its first public reading for the First Look 101 crowd. I learned a lot about the ride of the play with that first audience. It allowed me to take a solid, informed whack at rewrites before jumping into rehearsal and pulling this thing up on its feet. Now we are nine rehearsals in. I’m busy watching an immensely talented group of people figure this play out, and in turn, they’re helping me figure out what the heck I’ve done.
Over the long 4th of July weekend, as the sulphur-stink of fireworks imported from a lawless Indiana wafted into my apartment, I had to rewrite and rethink the last two scenes of the play. One problem I encountered is that this play sometimes gets physical, but the way I had written it had a bumpy transfer from the page to the reality of the stage. Another thing that was becoming clear in rehearsal was that everybody needed a missing piece of the story to grab on to. If you want to read the blurb for the play now, you’ll guess it has a murder-mystery/who-done-it element, and it had been true, for a while, that I wasn’t making some necessary decisions concerning certain characters’ involvement or lack of involvement in what actually happened. The play ended well-enough and it was a good time, but it didn’t really land. So this past week I sucked it up and make some choices I’d been avoiding.
It’s been great to have a resource like director Dexter Bullard to show me how everyday household items can be used for nefarious purposes, and dramaturg Sarah Gubbins to help me solve all the world’s problems, or at least the world’s problems that pertain directly to my script. These wonderful actors are brave, brave souls. I have to give up wearing eye make-up to rehearsal because sometimes they make me laugh until I cry. It’s been a hoot so far. There’s still work to be done, and this blog entry has helped me procrastinate on some rewrites. Thanks for reading!