Last weekend, Cypress Lakes School for the Arts produced “A Monster Calls,” a devised play in the tradition of “The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time.” The play gave Artistic Director Carmen Crussard’s theater students a rare opportunity to learn about and be in a unique, ensemble-driven theatrical genre that is reshaping how stories are created and performed.
Most theater productions utilize a script in which a playwright or playwriting team sets out scenes, settings, characters and dialogue. The script typically includes stage directions that delineate the playwright’s vision for how their story should be told. Then a director casts actors and selects designers to interpret the script and stage directions, resulting in a theatre production.
“With devised theatre,” contrasts The Kennedy Center, “a collection of artists begins without a script. A devised piece of theatre can literally start with anything: a painting, a song, a real-life event, a novel to adapt, etc.”
Or interviews collected from the people of Laramie, Wyoming, in the aftermath of the torture and murder of a gay college student by the name of Matthew Shepard.
The collaborators often include directors, actors, lighting and sound techs, and musicians. They employ improvisation, trial and error and lots of creative dialogue to formulate a production piece.
While the creative process may seem novel, devised theater has been around for a while. It has roots in experimental movements like Jerzy Grotowski’s Poor Theatre, which stripped productions down to their essentials, and the Living Theatre, which pushed the boundaries of political and social storytelling. Since then companies have produced a number of notable immersive devised plays including “The B-Side” (by The Wooster Group), which delves into the history and culture behind a 1965 album; “The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time” (by Frantic Assembly), which uses collaborative real-time choreography to bring the protagonist’s inner world to life; and “Things I Know to Be True” (by Frantic Assembly), an exploration of family dynamics to make a truly moving show.
Devising is becoming a go-to method for performers and creatives looking to explore fresh, innovative ways of working. It's revolutionary, it's experimental, and it's breaking the mold.
‘A Monster Calls’ as a case study
Crussard chose “A Monster Calls” with which to introduce her theater students to devised theater.
This play traces its origins to Siobhan Dowd, an award-winning British children’s literature author and prominent human rights activist. Her first novel, “A Swift Pure Cry,” won the 2007 Branford Boase Award and the Eilís Dillon Award, was short-listed for the Carnegie Medal and Booktrust Teenage Prize, among others, and long listed for the Guardian Children's Fiction Prize. Her second novel, “The London Eye Mystery,” was also critically acclaimed, winning the NASEN/TES Special Educational Needs Children's Book Award and being longlisted for the 2008 Carnegie Medal.
At the time of her death, she had completed two more novels that have since been published. “Bog Child” (February 2008) won the Carnegie Medal and made the Guardian Award shortlist and “Solace of the Road” (2009) was shortlisted for both the Guardian Award and the Costa Book Award.
“A Monster Calls” was the next in line and under contract when her illness accelerated.
Patrick Ness, a substantial YA author in his own right, was persuaded to take on the project, with Jim Kay providing the illustrations. It was published in 2012, winning both the Carnegie Medal (Ness) and the companion Kate Greenaway Medal (Kay) as the year's best children's/young adult book published in the UK.
Director Sally Cookson, writer Adam Peck and their development team then converted Ness’ book into a devised piece over the course of just two weeks. The result has the ensemble feel and the physical adventurousness of a lot of devised theater, but with a much stronger narrative thread and emotional heart.
The story revolves around a woman who is facing a terminal cancer diagnosis. The principal character is her son, 13-year-old Conor, who is looking after his mother as best he can while his dad is with his new family in America. Mom wants Conor to go live with his prim and fussy grandmother and to make matters worse, Conor is being bullied by a charismatic classmate at school.
Mom keeps telling Conor that she will be fine, that the new treatment she is about to try next is the one that will do the trick. He says he believes her, reacting angrily when his dad or grandmother try to prepare him for the worst. But deep in his unconscious, Conor understands the reality of the situation, and his guilt over the way he truly feels erupts in frequent nightmares that bring the ancient yew tree in the garden to life.
The tree tells Conor it will tell him three stories on different nights, always at 12:07. Then Conor must tell a fourth story, and it will be the truth, his truth. The tree’s stories are like fairy tales, but the endings are messy, confusing and not the least bit satisfying as the wrong people may end up winning.
As the nightmares and the stories progress, Conor becomes more erratic and violent until he finally confronts the truth.
Cypress Lake High’s production demonstrated the same technical complexity, lighting cues and imaginative staging seen in “The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time,” which was produced locally The Naples Players earlier this year, by Players Circle Theatre in 2020 and again in 2022 and by Florida Studio Theatre in 2019 (and won the Herald-Tribune’s Handy Award for Best Play), but with greater emotional resonance and gravitas.
In the role of Conor, Reagan Strachan plumbed the emotional depths of a teen plagued by the specter of his mother’s declining health, conflicted by his growing skepticism of her strident assurances that she will be alright and haunted by a truth so horrible he cannot admit it to himself, never mind to anyone else. Her performance was raw, evocative and so heartfelt that she and Ella Maas embraced each other long after the play’s penultimate scene had ended.
Ella Maas’s performance as Conor’s mother was equally powerful. In her case, it was not only necessary for her to look the part of someone experiencing the wasting syndrome that often accompanies the final stage of terminal cancer, but also she had to conjure the emotional state of a mother faced with the prospect of leaving behind a 13-year-old child at a time when he needed her most.
Jackson Halliburton in the role of the monster— the yew tree in the backyard that comes to life to save Conor — kept the audience guessing whether he was a benevolent or malevolent presence in the storyline.
Crussard’s choice of “A Monster Calls” not only taught Strachan, Maas, Halliburton and the rest of her cast and crew about the intricacies and advantages of devised theater, but also challenged them as performers in ways not experienced by traditional theater productions.
Tangentially, it has also enlightened Southwest Florida theater audiences to devised theater and created an appetite for more.
Cast
Conor: Reagan Strachan
Mum/Ensemble: Ella Maas
Monster: Jackson Halliburton
Grandma/Ensemble: Miracle Joston
Harry/Ensemble: Tristan Michael
Sully/Ensemble: Liv Schiller
Anton/Ensemble: Logan King
Lily/Ensemble: Aubrey Wilson
Mr. Marl/Dad/Ens.: Dylan Mathes
Ms. Godfrey/Ens.: Katie Cook
Ensemble: Claire Lain
Ensemble: Isaiah Beneche
Support for WGCU’s arts & culture reporting comes from the Estate of Myra Janco Daniels, the Charles M. and Joan R. Taylor Foundation, and Naomi Bloom in loving memory of her husband, Ron Wallace.
