Mind Readers

Mind Readers was formed to respond to curricular needs in the theatre department (creating opportunities for non-theatre majors to experience the plays they were learning about in courses) and graduate student needs to expand their own production opportunities. The program utilizes non-BFA actors and all production are co-directed. As extra-curricular educational productions, each piece also creatively stages the "dramaturgy" work that is often conducted alongside a production. The group was also founded on the principle of collaborative creation and as such employs a rotating collective of co-directors who may be involved to varying degrees on each production.

Exorcism

Exorcism, a lately discovered text by Eugene O'Neill, was our inaugural production. Alongside the text, we also incorporated re-enactments of scenes from A Long Day's Journey Into Night and the transcript from the divorce proceedings between O'Neill and his wife. Our resident O'Neillian expert, Dr. William Davies King, also wrote a "frame play" and performed as the narrator Eugene O'Neill that weaved the discrete pieces together.

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Alone Onstage by Mario Lucio Suza is a play from the Cape Verde Islands. It explores the complicated identity of postcolonial women in Cape Verde. Resident Lusophone theatre expert Dr. Christina McMahon translated the text into English and wrote extensively about this work and the identities represented in the play. Our staging cast the originally one-woman show as 4 women in an attempt to explore the multiplicity and sense of fractured identity that is present in the play, and the complications that arise in the act of translation. As a means of making this translation work present on stage, we also included a character that represented Dr. McMahon who sat in the audience and often interrupted the action to deliver the footnotes necessary to help audience understand the play.

Alone Onstage

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Theatre of the Oppressed

For the Theatre in Latin America course we went into the classroom to do demonstrations of Augusto Boal's Theatre of the Oppressed. We solicited performers from the course itself rather than relying on external auditions, rehearsed with those students outside of class to develop their understanding of the process, then utilized TO strategies in the classroom to allow other students in the course to also participate.

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The King's Elephant

Interdepartmental Collaborations

The King's Elephant (not pictured) was another interdisciplinary collaboration with the Middle Eastern Studies department. For this Syrian play about dictatorships, we wanted to give the students an opportunity to active engage and develop their socio-political engagement. We interspersed the performance with digital images and tweet chains and gave the student audiences opportunities to tweet back to the performance.

Mind Readers also created performances in conjunction with other departments. For Devising Nabokov we collaborated with the Slavic Languages and Translation Studies programs. For Kafka's Comedies (not pictured) we drew worked with the Germanic Studies Program. Each of these productions was solicited by our partner programming as a result of the reputation our group had gained on campus. We collaborated with graduate students in each of these departments who served as dramaturgs for the production processes, helping our actors understand the histories and nuances of the texts and biographies of their authors. For each of these projects we used familiar texts from Nabokov and Kafka respectively to devise anthologies of short performances that were shared with students.

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