Will Davis: Play Laboratory (12/2-12/4)
In-Person Workshop WILL DAVIS: Play Laboratory Picnic by William Inge 3-Day Weekend Dates & Times Saturday, December 2, 2023 – 10:00am-5:00pm (Studio W) Sunday, December 3, 2023 – 10:00am-5:00pm (Studio D) Monday, December 4, 2023 – 5:00pm-9:00pm (Studio D) Gibney: Agnes Varis Performing Arts Center 280 Broadway, Entrance at 53A Chambers Street This workshop is open to observers and all company members are invited to attend. About the Workshop Director and choreographer Will Davis joins The Actors Center for the first time this December for a play laboratory, examining the world of William Inge’s Picnic. Over three days, we’ll experiment with the play, collaboratively exploring scenes on our feet and alternating roles (including across gender), all informed by Will’s unique and physically adventurous directing style. From Will Davis: This piece has always compelled me. It's a world where big emotions are forbidden and yet all anyone has in this play are big emotions, which builds fantastic pressure inside the scenes. The play is melancholy and strange, it's pastoral and poetic and it can also feel stilted and pulpy. All these things seem to crash together and create more of a dream logic to me, than a naturalistic ordered play. The language can sound weird to our current ears. I like the opportunity it presents to create a world of emotion under the surface of the language and then use that language as a pressurizing force. As a result, I find these scenes are great canvases to play on—they can hold as much as we want them to, they're very malleable. This play is all in the subtext. It's a very internal dreamy play that at first seems to be all surface. A mentor once told me: Inge is America's Chekhov and Picnic is his masterpiece. I agree. Sessions run Saturday and Sunday, 10am-5pm, and Monday, 5pm-9pm. About WIll Davis Will Davis is a transgender director and choreographer focused on physically adventurous new work for the stage. Will is Artistic Director of Rattlestick Theater, and the first transgender person to lead a major nonprofit institution without a defined LGBTQ mission. Off-Broadway credits include: Road Show (Encores! Off-Center); India Pale Ale (MTC); Bobbie Clearly (Roundabout Underground); Charm (MCC); Men on Boats (Clubbed Thumb and Playwrights Horizons—Lucille Lortel nomination); and Duat (Soho Rep). Regional credits include: As You Like It (La Jolla Playhouse) The Swindlers (Baltimore Center Stage); Everybody (Shakespeare Theater Company); A Doll’s...

