Todays rehearsal was so much fun! I think I laughed some tears 
I wish I could see the production as an audience member. I got goosebumps a few times during the run-through.
Cindy said that she got emotionally involved when she watched the rehearsal. Cindy read the book a million times, she knows some of the lines by heart and if she still gets moved, that says a lot.
I’m looking forward to performing tomorrow night. I’m nervous but I’m also very excited!
While searching for a one-act play to direct at an upcoming director’s festival, playwright, dramaturge, adaptor, and director Cindy Marie Jenkins stumbled across a collection of interviews from individuals affected by the
What was it about the stories of these individuals that compelled you to compile them into a play?
CMJ: There was such poetry in their descriptions. Conflicted feelings about being interviewed, about their land, and ultimately radiation. They are tied to their land and their homes in ways that I had never experienced. The beauty in their horror and how they went on living their lives. How they were treated. Who knew what. Also, before I read the book, if you had asked me about
On a purely theatrical side ,I love working with a play like an orchestra, and storytelling through sounds only. Then opening my eyes and matching the physical environment with the words, all in a very close collaboration with the actors and designers. When I’m processing a new adaptation (we’re on Draft 13 and 3 fully-produced productions), I re-read the entire book and find a unique way of record-keeping, which sounds very clinical, but I need to process the entire book again before finding the new voices for a new adaptation.
What is the overall theme of Voices from Chornobyl?
CMJ: Living. How do you live within radiation? How do you live away from home? How do you live in your home when the earth betrays you? Survival of the mind and of the body. The subtitle is “Chronicle of the Future” and that is really the theme - how do we survive in this world we’ve created, and how will our children survive?
One of the voices in the play talks about being a “
CMJ: A
But we do! The more I immerse myself in Chernobyl-land, the more I realize that we all have to deal with “their” issues. We all breathe the same air. We all live on the same planet. Just because it happened in the
Those 2 examples might appear to contradict each other. That is because I have never set out for this piece to be anti-nuclear, anti-Soviet or anything like that. I want people to walk away from it with their own stories and to just be more aware and active in supporting their environment.
How has Voices from Chornobyl been received by
CMJ: Very well, but we need more exposure. After the original production, I had the book in the lobby and they sold like hotcakes. People said they wanted to go home and learn more about it. That is what I want. After the Edgefest production, strangers came up to me and wanted to know more; that is actually how we were invited to be part of the Empty Stage Theatre’s New Voices Festival, from someone seeing the show at Edgefest.
We are working on more exposure, linking our website www.voicesfromchornobyl.com to
What are you hoping audiences will take away from the play?
CMJ: I saw a great bumper sticker today : “Ignore the environment. It will just go away.” I want people to walk out of the theater and for the images and the words to seep into their actions. Walk to the store and bring your own bag; let cyclists who are obeying the rules of the road to share the roads with you. Arrange your life around the world and not the other way around. Keep your perspective wider than the dashboard. Instead of labeling, listen to people and their experiences and learn what you can. We are all part of the same world and must work together.
Voices from Chornobyl plays at the Empty Stage Theatre Sept. 30th & Oct. 14th at 7pm. Tickets are $20 and available by emailing Bookshoptheatre@gmail.com. For more information visit www.voicesfromchornobyl.com.
* Ride your BIKE to the show on either Sept. 30th or Oct. 14th and get $5 off the ticket price!! More information is available at www.illuminatela.com.
This cast is pretty amazing. I feel completely safe with everyone. I felt safe just crying my eyes out yesterday. I was crying from exhaustion. I felt safe today falling asleep while we were running lines.
That’s all we did today at rehearsal. Running lines. We ran them italian style, which is the speed read. We ran off book and on book. We red a few scenes separately and we also red the entire play from beginning to end stuttering, trying to remember our cues and our lines. It was great!
Tonight was very casual. No acting. Just rehearsing lines. And I felt very comfortable with everyone. It was a great rehearsal. And I got a shut-eye as well
Yesterday I had no time to work on Chornobyl. I’ve rehearsed for another play, that will open in October, then I had to do some VO work for that other play. After that, I ran to vote at my Neighborhood Council election and then I was off to a Women In Theatre Quarterly Mixer that I was hosting. I didn’t get home until 11 pm. Dead tired!
I didn’t read the book, I didn’t pick up the script, I didn’t practice my lines. Nothing. The only thing I did was find in the morning a pair of thick knitting needles and some thick yarn. And I knitted three rows in the “library.”
I liked the idea of knitting during Anna’s interview. Cindy loved it so much, she asked me if I could knit something 10 feet long. Ha! She said that it’s not necessary but she loves the visual of Anna knitting an endless scarf.
I love the idea as well and even though Cindy said it’s not important, for me it is. I want to make the directors vision true. It’s her play and I love to be directed. Not bossed around. But directed. And Cindy does it well. So I’m going to try to knit an endless scarf for Sundays performance.
So much to do! I hope I’ll know my lines tonight at rehearsal. I’m really nervous. Only 4 days left. And I’m worried about my cues. I’m worried about remembering my lines. I’m just a nervous wreck today. Aaaarrrrggghhh!!!
A very influential Directing Teacher of mine said that if it doesn’t scare you then it isn’t worth doing.
Or maybe that was Google’s Quote of the Day.
Anyway—–
I sure hope that’s true, because I get scared a lot.
I get scared every day before rehearsal that I don’t have what it takes. Why am I continually working on Chornobyl? Why is the subject matter fitting for a play form? Why on earth do all of these people come along to rehearsal with me? Why are so many people dedicated to the project? That is really the force that drives me - the ensemble drive me every day to persevere. They believe in the project and believe that I will come through.
I struggle every day to make it to rehearsal.
Every rehearsal is exhilarating. The deep understanding that the ensemble has of what it takes to do this show and to alter the genre we have created, it’s fantastic and rids me of anyfright as soon as I hear their laughter from the rehearsal room. You don’t laugh unless you’re incredibly uncomfortable or incredibly happy. If you could see their faces, then you would know immediately that they are incredibly happy to be there. Yet they’re able to leap into the serious tone and the disturbing images.
I still get scared, but it’s a good scared. Directing is really carving out a piece of your brain, of how you see the world and hear the world and smell the world and your point of view or some pov on the world. Trying to express and filter your brain so that it makes sense for actors and designers and so that you tell a compelling story to the audience. Your brain, your ideas, your thoughts and your hopes and dreams, all onstage for everyone to see and to have an opinion. I like reviews not because I want praise or that I enjoy criticism, but because I love hearing what the audience thinks. I want to know if we succeeded and what you thought.
After you see the show, tell us what you thought: Bookshoptheatre@gmail.com
Tell me what you think of our brainchild!
Anna Petrovna Badaeva loves nature. And so do I. Cindy offered me Anna’s role because she new that Anna and I are very compatible.
So why do I struggle with my character? Why do I struggle with my lines? Why do I have such difficulty to connect to some words? Because I did not live through the disaster?
Tonight, after rehearsal I rode home on my bicycle and four full grown coyotes crossed my path. I slowed down and followed them. They stopped and looked at me. They were curious. I held my distance. I watched them and they watched me.
Then three of them started playing with each other. They looked beautiful. They let me watch them. And when I decided to go, one of them ran ahead of me and the other three were following me while they were chasing leaves on the ground.
I was so happy with them, I had to laugh out loud. I thought of Anna. I thought of her and I thought, this is how she would laugh. This is how she would feel amongst the animals. I think I truly found the connection with her tonight. I found the connection we share. To the animals. To earth.
What will happen to the part of her life that I can’t connect to? Who knows. I’ll keep looking.
I came up with verbage for the way I like to direct. Goals vs. Results. I walk into every rehearsal with goals but I don’t set a limit or know exactly what I want to see. I just know, “OK, by the end of today I want these actors to understand what their characters value. How their character looks at life. The way we worked yesterday accomplished that. Even though we only “worked” on their first few lines, I believe that they know understand how to approach most of their lines. And if they know the right approach and the rules of their world, then everything else will fall into place.
Today was the first time that we got to rehearse at the Empty Stage Theatre. I was nervous. Don’t know why. I got there at 10 am today and we jumped into the rehearsal pretty fast.
Cindy asked us to take our places anywhere we like and to make ourselves comfortable. She asked us to imagine the place where our characters were interviewed in 1996 and to imagine the interviewee, Svetlana Alexievich. Then the work began.
First we did some relaxation work. Then we worked on some key words and on our “most important” paragraph, and on intention. We concluded by working opposite another actor, telling him/her our story.
It was incredible! I learned so much about my character. More then I learned on my own at home. I learned a lot about the other characters as well. I also found some importance in some of the words that didn’t seem to matter to me before the rehearsal.
It was great. I left exhausted but excited about the new knowledge, the new find about my character Anna Petrovna Badaeva. I’m looking forward to the next rehearsal!
First rehearsal with the new script yesterday, just had the gentlemen (Bradford Beacom, Aaron Lyons & Brian Sparrow). Throughout the process, working with numerous adaptations + collaborators new to the process, it’s hard not to always compare this incarnation with the last or the first. We found that challenging last night. Especially because this adaptation is so vastly different than anything I’ve ever even talked about before; it’s much more character-driven and a huge dimension forward from the genre that we had created for the first two incarnations. I say “dimension” because this is the first script where we are truly approaching the people as Characters. They have more direct interpersonal relations and arcs.
As we were describing how the new script feels, Aaron brought up the filmmaker Jim Jarmusch. I’ve seen Dead Man and after seeing the first few minutes of another, completely understand what Aaron means. Small glimpses into every character’s inner feelings and outside of time. He plays with time a lot and I feel that our character of Vasily is in a race against time.
Also, Valerie Rothenberg, our Costume Designer, and I noted how the pictures of what people in The Zone wore was the same as they would have worn in almost any decade. The people in that region, and especially after the accident–the people who re-settled after the evacuation–live out of time and almost in another world. I wonder how the population feels about that. I know how the people who were interviewed feel, I know how they felt in 1996, but how about in 2007? Who is still alive?