Signature
THE OPEN HOUSE BY WILL ENO
DIRECTED BY
OLIVER BUTLER
Will Eno on his new play, his inspiration, and resolving the unresolvable.
The play takes place in a town located somewhere in New England. It’s about a family and, I
hope, evolution and the larger world. Or death and change and growth? I’m not trying to be
precious or overcomplicated when I say I’m not completely sure what it’s about. I’m saying
it for two reasons. The first is, I’m still working on it and I’m not completely sure what it’s
about. The second is, I’ve always felt, and I hope felt in a responsible and engaged way, that
saying “what a play is about” is more the province and right and privilege of the audience,
rather than the writer. Certainly, as a writer, you try to create something that, ideally, allows
for a sequence of thoughts and feelings that will bring different people to roughly the same
place, but, you never know. You hope — again, ideally — that you make something that is
simple and plain and unavoidable, like the world, but is also mysterious and weird and kind
of unsolvable, like the world.
I’m still sort of dogged and intrigued by the way we grow up in a family and for a while, that
is the world. Then we get out into the world and we either recreate that thing we first knew,
or, we mistake the world for that first thing. Or we willfully deform it into that first thing.
Or are incredibly pleased and surprised or disappointed and saddened that the world is nothing like the thing we first knew.
Or some other strange and complicated — but in some sense entirely logical — path is created. I was interested in taking a sort
of normative play arc and applying some new math to it. Or to say that another way, how do you theatrically and creatively
resolve something that doesn’t seem to ever get actually resolved in real life?
APPROPRIATE BY BRANDEN JACOBS-JENKINS
DIRECTED BY LIESL
TOMMY
Branden Jacobs-Jenkins’ Appropriate gets ready for its New York premiere.
Branden recently completed a staged reading of his new play Appropriate, collaborating
with director Liesl Tommy and a talented cast for a week in the Ford Studio Theatre. The
playwright focused on a handful of dramaturgical objectives over the course of five work
days: fine-tuning relationships between characters, clarifying the family history in the
play, finding the right act break, and finessing the flow of the play from scene to scene.
Branden and Liesl have also spent time this September and October working closely
with Set and Costume Designer Clint Ramos, Lighting Designer Lap Chi Chu, and Sound
Designer Daniel Baker as they dive in to the design process for the play, which features
the living room of a dilapidated mansion as well as the constant din of cicadas and
haunting, atmospheric lighting. Casting sessions for Appropriate have been ongoing,
and in October Branden and Liesl will travel to Washington, D.C. (Branden’s hometown),
where they will work further on the play at Woolly Mammoth Theatre Company.
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