Show it, don't tell it: a school theatre workshop explores stripped-back story-telling techniques, writes Sara Keating
THREE MEN SCATTER a circle of rice on the pavement and step inside. Their gesture might be the etching of a square in the sand, the marking out of boundary lines across an empty room, the erection of a platform framed by velvet curtains. The significance is the same. The rice marks out the boundaries of their stage, the empty circle inside their arena of play. These men are the storytellers. These are their rules.
The Brothers Size, which is running at the Peacock Theatre, evolved from such simple storytelling rituals. Written by Yale student Tarrell Alvin McCraney, the play was created as part of a curricular playwriting project, in which budding dramatists were teamed with a director, a group of actors, and a tiny budget of $200 (€130), and were instructed to create a full-length, full-scale theatre production.
What McCraney came up with was a simple piece of "street-corner theatre" which was to have an extraordinary effect upon the contemporary American theatre scene, transferring from Yale's student theatre space to New York's Public Theatre, and now the downstairs studio at Dublin's National Theatre, while a second production is currently playing to five-star acclaim at London's Old Vic.
The Brothers Sizeexplores the relationship between two African-American brothers, Ogun and Oshoosi Size who are growing apart. Ogun is a straight-talking hard-working citizen; Oshoosi is a petty criminal whose prison friendships are threatening to drag him down. While the play combines song, movement, mythic ritual and live music to tell the story of the Size brothers, simplicity was the key to its conception. McCraney and his director Tea Alagic wanted it to be the kind of theatre that needs no theatre, but can be performed on a street corner if there is someone there to listen, and the remarkable shoestring show - which requires no props, no proscenium arch, and no special effects - indeed needs nothing more than an audience for the theatrical transformation to take place.
IT IS THE STRIPPED-BACK nature of the storytelling at the heart of The Brothers Sizethat provided the Abbey Theatre's outreach department with an especially innovative way of connecting the visiting production with its education and access remit. As Phil Kingston, who has been facilitating the production-based theatre projects with three schools in Ireland explains: " The Brothers Sizepresented us with an important opportunity to allow students to devise their own work, to invent stories for themselves, as well as learn about theatrical techniques.
"Usually in our work with students, the engagement is more passive. We help to introduce them to world of the play, providing them with a more sophisticated understanding of the performance that they will see. But The Brothers Sizeallows an even deeper, more meaningful, understanding: by allowing them to make a piece themselves, using similar techniques, we let students see that you don't need to be highly educated or articulate to understand theatre."
Kingston continues: " The Brothers Sizetells a really accessible, emotionally engaging story, but because it could be put on anywhere it provides a way to tell a story about how a play is created too. It's a brilliant way to encourage this constituency - who have very little experience of theatre - how to create drama. Seeing the show at the end lets them see that there's little difference between how they have applied themselves and the play they see performed on stage."
Leafing through the resource notes that Kingston has compiled, the engagement with both theatre theory and storytelling seems extremely sophisticated, with modules on Brecht's alienation technique and Brook's "rough" and "holy" theatres providing a theatre history context, and sections on Yoruba myth and performance ritual providing a context for the background to The Brothers Sizeitself. For Kingston, the background material allows students to find a way out of their own natural performance habits.
"For example, teenagers tend to talk too much," he explains. "When telling a story they try and explain everything, but with the Brechtian and Brook techniques, we let them see that there are other ways of telling stories. We teach them how they can show instead of telling all the time: that they don't need to spell out everything; that understanding can be reached through a gesture, an image, or simply by the way in which you stand; that the emotional effect can be stronger if you only show someone a glimpse of what is going on. But the most important thing is that they understand that these ideas are not mysterious, that they can tell their own stories using such devices, and that their own stories can equally be performed as theatre."
Their devised pieces will be performed on the Peacock stage for an audience including Alagic, The Brothers Sizedirector. In fact, the most striking thing about entering the library at Assumption College, Walkinstown, where a group of transition year students are rehearsing the piece that they have devised, is the silence. There is none of the girlish giddiness you would expect, but complete and intense concentration, as they move slowly through a series of stage pictures based around the idea of teenage pregnancy. The credit of ownership that Kingston has been talking about is more than lip service: the play the students are devising is entirely their own.
KINGSTON DIRECTS THEM a little here and there and keeps them focused, reminding them to direct their performance outwards, instead of to each other. But suggestions for enhancing the story, creating links between the different elements, assigning roles, all come from the students themselves, negotiated on a trial and error basis.
The story itself is also entirely of their own devising, as they explain (the girls work so fluently as an ensemble that even the explaining is shared among them). "When Phil told us about the play," one girl pipes up, "he asked us to think about what story we would like to tell about our lives. And the first thing we thought was that we didn't want our story to be a cliché.
"People always think the worst about teenagers - like when that story about girls at Welsey disco came out a couple of years ago. People talked about us like we were all going around with no knickers on. But that's not true." Another girl takes over: "We decided that we wanted to show a different side of things, so we thought we'd do a story about teenage pregnancies and then we thought that the Magdalene Laundries story would let us show our stories in a different way."
Someone else chimes in: "Like about how things are different now - how teenage pregnancy is more accepted nowadays. That there's no shame in it." All the same, another pair exclaim: "Our parents would be mortified. They'd go mad. But then they'd support us. They know there are worse things - like being a junkie."
The girls are unsure how best to represent that ambiguity - because although the historical leap between 1950s Ireland and their own lives is huge, it would be untrue to give their story an entirely happy ending. "It's not like there's shame or anything," another student explains. "You think - oh you're going to have a baby, that's great, but you wouldn't really want that for yourself when you're so young." The commitment to the integrity of their story continues as they throw ideas back and forth between themselves.
For Kingston, however, the truth of the story is immaterial, although he commends the topical relevance of the project that the students have committed themselves to: "Ultimately it's about how stories are told rather than what the stories are. It is the way in which the students have chosen to tell their stories that is crucial," he concludes, "because that shows us an awful lot more about their lives."
The Brothers Size runs at the Peacock Theatre until June 14.
