Fall gal

Bridget Carpenter swings into Trinity

by Bill Rodriguez

Music and dance must have been part of the theater from the earliest days, acting out a fearsome hunting tale around a fire in a cave. Since the most involving plays are mostly about what's between the words, a playwright can better enthrall us with rhythm and movement than with adjectives. More than 20 plays into her busy career, Bridget Carpenter keeps relearning that. But until now, and the world premiere of Fall at Trinity Repertory Company, she hadn't gone for broke, betting that audiences would enjoy the approach as much as she does.

Fall is energized by swing music. It's the story of the adolescent passage of 14-year-old Lydia, played by Ari Gaynor, who was Little Red in Trinity's Into the Woods three years ago. The setting is swing dance camp, where Lydia has been dragged by her parents (Anne Scurria and Dan Welch). She hopes to spend most of her time escaping into her current obsession, scuba diving. There is plenty opportunity for family conflict and romance, dream and fantasy episodes -- up to and including spontaneous combustion -- and whole scenes performed under water. Through it all, popular Rhode Island dance partners Brian Jones and Susan Boyce stitch scenes together by doing the lindy hop around the stage.

The play had a staged reading at Trinity last spring at the Providence New Plays Festival. It was directed then by Neal Baron, who is doing so again for the full production. "The characters are a lot of fun to bring to life," he remarked after a recent rehearsal. But it's a tricky play to direct as well, he noted. "A lot of scenes have a very cinematic approach, which is a real challenge onstage."

Carpenter isn't a newcomer to Providence, having gotten her MFA in playwriting at Brown University in 1995 and her BA there in 1991. Born in New York City and raised in Los Angeles, she is currently settled in Minnesota, as a visiting assistant professor at Carleton College. Her plays have been performed at Arena Stage, in Washington, D.C., at the Los Angeles Theatre Center, at La Mama ETC in New York, as well as at smaller regional theaters. Local theatergoers might recall a short play of hers performed at the 1995 Women's Playwriting Festival at Perishable Theatre. The entertaining high point of The Ride was a black Labrador retriever cringing as his owner described traveling around the country to try out roller coasters.

Carpenter's awards include the New England Clauder Competition and a recent NEA/TCG playwriting residency at the prestigious Guthrie Theatre in Minneapolis. Fall received an award and a staged reading in London earlier this year.

With her shoulder-length honey blond hair, bright red lipstick and tortoise-shell glasses, the playwright looks like she would be equally comfortable hunched over a computer keyboard or swinging to big band music. The latter she began doing obsessively -- sometimes five or six nights a week -- five years ago. The former she sat down to talk about during a recent rehearsal break.

Q: Is this a new approach for you or have you used music and dance in some of your other plays?

A: I would say that I have in this way: I think very percussively. I think rhythmically. I arrange words on the page in a particular rhythm that I hear. This, I would say, is the most overt use of dance in any straight play that I've written. I've written a couple of children's musicals. And there was one show that was very overt and distinct in its use of music and dance. It was called Mr. Xmas, and there were these big, lavish, splashy musical numbers, all of which were Christmas songs. But it was very presentational. It wasn't as seamless as this.

I did think to myself recently: I have to have music and dancing in every single thing that I write from now on. Because why would I not? It's such a joy . . . I want to be around this all the time. And it heightens things so beautifully or terrifyingly, or any other additives you could choose. It raises the stakes.

Q: What sort of things have changed in the playscript since the reading here at Trinity last spring?

A: The core is the same. [Rehearsal has involved] paying attention to where we want to take the audience and how fast we want to take them there.

Q: What choices were there in where to take the audience? Where might they have gone that they have not?

A: I think that in a first draft I can over-explain. And what I like best in theater is mystery and surprise -- not opacity. But life is not simple, and this play is not simple. It's complex and things are not neatly tied up. It's about a 14-year-old girl. Adolescence is possibly the messiest of times. So it's about respecting the mess. Going: "All right, here is this big, crazy, mess of relationships and alliances." And then going: "What's one line we can draw out very cleanly?"

Q: So you want the audience to have some of the sense of mystery that you came to in discovering the characters yourself.

A: Absolutely. The playwright Charles Maine, some years ago when he was reading a play of mine -- when I was at Brown, actually -- said there are two plays that happen. There's the play that you go to see and experience with everyone else in the theater, and there's the play that you experience when you go home. And I thought: That is fantastic! There are so many plays that can happen with a single play. I love plays that allow me my own agency, in going: "This is what I thought of that, this is what I thought that means." And that everybody can be equally right. Because, you know, it's their experience of the play.

Q: How have you changed and grown as a playwright?

A: The thing that I'm trying to change and do is to keep listening harder, just keep listening. I feel that if I can lean hard enough on my elbows and my knees with my head cocked just the right way, then the right ideas will come through and the wrong words -- or the too many words -- will fall away. And that counts for dramaturgy too. That the right ideas will lodge themselves in my brain, and the other things will just be like water and roll off. So I'm aspiring to change, to evolve that way. Listening.