Churchill's A Number -- Off to a good start

On the page, the play seems spare: the speeches are mostly short, within narrow margins, and the there is a noticeable shortage of punctuation and capitalization. On further inspection, most utterances seem grammatically fractured. So one's first impression of the play is that of a mystery waiting to be solved, daunting and detailed.

Spoken aloud, the text of Caryl Churchill's 2002 play A Number, sounds like "real" speech: that is, it seems completely to put the artifice of its writing into the background, while putting the characters and the action up front. Rarely have I felt a play so effectively create the impression of its characters speaking with one another. What this means of course, is that the writing creates the illusion of its sub-conscious sources, and gives the actors real lives in which to live. For the actors, this means not only applying their considerable technique, but the kind of emotional courage one needs when the only way forward is dead ahead. Skydiving requires jumping. So it is the most deliberate kind of writing imaginable; only a playwright of Churchill's gifts and long experience could have made a play so rooted in its own core. Churchill celebrated her 70th birthday last September: you can read more about her here.

There are just two actors called for by the play, and the staging is likely to be relatively simple, and so -- despite the usual time limitations -- I've opted for us to spend as much rehearsal time "at the table" as we feel we might need. We've been at it for a week, and found that every comma, every full stop (or lack thereof) tells us something about the situation, the action, the relationships, the mindset and being of the characters. A Number is a play built on the singular necessity of its operative words. Nothing is for show, and our growing intimacy with the text is engendering a shared commitment to creating a production that is lives up to its essential textual basis.

NC Stage has recently begun its own blog. A Number will be the company's first show accompanied by blog posts about the creative process: impressions provided by our student guest blogger, Elizabeth Dacy, whose current and future posts can be accessed all together here.