“The best thing you can say to get us to do something is to say we can’t or it’s not possible.” That’s how artistic director Jon Cohn describes The Mutineer Theatre Company. “And we’re usually able to overcome, to some extent, that obstacle.”
A MUTINEER’S LIFE FOR ME
Jon Cohn
Cohn began his theater with a website and the name Mutineer Theatre Company. True to the name, he wasn’t interested in starting a theater company “the way you’re always told you are supposed to do it.” Even the website has a disclaimer: “We are committed to the development of original work and our website is no exception. Please bear with us as we overhaul our online home.”
Cohn and Mutineer quickly added a script submission to the site but without a company history, playwrights weren’t exactly sending their scripts in droves. So Cohn rethought the traditional way of beginning the new play process. “I ended up putting a group of people together,” he says, “and not just theater people but people I’d worked with in various capacities in my time in LA, who were smart and creative and cultured, who I thought could offer something to a storytelling process. I assembled them in a room and we heard these pitches my playwright friend [Keith Bridges] had, and there was one idea that basically asked the question: ‘What if a man falls in love with a woman who happens to be his daughter?’”
There were other ideas, some just as interesting to the group, but everyone gravitated back to this question, interested in treating it as a serious, honest question rather than a shock fest. Thus began the process of Lie With Me, Mutineer’s premiere production in spring of 2009, and a co-production of that play with Charter Theater, a DC organization dedicated to new work, in the fall of that year.
At the same time as the DC production, Mutineer produced an audio story by James Richter, adapted from the story by Jan Freeman. Next up was Ditch by Taylor Coffman and three original stories for the Hollywood Fringe Festival, Shaked and Speared.
Speared originated in StabLab, a process that involves “basically taking a stab in a laboratory setting. We try little bits and pieces of things to try it out and then get collaborative feedback in the hopes that will make the piece stronger,” Cohn explains. The only requirement for participants to hear their work out loud or workshopped is that they desire collaborative feedback. Cohn himself threw out an idea revolving around Romeo and Juliet after the last scene as we know it. With the company encouraging him to write it and adding two more similar scenarios, Mutineer found a piece to produce for the first annual Hollywood Fringe Festival.
Cohn says, “We created this model where it’s basically this traveling troupe of snake oil salesman-like actors trying to convince the world they’ve found the last acts of all of Shakespeare’s plays. They travel the country and one of their stops is going to be in Hollywood for the fringe festival.”
With reviving Shaked and Speared: The After Plays and a live production of their audio story The Miller’s Ghost at the Atwater Playhouse last fall, nothing about the process, even when in production, is traditional.
ALL HANDS ON DECK
Brian Norris
A Mutineer tradition is the company review, where all company members watch a design run or a late runthrough. All cast and crew are asked to leave before feedback is given, including cast members who are also in the company. The remaining Mutineer company members are given full rein to discuss their thoughts on the production to the director. “That way we know the company continues to be involved even in the production process, and the director doesn’t have to take every single note.
“As you can imagine,” Cohn continues, “in a collaborative setting, there are lot of notes that might contradict one another, but it just gives us a chance to improve the strength and the merit of the piece based on this collaboration. It’s not easy — it sometimes is extremely frustrating and hard. But it keeps us honest and retains the focus of the company in putting the focus on the work, not on the individual opportunities for the members of the company as they’re involved in the process and what not.”
It isn’t always rainbows and unicorns, though. Cohn admits how difficult the process can be but wouldn’t trade it for a more traditional one in any sense. “The challenge is actually a product of something that’s extraordinary. And that is the people in the company who have become involved in the company reviews and meetings are extremely passionate, intelligent and articulate individuals. Because of that, their opinions and perspective can come out in a way that can be borderline emphatic, and that is a blessing to have people so engaged and…so passionate about what we’re doing. To me, that is one of the driving strengths to the company.”
COLLABORATIVE MALCONTENTS
Brian Norris, Tamara Zook and Mark Withers
Company members are so devoted to the telling of the story, in fact, their process extends through the performance. Citing an example from their production of Ditch by company member Taylor Coffman, Cohn describes how both the company and the audience drive their changes. “We developed Ditch, opened it, ran it for two weeks and then went into rehearsal three weeks in, wrote some new stuff, took some scenes out, made the play stronger. It’s always about the work; it’s always always always about improving, and it’s not just the script but the production, and it made the play stronger.”
Mutineer never forgets a key component to its theatrical journey — the audience. A dramaturge is enlisted from day one for every show, to represent the playwright and stay true to the writer’s original intent. The dramaturge’s role is also to form the survey questions for audience members. Audience feedback isn’t just for the post-mortem, though; the company may integrate changes based on the surveys at any point during the run.
Cohn says, “There was a scene we had in Ditch that I was concerned may not be the best way to tell the story, and may actually be really interfering with how we told the story. I thought it was really funny. The actors were doing an amazing job in it, but I was sort of interested in hearing about that. When the audience responded, there were a lot of consistent comments about this scene, and that was one of the scenes that got cut three weeks into the run. It made the play significantly better. So we did really turn to the audience as yet another step of collaboration and take their feedback, take their input. We are still rooted in our creative process and expression but we are open to our audience.”
All of these voices and changes in the production, Cohn believes, are really just about “creative storytelling… it keeps us honest and innovative in the way we produce and story tell, making sure we are innovating our process. So part of our process is changing our process for every production.”
The next Mutineer production, The Woodpecker, a world premiere by Samuel Brett Williams, directed by Cohn, innovates the process merely in the fact that it was more fully developed than anything the Mutineers had produced. Cohn finds the characters and the story beautifully written. Even as there were revisions and multiple drafts through rehearsal, going into the process with a mostly developed script encouraged even more creativity on the part of the company.
Brian Norris and Andrew Price
The characters ”are wonderfully flawed yet compelling human beings, in a story [grappling with] the futility of hope and prayer. [Yet] maybe hope is possible or should be possible despite…the characters’ seeming hopelessness.” The playright is creating ”art that is realistic and relevant but still challenges us to be optimistic, even when the world we inhabit doesn’t give us tons of reasons to be. It’s really challenging, it’s very complex, it’s very ambitious and it’s very intelligent, and I think a lot of people shied away from wanting to produce it.”
NO MAP TO THE TREASURE
Why such a steadfast devotion to new plays? Cohn’s bio spans classical work and new play development in the DC area and here, but in his experience, new work is the most engaging and “there’s just something about being kind of a trailblazer and…initiating [that] I feel ultimately yields the most creative freedom. There’s no existing roadmap and I find that to be a most invigorating thing.” He also admits that because these plays have never been done before Mutineer’s productions, “the risk to fail is so much higher and the stakes become significantly higher.”
The Woodpecker deals with heroism, belief and moral structures. Mutineer’s Facebook page has released tidbits about Arkansas, where the play is set, folk songs about the ivory-billed woodpecker, or “the great god bird” as singer Sufjan Stevens swoons on his YouTube page. Mingled among fundraising campaigns, calls to help build the set and discounted tickets to previews, these supplementary stories bridge the gap between an original piece and its intended audience.
Cohn doesn’t really have a demographic in mind; he simply feels the Mutineer audience is an adventurous one. “We just want an audience that is willing to be challenged, willing to go there. I think it’s most successful for us when we have an audience with mixed responses. Then I think we’re doing our job because we’re pushing the envelope; we’re challenging people. At the end of the day I hope we’re giving them a good show and just trying to be a better company and better storytellers.
“We try to be as creative as possible and stay relevant and stay consistent, to be open to all experiences and stimuli that exist in our world and to bring that to the way we approach what we do. We always always always want to honor and respect the initial intent of the writer, the creator, the playwright.”
***All production photos by Amber Hamilton
The Woodpecker, produced by Stephanie Chang and Taylor Coffman for Mutineer Theatre Company, opens March 5; plays Fri.-Sat., 8 pm; Sun., 7 pm; through April 3. Tickets: $20. Studio/Stage Theatre, 520 N. Western Ave., Los Angeles; 323.871.5826/mutineertheatre.com.
