Collective Consciousness Keeps It Fresh

For teenager Chai’s birthday, his girlfriend Caryn is getting him something unusual: a new name.

She knows Chai doesn’t like his name, his full name, so behind his back she does some crowdfunding and raises the money — over $2,000 — to legally make the change.

One thing, though: Chai doesn’t know what to change it to. Another thing: Caryn doesn’t even know why Chai doesn’t like his name, or what it will do to his small nuclear family if he tries to change it.

Chai, by DC Cathro, is one of three plays being given staged readings in Collective Consciousness Theatre​‘s Freshworks New Play Festival. It’ll be performed on June 23 at 3 p.m. Exception To The Rule, by Dave Harris, will be performed June 22 at 7 p.m. The Captives, by Barbara Blumenthal-Ehrlich, will be performed June 23 at 7 p.m. Each performance will be followed by talkback sessions; the talkbacks for Chai and The Captives will feature the playwrights themselves, traveling from out of town to be a part of it.

The idea for Freshworks came about last year when Executive Artistic Director Dexter Singleton and Associate Director Jenny Nelson were discussing plans for the 2017 – 2018 season. ​“One of the things we’re always talking about is having more community engagement,” Nelson said, ​“and puling in new artists to give them a voice.”

So they hit on the idea of doing three plays at once — not as full-fledged productions, but as rehearsed staged readings — and of doing plays that had not yet been fully produced.

“We put out a call, and over about a two- or three-month period, we got about 150 submissions,” Nelson said. The submissions came from all over the country. Singleton and Nelson assembled a group of 25 volunteer readers to carefully read the submissions and select their favorites. ​“Once we whittled it down to the top 20, Dexter and I read them all individually,” Nelson said. It all took about two months. ​“We really took the time to be thoughtful about these plays.”

The three plays they arrived at are each quite different from the others. Exception to the Rule is about students in detention, but as the play progresses, it takes on a Beckett-like character. ​“These kids are in detention,” Nelson said, ​“but then it becomes more abstract, that they can’t get out of detention.” There are echoes of Waiting for Godot in particular: ​“We’re waiting but we’re fearful of moving forward.”

The Captives, meanwhile, is about a woman who, as a major artistic project, paints the last meals of death row inmates from details that she culls from the public record — yet has never met or spoken with an actual inmate on death row. In the play, she finally does, and it changes the artist’s whole project and how she feels about her subject. ​“You’re not the sum of your worst mistakes,” Nelson said.

But there are common threads that pull them together. ​“They’re on mission for us,” Nelson said, in taking on social issues and possibly helping to foment social change. From a technical perspective, ​“Dexter being a playwright and me being a dramaturge, we’re drawn to great dialogue,” Nelson said. ​“All there are just exceptionally written, well thought out, with heavy subject matter — but peppered with comedy.”

That’s important to Nelson. ​“The lightness helps with the darkness,” she said. ​“Even Hamlet had the gravedigger” — drunk, too clever for his own good, and hilarious.

The Freshworks festival is all part of CCT’s eye toward the future as it finishes up what Nelson reports is its most successful season yet. ​“We’re already getting a lot of emails of people wanting to come” see the plays, she said, and may do it again in coming years. In rehearsing for the readings, they have been able to mix actors they’ve worked with in the past with actors they’re working with the first time, and have gotten to bring in three new directors — AJ Lovelace for Exception to the Rule, Katie Sparer for Chai, and Christian Shaboo for The Captives.

On Tuesday night, Sparer met with the cast of Chai — Valerie Badjan, Cantrell Cheeks, Tamika Pettway, and Akintunde Sogunro — to start breaking in the script. The actors already had a clear sense of their characters. As Caryn, Badjan was smart and knowing. Cheeks got at Chai as a teenager coming into his own as a responsible young man. Pettway knew how to bring out Chai’s mother Shayra’s acceptance of, and worries about, her son. And Sogunro commanded as Chai’s father Lincoln, a man trying to do the best for his family. Now together for the first time in rehearsal, they worked with Sparer to quicken the already fast timing and to bring out the line-by-line comedy in Cathro’s script, and the underlying drama. A slight emphasis on a word suggested that Caryn was probably smarter than Chai, and Chai probably knew that. Leaning just a little more on a line let the audience catch a glimpse of the legitimate reasons why Shayra might be worried about her boy.

As questions fired around the table, Nelson pointed out that this was one reason why staged readings could sometimes bring out better acting than full productions. Still harnessed to the book, actors had to be in the moment all the time, without a second to relax. They had to respond to each other or else. And everything — the scenery, movement across the stage, characters first in close proximity to one another, then far away — had to be conveyed almost exclusively through language alone. But the cast were more than up for it.

“We have a network of people that we’re proud to be connected with,” Nelson said, and that network is getting bigger. ​“We’re still a growing theater, and people seem to come back.”

Like another theater company in town, Collective Consciousness Theatre also finds New Haven to be a good town to be growing in.

“If I’m walking down the street in New Haven, I’m going to run into someone I know, and we’re going to connect and try to help each other. Everyone is really in it,” Nelson said. At The American Unicorn at Long Wharf, which she attended last week, Nelson found that ​“the sense of community was just so strong. Everyone came out to support, and I thought, ​‘this is so New Haven.’”

“We need it more than ever right now,” she added. ​“We need to be together.”

The Freshworks New Play Festival runs June 22 – 23 at Collective Consciousness Theatre, Erector Square, 315 Peck Street Studio D, Building 6 West, 2nd Floor). Exception To The Rule is performed June 22 at 7 p.m. Chai is performed on June 23 at 3 p.m. The Captives will be performed June 23 at 7 p.m. Click here for tickets and more information.