British actor-writer Tim Crouch last appeared in a play in New York at 59E59 Theaters in 2004. It was called My Arm, and Crouch, who wrote the piece, used props elicited from the audience, plus video for diversion and commentary, to narrate the first-person tale of a 10-year-old who, maybe for attention, held his arm aloft for days, weeks, months, years—until the rest of him rotted away. Watching My Arm, you noticed Crouch's arms, so it was obviously a dramatic ruse. Still, the piece's visceral immediacy was cauterizing and full of power.
Now Crouch's newest play, An Oak Tree, is arriving on American shores, produced by the Perry Street Theatre Company, among other groups. And here, too, the précis is clear: A hypnotist (Crouch), who at some point killed a young woman in a horrible car accident, is plying his trade at a less-than-stellar venue. From the audience, he happens to pick the dead girl's father to undergo hypnosis. Each night a different actor, having never read a word of the script, plays the father. The actor isn't hypnotized, of course, but he does need to be game.
"Interested actors receive a single-page document outlining some of the rudiments of the play, so you mustn't know the play before you come on stage," Crouch explains. "You must be able to sight-read—meaning you can't be dyslexic—happy to wear an earpiece, and know that the play concerns the death of a child. If that story is close to you in any way, I recommend you don't do it." But if you do, he says, "we meet about an hour before the show and talk for about 40 minutes. I talk about how they'll be cued in three different ways. One is through direct requests by me. A second is through pieces of text—we practice through sample text not from the play. The third way is that one speech will be fed to them through the earpiece, as well as various instructions and support."
On one level, he says, there are the states of the two characters in the play: "one [the hypnotist] who has lost the power of suggestion and one [the father] who has gained the power of suggestion." On another level, however, "there's a thesis that looks at what the primary requisites are to make drama: the notion that performance must be finely crafted, psychologically researched, and motivated." The play's title comes from a famous 1973 conceptual artwork by Michael Craig-Martin involving a glass of water placed on a shelf. Instead of calling the piece, for example, "Glass of Water Placed on a Shelf," Craig-Martin called it "An Oak Tree." In a similar sense, Crouch is aiming to challenge reigning theories of what elements are absolutely necessary to create a character—or by extension, a performance.
"There are parallels throughout An Oak Tree between what the play is about and the 'meta' part of what the play is about," Crouch adds. "There's an old-fashioned story you might find on The Oprah Winfrey Show—a story of loss and grief and guilt. That's one of its strengths—it does tell a story, and I believe passionately in the story being told. What I'm adding is a metatheatrical level to the performance. There's a very basic level of trust that the actor on stage with me has to have; they have to say, 'I'll do this,' because the actor playing onstage with me is playing someone who has lost his compass. It's the father who has lost a daughter, but on—forgive me for this phrasing—a grandiose level, it's the loss of psychologically motivated drama, the work of an actor who gives a performance they've never worked on until that moment."
Crouch concludes, "Stories don't change. What changes with the generations, the decades, and sometimes from year to year is the form of those stories. I think we're coming toward the end of a dominant form of storytelling, increasingly toward a new approach to form—and the form is something I think we should be most alert to because of what it says about how we are, who we are, and how we dialogue with each other. I'm talking about changes that have occurred in storytelling since Brecht—how we deconstruct stories—and its impact in terms of how we communicate, onstage and off. Lots of theatre artists don't realize this. They're absorbed by characters only in realistic ways."
An Oak Tree is running at the Barrow Street Theatre, 27 Barrow St., NYC. Tickets: (212) 239-6200 or www.telecharge.com. Stephanie Klapper is the casting director. To find out how to perform in An Oak Tree, visit www.perrystreettheatre.com.