"The Rubber Room" Bounces Actors into Unpredictable Territory

Cross-posted on Lapis Loquens blog.

The Rubber Room, a new play now on in New York for a brief run, delights while upending conventional notions of rehearsal and performance.  Written by Gary Garrison and Roland Tec, and produced by Artistic New Directions, this innovative work delivers an exciting audience experience somewhere between improv and rehearsed performance.

Here’s the concept.  Five characters.  Five theatre companies.  Five directors.  25 performances.  Each performance has a unique combination of actors.   The different companies rehearse independently with their own five actors.  In performance, each actor, while well rehearsed in his or her role, has never met the other actors sharing the stage that night and did not even know who they would be.

As you might imagine, this adds a certain electricity to the play.  Unpredictability is in the air.  It’s a new (and well written) play so I didn’t know where the story was going.  In addition to that magical experience of good first-time plays, I also didn’t know how the actors would do.  Would they miss cues?  Would they walk over each other’s lines?  Would a scene partner’s interpretation of a character run at cross purposes to their own carefully prepared role and kill the scene?  Would jokes fall flat because of disjointed timing?  None of that happened.  One actress went up on her lines a few times but that happens all the time.  In fact, I doubt that if I hadn’t known the concept, that I would have detected anything amiss; I believe I would have felt the production had a high energy and suspense level without suspecting any unusual conditions at work.

The play also offers an interesting experiment about the influence of a director on performance.  Co-writer Roland Tec, familiar with the five directors, played a little game and tried to guess which actors worked with which director.  In the first four performances he attended, Roland guessed right on 18 of 20 actors.  Roland’s unsurprising conclusion:  Yes, directors definitely do put their stamp on performance.

I found myself sitting next to the husband of one of the actresses before the play and we got to chatting.  He said his wife feels that she’s grown from the experience and has really enjoyed it.  I asked if she was going to attend any other performances to see how other actors were interpreting her role.  He told me that she was really curious to do that but the rules are that no actor can watch another actor doing their role until they are done with all their performances.  Probably a good idea to maintain the integrity of the concept.

I’m only in New York for a few days so can only see The Rubber Room once.  I now wish I had time to see at least one more performance for the treat of comparing.  There is one person who is seeing more than one performance, in fact he is seeing all 25!  His name is Raphael Badagliacca and he’s blogging about it.  You can read his musings here.

The play closes this Sunday, Feb. 20.  If you’re in New York and in the mood for a different sort of theatrical experience, I highly recommend The Rubber Room.  And even if you don’t see it, this is a fascinating production concept for other theatre companies to try.