Notes from the director of Circle Mirror Transformation

For the past three years, Immediate Theatre Project (or ITP) has produced two shows each year, both in collaboration with NC Stage. The first is our yearly production of Live From WVL Radio Theatre: It's A Wonderful Life, and the second is ITP's contribution to the NC Stage MainStage series.

This means, because half of our season is pre-determined, that we only get one shot: one chance to choose the perfect play. No pressure there, right? It's important to us to choose plays that excite us creatively, that will honor and challenge the intelligence of our audience, and that feel vital and relevant to Right Now. And, of course, they have to represent a theatrical challenge that we can reasonably expect to meet, fit within our budgetary constraints, and be available for production.

Between artistic and practical considerations, the play selection process can be daunting, but every year, we hope, we find just the right gem of a play, polish it up and present it to you. And we hope that you connect to it in performance as deeply as we did when first reading it and dreaming of production.

Circle Mirror Transformation stood out for a number of reasons when we first discovered it. Sure, it was relatively easy to produce (small cast! contemporary costumes! single setting!), but more importantly it clicked immediately as something different, something unlike any of us had ever seen onstage before.

It was a theatre-centric play that was free of backstage antics and stereotypes. It celebrated the unknown, but was anchored in the ordinary. It lived comfortably in the uncomfortable silences that pepper our everyday speech and thoughts, as our brains and tongues try to catch up to our feelings. It gave voice to the inexpressible, sometimes without words. It felt, in a very unusual and exciting way, that we were witness not to a play, but to an intimate discovery of five real people interacting as real people do every day, of their very lives being shaped in subtly and often completely unknown ways at each seemingly unimportant moment.

In short, it defied our expectations, excited our senses, and made us cry out, “This is it! This is our play!”

The conceit of Circle Mirror Transformation is also unique-- we only see the characters interact in the context of a six-week community drama class in which they have enrolled. Most of what we learn about them is a sideways view into their lives, revealed though simple acting exercises that are designed more to foster trust and bridge differences than to explicitly teach acting. Of course, as all of us in the theatre realize, it is only by building the capacity for trust, openness, creativity, and commitment do we start to become better actors.

And hopefully, like the characters in this tiny play with a big title, we find that the joy, the delight, and the raw, painful emotional discoveries we make along the way can make us better people, too.

Willie Repoley
Director