How MXTW works…
MXTW is a five-week workshop that is part classroom and part production-company. The goals of the workshop are to introduce interested students to theatrical styles they are unlikely to encounter in the regular school year and to allow students the opportunity to write and perform original pieces collaboratively with their peers.
In the first two weeks students study representative movements and styles from the history of avant-garde theater. In 2005, for example, students read pieces by Madame Rachilde, Oscar Wilde, Georges Ribemont-Dessaignes, Tristan Tsara, Antonin Artaud, Betsuyaku Minoru, Susan Yankowitz, Harold Pinter, Samuel Beckett, JoAnne Akalaitis, Lee Breuer, Adrienne Kennedy, David Greenspan, and Caryl Churchill. The company also learns vocal and movement techniques that are appropriate for performing non-traditional theater pieces. We use many sources for these exercises, but we rely principally on techniques developed by Augusto Boal, JoAnne Akalaitis, , and Peter Brook. Each year a number of the staff bring new techniques into the mix.
Our philosophy is
The writing and producing part of the workshop takes place in the last three weeks. At the beginning of that three-week period, the whole company decides what they will all write about – what we call "the target story." A good target story is one that is used to teach us something (which may, upon reflection, be morally questionable), that most people think they know (but often do not really know), and that can be explored, rewritten actually, by means of a number of different styles among those the company has studied. In one long sustained discussion each year, the company narrows down from as many as fifty stories that have been suggested in the first two weeks of work to a single story that they will focus on for the remaining three weeks.
How MXTW is different from other theater experiences
Mainstream theater in America usually presents what is called "naturalistic" representations of characters caught up in stories that have beginnings, middles, and ends. Naturalism as a style of theatrical representation was developed in the late Nineteenth Century to focus attention on the inner lives of the characters in plays, because that was thought to be the arena of the most significant lessons to be learned in theater.
Although the revitalized program at Manhattan High School is stretching these boundaries, this is still the form of theater most often presented by and to high school students. It is the form most often studied in high school theater classes. And it is the form that (anachronistically) guides most reading in high school literature classes of plays from periods before the development of Naturalism.
The MXTW process helps students explore alternatives to Naturalism.
If the many avant-garde theater practices that have been developed in the past 125 years have anything at all in common with each other, it is distrust of the effects and of the means of Naturalism. So, in MXTW we teach a variety of non-naturalistic styles of theatrical representation. We focus on techniques for dissecting, disassembling, and reassembling story lines. We help students learn to develop techniques for focusing upon things other than the inner lives of characters; for example, the characters' social situations, or their ideas, or their capacities for various kinds of expression. Part of our goal is to get a clearer understanding of the hidden motives and unconscious effects embedded in any naturalistic theatrical plotting of a series of events. An even more important goal is to increase students' own expressive powers by providing them with more, and more varied, tools of expression.
One reason our students are able to generate high quality work in such a short time – a feature for which MXTW has become known – is that we insist each group of students explores their style in depth and then consistently stick to what they have learned about that style. This constraint simultaneously liberates their creative juices and forces them to push themselves creatively.
Another way MXTW is different
The production of plays conceived and written by others is the hands-on theater experience most familiar to high school students. This experience is undeniably beneficial. It provides exposure to a variety of tasks and skills required to mount any form of art. However, it is obvious that two important skills are not taught in this mode of theatrical production: how to make a basic style choice and how to write a play within that choice. In fact, since these two skills control what plays are all "about", even in the best atmosphere of cooperative production of plays students may be taught, subtly, that the most important elements in a play are still not within their control.
In the MXTW the students make all the basic decisions about subject matter, style, and performance. And they write everything they perform.
This is, we think, another reason for the high quality of MXTW's work. Each student contributes to every element of the production. Everyone writes and everyone discusses the group's performance choices. Students display a confidence in performance that springs from understanding exactly why they are saying and doing what they are saying and doing: they have made those decisions themselves. They have invested themselves creatively in the most basic and detailed choices in the pieces they perform.
