ARE YOU SOMEONE TO SOMEBODY?

A note from the
Director, Lindsay Beamish

In its essence, devising theatre is a process in which you create a piece of theatre without the starting place of a script. Unlike directing a play – where your launch pad is the text and the script of the play itself – in the world of devising we start with the biggest and most blank canvas. Some devisers begin with a theme. Some begin with a prompt of some sort. In my personal style of devising, we start from a true place of nothing. No ideas; no defined “themes” as a starting place. And definitely no ideas about characters or “story.” So where do we start? We get in the rehearsal room, we get on our feet, and we start playing around and improvising.

But the tight schedule of Emerson Stage presented us with a unique challenge: the show needed to be designed before the show existed. Design plans (lighting, costumes, sound) needed to be finalized over the summer, but we wouldn’t start devising the show until September. To solve this conundrum, we decided to create a scenic and costume design concept, and then then we would devise a piece of theatre that justified this design. For our scenic (and lighting) design, we settled on a sort of 1980s game show world (that had the visual potential to implode somewhat), and the world of three “boxes” with different levels of confinement. In the world of costumes, we decided on two game show host outfits, a “uniform” worn by everyone, and undergarments that could be revealed under the main costumes. And that’s all we knew when we first all came together in our first rehearsal in September. We knew there would be a game show of some kind, two game show hosts, and three differently sized and confined boxes. And from there, we got on our feet and started to experiment. And that’s how we begin the long and painstaking and joyous and sometimes miserable and deeply fulfilling and totally maddening process of creating a piece of theatre from the ground up. What you will see when watching Are You Someone to Somebody? is the outcome of three months of truly intensive work deep from within the trenches of that process.

Almost everything you see in this piece came from a little spark myself or the assistant directors saw in something the actors did. It might have been a two-second part of a bigger piece they presented. It might have been something they improvised based on an impulse. It might have been a little moment in between moments of actual “acting” when I glimpsed them doing something that sparked an idea or new pathway, or that broke open something we were struggling to figure out. My job as the director/writer of a piece like this feels akin to that of a prospector or someone mining for gold. There was so much material presented that we experimented with, all of which I navigated with the highly unscientific system of digging in to something when it “felt right.” As a deviser, I listen for the “ding” sound in my head/body when we are rooting through the material the ensemble is creating. And when the ding goes off, we bore deep into the direction of whatever small spark set that bell off. And in this process of searching for the “ding,” everything is fair game. The climax for the character of game show host Pat Martin (played by Luke Morrison) came from watching Luke onstage in a moment of boredom. He was sitting at one of the gameshow podiums while we were focusing on something that didn’t involve him, and when I looked over he was sort of muttering to himself and pretending to be a contestant for his own amusement. I felt the ding loudly, and from there, we dove into that behavior for his character and we uncovered the end of the show.

I want to offer my biggest thanks and appreciation to everyone who worked on this show. It was a risky deep dive into the unknown, and everyone on the team truly gave it everything they had. A special thanks to those who spent a million hours in the rehearsal room making this show a reality: the cast, the assistant directors, our sound designer, our understudy, and our stage management team. Your blood, sweat, and tears are the backbone of this show. And my greatest appreciation to the cast: as we say, “you left it all on the floor,” and I couldn’t be more appreciative or proud of how much of yourselves you all gave. In devising this show, felt like I got to “paint” with all of your profound talent, and it was a true gift to do so. And a final special thanks to the late great Bob Colby and the late great Maureen Shea—two giants of the Emerson Performing Arts Department, who both advocated hard for this show to be reality. We owe you both so much gratitude.

About the Director

Lindsay Beamish has been a professional film, television, and theater actress and creator for over 25 years. Notable film work includes “Forgetting the Girl” for which her performance received favorable reviews in The New York Times and Variety. Before that she appeared in the independent film “The Greatest,” starring Pierce Brosnan, Susan Sarandon, and Carey Mulligan, which premiered at Sundance Film Festival. Other film work of note includes the seminal film “Nest of Tens “directed by Miranda July, and John Cameron Mitchell’s “Shortbus,” which premiered at the Cannes Film Festival. Lindsay’s performance in “Shortbus” was notably reviewed by David Ansen in Newsweek and Tom Carrao in Film Monthly, was awarded the Lulu Award for Best Supporting Actress, and was nominated for a Gotham Award (NYC). 

Recent devising/directing work includes her original theater piece “The Institute for the Opposite of Longing,” which premiered at the Hollywood Fringe Festival, where it won the 2Cents Theatre Distinctive Voices Award, the Producers Encore Award for artistic and commercial excellence, was nominated for the Inkwell Theater Playwright’s Promise Award, and went on to win a grant from Boston Foundation’s Open-Door Grants via Apollinaire Theatre for its east coast/Boston premiere. Other devising work includes multi-media full-length performance “38 ½,” as well as “Wigs,” which premiered at the NYC Fringe Festival. Other selected stage performances include Winter’s Solstice (Boston), Desire (Boston), The Man Who Never Yet Saw Women’s Nakedness (LA) and The Faust Projeckt (LA). Other film and television acting work includes performances on/in Don’t Look Up, CSI, Gilmore Girls, Six Feet Under, The Pretender, Jimmy and Judy, and Strong Medicine. Her film directing work includes the experimental short “In Can Can Descent,” which was nominated for Best Experimental Short at the South by Southwest Film Festival, and played at the NY and Chicago Underground Film Festivals.

Recognition for Lindsay’s creative writing includes the 2011 Iron Horse Discovered Voices Award, and she was the Iron Horse nominee for the 2012 Pushcart Anthology. In her graduate studies at UC Davis, Lindsay received the Provost’s Fellowship for the Arts and The John Shields Award in Acting. She holds an MFA in Acting from UC Davis, an MFA in Creative Writing from the University of Wyoming, and a BA in Theatre Arts from UC Santa Cruz. Lindsay is a proud member of SAG/AFTRA and is currently an Associate Professor of Acting at Emerson College in Boston.