Role:  Co-Director, Original Deviser/Creator

The first of its kind in Baltimore:  a full-length, full immersive and ensemble-devised theatrical experience co-directed by Susan Stroupe and Glenn Ricci (Ricci, who came up with the concept, received a Rubys grant for the project), performed at the Pratt House at the Maryland Historical Society in a sold-out run in the spring of 2015, revived in the fall of 2015 for a total of 62 shows.  Mesmeric Revelations received numerous accolades, including Best Concept and Best New Work from the Bad Oracle's B.U.L.S.H.I.T. Awards, and was voted Best Theatrical Experience in City Paper's "Best of Baltimore."

Mesmeric Revelations, as a fully devised work, gave agency to the original cast of actors to create their characters and the narrative that shaped the show.  Over the course of a nine-month rehearsal process, all ensemble members researched together, trained together, and devised together, creating a show with a tight-knit ensemble built on on trust, listening, and attention to intricate details in each others' performances.  Mesmeric Revelations took a special look at the women in Poe's life, and much of the devising process revolved around deconstructing the male-gaze infused myths surrounding Poe's wife, mother, and later loves, allowing the actors to create full human beings out of women who have become mythologized and sidelined.

Read an interview with Stroupe and Ricci here:  http://www.theatrebloom.com/2015/10/a-dream-within-a-dream-an-interview-with-the-co-creators-of-the-mesmeric-revelations-of-edgar-allan-poe/
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    Mesmeric1.JPG
    Jenna Rossman as Eliza, David Brasington as Auguste, and Shannon Graham as Sarah, performing the seance with audience members. The seance was a moment that we asked ourselves: "we want audience members to fully participate in this, so how can we have them fully engaged without explicitly giving instructions?" The actors work on how to subtly engage audience members to do what we needed them to do through physical cues.
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    Mesmeric2.JPG
    Susan at the "Dramaturgy Wall." In our first month of rehearsal, our goal was to accomplish two things: to build the ensemble with our actors, and to discover and develop the focus of the characters. Part of this was the research the whole team had been doing throughout the summer, which culminated in a giant wall of pictures, writing, articles, etc that we made in the first few weeks of rehearsal.
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    Mesmeric3.JPG
    In December 2014 we moved into the Pratt House, which deeply informed the remainder of our devising process. While we had made many decisions about the characters, the space provided the final key to their narratives. The relationship between the actors and the architecture was essential to finishing the devising process.
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    Mesmeric4.JPG
    This is "the Ball" scene, created as a meeting point for the end of "Act 1," in which the characters were, for the first time in the show, all in the same space at the same time. One challenged we worked with in devising was how to tell six (and then nine in the second run) different narratives without leaving the audience in the cold. Part of our solution was to create "touchstone" scenes like this one in which the audience could see everyone at the same time and put some narrative pieces together.
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    Mesmeric5.jpg
    Natanya Sheva Washer in rehearsal as Virginia, in her "parlor." One of the greatest challenges for the actors was the physical challenge of performing in such close quarters with the audience. There were no breaks, no intermissions, and, essentially, no faking. Because every moment had the possibility of audience witnessing in close proximity, the performance choices had to be sculpted so they were both sincere and sustainable.
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    Mesmeric6.JPG
    Lisi Stoessel as Barkeep (Fall 2015 cast). Throughout the devising process, we left room for each character to grow in its own way, and gave support to each actor to discover how the character wanted to live in the world we were creating. No character followed the same performance style, and the Barkeep was one of the most mysterious, both in devising and performance. With little spoken text and few outright narrative revelations, the original Barkeep Jessica Ruth Baker, along with the actors who came along in the fall, Stoessel and Caitlin Bouxsein, worked diligently to find ways to give concrete narrative clues to the audience without being able to speak directly to them. Barkeep was one of the most challenging but most satisfying characters.
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    Mesmeric7.JPG
    Matthew Payne as V. and Alexander Scally as Auguste. Since we did not start with a written script, the majority of our spoken dialogue came from Poe's text, which in their original form were not meant to be theatrical dialogue. Our actors were challenged to find the physical life of the often dense text, and how to show narrative clues to the audience through physical dialogue while allowing the text to inform the audience in different ways. The "Chess Match" as this came to be called, was created from Poe's opening passages in "Murders in the Rue Morgue."
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    Mesmeric8.jpg
    In our remount of the show in the fall of 2015, we increased our cast from 6 to 16, creating 3 new characters and doubling the actors for the existing parts. A large challenge in the remount was having the original actors teach their parts to the new actors, because the characters were not created from a script, but from the minds of the original actors, and therefore their individual humanity was infused into them. The new actors had to find out where their own selves existed in the characters, often resulting in us needing to adjust scenes or moments to fit with the new actor's mind, body, and voice. We worked with our original actors to create a sense of generosity about their original creations, and essentially deputized them as directors to help their counterparts.
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