This Fall TJW Comes to NYC

The April 20 Reading Went Very Well!

Immense thanks to the audience who taught us so much about our play and TheaterLab for hosting us. (Go see Orietta there in Let Me Cook For You)

The playwright Alan Ayckbourn has taught me more about that craft than anyone and his most important lesson might be in this sentence: “Theatre is not about the writing, it’s not about the directing. It is about that, but in the end it’s really about the actors and the audience and most audiences – aside from the cognoscenti who sit there being experts – come to watch a bit of acting.”  Our kind (and I must say highly intelligent, sensitive, and aesthetically refined)audience for this reading watching and reacting to ‘that bit of acting’ by Winnie, Steve, and Xander (along with Ed Altman as necessarily noisy narrator) taught us so much about what needs to happen as we move towards fully realizing our work.  We anticipated a ninety minute night but the reading came in at exactly ten minutes LONGER, which taught us that we can trim some branches to this story of a woman whose name we never learn without harm to the overall tale. Our TJW actors gained from our audience the advantage of feeling for the first time what the moments between each one of them and the audience can be. As Margaret Atwood has written, the audience is co-creator of any story and at this stage of our work, their presence was felt and appreciated greatly.

And now…

The Jester’s Wife, a medieval comedy by T. J. Elliott produced through Knowledge Workings Theater, will prepare for an autumn opening. Our play will seek to realize fully the story of Jester and Wife as confronted by evil and still afraid for their lives they now encounter in their hideout cave a Stranger afflicted with madness. The Jester and Wife (who might have been the original prototypes for Punch and Judy with their hurled blows and one-liners) bicker, banter, and battle through questions of survival, responsibility, and who gets to tell their own story.

With an original blend of medieval and distinctly Irish tinges, the comedy pits the Jester’s self-preserving pragmatism and entertainer antics against his Wife’s heroic idealism — and her prowess wielding a broom! Their dilemma shifts from figuring out how to keep their heads to contriving how telling the story through a mystery play might be their ticket out of the cave where they live. But which story gets told is up for grabs. The narrative’s examination of myth-making, martyrdom, and survivor’s guilt mingle together in ways familiar to our present lives. 

So stay tuned as our team brings this tale to full and funny life.