Bennington hosts LAByrinth Theater Company's summer intensives

Image: The members of LAByrinth Theater Company at their 2006 Summer Intensive at Bennington College. Photo by Monique Carboni.

The New York Times has called LAByrinth Theater Company “one of the pre-eminent downtown theatrical ensembles in New York”—“creatively utopian” in its unusual and extremely fruitful approach to creating new theater.

As a company, LAByrinth isn’t particularly interested in talking about their own “pre-eminence.” What they do talk about is their vision; their way of working; their commitment to reflect the communities of New York in their work; their identity as a “multicultural collective” that combines emerging artists with seasoned professionals. Led by actor John Ortiz and Oscar winner Philip Seymour Hoffman, LAByrinth is known for developing new plays through a unique process that allows its ensemble members to take on all the roles involved in creating new theater—writing, acting, directing, designing, and producing. This leads to plays like the new Jack Goes Boating, written by LAByrinth playwright Bob Glaudini and glowingly reviewed in the Times and elsewhere for its loving portrayals of misfit characters.

What’s less well known is that much of LAByrinth’s work is sprouted and nurtured on the campus of Bennington College.

"The students were green but completely willing to be brave and try anything.”

The relationship between LAByrinth and Bennington got rolling a few years ago, when Bennington drama faculty member Dina Janis invited some New York playwrights she knew to lend their plays-in-progress to a Bennington acting class called New Works Ensemble. “Working with living, breathing playwrights would help the students feel a sense of obligation that’s really healthy, I thought,” says Janis. It turned out to help the playwrights, too, who allowed the students to contact them throughout the term and later came up to Vermont to see their works interpreted. “[LAByrinth playwrights] Stephen Adly Guirgis and Megan Mostyn Brown just fell in love with the students, who were green but completely willing to be brave and try anything.”

Trying anything is something close to the heart of LAByrinth, where the creation of new work is paramount; every member is encouraged to write. The symbiosis succeeded to such an extent that the Company accepted the College’s invitation to spend two weeks on campus during the summer, where ensemble members live in the white clapboard houses on campus and stage upwards of 70 private readings in the studios of VAPA (Bennington’s Visual and Performing Arts Center). These retreats are greenhouses for new work; every new play that LAByrinth produces is first presented at the Summer Intensive.

"You learn by doing; the work, like an education, is a process, rather than a product.”

LAByrinth also reserved two of its six highly-coveted apprenticeships for Bennington students. These apprenticeships take place not just on campus over the summer, but off-campus during Field Work Term in the winter.

Recent Bennington graduates Ashley Hanna ’06 and Sebastian Naskaris ’07 completed Field Work Terms as well as summer apprenticeships with LAByrinth. While both students did their fair share of necessary photocopying and filing, they also tracked the budgets, scoured the city for props for a new production, and participated in workshops and staged readings, as well as being “on book” for rehearsals. Additionally, during her first FWT, Hanna was given the rare and generous opportunity to read scripts and perform during her time with LAByrinth. “By watching artists such as Stephen Adly Giurgis in action,” Hanna says, “I discovered similarities between the core philosophies of LAB and Bennington—you learn by doing; the work, like an education, is a process, rather than a product.” Hanna later portrayed the waitress in the LAByrinth play All the Bad Things.

“You really do feel that pressure to perform, but at the same time people are playing volleyball and swimming in the lake.”

Lex Friedman ’07 met playwright Bob Glaudini, the author of Jack Goes Boating, in the New Works Ensemble class. In the fall of 2006, Glaudini returned to Bennington to teach two classes of his own—Playwriting for Those New to It, and Playwriting for Writers with (Some) Experience—and Friedman decided to study with him.

Glaudini helped Friedman secure a Field Work Term job with LAByrinth, and the recent graduate is grateful. She ended up working closely with Peter Dean, the production manager of Jack Goes Boating, and her resourcefulness in seemingly small tasks—like pricing flexible blue neon—earned her a post-graduation job offer. “Peter later told me that the stuff I’d found was a lot cheaper than what either he or the scenic designer had found,” Friedman says. “Luck? Persistence?” Either way, “I had planned to move to LA after graduation and cash in on some of the contacts I’d made over other FWTs, but Peter said, ‘If you stay in New York next year, I’ll hire you as my assistant.’” To top it off, she was also invited back for another Summer Intensive apprenticeship; as soon as she completes it, she will begin working for Dean full-time.

“It’s all about growing a play, not producing one."

In addition to Glaudini and Janis, Friedman will be among Hoffman and John Patrick Shanley (another Oscar winner, who has also won a Pulitzer), Ortiz, Glaudini, Sam Rockwell, Eric Bogosian, José Rivera...and Bennington graduates Carlee McManus ’06 and Sophie Hinderberger ’07. The works-in-progress couldn’t ask for a better backdrop than the Bennington campus: As Peter Dubois, the director of Jack Goes Boating, told The New York Times about the residency, “You really do feel that pressure to perform, but at the same time people are playing volleyball and swimming in the lake.”

But the two institutions—the College and the theater company—have more in common than a summer setting. LAByrinth is celebrating its fifteenth year, and Bennington is its seventy-fifth, but both continue to thrive on a pioneering spirit. Janis believes that spirit forms the core of the happy relationship between the two. “LAByrinth is the bravest of the brave when it comes to gaining experience in the doing, collaborating across disciplines, and being open to surprising oneself with the possible answers,” she says. “It’s all about growing a play, not producing one. It reminds me very much of a Bennington education."

More:

• LAByrinth Theater Company
• Drama at Bennington
• Field Work Term

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