Campus in spring semester is wildly busy. Six weeks out from graduation, seniors are jamming on capstone projects. Undergraduates organize campus conferences to showcase their research. Term paper deadlines and final exams loom. The energy level is palpable.
Over in UAA's Fine Arts Building, the theater faculty and students are hard at work on an ambitious endeavor -- staging the first West Coast production of "Stalking the Bogeyman," based on Alaska journalist David Holthouse's personal story of childhood rape.
The play runs April 1-24 in the 80-seat Harper Studio Theatre, but planning and collaboration have been ongoing for months. By late March, work is at fever pitch.
The play's topic, child sexual abuse, is relevant. Alaska has one of the top five rates in the United States. Theater and psychology professors and community partners are collaborating to use the play as a way into community dialogue. Each performance has a talk-back session with the director and actors, but also guests, like the playwright and community health experts. The production will tour several Alaska communities this summer, including Mat-Su, Homer, Seward, Valdez and Fairbanks.
The ambition and expectations are big. This week, I sought out director Brian Cook to check in on progress. He's new to the University of Alaska Anchorage this year, with a master's degree from the Royal Academy of Dramatic Arts, King's College, London, and a doctorate from the University of Oregon. His research interests are contemporary British theater, alternative theater, crime and indigenous dramas.
Here is some of what he had to say about directing "Stalking the Bogeyman."
Q: I learned from interviewing actors in the play that the script for "Bogeyman" is still changing. Theater students say this is particularly invigorating, a real shift from their normal experience. How do you direct a script that is still changing?
Cook: The play hasn't been published yet. For every script in the world, the process is the same. Someone writes a play. At readings, the writer hears what's working and what isn't. Then the play gets a workshop production so actors can work on characters and the playwright can watch and adjust. It may continue to change for a while. Then it finally gets published and that's the set text.
For this one, part of what's different is they have a director who is not one of the writers. Markus Potter wrote and directed it (in North Carolina and New York), and knew exactly what he was thinking. I don't have that access … And sometimes it's just David (Holthouse) or Markus realizing something, like 'That word has always bothered me.' At some point, they have a brainstorm and think of what it should be instead.
Q: I heard the play lost a character and added a new one?
Cook: That's the biggest change the actors saw between auditions and when we started rehearsing the show. That does not happen all that often. Originally, the character David has a psychiatrist he would go to and talk through his problems. So some of the exposition—about the other guy [the Bogeyman] being in town and the stalking—would come out in those conversations.
Between David and Markus, since the last production, they both decided they wanted to make character David seem more impacted by the things that have happened to him. To make him less like a hero. I mean the question of him shooting the Bogeyman is a question of heroics anyway. But instead of the psychiatrist, he visits a friend who sells him drugs. We don't see David take drugs, but we know he is because he goes to (new character) Molly's house and buys them from her, and while he's there he has conversations similar to what he used to have with the psychiatrist.
It does give David a different kind of character, but I embrace the change. Obviously the David character comes off well in the play. He is the character everyone sympathizes with and that is intentionally so. But it is good to have things about him that are not genuine and true and pure. I think that makes more sense than this heroic person who doesn't have any outward signs of issues, who all of a sudden has all this anger. Now, you can see this manifestation of what is going on under the surface before we hear him wanting to kill somebody.
Q: The actor playing David in the play has met playwright Holthouse. How does that influence the work?
Cook: One of the things you do with a play that has a biographical basis is to decide how far do we need to go at recreating real life. A lot about the play is based on the story David originally wrote, but a lot is not. David tells us about moments, and we see some of those onstage, but some has been fictionalized. At some point the play stops being entirely true to real life and becomes something else.
Kathleen McCoy works at UAA where she highlights campus life in social and online media.