Your mail arrives. What’s this? An invitation to a theatrical event in a downtown hotel suite, an invitation that tells you to find a certain person at the hotel who "may be able to provide more information." Sounds enticing and a bit covert. Can’t you just see the key card slipping out of the slot as the small green light signals entry? What waits within?

Beginning July 31, The Hotel Project plays out in Charlotte. Two playwrights have written one-act plays that both take place in a hotel room and have two person casts. The same two actors perform in both pieces, and audience members must play along to find their way to the right room.

Matt Olin and Anne Lambert (respectively, managing director and director of development for Charlotte Rep) started cooking this up at the first of the year. We sat down with Matt recently, and he explained the project and dropped some names. He began by telling us what led to this project in Charlotte.

"When I was producing theater in New York, one of the groups I was producer for was called Absolute Scratch. Part of the mission of Absolute Scratch was to write new pieces, particularly one-act pieces, and to foster a conversation between emerging playwrights and emerging directors. One of the projects was very much like The Hotel Project that Anne Lambert and I are producing now. We asked two playwrights to each write a one-act. Each play was to take place in a hotel room, and have two characters, a male and a female, and be about 30 minutes in length. We rented a suite at the Marriott Marquis in Times Square, and performed them over a long weekend. The audience members loved the intimate feel of the event, they loved that they were seeing sophisticated theatre pieces in that very specific environmental setting."

Some potential Charlotte audience members have voiced temerity when calling the telephone number given, wondering what to expect. "It is meant to be a theatrical experiment, but has turned into a bit of a social experiment. We’re receiving reactions over the entire spectrum: everything from adventurous people who are ready to dive in to people who are apprehensive about attending something so vaguely described. When we describe the project, the more cautious people normally come around and are excited. We’re happy to have those conversations, because it underscores our belief that it’s time to do something like this here, and challenge expectations."

"It’s important to note that this is not a Charlotte Rep production, although Anne and I both work there. I love my job at the Rep, and my colleagues there also know that it's important for me to always have a personal side project going on. This is a side project that I’ve been eager to do. Anne is a very good friend of mine, in addition to being a co-worker, and we’ve discovered that we share a love for unique, site-specific environmental theatre. Anne directed and produced Fefu and her Friends, as you know, which received critical and audience acclaim a couple of years ago. That was my green light to pitch the idea to her. She loved the idea, and we started talking about when we might want to do it, who we would like to involve, and came up with a sort of roll-out plan."

Having agreed to go forward, Matt and Anne had to first commission two plays. They identified a couple of playwrights. "Stan Peal is very obviously coming into his own. I’ve been a big fan of his work for a while, as has Anne. He was very interested, and turned something around very quickly. I think that’s a testament to his craft. At about the same time. I introduced Sharr White to Anne. Sharr was one of the playwrights who wrote for the similar project that I produced in New York. I’ve produced several of Sharr’s plays. I’ve attached myself to him because I respect his work so much. I truly consider him to be one of the great young playwrights of today. I was thrilled when he said that he was available and had an idea to contribute. He submitted a play. I read it, and I loved it. Anne read it, and she loved it. And like we did with Stan, we went through a developmental process that resulted in these two great pieces. By coincidence and pure luck, they turned out to be companion pieces. Audiences are going to recognize right away that these two pieces have parallel themes, although one is hilarious comedy and one is a very haunting, breath-taking drama. There will be a fine balance to the evening."

We were able to reach both Stan and Sharr via email, and they each offered comments on the process, having been given these somewhat spare guidelines. Stan Peal’s work was most recently seen in this summer’s The Friar and the Nurse, in which he also acted with his wife, Laura Depta. Stan enjoyed the structure of this process. "I find it incredibly helpful to have suggestions and parameters -- the more the better, usually -- it immediately conjures up ideas and forces creativity, whereas having no limits can feel like meandering through an open field. If someone tells me just to write a play for two people, I could sit and think endlessly about who they should be before I even get to where they are, why they're there and what they do. If I’m asked to write a play about a man and a woman in a hotel room -- here are the actors who will play them and this is what the hotel room looks like -- suddenly, I'm there in the situation and I've got ten ideas about what could be happening with those two. Matt gave me the scenario and I got an idea practically mid-sentence. I gave him a first draft the next day -- being given the scenario, most of the piece seemed to write itself."

"Also, a hotel in particular is almost a metaphysical inspiration for theatre. A hotel is a fabricated reality in a way -- it inspires fantasy and 'what-ifs' for everybody. There's a sense of adventure in that people from all over the place, all walks of life are suddenly neighbors, living as close as family -- for a moment you're in a universal community and you almost feel like you could go anywhere and do anything -- the perfect place for the magic and possibilities theatre creates."

This is Sharr White’s fourth collaboration with Matt Olin, which includes his full-length Satellites of the Sun (also developed extensively with Matt as producer). Sharr lives in New York, and will be in town for the event. Sharr talks about the special rewards of working this way. "Matt and I have a history of working this way together and it's never failed to be rewarding, particularly because it is such a challenge. But I do find that to set such tight parameters in the beginning can actually help jump start the creative process simply because often the largest difficulty in starting a play is making the most basic decisions about the world in which a play is set. Once you know you have a play that takes place in a hotel room about a man and a woman in their late twenties, you suddenly have a limited number of circumstances to draw from. And then once you daydream for a while, the circumstances become more and more specific. I wanted to set my play in 1949, so suddenly their language and history became more specific. And the couple is married, so there can only be a few reasons they're in the hotel room, and on and on, until the circumstances under which they've come to appear there are so select that there's nothing left but for them to say exactly what it is they say."

"Working this way has also guaranteed that I get a perspective on the stories of the characters that I wouldn't have had before. I might never have set any part of this story in a hotel room had I been working on it alone. And now, in a way, I get to trick myself into thinking that I'm getting some secret glimpse of these character's lives that I wouldn't have seen before."

"There's also a joy in the feeling of working so collaboratively with a group of really talented people. Everyone brings something to the table. It's been great working with Lon on this for a number of reasons, including the fact that his own history has allowed him to ask for changes in the script that have made it much more personal and visceral."

Sharr’s comments provide a perfect segue to discussion of the rest of the creative people involved. Matt and Anne handpicked the artists for this collaboration. "The next step after engaging the playwrights was to select directors. Lon Bumgarner is a good friend of mine, and I hold his artist sensibility and his artistic intelligence in very high regard. I love his directing style. He’s a true actors’ director. And when I read Sharr’s piece, the first director that popped into my head was Lon. It seemed to be a perfect match, so we shared the piece with Lon. I set it up for him, explained the project, and asked him if he thought it was something he’d enjoy directing. He found it to be an extraordinary piece of theatre. He was emphatically excited about what Sharr had written. Lon is doing an exceptional job of shepherding that piece up to performance weekend. Sharr has been very receptive to changes that have come up, and can tell that Lon is very in tune with his voice."

"Anne Lambert is directing Stan’s play. That also seemed to be a perfect match. It was good that choices for directors were obvious to us very early in the process. Stan has also been very receptive to the changes that have come up, been engaged in developing the play in spots, and working in the changes through the rehearsal process. It’s exciting to see the artistic development as we rehearse these plays."

The plays will be performed one after another each evening for two shows. Matt talked to us about the actors. "We had a short list of actors we considered to be some of the best in the area. The two we ultimately decided on are Beth Pierce and Brian Lafontaine. Each has an individual character development process that suits the other actor well; they look great together; they’re working very well within the context of this developmental and experimental piece of theatre. The nature of this project is very collaborative, and Beth and Brian are wonderful collaborators with us. Finally, with an out-of-the-box idea like this, you need a specific kind of artistic courage to join the team -- both of our actors have shown us the valor, the sense of adventurism, and the solid work ethic necessary to successfully pull this project off. It's all about trust, after all."

Site specific performance art is en vogue this summer. There’s The Angel Project in New York City (part of the Lincoln Center Festival), which presents a solitary, self-paced walking tour as art. The Angel Project was conceived and directed by Deborah Warner, and is the latest incarnation of an idea that Miss Warner has presented earlier in London and Perth. Part of what makes it performance art is the angels that appear along the way. Six actors share the view from the 63rd floor of the Chrysler Building. Some have wings. Just who among those who share the view are the angels, and how much does the traveler become a part of this? Deborah Warner is more well-known as a stage director (she directed an amazing production of Euripides’ Medea, starring Fiona Shaw, which originated in Ireland and played in New York though last spring). It is her artistic intention for The Angel Project to enfold the viewer, and to make him or her an accomplice to the mystical flavor of the tour. Of the project, Miss Warner says, "What interests me is the nature of theater, and this is a very similar job to directing an opera or a play. The score or the text is silent, but it is nonetheless cacophonous in its possibility."

Also happening in New York, The Mob Project is an email-driven experiment in organizing groups to suddenly materialize in public places. They then interact, according to a loose script, and dissipate as suddenly as they appeared. The Mob Project is just for fun, and is non-political. The Last Supper, billed as "honest-to-god dinner theatre," is set in the playwright’s kitchen and dining room. A modern retelling of the biblical last supper, and including a cooking demonstration and dinner, attendance is limited to 12.

There’s a certain playfulness to The Hotel Project. The audience must be willing to be a part of something that’s a bit unknown. "The sense of adventure tends to continue into the evening. When they make their reservations, they still don’t know in what room the performance is being done. The invitation instructs them to go to a certain place in the hotel for more information. It’s all part of the game, and there’s an energy in being engaged in a game, and engaged in part of the show, that they’ll bring along with them. When they find their way and take their seats, they have a sense of participation. And these are two wonderful pieces of theatre, pulled together expertly by some dynamic artists. The audiences are intentionally small; the capacity is 40, so I think they’re going to be glad they jumped in to be a part of the fun. It’s going to be a very satisfying evening of theatre."

The two hotel pieces that were produced in NYC have moved on to legitimate lives of their own, one having just been produced by a theatre in Los Angeles and the other having been optioned by a commercial producer. That one is now being seriously considered for a remounting by a major movie star. And another LA-based theatre producer has requested the plays that comprise the current Hotel Project for a possible west coast remounting.

Matt’s next side project, slated for next summer, is something altogether different. "I’ve always wanted to produce Shakespeare’s Coriolanus. Some critics find it to be one of his weaker plays, but I wholeheartedly disagree. What I’m working on right now is writing some original punk music, and want to produce Coriolanus as a live punk rock experience, if you will. There will be a live punk band, some of the actors will be singers, and there will be other intense visual things going on. In the end, audiences will know they’ve seen a production of Coriolanus, but it’ll be part of a larger experience, one that takes the political energies and anger shared by Coriolanus and punk rock music, fusing them into an energetic theatrical creation. I’m looking at alternative spaces, things like warehouses and clubs, to find the best environment for this project. It’s very much in its embryonic stages, but I am beginning to talk to collaborators that can help me get this to next summer’s audience."

The Hotel Project runs July 31 - August 2, and it’s not too late to get an invitation of your very own. For more information about the Hotel Project, you can call 704-334-2602 or view the invitation here. For related information, see the links below.

~ Lydia Arnold
July 18, 2003