There's a bugaboo around the big 'E' word. Call your work experimental and something remarkable happens: the first images in everyone's mind are the exact sort of experimental work that they don't like. Like the glacial? "Experimental work" calls to mind the hyperactive and neon. A big fan of movement? Suddenly "experimental work" is purely textual and overly wordy. It's the natural human reaction to consider work that we enjoy the norm and, therefore, anything that fucks with what we enjoy is experimental, or at least falls within that umbrella that we call experimental. Problem is, there's no real substitute word that both gets the message across and avoids any of these built in connotations.
If I had to use any one word to switch out for experimental to describe the attitude and style of The Nine as a total product, it would be 'new'. I'm a huge proponent of new work, but an even bigger proponent of the idea that new work does not always equate to new words. Original work, world premieres, new and emerging playwrights, they've got their supporters -- that half of 'new work' has a pretty dedicated watchdog network. No, I'm a stickler for the other half: the idea that it is still possible to make new and exciting decisions that effectively transcend plays and other art that are otherwise engrained into us as an audience. I'm sure you will have made curious note by now that not only is Romeo & Juliet part of The Nine, but it also falls in at Part Seven, definitely on the more experimental end of the spectrum. It's one of my favorite parts to explain to others for that very reason. (Seriously, hit me up sometime, I dare you.)
Even more importantly than that, and still under that new work heading, I revel in the idea that it is possible to find thousands (thousands!) of works of theatre that have been forgotten and/or left by the wayside for whatever reason. Walk into the seventh floor of the Harold Washington library downtown and you can't throw a rock without hitting a play that hasn't been done in Chicago in a decade or more, if ever. Curious note you may not have made: as far as I have been able to gather, Part Six, Caesar Antichrist, will be a Chicago premiere. The play was written by Alfred Jarry of Ubu Roi and proto-surrealism fame... in 1896! It seems like a claim too bold to be true, and I certainly encourage anyone with information I might not have to correct me, but the idea that it is possible for a play to exist and be readily available and to still have not been performed in a major theatrical center more than a century after it has been written both horrifies and delights me. Delights because, in all of the pissing and moaning that happens about the warhorses being trotted out yearly (and believe me, I am pissing and moaning just as much as the next guy about Chicago's 2010/2011 Orgy a la Arthur Miller), the problem is not that old work is old hat. The problem is that we've forgotten how to dig for it.
I love to do exactly that sort of digging, and I'm more than happy to be the guy to resurface Adamov and Tardieu and Caesar Antichrist. And I'm more than happy to be the guy to roll out standards like subUrbia and Romeo & Juliet not because they are crowd pleasers but because they fit the reframing I have pulled for them like a glove without falling apart within. And I'm also more than happy to be the guy to bring in the new words with two world premiere full lengths and one world premiere one act. But what I'm most happy to do? The sort of thing I am not able to find other people doing in the contemporary theatre scene in Chicago. That is bottom guideline in my mind to not only experimentalism, but also to art in general: Is someone else already creating what you want to create? Then don't add to the clutter; find that someone else and work with them to do it better and with more reach. Is no one else creating what you want to create? Then it's more imperative than ever that you do.
The Nine, both as a sum and its parts, are that something that I don't see others creating. I'm taking that first step and hoping that the others that currently aren't will join me to make it better and to give it more reach.
Bries.
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