One of West Windsor Arts Council’s newest employees wants you to discover what a hidden gem the organization is—and what a treat experimental plays can be for their audience when her theater troupe’s professional debut takes to the Arts Center stage July 23.
Having worked as the council’s education porogram associate since April, Farrell’s previous experience in non-profit ventures as both a teaching artist and camp counselor has been augmented by her time witnessing firsthand just how much work goes on behind the administrative scenes.
“I think this is true everywhere but there always so much to do but never enough time or manpower to do it but within the couple of months I’ve been there, I’ve seen the women at the helm of this organization really do it all,” she said. “There’s so much good that this particular organization is trying to make happen in the community.”
Farrell has been a fixture in the area for awhile now—she lived in Plainsboro for awhile and also worked in the WW-P School District Community Education Department.
While she’s entrenched in the arts council’s goings-on during the day, Farrell’s heart has been in the performance arts since her last year as a high school student; by the time she graduated, she knew that theater was her calling. She quickly made the transition from a high school senior who had just found her passion to a college freshmen who found her way into the theatrical arts at Eastern University.
“There’s something about being able to step into someone else’s shoes in a way that requires me to really get to know what a character is feeling in certain moments that makes me want to do it again and again,” Farrell said. “This art of learning how to empathize and breathe life into something and sharing that, it’s something innate in human nature that’s a part of us. We want to tell stories and we want to create something unique, and the biggest part of that is being able to create another being and put it on stage, and then for me to come out of that experience understanding little more about humanity.”
The Christian college situated near Philadelphia proved to be fertile formative grounds for Farrell, as its theater program shaped her approach to the art she loved—though she admits that the full impact of her time as a student and well-rounded thespian who was trained to be equally adept both on stage and behind the scenes didn’t fully register until after she graduated in 2012.
“It’s very interesting, the way they do things at Eastern: They’re very much about being process-based instead of just quickly throwing together a performance, putting it up and doing as many shows as we can a year,” she said. “The way we learned to work there was very much about non-verbal communication, and working as an ensemble and having to relying on other actors in the moment. It was steeped in mindfulness—and, of course, I didn’t realize that until after I left.”
Fortunately, part of Eastern’s offerings included a new play workshop that brought together alumni and current students alike in a collaborative approach to bringing wholly unique, one-time-only performances to the college’s stage. The workshops were the brainchild of an older alumna, Liz Carlson; once she headed off to graduate school in 2013, the program’s director Mark Hallen approached Farrell and two of her peers about continuing the tradition.
They accepted, of course, though Hallen passed away later that year. It is partly in memory of their mentor that Farrell and the two budding young performers she met at Eastern, Kendra DeMicco and Ben Hennesey—a trio also known as BKE—are now branching out with the Chalkboard Theatre Project, a company that incorporated in February of this year and was directly inspired by their shared college experience of letting the process guide their art.
A year prior to its incorporation, the Chalkboard Theatre Project made its big leap from the college stage to community outreach. No longer calling its speculative approach to the creative process “workshops” but rather “experiments,” BKE took its flair for the dramatic first to a Philadelphia-area high school and then to one in Colorado, experiences that Farrell said presented exciting new opportunities to work with a younger crop of actors for the first time.
The Chalkboard Theatre Project is now on the precipice of the rapidly approaching next phase of its upward trajectory right on the West Windsor Art Council’s stage: Its inaugural professional theater experiment.
In keeping with the tradition of the new play workshops that helped Farrell and her co-producers hone their own creative processes, the upcoming Sideways Mandate Experiment will throw intimately small groups of writers, directors, and actors into a room with only 24 hours to create an original 10-minute play, totaling five world-premiere productions.
“We’re bringing the best of our collaborators to do this,” Farrell said. “The 21 artists that we have invited are top-notch: They’ve been doing this for years, they know the ins and outs of the 24-hour process, and what it’s like to be closed up with people you have to create something with.”
Much of that abbreviated brainstorming in closed-off rooms will be hosted by Farrell’s church, Plainsboro Presbyterian, and she is grateful that her congregation has been “wildly supportive” of a creative endeavor that’s close to her heart.
“The actual bulk of the process will be happening at the church I attend, which is where we’re going to be staying until some ungodly hours and running around like lunatics,” she said with a laugh.
That frantic reaction is practically a guarantee when a small group of artists struts and frets as they rally their collective strengths over the course of a limited and often stressful gestation period—but that yields benefits that, according to Farrell, are raw, human and inspiring.
“The benefit is they don’t have any time to waste,” she said. “They don’t have any time to second-guess their initial impulses—even though they always do at that 3 a.m. witching hour, and you just have to assure them all that it’s going to be okay. They have to trust themselves and the people they’ve been thrown into a room with. Sometimes the things that come out on the other end are a little bit crazy but it’s something that comes from someone else. There’s a level of humanity and relatability to the things that are produced. I think the biggest thing that we learned through that 24-hour process is that all we have is time to trust.”
Feeling the secondhand stress creep in yet? Because there’s more: Farrell and her Chalkboard Theatre Project cohorts have added another layer of unpredictability into the mix with a few secret last-minute requirements they’ll soon unload on their artists and demand from their plays.
“We’ll be throwing some curveballs at our participants just so they don’t get comfortable in the choices that they’ve made in those 24-hour sessions,” Farrell said. “They’ll have to incorporate a random prop or a line that just makes no sense. Most of the time when we’ve done this, those seemingly impossible additions makes the piece so much better and just make the production unique.”
The high-stress process is familiar territory for the theater company and the creative minds they’re relying on to make this upcoming experiment a successful milestone, which, in turn, produces lively, unpredictable performances that Farrell believes will captivate those who come out for the one-night-only show—and, of course, introduce them to just one of the many offerings that the West Windsor Arts Council brings to its community.
“When I presented this idea to West Windsor, they were really excited about the possibility of bringing in a younger crowd because this experiment process is something that I think could really grab the attention of a high school or college audience,” she said. “The hope is that it will attract a new demographic to the West Windsor Arts Council, even if it’s just to even see the space and all that’s possible there.”
As for the Sideways Mandate Experiment, Farrell said it’s a chance to see the creative process come to life in theater’s most raw form—while also catching a few plays that are truly one-time-only affairs.
“A lot of these plays won’t ever see the light of day again,” she said. “These shows that started out as caffeine-fueled romps will only breathe once and are theater in its prime state. Actors don’t always get to show their process so others understand why we keep doing it again and again—this is our chance to show off the delicious, juicy end-stage payoff that’s the last stop on the process.”
The Sideways Mandate Experiment will premiere—and finale—Saturday, July 23, at 8 p.m. in the West Windsor Arts Center, 952 Alexander Road. Tickets are $12 each and can be purchased online. Visit westwindsorarts.org for more information about the West Windsor Art Council, and chalkboardtheatreproject.com for more information about the Chalkboard Theatre Project. All proceeds will benefit both organizations.
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