Cultural Affairs

'Atrainplays": When Creativity Hits the Fast Track

Michael Rhodes, a playwright, took a subway trip he calls "amazing and terrifying."

The ride itself, from Far Rockaway in Queens to the Bronx, was calm. What was terrifying was the fear of failure that gripped him as he attempted to write a complete 20-minute play during the 90-minute trip. What was amazing to him was that he succeeded

Rhodes boarded the A train March 1 with an empty notebook and photos of four strangers, keenly aware that, at the end of the line, a director and a cast were waiting to perform his as-yet-unwritten play. The assignment seemed impossible to him. But somewhere along the track, inspiration hit, born of sheer terror and pumping adrenaline. "I was pulling into 42nd Street and I only had half a play at that point," he recalls. "Then, between 42nd and 50th, something happened and I knew where it was going." By 207th Street, he had written a one-act play about three men--an artless Average Joe, a sweet-talking Romeo, and a Zen-like young hipster--competing for the affection of a fantasy woman. The play was set, of course, on the A train.

This was Rhodes's first time "on the train." But he joins the growing ranks (totaling almost 100 so far) of writers, playwrights, actors, directors, composers, lyricists and musicians to take part in the "Atrainplays," an experimental series run by the Neighborhood Playhouse School of the Theatre that is designed to test the mettle of New York City's thespian set. These artists have been living through similar experiences for the past two years, producing a total of 36 plays and 22 musicals, presented a series of 13 productions. Rhodes's play was among the three plays and three musicals performed at the group's latest production, which ran March 2 through March 8 at the Neighborhood Playhouse.

The gimmick behind the show is simple and catchy: Professional playwrights and librettists have the length of a subway ride to write a play to be staged the next evening by an adventurous crew of actors. For participants, though, the "Atrainplays" is more than a cute contrivance. For writers and actors alike, the project is an inventive way of overcoming intellectual inertia by tapping into the creative potential of enforced spontaneity. And, for the production's audience, the show is an exhilarating glimpse of theater at its rawest.

For Michael Rhodes, at least, the project was an artistic and a personal breakthrough. "My dad used to fight fires," he says. "In some tiny way, I imagine it was similar to what he felt when he fought his first fire: It scared the hell out of you, but you lived and you want to get right back and do it all over again."

The project is the brainchild of producer Larry Feeney, who once found himself wishing for pen and paper while sitting bored in the subway. Of the works that have resulted so far, all but one (a Staten Island Ferry experiment) were written on and about the A train. Despite the limitations of the setting, the plays (all individually titled either "An Atrainplay" or "An Atrainmusical") cover a surprising variety of themes and plots. The latest material ranged from prosaic subway behavior, such as mistaking a fellow rider for his more-famous lookalike, or navigating around a wildly gesticulating blind passenger, to more-fanciful situations, such as romance in a stalled car. Feeney says he chose the A train, in part, because its line is the longest, an important consideration when every creative second counts. And, thanks largely to Duke Ellington, the A train has a more familiar ring to it than the F or the W.

The production process has evolved into an elaborate ritual, as dramatic as the product. At 207th Street, three librettists meet to pick a number from a bag, to determine how many characters their play should have. From a separate bag, they pull headshots of the actors they must write for. They board the train, and the fun, or torture, begins; each must produce a book for a musical in the hour and a half it takes, the MTA willing, to reach Far Rockaway. There they hand their scripts to teams of musicians and lyricists who compose the musical numbers, while three new playwrights board the downtown train to write three plays.

Back at 207th Street, the exhausted writers meet the directors for their plays, who are also picked at random, and have until the 59th Street station to discuss their vision for the production. From then on, everything is in the hands of the actors and director, who have barely 24 hours to choreograph, memorize and rehearse their parts. The meeting of the entire team of actors, directors, writers and musicians at 59th Street is something akin to Christmas, says Ron Stetson, an actor who has performed in 11 of the group's productions. He explains, "You're like a kid waiting to find out what you've got, and it could be socks, or it could be that CD player you've always wanted."

Participants describe the process as an exercise in fear; its appeal is similar to the exhilarating terror of extreme sports. The process takes actors' and writers' common fears of not being able to produce and amplifies them. The group's favorite metaphor for the experience is "theatrical skydiving." "It's like jumping out of an airplane and sewing your own parachute on the way down," Rhodes says.

An experienced actor and playwright, Rhodes had written plays both in writers' workshops and on his own, but never under such intense pressure. As a first-time writer for the "Atrainplays," Rhodes says he had to "start from zero," with only brief notes on the back of the headshots for guidance on each actor's strengths. All the ideas he had boarded with had to be abandoned as Rhodes realized that the abstract plots and characters he had sketched in his head wouldn't work for these actors, in this setting. Rhodes doesn't remember much about his ride, the stations he passed through, or the other passengers on the train. All he remembers is the terror of the blank page and his anxiety about letting down his fellow writers and actors if he failed.

"I was sitting there all but tearing my hair out," he says. "But you find a way to push through the block." A director's note on the back of one actor's photo was the cure to Rhodes's writers' block. The description of actor Ron Stetson, one of the three male actors in Rhodes's play, read, "Could play a wonderful loser." Something clicked; he knew instinctively that Ron's character was struggling between his everyday existence and a fantasy world, that his monologue had to build to the moment of self-revelation in which the humdrum triumphs: "I'm just the guy who loves his wife."

Even for "Atrainplays" veterans, the fear never goes away. But nervous energy is the key to the show's creative success, they say. "With the train, you have a physical deadline as well as a time deadline," says David Reidy, a writer who has been with the group since the beginning. "You know when you look up where you are. That really increases the pressure and forces you to give up any self-editing." Like Dadaism's automatic poets and free-association psychoanalysts, Reidy and his fellow writers believe in the raw creative power of letting the subconscious mind take over. The experience is no different for the actors, who have less than a day to learn their lines and work out the nuance and motivation of characters. "I learned to kill the critic in me," Stetson says. "I am less a victim of paralysis-by-overanalysis."

If the participants have little idea what to expect, the audience has even less so. With only a week's running time, the plays don't lend themselves to reviews. "I'm selling tickets to a show before it is even written," Feeney says. Still, the shows attract a loyal, and game crowd, many of whom return for production after production. Several of the group's writers and actors first discovered the experiment as audience members and found themselves immediately hooked.

And the plays depend heavily on audience feedback and energy. Some of the uninitiated enter the theater with skepticism. But the doubts are soon swept aside by the buoyant atmosphere, on-stage and off. Feeney, in a pre-play pep talk, tells the audience, "You've got to be into it," asking, "Are you ready to rock and roll?" The show's predictably unpredictable format naturally attracts theatergoers willing to be either surprised or disappointed.

Participants reluctantly admit that there may be occasional tradeoffs of quality in order to produce work under such extreme pressure. But all insist that the buzz and distraction of a busy subway car stimulate playwrights in a way that conventional writing circumstances don't. "I know writers that are involved in this show that have spent seven years working on plays," Feeney says. "And the plays that they've written for us have been published, and the ones that they've been working on for seven years haven't."

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