FINDING THE TRUTH IN A NUTSHELL WITH CARSON KREITZER
by Jason Loewith on 3/06/2007 03:46:00 PM 

So we've just closed an incredibly successful world premiere - The Adding Machine: A Chamber Musical. Many of you remember we did a workshop of the piece two years ago, and the subscribers who attended gave us amazing feedback which helped turn it into the hit it's become. So what do we do now? Rest on our laurels?

HARDLY!

No, we start work on a new world premiere: The Nutshell Studies of Unexplained Death by Carson Kreitzer. And we're getting a workshop ready this week.

The play is about two famous Chicagoans: Mrs. James Ward Thorne and Mrs. Frances Glessner Lee, both of whom were born in the 19th century, were members of high society, and lived until the 1960s. Both also had a fascination with small-scale replicas of actual rooms… but expressed their interests in very different ways.

Most of us have heard of the Thorne Miniature Rooms at the Art Institute, and you may have visited them. These were the replicas Mrs. Thorne built (with a fleet of carpenters, craftsmen and furniture-makers), recreating with architectural precision the rooms of the cultured and sophisticated of Europe and America from the 1300s through the beginning of the 20th century. Many of the rooms made their debut at the World’s Fair of 1933 and went on to tour the country before coming to rest at the Art Institute, where they are visited by thousands annually.


English Reception Room of the Jacobean Period (1625-55), 1932-1937 by Mrs. James Ward Thorne

Few of us, however, know about Frances Glessner Lee’s rooms. Frustrated by her limited role in society and denied an education by her father (he considered college unladylike), Glessner Lee found a calling in the world of forensic medicine: think CSI: The 1920s. A devoted model-maker like Mrs. Thorne, Mrs. Lee paired her artistic talents with this new-found passion and made a series of rooms recreating actual crime scenes, complete with dead bodies. She used these models at Harvard (where she helped found and endowed the Department of Criminology) to train policemen and students in the proper gathering of forensic evidence. She called them The Nutshell Studies of Unexplained Death based on an old policeman’s saying: “Convict the guilty, clear the innocent, and find the truth in a nutshell.”


Bathroom crime scene, Nutshell Collection, 1940s-1950s

When I learned that these two remarkable women – both larger than life – had taken the same miniature passion in entirely different directions, I thought there might be a play in it. But what writer should Next commission?

Those of you lucky enough to see Carson Kreitzer’s play The Love Song of J. Robert Oppenheimer (which we mounted in 2005) know that Carson has a gift for language, a love of theatrical experiment, and a fascination with women living on the fringes of society (we’ve enclosed a copy of this month’s American Theatre Magazine article about her). I proposed the idea to her, and lucky for us, she said yes. With the help of dramaturg Kathleen K. Tobin, Carson gathered as much biographical data as she could on these two extraordinary Chicagoans. What has emerged is a compelling portrait of two very different – yet very similar – women; a collage of voices that swirled around them; an exploration of tiny rooms, tiny worlds, and tiny moments in these monumental women’s lives.

We flew Carson to Chicago early this week and spent two rehearsals just reading through the play and talking about it – its language, its ideas, its structure. Carson spent a day rewriting, and then the cast and I will have two more rehearsals to put it on its feet for a staged reading before subscribers and friends. The process has been thrilling so far - I dig this new play thing! - and I can't wait to do more of them.

I know, of course, they won't all be as successful as The Adding Machine: A Chamber Musical. But hopefully they'll all be as exhilarating and experimental and ambitious...

Labels: Carson Kreitzer, Commissions

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