Gearing Up for Season Two :: Bridge Rep of Boston Stays Bold

"Live theater is not an end unto itself, but rather a means of connection," text at the site for Boston's Bridge Repertory Theater declares.

With a slate of four exciting productions lined up for the 2014-15 season -- including two premieres, a one-woman show, and a selection from the Shakespearean canon -- Bridge Rep is building on the excitement it created over its first season.

Bridge Rep burst onto the city's already-robust theater scene in March of 2013 with Harold Pinter's "The Lover." This was a mere taste of what was to come: When the company launched its inaugural season last fall, it was with "The Libertine," a dazzling co-production with New York theater company Playhouse Creatures (in which D'Ambrosio herself took role onstage). But Bridge Rep needed no partnership to premiere company member MJ Halderstadt's "Not Jenny" last December, mount a production of the musical "Hello Again" in March, and close out the season with the Karen MacDonald-helmed "Gidion's Knot," a harrowing two-actor drama about bullying, suicide, and the hidden complexities of what might have seemed, on the surface, to be a familiar story. (D'Ambrosio starred in the production, opposite Deb Martin.)

It was with such bold fare that Bride Rep announced itself, and there's no sign of retreat for the company's sophomore season of four shows, all of which are slated to be directed by women. The new season is set to rocket out of the gate with the world premiere of Vanda's "The Forgetting Curve," another co-production with Playhouse Creatures (and also with Theatrum Mundi Productions). Based on the true story of Henry Molaison, an epilepsy patient who lost his ability to form new memories following experimental brain surgery, "The Forgetting Curve" sounds like a good candidate for Cambridge's science-focused Central Square Theater. (In fact, Central Square Theater actually did present a play based on the case -- Wesley Savick's "Yesterday Happened: Remembering H.M." premiered there in 2012, a production of Catalyst Collaborative@MIT, a partnership between MIT and Underground Railway Theater.)

The subject matter's gravitas is not lost on the co-producers of the new work. "After the Boston production," a "Season Two Nugget" at the Bridge Rep site boasts, " 'The Forgetting Curve' will be presented as a staged reading at the 2014 Annual Meeting of the Society for Neuroscience in Washington, D.C."

EDGE caught up with Bridge Rep's Producing Artistic Director, Olivia D'Ambrosio, for a chat about how the past season was a prologue for the new one, and how the young company is jumping into classical text, the "repertory" part of Bridge Rep's name, and other fresh challenges.

EDGE: What did your inaugural season teach you, and what are you going to take forward from that experience?

Oliva D'Ambrosio: Oh, gosh. There's such a long list in response to that question -- I learn something every day!

I think the biggest lesson I'm taking away is how to structure our performance calendar. Last season we did three weeks of shows, which is really more like two weeks, because you start performances at the end of week one, not the beginning. The shows need a little bit longer than that to pick up steam, so this season we're adding a fourth weekend. The first weekend will be previews, with an opening in the beginning of the second week, followed by three more weekends of run time, so that our audiences have longer to catch on and each piece has more time to live and breathe.

I realize this is not a sexy answer, but it has been a big take-away nevertheless. In fact, I'd say that the majority of things I've learned from Season One have been on the management side, because my training is in the arts, and not specifically in producing. I'm learning that as we go!

EDGE: One of the big things that jumps out about Season Two is that the four productions for the season are all going to be directed by women.

Oliva D'Ambrosio: Yes! I'm so proud of that! What I'm most proud about in terms of how the roster of directors came together is that it really was very organic. We didn't set out saying, "We're going to have four woman directors." It was just the process of looking at material we were interested in, and artists we are interested in working with, and who matched up with the right project in the right way. It came about organically, and we were like, "Oh! Look at this! Look at what we did!" [Laughing] It really felt like it happened in the right way.

EDGE: In fact, you're going to be one of the directors, for Bridge Rep's production of "Julius Caesar." Will that be your first foray into directing?

Oliva D'Ambrosio: I'm actually directing at B.U., in the school of theater this fall, so that will be my maiden voyage. And then "Julius Caesar" will be my second voyage, but my first professional production.

EDGE: Did you say to yourself, "Julius Caesar - now, that's a play I'd love to direct!" Or how did you end up signing on for that?

Oliva D'Ambrosio: "Julius Caesar" has always been one of my favorite plays - not just Shakespeare, but favorite plays, period. And, you know, a classic text wasn't something that we did in Season One. It has been important to us to establish here in the beginning of Bridge Rep's existence that we do all different kinds of texts, and the common thread among them is that we stage them in an intimate, spare way where the actors are the primary storytelling device, and the design is this theatrical, spare environment that allows the acting to take center stage -- no pun intended.

Actually, that's a big thing that I learned last year, too. Bridge Rep is an actor-driven company, but we also have emerged to have a specific design aesthetic as well -- this surprised me as I watched us grow. The design is as important to our productions as our acting and our actors, because they go hand in hand. The design allows the actor-driven thing to happen, and has to be executed at a very high level and in a specific way for our aesthetic to come to fruition.

So, the Shakespeare: I want us to establish that we can do all different kinds of material, but we do them all in this similar aesthetic way. So last year, you know, we did "The Libertine," which is a big, heightened language piece; we did a brand new play; we did a musical; and we did a pretty straightforward contemporary piece. And now, this year, we're adding, and establishing that we can do, a classical text, and one-person shows. We're trying, in the first couple of seasons, to cover as many bases as possible in terms of the kinds of material we present. I think "Julius Caesar" is going to be very relevant to the national landscape next spring because the presidential election is going to be in the air.

In terms of directing: I am an actor first. And I think so much of directing Shakespeare is about shepherding the actors through the work with the text -- that's something I'm trained in. So on the one hand it's daunting to take on Shakespeare as a first-time director. On the other hand, since the language is the thing, and I'm trained in how to handle the language, I feel that it's an appropriate script for me.

EDGE: We've been talking about what's going to be the last play of the season; now, let's step back a bit and talk about the two plays in the middle that are going to be running in repertory - one of which, "Fufu & Oreos," starring and written by Obehi Janice, is the one-person show you mentioned a moment ago. How difficult is it to do pieces in repertory rather than doing them one at a time, and why did you make this choice?

Oliva D'Ambrosio: Well, we're going to learn how hard it is! [Laughing] There are a few reasons why we made this choice. One is, again, to offer a new experience to the audience: Not only have we not done a one-person show before, we haven't done a rep, either. And we are Bridge Rep! So it's nice to introduce that experience for our audience.

Secondly, and honestly, it's another management reason. It has to do with the spaces that were available, and the time frames when they were available. The only other time slot we could have gotten if we wanted to do four slots again would have been between Thanksgiving and Christmas, and we learned that lesson last year, with "Not Jenny," that that's very, very difficult. We were wondering how we could do four shows [given the schedule for the space available], and we thought maybe we could try a rep.

Two of my associates, Marc Franklin and MJ Halberstadt, said we really should look at Obehi Janice's piece -- it really is fantastic. And I had, long ago, thought "Sixty Miles to Silver Lake" would be a really good choice for us. And again, this was totally organic. Obehi's piece and "Sixty Miles" are incredibly resonant thematically. They have a similar structure that jumps back and forth in time; they both feature a young person coming to terms with issues of identity and their parents and their relationship with their parents. These two pieces, which don't on the surface seem that they should go together at all, actually go together very beautifully and offer two different perspectives on some very universal themes. I'm very excited to offer them together. We're going to learn a lot about how you put on two plays at the same time, but it can't be any harder than doing a musical!

The author of "Sixty Miles," Dan LeFranc, had taught me in my MFA program at Brown University/Trinity Rep, because all of the actors there are required to take play writing in their first year. The director of the piece, Shana Gozansky, also went to Trinity Rep, so Dan taught both of us, and we're familiar with his style. We wanted to work with Shana again after she directed "The Lover" for us, and I said, "Shana, what do you think about 'Sixty Miles?' " And she said, "I would direct that in a second! I would say yes to that right now, no questions asked!" I was, like, "Great. Done!"

EDGE: You said just now that it was difficult to find space for all four of your Season Two productions. Was that the result of the Factory Theater's imminent closure in October? Have you been displaced by waves of theater refugees looking for a new home?

Oliva D'Ambrosio: We've never used that space, so its closure didn't impact us as much as it did some other of the small companies. The Calderwood Pavilion [at the Boston Center for the Arts] is where we've always been, and where we want to continue being, and last year two of our four slots were really tough slots. We took the Thanksgiving-to-Christmas slot, and then we took the June slot. And part of what I learned is the reason those times are available is they're very difficult to produce in. We're not going to do that again! So, of the three slots we have this year, the first one is a little early. It's a little hard to produce so early in September, so I'm a little concerned about our first week. The other slots that we locked in are good time slots. And the reason space is scarce at the Calderwood is because the Huntington and the SpeakEasy [and other companies] have all been there for a long, long time and they are big resident companies. They get rehearsal and performance space assigned to them first, and then they open up the schedule to other companies like the Bridge Rep. So by the time we get to the table, a lot of slots are already taken. That's how it goes.

[We didn't get displaced by theater refugees affected by the Factory's closure] but I will be very curious about what happens next year. That's when it really will hit.

EDGE: Let's talk about "The Forgetting Curve," the play you're starting off the season with. Is this a premiere?

Oliva D'Ambrosio: Yes it is, a brand new play.

EDGE: Will you have a role in that on stage?

Oliva D'Ambrosio: I will not. I stepped out. I'm not acting in anything this year. I was perhaps going to be in "The Forgetting Curve," and then I decided the show needed my work from a management aspect rather than from an artistic aspect, so I'm production managing the show and working with the team of producers that we've cultivated. We're actually going to be loading into the space next week -- so we're well under way. I look forward to seeing it all come together.

EDGE: To what extent do you think that the choice of this play as the first production of your second season is going to set the tone for the season as a whole?

Oliva D'Ambrosio: In some ways, it goes back to what I was saying about how all of our pieces are different, but also the same. On one hand, I think it will re-invigorate the sense of intimate aesthetic qualities in what we produce; however, this piece is also similar to "The Libertine," which we presented last year in the fall. Part of the reason I cultivated a co-production model is because when you pool all those resources, you can do a slightly bigger show. This play has nine actors in it; it's a bigger piece than all our other pieces in the coming season, and in that regard it will be a novel experience. And yet, with regard to how the audience is oriented in the space toward the actors, it will be a recognizable Bridge Rep experience.