Part XII: Alex Keegan

Alex Keegan

Hometown: Manhattan

Current Town: Brooklyn

Tell me about APLOMB :

Aplomb began as an idea back in 2014 – I was curious about anxiety disorder’s rising rate of diagnosis among college students, and about creating a piece developed by an all-female ensemble. So I asked nine college seniors and recent grads to join me in embarking on an experiment in process, content creation, and product. The show tracks college senior, Hayden Daniels, who begins therapy after having a dissociative panic attack at a rave in 2015 Bushwick. Over the course of the play, Hayden starts to examine her adolescence in Iowa, and her first romantic relationship in college – aiming to understand how she’s been perceiving the world through a distorted lens. I’m fascinated always by unreliable narrators; we’ve been playing with the concept of “truth” throughout this process. What does Hayden perceive to be true, how is that sense of truth then thrown off balance? I also am fascinated by queer coming-of-age stories – most adolescent girls are socialized with the assumption they’re straight. I’m intrigued by how nostalgia functions in this context – and if we can be nostalgic for events that never occurred. There are moments in the show where Hayden fantasizes about past events – like middle school dances, or an elementary school gym class – that never were. As Hayden realizes her coming-of-age was one in which her identity was effectively invisible, she starts to be able to understand how to reach out and connect with others with greater confidence and a newfound sense of self-worth. APLOMB is a love story – Hayden’s world is thrown off balance when she meets her first girlfriend, Zoe. In other ways Aplomb is intended as a story about cultivating a sense of self, learning to accept and manage anxiety, and ultimately is about a young woman who has to take responsibility for her future.

Tell me about the title.

I love the dictionary definition of Aplomb, which reads: Aplomb (noun) self-confidence or assurance, especially when in a demanding situation. The word’s meaning is so fitting to what Hayden’s striving for in the play – and I think more broadly captures navigating the world with clinical anxiety. Each day requires a certain degree of aplomb when socializing is inherently demanding. I also am drawn to the word’s bizarre uniqueness in spelling. I love too that it’s a noun – the idea that aplomb is something you can carry with you, that assurance in a demanding situation is graspable I find strangely moving.

The idea for the title actually came when I was watching a Parks & Rec episode, where Leslie Knope is given a seemingly impossible task and responds that she will complete it “with aplomb.”

Tell me about your process and concept of this show.

I started with Hayden (the protagonist with anxiety disorder), Zoe (her first girlfriend), and Kira (the therapist) as character ideas. I knew Hayden would go to a rave, have a dissociative panic attack and wind up in a psych services intake meeting at her college in NYC – I hoped also the play would become a love story of some kind between these two young women, who are trying and often failing to honestly communicate with one another. I also hoped we’d create a world in which we could manipulate what an audience is seeing occur on stage through the lens of Hayden’s anxiety, and then shift to understand what we’ve just seen as distortion. These characters and this basic start-point existed in 2014 when we began the project. My goal was to develop more characters and text from long form improv – a mode of character building I’ve used to create backstory when directing established plays, but one I’d never previously utilized to generate content.

From 2014-2015, we built most of Hayden and Zoe’s relationship. I’d give the two actors a prompt for a scene and then we’d audio record. The scenes usually lasted about ten – twenty minutes. I’d then transcribe the scenes into script format. We ended that first year with about one-hundred pages of Hayden/Zoe content. We also created a number of other characters, also through long-form improv – most of whom appear in the play as it currently exists. That first year on the whole was about generating content and building Hayden’s life from ground up.

In 2015 we were welcomed into The Habitat’s Directors Playground and given a two-year home to turn these transcripts into a play. We spent the first year constructing a draft of the first act, and the second year finishing the first act and building the second act. We worked on building a coherent narrative, that included multiple time-lines; we also started experimenting with distortion – how does this scene read if we play it in a super heightened, aggressive manner? What happens when we then do the most relaxed version of the same scene? Questions of that nature became prioritized in looking at how to make the world appear manipulated through Hayden’s gaze.

This summer we were afforded both a residency with NYTW and a workshop production with The Habitat – both of which allowed us to begin clarifying the story, the rules of the play’s world, and incorporating design and audience to learn how Aplomb functions in three-dimensions.

I should also say that a large part of both the process and concept for me have been about giving voice to young women’s stories, creating a platform for young actors to generate dialogue that feels authentic. A large joy has been creating a whole range of roles for young women – that hopefully showcase the depth, vulnerability, humor, intelligence, and compassion that I love to see permeating narratives about women on the contemporary stage.

How would you define your job description for this piece?

For this piece I’ve had a more fluid role than I’m normally used to as a director. I control the script, write several of the scenes and ensemble text segments, and also function as primary editor. I guess the easiest way to define the role is that I’m ultimately in charge of cultivating the storyline. Throughout the process, however, we’ve had a room where actors have helped edit, shaped character-arc and narrative-arc – they often make their own re-writes to ensure lines sound more truthful to their speaking patterns. In that regard we’ve had quite a communal development process.

For this workshop production, I then also directed the play and staged the piece in collaboration with a wonderful choreographer, Yael Nachajon.

What else are you currently busy with?

Right now I’m busy prepping for my fall students – I also work as an academic tutor for middle and high schoolers, so late August is a big back-to-school time. Theater-wise, this summer I had the lovely opportunity to also work with MCC Youth Company’s FreshPlay and New Perspectives Women’s Work Lab – directing two exciting developing plays.

Tell me, if you will, a story from your childhood that explains who you are as a Director and/or as a person.

When I was quite little I spent an extensive amount of time mapping out the story of The Lion King on large sheets of paper in my family’s apartment’s front hallway while narrating aloud to myself. I would also enact several made-up stories with my stuffed animals – placing them in various formations around my bedroom and creating roles for each. These two activities were pretty early indications of my fascination by how we tell and re-tell stories. I still map out plays before I stage them – with a rough blocking in a notebook. Rarely do I actually use these maps anymore to stage, as I’m much more interested in what my collaborators in the room come up with – that said, I like the comfort of knowing I have a road map to return to, and taking the time by myself to process how the story might exist in space – which is what I think I was perhaps trying to figure out as a child telling myself stories with crayons and stuffed animals and no audience.

If you could change one thing about theater, what would it be?

Inclusion and diversity – of artists, audiences, and of the stories we choose to tell.

What kind of theater excites you?

Theatre that’s fanciful, epic and intimate, that’s somehow both surreal and emotionally honest. I’m drawn to large ensemble pieces and to productions that maintain an element of surprise, that uncover empathy in unexpected places.

Who are or were your theatrical Heroes?

The three defining productions I saw as a teenager were: Sam Mendes’ Cabaret, John Doyle’s Sweeney Todd, and Moisés Kaufman’s Macbeth – each of these productions gave me insight into how a director’s vision could shape a theatrical world.

My theatrical heroes also include Paula Vogel, Sarah Ruhl, Anne Bogart, Marianne Elliot, Rebecca Taichman, Lynn Nottage, Maria Irene Fornes, Sarah Kane, and Rachel Chavkin.

What advice do you have for Directors just starting out?

To qualify success not by quantity of acceptances, but rather by quality of collaboration. Also to embrace not knowing – to value the moments you have in rehearsal rooms where you can comfortably say “I don’t know,” and trust that someone else in that room will bring an idea that you’d never thought of to the table.

Shout out to the designers and stage crew.

A: I’m endlessly grateful to the many people who’ve made Aplomb possible – The Habitat, our cast & development ensemble, the brilliant creative team all of whom are listed here: http://www.thehabitattheater.com/productions.html