Two Weeks From Tomorrow^{2017–present}

“It’s not a play about how things are or should be; it’s life in a dream, so the normal rules don’t apply.”

Foregoing direct engagement with the text, the troupe attempts to arrive at an expression of the play emerging from their own ideas. The director’s experimental methods border on the mystical as she pursues as many indirect routes into Chekhov’s play as her actors will allow. As opening night looms, the shape of the finished work becomes increasingly unknown.

As the strange troupe goes further into the Russian story of desire and ambition, uncanny parallels and hallucinatory visions emerge amid the taking on and dropping off of costumes and masks—replacing their spirits with the spirits of another. A descent into madness or euphoria becomes inevitable.

Characters exist in the space between the roles they take on and the roles that take them on. As opening night looms ominously, the crew confronts the possibility that its artistic ambition toward a transcendent new piece might instead produce a catastrophic failure.

Linear time is given over to the mind’s free-associative unfolding of memories, recalled by a collective in a metaphysical rehearsal room—a void brimming with the potential of the infinite.

Two Weeks From Tomorrow is based on a working process of Anton Chekhov’s The Seagull.

Process

Beginning with research into Mike Leigh’s method of devising films through months of improvisation, Christopher Givens worked individually with seven actors to develop characters based on people they had once known intimately. The characters were introduced to one another as members of a newly assembled theatre company. For two months, structured improvisations orbited Chekhov’s The Seagull; the resulting recordings were transcribed into a three-hour staged reading.

Credits