Creative risks are at heart of 'Onion Cellar'
CAMBRIDGE — Faith. You need it to work in the theater. For all the care put into dialogue, design, and direction, creative conflicts often crop up. Projects veer off schedule. Opening night sometimes arrives with nary a scribbled script change or last-minute costume fitting to spare, feeling more like a miracle than a finished product.
But the idea of faith-based drama has arguably reached new heights (or depths; we’ll soon find out) with the American Repertory Theater’s production of ‘‘The Onion Cellar.’’
Two and a half weeks before its opening this Saturday, ‘‘The Onion Cellar’’ — a collaboration between the ART and the Brechtian punk-cabaret duo the Dresden Dolls — had no script. Actually, there had been 15 scripts, but there was still no consensus about whether or not the show should even have a narrative arc. Of the nine actors (not counting the Dresden Dolls), only one had an actual role. The rest were immersed in improvisation exercises in a Cambridge church x basement in the increasingly frantic hope of finding usable characters. After rehearsal Dresden Dolls drummer Brian Viglione donned a bear suit and fled into Harvard Square.
The one thing everyone agreed on is that nobody was in charge. Nobody could even say exactly what ‘‘The Onion Cellar’’ was. And nobody knew what to do about it.
‘‘It’s like trying to put a camera into focus, and it’s so painfully slow you can’t make things out,’’ says Amanda Palmer. Wedged into a corner table at a Harvard Square cafe after a rehearsal, she looks tired, sounds frustrated, and takes spoonfuls of lentil soup like doses of medicine. ‘‘You know what you want things to feel like,’’ she adds, ‘‘but you haven’t been able to see anything clearly.’’
Palmer is one half of the Dresden Dolls and a fixture on Boston’s underground performance scene. When ART artistic director Robert Woodruff approached her two years ago about creating a piece for the company, she says, it felt like providence; she had already begun conceptualizing a show based on a chapter of Gunter Grass’s novel ‘‘The Tin Drum.’’ Titled ‘‘In the Onion Cellar,’’ the chapter is set in a nightclub in postwar Dusseldorf where patrons cut onions, forcing themselves to cry and share their sorrows. A house band performs in Grass’s nightclub; the project seemed perfect for the Dresden Dolls.
As you read this, Cambridge’s Zero Arrow Theater is being transformed into the Onion Cellar. Audience members will be seated at small tables, served by waiters and entertained by the Dresden Dolls, with the actors interspersed among them.
Whether anyone will be cutting onions is a loaded question — one that goes to the heart of this show’s creative struggle and that, at press time, had yet to be resolved.
‘‘I’m massively pro-onion. I wanted the audience weeping as part of a wild performance-art extravaganza and a plot about Gunter Grass, guilt, rape, Nazism, and coming to terms with the Holocaust,’’ explains Palmer, 30, whose DIY resume includes busking as a living statue called the Eight Foot Bride and founding the Shadowbox Collective, where she’s staged three avant-garde theater pieces.
The ART had something more structured and civilized in mind, Palmer says: ‘‘Marcus [Stern, the show’s director] seemed uncomfortable with those ideas and wanted a night of stories and a well-lit symbolic onion onstage in a glass box. Both ideas are totally valid but not easy to fuse together. With both of us unwilling to offend the other, we began trading responsibility for the show back and forth like a hot potato.’’
In addition, three more members of the creative team — set designer Christine Jones and writers Jonathan Marc Sherman and Anthony Martignetti (the last in a series of hired and fired scribes) — now share official credit with Palmer and Stern for conceiving, writing, and designing ‘‘The Onion Cellar.’’
‘‘Groucho Marx said ‘A camel is a horse created by a committee,’.’’ notes Palmer. ‘‘Bingo.’’
Stern, associate director at the ART, began work on ‘‘The Onion Cellar’’ 11 months ago. Three ART company members — Karen McDonald, Thomas Derrah, and Remo Airaldi — were cast right away; ART vet Jeremy Geidt and one non-ART actor, Claire Davies, would join the cast later. During auditions to cast four ART Institute students, hopefuls performed a self-written monologue that involved cutting an onion.
The cast largely assembled, Palmer and Stern arranged a two-week workshop. The actors were asked to share stories and memories of events that had made them cry, and to relive moments in their lives when they had felt unable to cry. They improvised conversations between couples in the Onion Cellar and created dialogue in reaction to Dresden Dolls songs, among them ‘‘Half Jack’’ (a conflicted missive to Palmer’s father, who divorced her mother when Palmer was an infant) and the excruciating anti-fairy tale ‘‘Glass Slipper.’’ (Palmer is working on one new song for the show; the rest are from the Dresden Dolls repertoire, which is intense and cathartic to a fault.) The bulk of what will eventually be the show’s dialogue has been generated during workshop exercises.
‘‘It was craziness. Ideas were flying everywhere,’’ Palmer says. Nearly a year later, they still are.
‘‘The learning curve has been enormous,’’ says Stern by phone. ‘‘Normally my role as a director is to put form to content. Here I’m an editor and a guide. Normally you have a script and work on it for four or five weeks. Here we’re addressing a different script every day. We’re trying to use Amanda’s vision and offer her the best support we can in terms of creating a viable stage event, and perhaps the answer is not in some dictated thesis about what this is but in the cumulative effect of the fragments. And that can only be realized if we stay focused and clear about the process. It’s an interesting, scary ride.’’
The past year has been something of a roller coaster for the Dresden Dolls as well. Palmer and Viglione spent much of that time on tour, first with Nine Inch Nails and then with Panic! at the Disco. And Viglione is not enthusiastic about ‘‘The Onion Cellar.’’ He would rather be playing rock shows, Palmer says. During our interview Viglione punctuates his stony silence with an occasional ‘‘no comment’’ and several direct challenges to Palmer — cross-examining her about her desire to ‘‘confuse’’ audiences, skewering her description of ‘‘the beautiful place’’ where rock music and theater meet with one word: ‘‘Tommy.’’
While the Dresden Dolls were on the road, Palmer says, she, Stern, and Jones, who is based in New York, did ‘‘creative battle’’ via conference calls that sometimes lasted for four hours. At various points each took control of the script for a few days or a week, tried to whip it into shape, and returned it to the table only to be rejected by the others. The volleys came faster, the questions mounted and deepened, writers came and went, and the show’s prospects grew more convoluted.
On Nov. 7, when the actors arrived for the first day of rehearsals, they were told that the show was without a script. Palmer and Stern both marvel at the cast’s flexibility and good humor throughout the often grueling process.
‘‘There are lots of nuts and bolts waiting in the box, and I think once we’ve got the structure, once we get into the space, things will begin to take off,’’ says Jeremy Geidt, a founding member of the ART and the lucky actor whose character — the owner of the Onion Cellar — had been determined.
‘‘This is something we’ve never done before, and when you’re carving a new form you’re bound to run into walls and stumble. And then something wonderful happens,’’ Geidt says. ‘‘I’m really very confident. I think it will be quite extraordinary.’’
On Nov. 21, just 18 days before opening night, Palmer said that she believed the play was 63 percent of the way there. She had started sleeping for the first time in a long time and was managing her worst-case-scenario fears with thoughts of the good, non-‘‘Onion Cellar’’ things in her life.
Three days later, Palmer sent an e-mail saying that she’d ceded all creative control to Stern.
‘‘We realized we were in a foundering ship with no captain,’’ she wrote. ‘‘It isn’t easy for me to give up control, but this is the only solution. I trust Marcus to create something strong. It may not be my vision but I’ll show up to give my all for the band and play my heart out, because that’s the only way I know how to work.’’
Joan Anderman can be reached at anderman@globe.com. 