Broolyn Center for the Performing Arts, NYC

Trestle is a searing, contemporary play set in 1936 that explores the impact of the Depression on the lives and relationships of five characters in an American town. It is told nonlinearly, in an imaginative style that blends fierce, visceral scenes with poetic language and visual metaphor. At the center of the story is a teenage boy Dalton and his relationship with the charismatic Pace. Weighed down by the sense of having no future, Pace becomes obsessed with the power and forward momentum of a 153-ton locomotive. She creates a life-or-death-challenge to outrun the train and enlists the impressionable Dalton in the test, with fatal consequences.

I was drawn to the play by its compelling historical context, poetic use of language, imaginative storytelling, and muscular, actor-driven drama. But I was also pulled in by its physicality. The characters need each other desperately, but they are deprived of human contact. The effect of the economic hardship in Naomi Wallace’s world is that it distances us from each other and corrupts even our intimate relations. Bodies in the play are burned, scarred, cut, bloodied, permanently stained, severed, smashed, worked to the point of exhaustion and cast aside. As I began to understand this theme more deeply, I decided to explore the connection between physicality and character outside of the written scenes in the script. I developed movement character studies with the actors, first as rehearsal exercises and then as performance material. I placed these nonverbal character solos between scenes at emotionally motivated places in the final production. They served to connect the audience more deeply to each character’s journey and deepest needs. The Trestle at Pope Lick Creek was my thesis production for my 2014 MFA in Directing from Brooklyn College.