BWW Interviews: John Kurzynowski and Jaclyn Backhaus YOU ON THE MOORS NOW

Theater Reconstruction Ensemble will present the World Premiere of You On The Moors Now from February 13th through February 28th at HERE on 145 6th Avenue in New York City.

Playwright Jaclyn Backhaus is the Resident Playwright and a founding member of Theater Reconstruction Ensemble, and a member of TRE's 2016 Ensemble. Her TRE credits include Set in the Living Room of a Small Town American Play (Semifinalist, O'Neill Conference) and The Three Seagulls, or MASHAMASHAMASHA!. Her other credits include Men On Boats (Clubbed Thumb's Falcons, CT/Playwrights Horizons SUPERLAB), The Incredible Fox Sisters (2014 Ice Factory Festival), Folk Wandering (Ars Nova/Joe's Pub), Shoot the Freak (Not Just 3 New Plays) and F Train (Woodshed Collective's Empire Travel Agency). Backhaus is the co-founder of Fresh Ground Pepper, an incubation system for new artistic work, and a member of the 2014-2015 Civilians R&D Group.

Director John Kurzynowski is the founder and Artistic Director of Theater Reconstruction Ensemble. His directing credits include Salesmen: a meditation on masculinity and the American REAL!, Set in the Living Room of a Small Town American Play, The Three Seagulls, or MASHAMASHAMASHA!, Doctor Faustus, A Doll's House (TRE), Pullman Car Hiawatha (Target Margin Theater), Jack the Bird (Tugboat Collective), Zara Notes (HERE), Hamlet (Organs of State), and developmental workshops of new plays by Sam Corbin, Colby Day, Alex Kveton, and Dylan Lamb.

You On The Moors Now is a grand theatrical examination of four well-known literary heroines of the 19th-century and their shocking rejection of the men who so ardently loved them. Gleaned from the pages of Pride and Prejudice, Jane Eyre, Wuthering Heights, and Little Women, You On The Moors Now takes everything you've ever learned about love and puts it somewhere in the tall grasses, hidden from view, where only the truly brave will ever traverse to earn it.

Broadwayworld.com had the opportunity to interview Playwright Jaclyn Backhaus and Director John Kurzynowski before the opening of You On The Moors Now.

Our interview with Director, John Kurzynowski:

Why is You On the Moors such a distinctive piece of theater?
I believe Moors attempts to capture a particular confrontation with love and its history that most modern-day romantics struggle with as we read and reread the works of the great 19th-century novelists writing on the subject of courtship, but that we rarely confront through theatrical conventions. These stories have ultimately defined and structured our society's idealized process of falling in love. By reading them we have all imagined (and romanticized) what love should and could be. This play breaks apart that process of reading a love story and theatricalizes our own process of then restructuring the pieces into a new love story - a process that has lasted over a year and a half and is the direct result of developmental workshops and playful collaboration by a group of artists who are simultaneously falling in love with one another and our own process of theater-making. It's our unique process and confrontation with the material that makes this play so distinct in tone and shape.

Tell me a little bit about the cast and creative team.
Most of the cast is comprised of core members of TRE, many of whom have appeared in and collaborated on a number of our works from the beginning. The entire cast has taken part in most, if not all, of the developmental workshops and showings of this piece, and along with our amazing design team have directly created and inspired most of what has ended up in this production. It's been such a powerful and unique experience to work on such a mammoth play with so many wonderful collaborators. These are the best artists working in the downtown community today, and this show would not have been created without their passion and talent. These are not simply hired actors and designers, but rather an ensemble of artists who have just as much ownership of this piece as myself and Jaclyn. I love them, with all of my heart, and I believe in their collective work.

Tell us how the production is coming together from your perspective.
After such a long developmental process, coming into a room and needing to set and stage a "finished product" has been simultaneously challenging and rewarding, both artistically and personally. Over the past several weeks, we've been able to revisit the work from our past showings. We've tapped into our greater knowledge of the material and our own journey in order to work through any growing pains. We've discovered a firm and final structure for the piece that reflects the many questions we have posed and pondered over. This final production is such a beautiful response to the material and to our ensemble's struggle over the past year and a half, and I for one cannot wait to see it come together in the space this February. I think everyone is working at the very top of their game - the performers, the playwright, the design team - and their work has inspired me to stage something I'm extremely passionate about.

Why is it such a fine opportunity to direct this show.
Working on this piece for over a year and a half has led to such tremendous growth in my own artistic process and in the development of TRE. I started this company five years ago in order to further explore and build upon a unique process of theatrical investigation with and for a particular group of artists, each of whom shared my same desire to reach into the past and create new works of theater through a collective restructuring of the past. It's always been my own personal goal to grow artistically as an individual artist and as a company with each production we mount, and to create something that reflects the current stage of the ensemble's growth. Moors perfectly captures our current state, both in its unique structure and its grande scope. I feel like the last five years have been leading up to this production, and to finally feel it coming together over the past few weeks has been fine indeed.

Our interview with Playwright, Jaclyn Backhaus:

How long have you been working on You On The Moors Now?
In May of 2013, I started researching for the piece, which basically comprised of reading the four novels that serve as the play's backbone-Jane Eyre, Pride and Prejudice, Wuthering Heights, and Little Women. The first pages of the play started cropping up during TRE's first workshop session in June of 2013. Since then, the ensemble has worked on devising tone and playworld under John's direction, and the text of the play lives in conversation with that. In that time, I have been able to run free and wild with the text, moving closer to and away from the structure of the books, and finding my happy place in the middle.

What inspired this piece?
I had read three of the four novels prior to the project, for school or on my own because I'm a big ole sap, and I'd watched the movies too because WINONA. The one I hadn't read, Jane Eyre, ended up being my favorite- in part because of the page-long feminist rants seemingly to no one, in part because the scenes between Jane and Mr. Rochester are seriously fraught with every discernible feeling. But even in happily revisiting the other novels, each of them illuminated countless things to me, especially when I read them side-to-side and back-to-back. I started seeing themes, turns of phrase, and circumstances that wove through each book. My copies of each are full of stars and underlines and exclamation points.

I was trying to find my initial entry point into the play. I did not want the text to live as a mashup entirely, but more as a portal where all of these characters could find themselves. I spent a few months of adapting scenes from the novels and tried things with the actors. The scene when Laurie and Jo meet at that rich people party became a premonition made by a demonic, feverish Beth, and any scene from Wuthering Heights was bookended by Nelly Dean's best Carrie Bradshaw omniscient voiceover. At one point, the writers were characters onstage in a New York TimesTalks-style symposium.

Somewhere in there, I found my in: each of the heroines turns their back on someone who loves them. That's when it all kicked into high gear!

Tell us how the production is coming together from your perspective.
The majority of the ensemble has been present since 2013 for all the workshops and new page readings and little showings. Somehow, all of that work is able to serve the story of the full play we are constructing now. It's wonderful and strange to watch work built in layers, but John and the cast are building it beautifully. For any fan of the books: these actors are seriously channeling their characters while simultaneously staying true to their selves.

Tell us a little about the cast and creative team.
The cast: They make me laugh until I cry, they make me cry until I laugh.
The creative team: I'd let them build any world they wanted, if I could live in it for a while.

You On The Moors Now runs from February 13 - 28, 2015 in a limited engagement at HERE, located at 145 6th Avenue (Enter on Dominick, 1 block south of Spring) in New York City. Performances are Wednesdays - Sundays at 8:30pm with added Saturday matinees at 4pm. There is an additional show on Monday, February 23 at 8:30pm. Tickets are $18. Purchase at http://here.org or by calling 212-352-3101. The running time is 90 minutes.

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