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More Secrets From the Three Secret Box

6/20/2015

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Three closes tonight. The three women who met at NYU then embarked on a decade-long friendship will laugh, bicker, fight, and make up one more time.

And you have to wonder if the secret--the big secret--will be kept.

Our audience members seem to know about secrets too. Keeping them. And experiencing the pleasure and relief (release?) of telling their deepest, darkest secrets in the secret box in the lobby.

I have a crush on Kelly Chick.

I'm scared to get married.

I had an abortion.

I don't think I'm actually all that empathetic. I've wondered if I'm a sociopath or perhaps just really selfish.

If I have sex with someone who is bad at it, I will tell them they are great so they never improve.

As a teenager, I would steal money from my parents to buy weed. When they found out, I blamed the cleaning lady. She got fired.

I have very large labia.

I didn't use soap when I washed my hands.

I spend too much time with porn. Like, TOO much time. Seriously, I've got to search hard nowadays to find something new.


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Secrets are made to be told. And our audience told theirs.

6/10/2015

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Secrets play a major role in Three.

Diane and Sam have a secret that affects their relationship through the life of the play.  Jenni has a secret that could destroy the friendship we've seen evolve throughout the play.  Secrets are part of the dramatic tension of Three. Consider this bit of dialogue:

DIANE - I don't want to tell you, Sam wants to keep it secret.
JENNI - I think we should tell each other secrets later, though. Because it's fun.
DIANE - I love telling secrets.
JENNI - I know you do.
DIANE - It's, like, my favorite thing.
JENNI - I know, that's why I never tell you things I don't want other people to know.
DIANE - Don't tell me your secrets! I will tell everyone.

Or:

JENNI - If I tell you something will you promise to still like me?
DIANE - No.

When audience members know secrets before characters in the play, it makes the audience complicit in the secrecy. It brings the audience into the world of the play in a very visceral way.

Playwright Emily Kaye Lazzaro said that her idea behind the secrets was that the act of telling a secret, whether it's to a friend or to a stranger, is really pleasurable and freeing. "Secrets are sort of made to be told," she said.

Which is why, in the lobby, there is a box. And Emily has asked audience members to anonymously write their secrets on a piece of paper and put them in the box. There are a few prompts to help get ideas flowing. Prompts like, "I'm too scared to have sex because of the face I might make during it" and "You didn't prepare me for how cruel the world can be."

What we weren't prepared for was the honesty and fearlessness that we found from our audience when we opened the box.

I pee in the shower.

I feel like I'm the only thing holding my family together.

I'm ashamed of how I look but want to be a confident woman.

I never acknowledge when I accidentally fart.

I wish I had slept with more of my friends.

If I sit down to eat by myself, I'll cry.


Secrets. What's your secret?






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What If Michelangelo Was A Playwright, And Wrote A New Play Named David?

6/2/2015

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PictureA. Nora Long
A. Nora Long, the director of Three, talks about directing new work  in the theatre.

I had a professor in grad school who compared playwriting to the creation of Michelangelo's masterpiece, David.  Just as Michelangelo revealed the art within that block of marble, so must a writer carve his or her play from a block of time. It always struck me as a lovely image - the idea that under all the sweat and work and worry, the art was just waiting to be uncovered.


It is a rare treat as a director to get to work with a writer on a new play, especially a writer as gifted as Emily Kaye Lazzaro. To extend the David metaphor, there is no thrill quite like being invited into the studio as the hunk of marble takes form. Theatre is a field of many artists but the playwright is the only real generative creative artist - the rest of us only interpret the writer's words in our respective mediums: acting, design, or production. 

In directing any play, I see my function as crafting the experience for the audience, highlighting a singular cohesive performance, incorporating the work of all the artists involved, rooted in the text of the material. In any great play, there are a thousand possible stories to tell, and its my job to tease one out, based on the actors, the venue, current events, what feels the most immediate, the most relevant, the most powerful, the most achievable (that last one's a doozy).

But when you are working on a new play, particularly the first production, I find it necessary to strike a balance between telling the story the playwright is most interested in, the story she or he sets out to write, and illuminating some of the other possibilities lurking within the text. In one famous collaboration (gone awry) one of my favorite writers, Anton Chekhov, believed his plays to be hilarious comedies while their first director, Konstantin Stanislavski, believed them to be great tragedies, which incidentally, is how they are largely remembered today.

Both stories reside in Chekhov's text, and each interpretation says as much about the men in question as it does the plays themselves. While a hundred years on, you may be just as likely to see these plays told as tragedies as on the moon, I can't help but wonder what would have happened had Stan lightened up a little. Would Tony be remembered as a great comedian, or is it because of the gravitas the great director saw that we remember him at all? 


In theatre, we have the asset of many brains and bodies to make the show go on. It's exactly this collaboration of spirit that draws many a writer to a play, rather than a novel or poem, for example. Writing in itself can be a solitary gig, but theatre, for me anyway, is about mucking about in the room with a group of talented artists and seeing what story rises to the surface. 

In this case, Emily and I both hope you agree, it's definitely a comedy. 

A. Nora Long is the associate artistic director at the Lyric Stage Company of Boston, and an artistic director of New Exhibition Room, a Boston-area fringe company that specializes in developing ensemble-based new work. In addition to her administrative role in the company, she has directed and led the creation of several projects with NXR including Shh!, an exploration on the role of censorship which attended the New York International Fringe Festival after a sold-out run in Boston; The Paper Bag Princess, an all-ages show, Midnight at the Last Night Cabaret andEEP! Show.

Find Out More About Three >>
Get Your Tickets To Three >>
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