Home / Chronology / Batch / More About Batch The following articles appeared in Actors Theatre's subscriber newsletter prior to the 2007 Humana Festival BATCH Guys: the time has come. It happens to all of us. Your best friend has told you that he is getting married. After the initial shock you must regain your composure ,because you have a very important job to do. It is your mission to plan the night of his life: the bachelor party. —www.bullz-eye.com Bachelorette parties are like the Title IX of weddings: they’re supposed to make the girls equal to the boys. If the groomsmen can take their boy out for a "last hurrah," so can we, right? After all, now that she has a matching set of Pyrex casserole dishes, she’ll probably never go to a bar ever again. —www.bridesmaidaid.com So the gauntlet is thrown: Can you get your friend ready for marriage? We all know the story: drinking and strippers for the men, risqué scavenger hunts for the women. Maybe it’s a great night; maybe the stripper never shows (or maybe he does). Overall, it’s mostly harmless, one last inside joke, a moment of embarrassment to take to the grave. But what if something else happens? What if this time, the world fractures and lets in the mythic juice that used to fuel these parties—a Dionysian frenzy, where satyrs chase maenads and it’s not over until some mortal’s been turned into a cow. What if you could throw your best friend a party that’s raucous enough, thoughtful enough, powerful enough to actually prepare them to change their lives forever? "The truth about bachelor parties," says Whit MacLaughlin, co-conceiver and director of Batch, "is that most people don’t like them. They hate them. so why do otherwise pretty sane people set out to lose their minds?" This is the question that MacLaughlin and Los Angeles based playwright Alice Tuan have taken on in their collaboration. MacLaughlin is the artistic director of New Paradise Laboratories, a movement-based theatre company in Philadelphia that’s begun a cycle of plays about rite of passage parties—prom, bachelor party, wake. Reflecting on his attraction to these rituals-in-party-form, MacLaughlin says, "It’s a fun way of looking at what people do, the desires and the fantasy life that come with you when you go to a party. In a sense, these plays are like fake anthropological events, like going to a wedding in a foreign country. everything’s kind of recognizable, but strikingly different. And, as in a party in a foreign country, these plays can become something to chew on for the rest of your life, a touchstone when you go to an actual wedding." Everyone knows what they ’ll find at a bachelor party, and Batch uses this familiarity and titillation as a launch pad to jolt the formulaic party to its Dionysian roots. The piece plays these conventions out to uncover whether and how these prenuptial parties can groom their participants to leave single life for the welcome constrictions of marriage. In this journey through the familiar and surprising, we follow soon-to-be-weds Betsy Competitive and Taggis as they endure, then escape, their prenuptial parties. We meet the members of their wedding party as they plan and fete, haze a little, love a little and say goodbye to their single friend. This recognizable story takes on strange form in Batch: the theatre is not quite a theatre, since it takes place at The Connection, a Louisville gay bar. And the stage is not quite a stage—it’s an island of playing space, set in the middle of the audience and at eye level, with a screen hanging behind each seating section. Gender and language are torqued: each New Paradise actor plays a bachelor and a bachelorette, as well as a visitor to the parties; the language of the play is conversational and poetic in turns. And hopefully these shifts lead the audience through this strange/familiar world where the actors appear in both pedestrian form —the best man, the maid of honor, the bride—and as an echo of their other persona, whether groom in bachelorette guise, maid of honor superimposed as one of the strippers, ex-girlfriend of the bride as underground oracle. "What I like about working with New Paradise," says Tuan, "is the challenge to fit into a dialectical space, a space where there’s more than one answer, where two truths butt up against each other. Like a prism, light refracts, and depending on where you’re sitting, you see something new. " And, indeed, in embracing the contradictions of the bachelor/eette party— promiscuity and monogamy, individuality and union, the sordid and the sacred —Batch tries to embody both the molecular and mystic experience of change. MacLaughlin frames the play’s investigation in terms of an individual’s attempt to enter his or her future: "When we get married, we say, in one way or another, I’m getting married forever. We’re trying to rise out of our little moment of time and to speak to our future selves. In that context, the bachelor party becomes very interesting because we’re revving up to make one of the few transcendental statements of our lives: I do." Or as Tuan sees the play’s experiment: "If this ritual enters a mythic realm without the Puritan undertow, can all genders lust and transgress to cleanse away the past? Can we devise an event original to the bride human and the groom human minus capitalism’s or Las Vegas’s dictates? And so this is our challenge: to enter into the cliché of the bachelor/ette party and exit with all parties having witnessed an original ritual." As a guest at this party, you can expect the betrothed to have the night of their lives, a party that matches the women to the men, debauchery for debauchery, a blowout that creates a space for tenderness in a familiar ritual, and a marriage that takes itself seriously, in all its strangeness and sacredness. If a wedding is a moment to face the future, and the rites of the ceremony and bachelor party are faded copies of their ancient forebearers, Batch is an ever-unfolding sensation of the present, full of what MacLaughlin calls a "momentary, hopefully delightful confusion, hoping something around the bend is going to make it all come together. For me, right there, is the feeling of living. We go around the bend hoping that it’s going to clarify things, and what we get kind of clarifies the past but also opens up the future as another problem. It doesn’t decode in the moment, but becomes a lens through which we can see a lot of other things in our lives." —Adrien-Alice Hansel ALICE TUAN with WHIT MACLAUGHLIN & NEW PARADISE LABORATORIES Before the bachelor/ette party comes the proposal. Before the proposal comes the courtship. Before the courtship comes the first date. And before the first date comes the chance meeting, the dating service, the mutual friend. Among Actors Theatre’s many roles, it acts as proverbial matchmaker between playwright and director. With each play, the artistic staff conducts a daunting search for compatible collaborators. For Batch, this pairing was of the utmost importance. Two years ago, Marc Masterson was introduced to Philadelphia’s new Paradise Laboratories (NPL). The ten-year-old company, comprised of Artistic director Whit MacLaughlin and seven actors, aims to create "surprising, meticulous, spiritually challenging and wholly distinctive experimental theatre" which juxtaposes the strange with the familiar. In 2004, NPL launched a series of plays about rites of passage. They worked with the famed Minneapolis Children’s Theatre to generate Prom, a theatrical dissection of the emblematic and complicated American tradition of high school prom. Batch represents the next in the cycle. Prior to Batch, MacLaughlin and his company had crafted plays from the ground up, without the help of a playwright. But in 2004, Actors Theatre commissioned a playwright, introducing NPL to its first blind date: Alice Tuan. Their two-year relationship has proven to be a true success story. "I feel we ’re removing the hierarchy, " Tuan explains. "Because usually the playwright gets to be the center, gets to dream up stuff. But this is a collective dreaming." Or, as MacLaughlin posits with characteristic metaphor, "You take the normal process of working on a play and feed it steroids and psychedelic mushrooms and videotape it …and then play it back with feedback." Whether subverted hierarchy or conceptual mushrooms, the process has ventured to the heart of the American psyche in order to deliver a theatrical experience which is, in Tuan’s words, "like rock ‘n’ roll in the groin." Tuan is no stranger to the American psyche; she’s spent most of her life scrutinizing it. Growing up in a Chinese household in California’s San Fernando Valley, Tuan felt the pull of two disparate ways of life, or what she calls, "a cultural schizophrenia. " Attempting to balance Asian expectations with American ideology, Tuan majored in economics at UCLA. After graduating "by the skin of my teeth," Tuan turned to writing: "The whole reason Ibecame a writer was to practice the First Amendment, to be an operating U.S. citizen who had freedom of expression. Being a woman and yellow in a white system, you don’t get the same kinds of entitlements, so writing was my bastion of the utmost freedom. " For Tuan, what started as a rebellious whim turned into a career. In 1991, Oscar Eustis and Oliver Mayer invited Tuan to participate in the Mark Taper Forum’s prestigious mentor-playwright program. New to the theatre scene, Tuan didn’t "really understand what they were talking about." She remembers, "I was literally like, ‘Oh, Saturday’s the UCLA-UU game. I can’t make it.’" Luckily, Eustis and Mayer didn’t take no for an answer. At the Mark Taper Forum, Tuan met Paula Vogel who invited her to study at Brown University. She received her M.F.A. and continues to write voraciously, honing her craft by practicing it. Both Tuan and NPL embrace this method of learning by doing. Over the past two years of workshops, Batch has lived in three dimensions, morphing from shape to shape and exploring provocative themes, stunning images and dissident structure. Audacious and unruly, it has become a being all its own: an experiment, an event and the product of a perfect match. —Diana Grisanti