“We believe that theater is a really powerful tool for learning important skills in life,” said Jennifer Thalman Kepler, community outreach director of Louisville’s all-female theater company, Looking for Lilith. The company prides itself in telling unheard stories and lifting up women’s voices.
The company is rounding out its 10th season with a new in-house production titled “Becoming Mothers.” Kepler, who is serving as devising director for the production, explained that LFL has been focusing on growth and change for some time, both organizationally and personally.
“We were moving in to celebrate our 10th anniversary as a company and we sort of felt like we weren’t really a baby anymore as a company,” said Kepler. “We were in a place where we had started mentoring other smaller organizations. So we just sort of felt, as a company, that we were moving into this different phase of life.”
“Becoming Mothers” was originally presented as a staged reading during the company’s previous season, but is now further tweaked and fleshed out as a full production.
“This delightfully moving play is a mosaic of stories of women’s journeys to motherhood,” reads the LFL website.
“Becoming Mothers” is LFL’s eighth production devised solely in-house and draws its vast perspective from more than 50 hours of oral history interviews, as interpreted for the stage by a cast of eight actresses.
“We tried to gather perspectives,” said Kepler. “So the play has stories about adoption, pregnancy, about trying to get pregnant and not being able to, about in vitro fertilization and a lesbian couple that’s trying artificial insemination. But the more we did interviews and researched, the more we realized that, while there are some universal themes and experiences, that no one’s journey to motherhood is identical, that each individual person’s is different. And we can’t possibly tell every story. We’re trying a balance of celebrating the particular stories of the particular women we’ve talked to and, at the same time, lifting up that this is happening for women everywhere, every day, every minute.”
The multiple narratives of “Becoming Mothers” function structurally as if flipping through the pages of a magazine.
“Like when you flip through a magazine, there’s the really short little paragraph articles where you read about something and then you never hear from that topic again,” said Kepler. “And then there’s the long feature stories where you read two pages and it’s like, ‘To read more, go to page 33.’”
The production is broken up further by a series of humorous faux commercials on diaper choice inspired by marketing scare tactics.
“We try to take a topic that we are looking at artistically and we try to see it as a three-dimensional cube,” said Kepler. “What happens when you look at it from different directions?”
“Becoming Mothers” is a product of LFL’s highly collaborative, mission-driven devising process. The company conducts extensive research for each of its projects before moving on to constructing a series of modular narratives.
“It is very much a similar process to what a playwright does, but we do it as a team,” said Kepler. “We have a period of devising, which is where we bring material into the rehearsal room. And we have a series of different types of activities and structure that we can use to apply to it. We do a lot of improvisation that eventually gets set into a scene. We’ll listen to an interview or read a transcription of an interview, then create some physical movement, some responses to it.”
“It makes room for more voices and more perspective,” said Kepler about this crowdsourced method of production. “If the research itself even has multiple perspectives, this process also allows for multiple artists to interpret that text. It also allows for a variety of style, that our shows tend to have both abstract and realistic scenes. And we feel like there’s something very feminine about that process. There’s something about that process of hearing multiple voices and the give and take that happens in that kind of rehearsal space.”
This play is LFL’s first full production on a far-reaching topic, as opposed to a particular time period. “Becoming Mothers” relies intrinsically on its basis in oral history and draws a large percentage of its final dialogue directly from those interviews. It is the third and final piece of LFL’s 2012-2013 season, after the world premiere of playwright Robin Rice Lichtig’s “Alice in Black and White” and an all-female version of William Shakespeare’s “Much Ado About Nothing.” “Becoming Mothers” will premiere on Thursday, May 9 and run through Saturday, May 18 at the Victor Jory Theatre at Actors Theatre of Louisville.
Of equal importance to Looking for Lilith are its community outreach activities, of which there are many. In addition to summer camps and afterschool programs, the company also produces “CHOICES,” an in-school interactive piece on the pitfalls of cyberbullying, and maintains a yearly program in Guatemala as developed from Kepler’s original trip to that country in 2003.
“[We] work with them to share their personal stories and create scenes and plays,” said Kepler. “And in that way kind of unpacking their experiences a little bit, building community together through sharing their stories and creating scenes out of them. And they are now actually wanting to use their skills in creating scenes to help other women and educate other women around the issues of food security, nutrition, domestic violence – other issues that women in Guatemala are facing.”
Kepler and the rest of LFL are looking forward to the further evolution of the company.
“As a way to be really intentional about moving into this next phase, we are beginning a strategic planning process that will help shape our growth over this next decade of our work,” said Kepler.
LFL will continue its established three-production series into the near future and has just recently finalized plans for the 2013-2014 season. Per tradition, the new season will feature one LFL original, one outside piece, and one that is partially devised and reinterpreted by the company.
“Building on the excitement generated with our current season…we’re kicking off with an LFL original, ‘Class of ‘70,’ last seen in Louisville in 2004,” said Kepler. “Our women’s history production is a regional premiere of Catherine Filloux’s ‘LUZ’ – which received its first production at NYC’s La MaMa Experimental Theatre – a powerful exploration of the intersections between immigration, human rights, and environmentalism. We’ll close our season with Annie Baker’s ‘Body Awareness,’ a contemporary dark comedy about how we perceive ourselves and each other.”
Having had the opportunity to interview mothers across multiple generations, Kepler explained that discovering the quirks of time and place was yet another of the many rewarding experiences of bringing “Becoming Mothers” to fruition.
“I remember [my] mom saying that they were the first people they knew to get a car seat,” said Kepler. “It wasn’t common back then to get a car seat. And so there was only one kind of car seat to get. And you had to go to the car dealership. They were like, ‘We went down to the Ford dealership and got a car seat. And my husband and I spent hours reading all the reviews.’”
Reflecting on her experiences, Kepler said the societal conversation on motherhood has advanced in recent memory, but that further progress can still be made.
“There’s things that are hard about it, but I think there’s this thing where women are afraid to admit that there’s things that are hard about it,” said Kepler. “I don’t know if there’s anything specific outside of just the honesty itself. Maybe in 10 years we’ll do another thing about being a mother to a middle schooler.”
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