Back Stage Magazine
March 8, 2007
by Leonard Jacobs

If you believe—to paraphrase All About Eve—that a lifetime is a season and a season is a lifetime, the 2002 New York International Fringe Festival feels about five lifetimes ago. Still, one show in that festival, writer-director Bridgette Dunlap's adaptation of Sylvia Plath's Johnny Panic and the Bible of Dreams, remains vivid for those who saw it, as it conferred shape and texture on a fractured narrative through surrealism, choreopoetry, satire, even sentimentality. Dunlap and a group of other women formed an ensemble to do the piece, and despite offering various youth-centered works since then—David Mamet's The Frog Prince, Dunlap's take on Grimm's Tales—it wasn't until 2005 that they chose a name: the Ateh Theater Group, named for an eighth-century Khazar princess who possessed, legend has it, seven faces.

Ateh is now offering a new Dunlap piece, The Girl Detective, based on a Kelly Link short story. Press notes for the play at first raise fears of a shaggy-dog caper, what with a "master of disguise" title character hunting "missing things" and chasing "tap-dancing bank robbers" yet really searching for her long-lost mother.

But The Girl Detective, Dunlap says, "is tricky because it's about coping with loss; that when you're living your life, you get a lot of fragmented information, and you have to sort through it to draw your own interpretations and conclusions. It doesn't necessarily add up to a satisfying, black-and-white ending like a Nancy Drew book."

Maybe Dunlap's at it again, aiming to balance between specificity and ambiguity as she did with Johnny Panic. She says the difference is that the ensemble then was "pretty much fresh from school. We'd mostly studied at the Atlantic Acting School, so our background was in naturalistic, objective-driven work. Since then, we've gone on to other training—Viewpoints, Committed Impulse—and experimenting." In 2002, they "had the foundation of a straightforward, practical approach." Now they want to create "more-emotional experiences so you feel something, rather than something that always has to somehow add up exactly."

Dunlap's flirtation with fragmentation is no doubt central to her impulse to write, adapt, and direct. To find new projects, she says, "we read a lot until we find [source material] that hits one of us strongly. And because we're an all-female group, we look for stories with fascinating female characters, as well as something that we sense can be told by a community." In the case of The Girl Detective, "I actually read Kelly's second book first, Magic for Beginners. And like Kelly Link—like our first show [as Ateh], The Girl in the Flammable Skirt—we like looking at everyday life and the funny things that happen through an unrealistic, dreamlike, fantastic angle. In her second book, I'd read a different story about these people in a gas station who have these zombies coming in and out. Everybody really liked it, but then I read The Girl Detective"—from Link's first book, Stranger Things Happen—"and realized it was even more for us. Thematically, I think everybody latched on to it: Everybody's lost someone—either someone's died or there's someone you don't speak to anymore. It's always kind of a surreal experience how someone who was once a part of your life isn't there anymore."

The development process for the ensemble—which includes Kathryn Ekblad, Emily French, Alexis Grausz, Madeleine Maby, Sara Montgomery, and Elizabeth Neptune—is also collaborative. "After we make a decision [on a project], I go to work adapting it and bring it in," Dunlap says. "We trust each other, so I can bring in a script that doesn't look like a play on paper yet, and we can jump in and see what the story is and by what means we want to tell it." Also, she adds, "I have to hear it in my actors' voices. Once I hear it, I sense the beginnings of what the story means as told by a community of actors attached to the theme. There are lots of things I can't tell until I see it."

Dunlap knows that presenting "unrealistic, dreamlike, fantastical" theatre is risky: You have to ensure that audiences are sufficiently in the loop. "And you have to find a balance between the impressionistic nature of a story and communicating it. Here you have the Girl Detective looking for her mother and going to find her in the underworld. You have to have balance between 'What do we really want the audience to follow?' and 'What should the audience get in terms of thoughts, clues, and impressions—and should it be themes rather than a strict plotline?' "