Playwriting
Hammer (The Right Brain Project, Fall 2013)
“There is admirable, astonishing audacity in Hammer. Its multitude of aesthetics calls all sorts of odd things from the soul. The visuals are enthralling and eerie. The mere fact that it is intelligible as a story speaks to the absolute precision the production uses to move among modes, ideas and forms.”
–TimeOut Chicago
“Stephen Gawrit shows exceptional promise in his career as a playwright, and I do look forward to what else he has to bring to the stage, so keep your eye out for his name.” –D20 Girls
“…you can’t help but be impressed by this audacious, unique, artistic, and well-acted piece.” –Chicago Theater Beat
“Over five years ago, Hammer began to take shape from the smallest of nightmares; with a lot of ideas, namely religion,” says Stephen Gawrit, director of Hammer. “Many of us find a point where we begin questioning everything we may have been taught, or subscribed to regarding our faith or religion. Like pulling that string hanging from a sweater, the pull of questions may turn said sweater into a large messy ball, only a memory of its former self. For me,Hammer was the string on the sweater. The more I pull, the more questions myself and my creative peers have. Throughout this ensemble- driven process we continued to pull, and refine this play to create a framework for audiences to start asking questions the moment they sit in their seats. This play challenges a lot of common religious themes, specific to the Judeo-Christian sects such as the function of God, afterlife, and sin. In form and execution of this production, we were inspired by Brecht, Artaud, and Robert Wilson, among others. And while we were excited to explore some extreme methods of storytelling, the story at the heart is what was most captivating. This play could be seen as a piece of theatre-of-cruelty. It may surely have some of those foundations, but that is not what the play is about. It is about a man’s journey toward atonement in a self-created hell. While the play is not a linear narrative in the traditional sense, it does have a structure amidst the prolific visual imagery. Audiences saw beautiful visual moments aided/enforced by a great ensemble, videography work by local filmmaker Nick Edelberg, and fierce music arranged by Jeff Award winner Trevor Watkin.
Photos by Tom McGrath
The Archivist (The Right Brain Project, Summer 2012)
“It takes guts to back a full production of new work at any theatre. That said, in the Right Brain Project’s world premiere of Stephen Gawrit’s original science fiction play, The Archivist, playing through August 20th at the group’s matchbox of a space, there was no other choice than to go all in. Gawrit’s wholly original world, brought to life through Emma Peterson’s painstaking direction and the stellar work of an excellent design team, is intricate and oftentimes confusing, perhaps a symptom of the play’s broad ambitions. But there’s something special going on in here if you can get past the puzzling rules and latch onto the deep themes alive in a dying world.”
Michael Dice Jr., Eric and Andy’s Reviews You Can Iews
“The Archivist is a sci-fi geek’s dream. It’s an end-of-the-world scenario where the brainiac is the superhero… For sci-fi diehards, it’s The Archivist convention waiting to happen. For regular humans, it’s like an intricate science project. I’m impressed.”
Chicago Theater Beat
In the summer of 2011, the RBP transported its audience to a distant place in the future where the world as we know it is a devastated wasteland. Nuclear war, the fall of the human race; all was destroyed except for a scattering of humankind. Those who survived were given a choice: embrace machine transformation or perish. Civilization became a word from a dead language – its meaning a shadow of a dream. A minority of the cyborgs, called Creators, secretly pioneered the Archivist Project to chronicle and validate humanity. Should they discover a means to repopulate the planet, they would understand the mistakes of the past. Their plan failed and the Creators expired – except one. The final Archivist has been abandoned for over 2,000 years, forced to travel time and space. All it knows is that it must fulfill its directive by traveling to the present, to prevent the apocalypse…
The Archivist was the second show of the RBP’s 2011 season centered around the themes of death and rebirth.
The Right Brain Project’s 2011 world premiere production of Stephen Gawrit’s The Archivist opened at the RBP Rorschach on July 21 and ran through August 20.
Stalk (La Costa Theater, Fall 2010)
Stalk, a cutting edge modern musical, explores a young boy’s loss of innocence through fantasy world of Jack and the Beanstalk. Playwright and composer of the show, Stephen Gawrit, states about this new play: “Stalk started off as a strange dream, and has blossomed into a monumental moment of my life. Jack and the Beanstalk, since childhood, is one of my favorite fairy tales, but I didn’t just want to tell the story through spoken word. Surrealism, hyper-realism, folk music, and larger-than-life puppetry influence the adaptation of Jack’s magical world to a contemporary setting complete with modern problems. With these inspirational elements, the pieces of the puzzle began to weave together to create an incredible journey of poetry and song. My goal was to craft a work of theatre the audience could empathize and connect with, while allowing them the escape offered by a world of dreams.”
