SHOT LIST
BAC Open Residency,
Baryshnikov Arts Center
New York, NY
by Eric Marlin
cast Annie Hoeg, Paul Lazar, Linda Mancini, Constance Shulman, Mari Vial-Golden
photos Maria Baranova
A mother publishes a harrowing wartime memoir. Her daughter tries to reconcile the recollections. A stranger enters their lives. And somewhere else, two actors make a movie. A new play about adapting humanity’s most horrific stories.
BAC Story
Alisa Solomon
The space looked familiar: Like just about every rehearsal room I have been in over the decades, the sixth-floor studio at Baryshnikov Arts Center was dominated by an extended table with people seated along only one side of it. It took me a while to realize, though, that something was askew. Usually, that work surface is the sanctum of stage managers, directors, playwrights, dramaturgs, designers, producers—all the personnel scrutinizing actors who labor away on the other side.
But here, during a final rehearsal of Shot List—Eric Marlin’s play for his BAC Open artist’s residency in collaboration with the director Ilana Khanin—it was the cast who sat in an orderly row behind the table, as if they were the ones probing the best means and methods of putting together a show. The set literally turned the table, placing the play’s characters in the position of professional storytellers at work. And that makes perfect sense because—as the play slowly reveals—the characters are indeed crafting a narrative, trying one approach, then another, and then one more as a Mother, her adult Daughter, and a Stranger, sitting at the stage-left end of the table recount and revise versions of their past, and two Filmmakers draft and tweak a screenplay at its stage-right end.