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Jafferis’ “Stuck Elevator” Headed To Sundance

by David Brensilver | Feb 17, 2011 2:45 pm

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Paul Bass Photo Local playwright Aaron Jafferis’ Stuck Elevator, a recent project of the Yale Institute for Music Theatre that received a workshop reading at the 2010 International Festival of Arts & Ideas, has been accepted to the 2011 Sundance Institute Theatre Lab.

“The artists and plays selected this season are among the most dynamic, diverse and innovative that Sundance Institute has supported in its 30-year history,” Philip Himberg, producing artistic director of the Institute’s Theatre Program, said in a press release.

Jafferis and composer Byron Au Yong have refined Stuck Elevator in workshop settings at the Museum of Chinese in America, in New York, On the Boards in Seattle, Washington, and elsewhere. Their upcoming residency at The Banff Centre, in Alberta, Canada—where this year’s Sundance Institute Theatre Lab is being held—will offer a relatively luxurious three weeks in which “to make the show better,” Jafferis said.

“The centerpiece of Sundance Institute’s Theatre Program, the Theatre Lab is a three-week developmental retreat designed to provide a private, creative environment for playwrights, directors, composers and librettists to devise and refine new work with the support of creative advisoes, full casts and rehearsal space,” according to the institute press release.

Stuck Elevator is described on the International Festival of Arts & Ideas website as “an operatic solo performance about a Chinese restaurant deliveryman trapped in an elevator for three days.”

The Sundance Institute Theatre Lab will give Jafferis an opportunity to develop the “imagined, dreamed and remembered characters from Guang’s (the deliveryman) head as other actors on stage,” Jafferis said in a conversation.

“This time we’ll have five actors, rather than one,” he said.

Jafferis said it’s been a little difficult for theaters, presenters, and producers to figure out what kind of work Stuck Elevator is. He’s hopeful that interest in the work from such established organizations as the Sundance Institute will make the piece more approachable to potential presenters.

Mary Lou Aleskie, executive director of the International Festival of Arts & Ideas, said, “We have been championing this piece almost from its very beginning.” She said the festival has a “grant proposal outstanding” with an eye on bringing Stuck Elevator, as a full-fledged production, back to New Haven.

Aleskie said she’s waiting to see what the next manifestation of the work is, as that will determine the context in which it gets produced.

“I would like to do it in a way that not only brings it home, but into the world,” Aleskie said.

Jafferis said that he and Au Yong wrote Stuck Elevator because they felt the subject matter was important as we in the United States grapple with issues of immigration and the value of the millions of undocumented immigrants currently in the U.S.

Jafferis believes that the story of an undocumented worker, who, in his own way, is helping the City of New York survive—and yet is undervalued, unseen, and struggling himself to survive—is one that would “resonate in New Haven.”

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posted by: Dr. Belinda Carberry on February 17, 2011  5:30pm

Congratulation!  I am proud of you.

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