PUTNEY — Director Ben Stockman spent a good part of his free time last year reading.
“I had been studying as many scripts of new plays as I could get my hands on,” he says. “I wanted to get a sense of what was being done now in theater, so I read play after play.”
One of the best he found was a relatively unknown drama by Sarah Ruhl, which Apron Theater Co. has assigned him to direct.
Beginning on Thursday, March 27, at 8 p.m., the Apron Theater Co. opens its 2014 season with Late: A Cowboy Song at Next Stage at 15 Kimball Hill. Apron Theater characterizes “this whimsical story” as “by turns engagingly witty and heartrending, both surreal and unnervingly natural.”
Late: A Cowboy Song stars Grace Nowakoski as Mary, Jeff Diteman as Crick, and Anne-Marie White as Red.
On her website, Ruhl gives some quirky clues to the characters in her play.
Crick is “charming, fragile, and child-like.” Mary “keeps her journal locked.” And Red is “no cowgirl, she's a cowboy.”
Ruhl adds that “Red talks slow. Crick talks fast. Mary's somewhere in the middle.”
She says this play, which is “for all the lady cowboys of heart and mind who ride outside the city limits of convention,” takes place in “a version of Pittsburgh,” backed by “a silhouette of a messy kitchen” while an “image of the Marlboro Man hovers in the distance against blue light.”
One of today's most acclaimed young playwrights, Ruhl, 40, lives in Brooklyn and is a member of the faculty at Yale School of Drama. Her plays have been produced on Broadway, in regional theaters throughout the country, and in London, Germany, Australia, Canada, and Israel.
Two of her plays, In the Next Room, or the Vibrator Play and The Clean House were finalists for the Pulitzer Prize, and the former was also a Tony Award nominee for best new play.
However, even if Ruhl is well-known, Late: A Cowboy's Song is still a relatively unknown play. It has yet to have a New York City performance.
Stockman discovered the play after a playwright friend recommended he read it.
“I was excited because it was such a wonderful play, which holds an intricate balance between the simple and natural with the complex and surreal,” he says.
“It draws you in because of the realness of the characters. The way they talk and interact seems just right, and we are eager to follow their journey with its twisting and turning. Contrasting this realism is a staging that often is surreal and dreamlike.”
The play's intimacy “made it a perfect vehicle for Apron Theater,” Stockman says.
Apron Theater Company was founded last year by Karla Baldwin, Hallie Flower, and Carrie Kidd. Baldwin and Flower had been involved in an earlier version of the company for a couple of seasons about a decade ago, but Apron has been defunct until it became the Next Stage Arts Project's “theater-company-in-residence.”
Last year, all productions were directed by the company's three founders, but this year, Apron invited Stockman to direct the first production of this season.
Stockman formed a close relationship last year with the fledgling theater company. He not only performed in its inaugural production, Wit, he also assisted Carrie Kidd in the direction of Apron's Death of a Salesman.
“Hallie Flower and I have been orbiting around each other for a couple of years,” says Stockman. “I would see the shows she directed and she would see mine. I auditioned for her production of Doubt in 2012 and, while I didn't get that part, we connected. So when Apron Theater was started last year, I went to them and said 'I want to get involved, and I am willing to do whatever I'd be good in.' So I ended up both directing and acting for the company.”
Stockman says that Apron “is dedicated to promoting new talent.” Last year, it was mostly actors, but this year the group has expanded to directors, and it also promotes the work of new writers in the area.
Apron is dedicated to staging original work and is negotiating with several local writers in the attempt to have a world premiere of a new play later this season.
Stockman became New England Youth Theatre's first student director in 1999, and he directed the well-received Compleat Wrks of Wllm Shkspr (Abridged) in 2002 and Harvey in 2006.
More recently, he has directed works for most of the major local theater companies, including Claire and a staged reading of The Pillowman for Actors Theatre Playhouse, The Dumb Waiter and Deathtrap for Vermont Theatre Company, and Cole Porter's musical Kiss Me, Kate for Main Street Arts. He has just been named artistic director of the newly formed NEYT Alumni Theatre Company.
Although Stockman considers himself principally a director, he does like to act in one or two plays a year.
“It keeps my empathy strengthened by knowing what all actors have to go through,” he says. “I think all directors should act in a play now and then to see that side of an equation of putting on a show.”
“But acting will always be a sideline for me,” Stockman says. “Directing is my main passion.”