A Great and Continuous Unfolding

In late July, my brain was overflowing with ideas, thoughts, and questions for my thesis and it was clear that it was time to start my project journal. As I do with every directing project, I write a short quote in silver sharpie on the front– a quote that feels somewhat relevant to the work I am doing, or that I know will help me to read every day. For this project, I chose the quote “[Your life will be] a great and continuous unfolding” from the play Tiny Beautiful Things and while I chose that quote intentionally, noting the craziness of our COVID world, it has felt more accurate everyday. 

In its core, in my brain, this project began in the spring of my sophomore year when I was simultaneously taking Directing II, Just Cities: Architectures of Public Encounter, Contact Improvisation, and Contemporary Theater: Theories and Aesthetics. Somehow, in these four vastly different classes about directing, urban studies, improvised dance, and theater theory, I felt like I was taking one giant class about the way that bodies move in space and how to use theater as an embodied platform for that research. So when the Contemporary Theater midterm/final paper was assigned as an open-ended exploration of the topics we’d dealt with in the class, I thought I might as well give this intersection a shot. And somehow, in that mess of research, The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time– a book I’d read in high school and seen onstage a few years later– fell back into my lap. I looked at the ways in which contemporary social spaces require people to improvise their daily lives and how that presents unique challenges for people on the Autism spectrum. And something clicked: there was a lot more to this intersecting curriculum than just bodies moving in space. 

And before I knew it, a year had gone by and I was starting my senior thesis proposal, picking up where I left off a year before in exploring social improvisation in public spaces, its relationship with ability, and The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time.  

But “life is a great and continuous unfolding,” and a lot had unfolded in that year. In September of my junior year, I began physical therapy for what I thought was a strained muscle in my butt. By early October, the pain had spread from one butt cheek to the other and to my hips and my thighs. By mid-October, the pain had grown to include lower back nerve pain and an appointment to a spinal orthopedist was scheduled. By early November, I had done an X-Ray and an MRI and had shifted into the “chronic injury” category, and by mid-November, spinal surgery was scheduled. Most days, I struggled to walk up the stairs, to put on my shoes, to pick things up off the floor, or sit or stand for longer than half an hour. On a good day, I could get to and from my classes and do homework from my bed; on a bad day, I wouldn’t even make it down the stairs to the front door. 

I was constantly consumed with questions of my own capacity and ability to go about my daily life both at the time and looking forward to the unknown on the other side of my surgery. I began adjusting my life to accommodate the extra time it would take to get to my classes that were only accessible by stairs and planning out my days in such ways that would require the least walking. Things I had never questioned like my ability to sit on the floor or stand without holding onto something suddenly felt impossible as I confronted my own impairment. I wondered what would happen if the surgery or recovery didn’t go well and I couldn’t come back to school because both my room and my classrooms required going up or down stairs to get to them. I wondered what would happen if I did make it back to school but couldn’t sit in my chair for the entirety of a class or performance or event. I wondered how I would even get from Texas back to Connecticut.

Thankfully, I was able to come back to campus at the start of the spring semester; I took fewer classes than I had any semester before, had a handful of accommodations from accessibility services, and went back to regular physical therapy. And amidst all that, I started meeting with designers to talk about joining my thesis proposal team, a project I was pitching as “an exploration of physical contact in public spaces” based on the project I had done the year before, with a splash of accessibility thrown in from my experience with my injury.

And then we ended up in a global pandemic. And all of a sudden, physical touch in public spaces shot under the microscope and everything about our relationships with strangers and the way we took up public space changed. We no longer allowed physical contact or public spaces, let alone both together. And from there, it became clear that in a world full of unprecedented situations, our social structures that had been built on our ability to be in contact with others and improvise our behaviors crumbled to the ground. We could no longer shake hands with people we met in passing. We could no longer run into people we knew or make small talk with strangers. And the project began to unfold in my head, connecting the dots between my original questions, a play featuring a person with a disability, my own new and still forming relationship with disability, and the world we are living with that suddenly presented a whole new set of questions.

And after many many Zoom calls, my little one sentence thesis idea continued its great unfolding and became the massive project it is now with more than 25 student contributors and more joining the team it seems like everyday.

With the unbelievable support of these students, this little thesis is now a production of The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time exploring what it means to create theater in a pandemic and asking the questions of physical contact in public spaces when we can no longer be in physical contact or in public spaces. 

It is a paper about the ways in which physical contact and social improvisation feed ableist design that does not benefit anyone, regardless of ability or disability status.

It is a community engagement experience starting with summer information sessions & creative workshops, and moving forward to include community education and engagement in our conversations about ability, ableism, accessibility in the arts, art in the pandemic, and so much more, ensuring that we are bringing our work into the world and the world into our work.

And it is a model of what accessible theater can and should look like when we come back to live audiences and in-person events. 

It is now these four massive parts, and it is clear that none of these parts should exist without the others. As much unfolding as it took to get here and as cheesy as it is to say, it is unbelievably clear that this project is meant to be nothing less than what it has become and doing less would be doing an injustice to our work. As we are just beginning rehearsals and approaching our preliminary design deadlines, this project is filled with more excitement and passion than anything I have ever been fortunate enough to work on with some incredibly talented artists, challenging each other to take a time we never could have imagined and unfold it into something we never could have dreamed of. 

The greatest and most continuous unfolding. 

Written by Lauren Stock. At the time that this was posted, Lauren (she/her) was a senior theater and sociology major at Wesleyan University from Dallas, TX. She was the Director and Thesis Writer for The Curious Incident. 

[IMAGE DESCRIPTION: In the center of the photo is the front cover of a navy moleskin journal. On the cover, in silver sharpie, it says “a great & continuous unfolding” with the word ‘unfolding’ in large, cursive letters. Behind the journal are lots of blurred pages of the Curious Incident script. Lauren’s hand is coming into the bottom left corner of the picture holding the corner of the journal.]