Jacob Ming-Trent (center) in David Lang and Mac Wellman’s The Difficulty of Crossing A Field

Project Titles: The Difficulty of Crossing a Field
Recipient Organization: American Conservatory Theater
Lead Artist: Kronos Quartet
Genre and Date Awarded: Performing Arts, July 1998
Presented as a concert: April 8, 1999, Douglass Grigg's painting studio
World premiere: March 22-24, 2002, Theatre Artaud

This project, featuring Kronos Quartet as the lead artist, focused on the development phase of a new piece of music theater by American Conservatory Theater (A.C.T.), its then playwright-in-residence Mac Wellman, and composer David Lang. Wellman and Lang were creating a musical adaptation of the Ambrose Bierce short story, The Difficulty of Crossing a Field . The Creative Work Fund grant enabled them to involve the Kronos Quartet it the music's development from its outset, specifically supporting an intensive, week-long developmental workshop among the all key artistic partners in April 1999. The workshop included stage and screen actor David Patrick Kelly and a chorus of singers, including Alexandra Montano and Lianne Marie Dobbs.

After the workshop presentation, Kronos Quartet's Associate Director Laird Rodet noted, "Without the opportunity of experimenting with the production over several days, an informed decisions to continue investing valuable resources into the production would not have been possible. Indeed, based on the success of the workshop, American Conservatory Theater premiered the finished work, subtitled "an opera in seven tellings," at Theater Artaud in March 2002.

The project was part of a new effort by the theater to support the work of diverse contemporary playwrights and to engage multidisciplinary artists in creation of innovative new works. At a time of little support for development of new, musical theater, A.C.T. remained committed to exploring new works in the musical theater form. A.C.T. artistic director Carey Perloff described the finished piece as "a hauntingly beautiful marriage between the theater and music that defies easy categorization."

Carey Perloff and A.C.T. had collaborated with composer David Lang many times, including work on The Tempest, for which Lang created a memorable score performed live by Kronos Quartet. Lang suggested that A.C.T. collaborate once again with the quartet: and the two (A.C.T. and Kronos) were eager to develop another project together, particularly one in which the musicians could be involved from the outset. Further, as A.C.T. wrote, "Kronos's unique talents strongly affected the kind of music Lang created for this piece, since they are brilliant not only musically, but 'sonically....'"

Set on a Selma, Alabama plantation in 1854, The Difficulty of Crossing a Field is an 80-minute piece exploring the strange disappearance of a slave owner in the middle of an open field, never to be seen again. The piece explored the possible secrets of a man's sudden absence, and the speculation that absence engendered through his household and an entire town.

The Kronos Quartet's artistic mission is the presentation and promotion of contemporary music and the expansion of the string quartet repertoire. The exploration of sounds, textures, and rhythms of musics from around the world nourishes and energizes its experimentation with and commitment to the musical "present" in a quest to discover (and often recover) music new to audiences as well as to the instruments of the string quartet. In addition to working closely with modern masters such as Terry Riley, Sofia Gubaidulina, and Henryk Gorecki, Kronos commissions new works from today's most innovative composers from around the world. The quartet is recognized for its collaborations with composers, musicians, designers, filmmakers, dance companies, jazz artists, and other musical ensembles.

A.C.T. was founded in Pittsburgh in 1965 as a theater company that would support and encourage the creative growth of its actors through joint performance and training. In 1967, at the invitation of local community leaders, A.C.T. opened its first San Francisco season at the historic Geary Theater. It offers an annual season featuring seven mainstage productions along with four levels of conservatory training and a full complement of community programs. Over the years, A.C.T. has gained national and international recognition and was the first regional theater company not affiliated with a university accredited to grant an M.F.A. in acting to students in the conservatory's Advanced Training Program. In 1979, A.C.T. won the Tony Award for outstanding theater performance and training and in 1996 received the Jujamcyn Theaters Award, given annually to a theater for outstanding contributions to the development of new work.

Cast and chorus of The Difficulty of Crossing a Field

Kronos Quartet

Kronos Quartet--David Harrington, John Sherba, Hank Dutt, and Jennifer Culp--has emerged as a leading voice for new work since its inception in 1973. Kronos's extensive repertoire ranges from Shostakovich, Webern, Bartok, and Ives to Astor Piazzolla, John Cage, Raymond Scott, and Howlin' Wolf. In addition to working with such modern masters as Terry Riley, John Zorn, and Henryk Gorecki, Kronos commissions new works from today's most innovative composers from all over the globe, including artists from Zimbabwe, Poland, Australia, Japan, Argentina, and Azerbaijan. Kronos performs annually throughout the world in concert halls, clubs, and at jazz festivals. Recent tours have included the Concertgebouw in Amsterdam, the Kennedy Center, the Montreux Jazz Festival, La Scala, Theatre de la Ville in Paris, and Chicago's Orchestra Hall. Kronos records exclusively for Nonesuch Records and has received a 2003 Grammy Award along with numerous Grammy Award nominations for its catalogue of more than 40 recordings.

Hank Dutt and Jennifer Culp of Kronos String Quartet and Lianne Marie Dobbs
perform in The Difficulty of Crossing a Field

Carey Perloff

Carey Perloff has been a prominent director and artistic director in the American theater for over 20 years. She assumed artistic leadership of American Conservatory Theater in San Francisco in June 1992 and has reinvigorated the company through bold productions of classics and new plays, through her passionate advocacy of actor training, and through her deep relationship with major contemporary writers such as Harold Pinter and Tom Stoppard. Under Perloff's leadership, A.C.T. rebuilt the earthquake-destroyed Geary Theater and won the prestigious Jujamcyn Award for Creative Excellence. Perloff's recent work at A.C.T. includes Tom Stoppard's Night and Day; the world premieres of Marc Blitzstein's No for an Answer, and David Lang/Mac Wellman's The Difficulty of Crossing a Field with Julia Migenes and the Kronos Quartet; the American premiere of Harold Pinter's Celebration and The Room ; and an acclaimed production of French-Canadian Playwright Michel Tremblay's For the Pleasure of Seeing Her Again with Olympia Dukakis. Before joining A.C.T., Perloff was artistic director of CSC Repertory in New York. Under her leadership, CSC won numerous OBIE Awards for acting, directing, and design, as well as the 1988 OBIE for artistic excellence. In 1993, she directed the world premiere of Steve Reich and Beryl Korot's opera The Cave at the Vienna Festival and the Brooklyn Academy of Music.

Cary Perloff is also a playwright and her first full-length play, The Colossus of Rhodes , was produced to great acclaim at the White Barn Theater in Westport, Connecticut and further developed at the O'Neill Playwrights Conference 2002, directed by Liz Diamond. Her new play, Luminescence Dating, was commissioned by the Alfred P. Sloan/Ensemble Studio Theater, where it recently received a reading directed by Brian Kulick and starring Martha Plimpton and Olympia Dukakis.

Julia Migenes and Lianne Marie Dobbs in The Difficulty of Crossing a Field

David Lang

Composer David Lang wrote the music for A.C.T.'s Hecuba, Antigone, and The Tempest. He has studied with Jacob Druckman, Hans Werner Heenze, and Martin Bresnick. His numerous awards include the Rome Prize, BMW Music-Theater Prize, Kennedy Center Friedheim Award, New York Philharmonic Revson Fellowship, and grants from the Guggenheim Foundation, New York Foundation for the Arts, and the National Endowment for the Arts. His commissions include International Business Machine for the Boston Symphony Orchestra, Eating Live Monkeys for the Cleveland Orchestra, Bonehead for the American Composers Orchestra, Spud for the St. Paul Chamber Orchestra, and By Fire for the BBC Singers. Lang is co-founder of New York's Bang on a Can Festival.

Julie Migenes in The Difficulty of Crossing a Field

Mac Wellman

Playwright Mac Wellman was born in Cleveland and is a resident of New York City. He has received numerous honors, including National Endowment for the Arts and John Simon Guggenheim Fellowships. In 1990 he received a Village Voice Obie Award for best new American play for Bad Penny, Terminal Hip, and Crowbar . In 1991 he received another Obie for Sincerity Forever. Among his publications are the play collections The Bad Infinity (PAJ/Johns Hopkins University Press) and Two Plays (Sun & Moon). Sun & Moon also published A Shelf in Woop's Clothing, his third collection of poetry. From 1994-97 Wellman joined the A.C.T. artistic staff under the auspices of Theater Communications Group's National Theatre Artist Residency Program, supported in part by the PEW Charitable Trusts.