BRIClab resident Amy Evans shares some thoughts about her April 2008 residency at BRICstudio.

Can you tell us a bit about the project and your personal connection to its subject?
Daughter's Mother is an intimate drama about three generations of African-American women coming to terms with the suicide of a loved one. The play aims to truthfully represent the issues faced by suicide survivors through exploring the complex, surprising and often contentious ways that memory shapes the narratives of everyday life. Although a great deal of the work has been informed by my own experience as a suicide survivor, my hope is that this play will appeal to a broad audience while shedding light on aspects of suicide and mental illness that relate specifically to communities of color.

Were there any parts of the process that were more challenging than you had anticipated?
The most challenging as well as the most exciting part of the process was working with a stellar cast and a gifted director who all posed very specific questions about the form, structure and content of the script-in-progress, forcing me to re-examine my assumptions about what was working well dramatically and take risks in trying out new ways of looking at the material. I came in each day with re-writes and the company rose to the challenge, pouring their energies into the text and reserving judgment in favor of a constructive shared vision of the play's potential.

How did the piece grow over the week throughout the workshop process?
The piece developed enormously as a direct result of the workshop week. In the course of two days alone, an entire act was re-written and the order of Act I and Act II were switched. The only thing that stayed the same during the week was the cast. On Saturday, my director Mark had the idea to move the work from the stage back to the rehearsal table and simply invite the audience to participate not as spectators, but as collaborators. The nature of the reading completely changed from what we had observed in our Thursday debut. It became clear to me that the experimental element of this process is extremely fragile and one that we have to strive to protect -- it doesn't happen automatically.  It was a dynamic and truly transformative exercise resulting in a level of clarity in the text that would otherwise not have been achieved.

How did the work-in-progress presentations and eLABorate conversations help you to develop the piece?
They allowed us to gain a fresh perspective on what we'd been working on throughout the week. It was our chance to test the waters and see what in the script an audience was able to absorb after a single reading, and what aspects of the script they had questions about.

How would you like to see the BRIClab grow in the future?
This is a fantastic opportunity for artists. It is so rare that we are encouraged to devote time and energy to process; instead, we find ourselves fixated on 'product' in ways that can be very destructive and often counter-productive. It is truly a gift to be allowed the space to experiment, make changes, and come out at the end with something very different from where we started. I would love to see BRIClab continue, and grow, and would be very excited to see more opportunities crop up all over New York --- a place starving for exactly this kind of attention to process!

Any final thoughts?
A thousand thanks to everyone else who worked so hard to make this happen! It was an invaluable experience, truly.