Lucinda Breeding

Patrick Sutton said Texas Woman’s University students gave their all during their first week of a transatlantic project.

Sutton is the director of the Gaiety School of Acting, which is the national drama school in Ireland. He spent last week on the TWU campus doing the first stage of work on a play that, to date, has only a title and an ensemble.

The Half-Moon Couple is inspired by a painting, Birthday by Marc Chagall.

Sutton couldn’t help but notice that American students work differently from Irish students.

“Americans are very anxious to please, and American students are very anxious to please their teachers,” he said. “I’m more interested in them getting to play. We learn a great deal through play, you know. I want to see what’s going to come out of that, and it’s not important for them to get approval.”

Sutton first came to the university several years ago, when he and playwright Martin Maguire were recruited to create a new play. TWU theater students helped produce The Long March, a gorgeous, 45-minute meditation on forced relocation and tribal tension.

Sutton, Maguire and the students created a gut punch of a play, mixing shades of ethnic warfare with a deep but undefined religiosity. Maguire’s poetic dialogue and Sutton’s high-impact stage pictures made for an exciting, unsettling play.

Students used Sutton’s process then, too.

Sutton assembled the ensemble and their professors. They pulled costumes from the department’s storage, made life-size puppets on poles and dove right into Sutton’s drills and exercises.

All the while, Sutton took pictures and video. He’ll present all of the images and all of the students’ writings to Maguire, who will then write the play. The world premiere will be in December.

American students are most accustomed to rehearsing published scripts scene by scene. They’re used to adding layer on layer to each rehearsal. Their eyes are normally on the opening.

“This isn’t about the product at all,” Sutton said. “This is about the process. And they’ve been absolutely great. They’ve given themselves over to it. I’m really pleased with it.”

In a five-hour workshop Thursday night, students did hours of work without speaking. Brows beaded up with sweat, and muscles quivered in poses held long past comfort. Their fatigue showed when their applause for one another became perfunctory.

Sutton, who said his first task is to create a true ensemble, wasn’t having any of that.

“Listen, guys,” he said, halting the workshop that included the first spoken content of the evening. “When you just sort of clap when someone’s finished, it makes them feel like they’re crap. We don’t do that. If you like what you’ve seen, then applaud it, yeah? Appreciate. Respect. Let’s get on, shall we?”

Bodies drew up a little straighter in chairs. But the clapping wasn’t absent-minded anymore.

The success of The Long March was likely in the intensity of the ensemble. Most theater productions see friendships blossom among players. The intimacy one feels in a theater during rehearsals — and in performance, if the audience is lucky — doesn’t happen in any other performing art.

Walk into a theater during a rehearsal, and you can’t help but see a strange familiarity among people who may have met only six weeks ago. The feeling that these people know each other — often on a level usually reserved for lovers or lifelong friends — is in the very air.

Sutton and TWU theater director Sharon Benge have to press this company into a deepening relationship. If it looks easy, it isn’t.

Good ensembles balance risk and trust, and they walk into the mystery of live theater with zeal. Throw commitment into the equation, and an ensemble can move like a locomotive. Sure, it can carry tons over a mountain, but it can jump the tracks, too.

In removing themselves from the American idolatry of the end product, TWU actors are discovering that some of the richest parts of art — and life — lie just beyond their comfort zones.

It’s not easy to go there, but these students are going with their heads up and their hearts open.

LUCINDA BREEDING can be reached at 940-566-6877. Her e-mail address is cbreeding@dentonrc.com.