Deborah Lake Fortson

co-artistic director

When I was 10, I made plays for us neighborhood kids to put on in the backyard. After working in dance and street theater and teaching high school, I trained with Jacques LeCoq at the International School of Theater in Paris. I learned how to see the world through its rhythms and embody them.

I’ve made a dozen plays in Boston and New York, with two expeditions to the Edinburgh Fringe. The work tends to alternate between very personal material, family experiences, and work about a social issue or situation. Baggage (ICA Boston, Theater for the New City, NY) was silent, with masked images: a mother giving birth through a forest of pillows, then sorting a storm of flying laundry; a bag lady ordering her pile of stuff in a baby carriage, a woman carrying water jugs, an anthropologist assembling a skeleton. In Out to Lunch, the dialogue was drawn from overheard conversations at lunch counters. The eating was rhythmically choreographed, with interludes by a sullen waitress (me) and dancing bananas.

When my daughter was born I spent hours on the floor with her, learning to do her movements. I interviewed family members. Over five years, I performed this material and shaped it with Steve Seidel directing. We started at Mobius, then worked at Re.Cher.Chez in New York with Lee Breuer and Ruth Maleczech to develop the piece, Baby Steps, which played at Re.Cher.Chez, The Production Company, and the Edinburgh Fringe. The Crazy Jane Show, a play, about a rebellion in 16th century England, was followed by Her Dream Kitchen, the interior life of a woman in her kitchen. I went back to school to study playwriting and had the good luck to work with Derek Walcott and Kate Snodgrass at B.U. My ears got tuned up and my language got more adventurous. Spackling and Ah Houdini! were shown at the Women on Top Festival.

In 2002, I heard about teenagers being trafficked in India and went to interview girls in shelters in Mumbai and Kolkata. Performing two of these stories back in the US, I learned how this was happening in our own backyard and interviewed young women and men in five cities. These texts became the documentary play Body & Sold, performed in thirty-five cities. Marc S. Miller directed a reading in 2014 with FPTC.

By 2018, stymied by the crazy political situation in our country, I couldn’t write. I went back to crawling, rolling, imagining hills and lawns. Back in the back yard! Then children were shot down at a Parkland Florida school, and the rolling group became Stain at the MASS state house: actors rolled down the hill to unfurl red cloth banners. A drums corps played as actors placed name signs for the victims of gun violence and stood silent between the seven red stripes. Now I am looking for the images that embody the dilemmas we find ourselves confronting all together. IDA 2022 is the first up and I hope soon we’ll be in my backyard rehearsing. Then performing on Cambridge sidewalks. I’m looking forward to getting back to work with FPTC and the great team we have to create IDA live!