Have you ever considered what would happen if everything stopped, and the world as you know it suddenly collapsed?   

      When Things Stopped is a collaborative project between the director, cast, and production team.  The project has its roots in the novel The Memoirs of a Survivor by Doris Lessing.  The world of Lessing’s work has provided us a vehicle to explore the making of a world of our own. The novel takes place at a time in the world when an event, which Lessing simply refers to as “it”—as in, “after it happened”—has occurred.  Imagining the specifics of that event, the individual journeys of those who experienced “it,” and how they struggled to go on, has formed the basis of our investigation.  This is the story of the ones who survived. 

      We have spent the last two semesters investigating the ways in which structure can rise out of the individual impulses drawn from the lives of the characters and the stories they need to tell.  The collaborative crafting of that structure—its contents and design—is the process we have engaged in this year.  It should be noted that in our adaptation, the individual characters and their texts are largely the original work of the cast.