By Jane Wagner
Wayland Baptist University
February 2001

Directing Jane Wagner's amazing one-woman show, The Search for Signs of Intelligent Life in the Universe, was one of those rare experiences that just seems to work out perfectly. When I started working on Signs with Lorraine Chavez, the one woman for the one-woman show, I had just completed work on Molly Sweeney a few weeks before. This show was an opportunity to completely switch gears. It was a chance to work in a starkly minimalist setting. I allowed myself only an actor, a stair unit, two chairs, a few lights, and all the clean black space I wanted as a stage.

I chose this minimalist set because, alongside all of the political rhetoric and poignant rants, this script is really about theatricality. It's about creating something out of nothing right before the audience's eyes. In a flash, the actor transforms from an aging bag lady into a strapping young body builder at a gym. It was obvious at the onset that this show demanded clear, clean transitions into and out of each character.

With this in mind, we began to play with gestures. To begin, I had Lorraine think of at least one overt gesture per character. Because there are so many characters, this process took some time to develop. We played games jumping, at random, from one character to the next. The goal was to cleanly move from one character to another without using the text. This method worked well. By the time she was off book, Lorraine's transitions were clean and precise, and each character was well defined physically. It was literally like watching this actor change size and shape with every character shift.

Photos by Rebekah Wilkins-Pepiton