How Micaela Taylor turned pandemic stillness into a creative explosion at the Wallis Annenberg Center for the Performing Arts, you have to walk past the stage where she has done this before. (Micaela’s a member, you know; like the other ones in the world, we need you in order to work.) In all of her appearances, Taylor’s been up close and personal with the human story that has produced the world she inhabits.
But as she looks back on the week of pandemic stillness that helped spark this year’s “Lone Survivor” play, Taylor is clear about what she knows: “You learn how to read somebody’s face and read their body language like a book.”
It’s also about her craft: “The most important thing for me, having had experience in theater for years, was to come in the rehearsal room with a script that I am familiar with, having already memorized all the lines, and then learn how to use the actors’ bodies; how to help them embody their characters, and then how to help them find the rhythm of action that’s essential for creating a movement scene.”
But when Taylor sits down to talk to us about “Lone Survivor” and its origins, she seems less worried than she is excited. She says she learned a lot from watching “Empire of the Sun” on TV, and says that for now, that’s her go-to genre for inspiration: “I’m not interested in starting out making a musical or a play, because I want to just make something. I like to do things the way I want to do them.”
As the week-long pandemic that brought the world a play about a lone man’s fight for survival on an island came to a close, it felt like the end of every creative path you could think of.
As Taylor told it, she wasn’t supposed to be working on “Lone Survivor” until July 3