LEYDEN — Instead of going to the theater, theater buffs can now enjoy original, live performances in the comfort of their own homes.
Inspired to break out of ordinary performance venues, former Leyden resident Emily Caffery has co-founded a traveling theater company called The Leastaways. During June and July, the company’s six actors and actresses went on tour not to performance halls, but to living rooms.
Twenty-eight-year-old Caffery’s relationship with theater extends back to her childhood, when she first started participating in elementary school plays.
www.leastaways.org
“It just never stopped,” she said. “I love being able to inhabit other people and I love the live element of theater. There’s so much that’s out of our control.”
After attending college at Wesleyan University in Middletown, Conn., where she studied social justice, Caffery got a job overseeing health and education policy projects in Ann Arbor, Mich. She made sure to still fit theater into her life, joining the traveling theater troupe The Vagari Project. It is through The Vagari Project that she met Forrest Hejkal, who would eventually co-found The Leastaways with Caffery.
“I decided I was never going to love anything more than making plays,” Caffery said.
Hejkal and Caffery would continue to work together, first as students at the National Theater Institute in Waterford, Conn. and then in production at Carriage House Theatre, which Hejkal founded in Ann Arbor, Mich. It was during a long road trip together in March 2015, “when crazy ideas start sounding like possible ideas,” that Hejkal and Caffery dreamed up the idea of a theater troupe that would perform living room plays.
The two had found the traveling theater troupe to be “a very interesting way of working,” Caffery said, and decided to take the idea a step further into an intimate performance environment. Hejkal and Caffery brought together six of their colleagues from across the country whom they’d met in their theater careers to collaborate on a play called “West of Elsewhere.”
“Many hands involved in every part of the process is something I really enjoy,” Caffery said.
“West of Elsewhere,” Caffery said, follows the story of five trainhoppers who leave home in the summer of 1893 in search of better lives. The characters include a young black woman dressed as a man who is fleeing racial prejudice, an old Civil War doctor and “a Jack London type” character who enjoys life on the road.
“From our earliest conversations with Forrest, there was a focus on wanting to tell an American story,” Caffery said, explaining that the group settled on the 1890s because of “the parallels in social and economic shifts” to the present day.
“It just seemed like the right time to tell a historical story that resonated with where we are now,” she said, adding that the play “explores both independence and dependency on strangers.”
Caffery herself plays two characters: a teen boy named Henry and an older homeless man with failing health named Pinstripe. Because the actors and actresses have little room to work with, the plays involve few props and all costume changes are done on stage.
“We wanted to kind of be very open about the process of creating the illusion,” she said.
The eight colleagues each pursued their own writing assignments, sharing them over conference calls and Google Drive. Once the play was complete, the group met in Michigan and spent one week practicing before hitting the road for a western tour.
In a period of 49 days during June and July, The Leastaways performed 38 shows in 15 states, traveling 8,630 miles in a colorfully-painted school bus.
“We had no idea what we were going to find that night,” Caffery said of each performance date. Sometimes, instead of living rooms, The Leastaways would perform in backyards before anywhere from five to 50 people.
Caffery said she finds performing in living room plays particularly moving, as the homeowners invite the actors and actresses into their home, creating an intimate experience.
Now that The Leastaways’ first tour is over, Caffery has returned to living in New York City, where she is an associate producer for a theater company called The Assembly.
What, then, is next for The Leastaways? Caffery envisions a future life for “West of Elsewhere” and is also beginning to consider a new play altogether.
“We’re sort of in our early dream stages of planning the next tour,” she said.
One day, Caffery hopes to take The Leastaways’ touring experience in a unique direction, pioneering bicycle tours.