KNOW A MONKEY: Luke Hatton
Posted by Alexis on July 22, 2010
You are the Artistic Director of Barrel of Monkeys. What does that mean?
Every day it’s something a little bit different. It’s a lot of preparation for shows that are coming up. When we have auditions I’m in charge of the casting and organizing that whole process. It’s got a lot of variation to it, including selecting new stories to put in the show each week, That’s Weird, Grandma. I tally all the audience votes and figure out what we should take out, which sometimes is a heartbreaking decision, but it has to be done.
How long have you been with BOM?
I was cast in the fall of 2000, at a time when ... the group was pretty small then. To give you an idea of how much it’s growing, we have 55 active company members, and at the time when I was cast I think they had 14 active company members —I may not have that exactly right—and they cast a big crew that almost doubled their size.
When did you decide to become involved in theater?
Whoa. That’s a loaded one. Well, this sort of ties into my love of Barrel of Monkeys. I was sort of a bad kid in grade school until third grade, and then I had a teacher who did creative drama in the classroom, and suddenly I think it was kind of a night and day switch and I turned around and I loved the teacher, and therefore wanted to impress her, and therefore was motivated to do well in school and so ... that’s when I became turned around from a problem kid to a kid who was a good student, I suppose, or a kid who was at least striving. So anyway, I had this teacher and that’s sort of simultaneously when I got interested in doing drama.
Do you have a memory of a thing you did as a bad kid? A pre-third grade memory.
Oh, a pre-third grade memory. Yeah, in kindergarten we had these life-sized blocks and we built a whole town. We were learning about the mail system, so you had to write letters correctly and write the address of the sender up in the corner, and who you were sending it to in the middle and put the stamp on and all that. And I intentionally did it wrong to see what would happen, and I got put in jail by the kid who was the sheriff, and I didn’t like that so I -
You were testing the system!
I was testing the system. And then I broke the jail. Like I broke the jail—I mean physically threw the blocks and broke out. And that led to a lot of parent conferences and stuff, the kid who was the sheriff was distraught and he was, you know, “Luke’s breaking the jail.”
Did you ride shooting guns down the street?
In my mind, yeah.
Where do you live in Chicago?
Rogers park. I like that neighborhood a lot. It’s convenient also because that is where our afterschool program is, which is the Loyola Park after school program - and we’re Arts Partners there at that Park District building…So we are there often, just a few blocks from my house.
You say “we,” who do you live with?
My wife, Oona, and my son, Royal. Oona is a Barrel of Monkeys company member as well, and we were cast the same year, in 2000.
How old is your son?
He is three months old. He was doing some really legitimate laughs today, which was very cute. He’s actually, he’s the first ... well, I don’t know, I don’t know if this is necessarily a big deal, but I think he is the first Monkey baby that is 100% Monkey, like, made by two Monkeys.
That is pretty significant actually.
Yeah, I think so.
Does he take after you?
He made his first face today that was like a pouting face, and you could tell it was a tactic, it wasn’t just, “I’m sad.”
It was like “I’m thinking, and I might break the jail.”
Exactly. Jailbreaker. That’s from me.
Okay, back to Monkey business. What do you hope to achieve as Artistic Director?
I really hope to create an environment where people want to be and people want to work. You know, it’s a fun environment but also a professional environment where we are striving to make great theater. We have a lot of people ask are we children’s theater or are we not children’s theater and I think we are theater that’s appropriate for children, but I think that doesn’t mean we’re “children’s theater.”
What do you think makes Barrel of Monkeys work so well?
I think it’s the kids. Whenever we have teachers who taught the Barrel of Monkeys residencies and are part of the show, you can tell each time they want to get it right, because they know the kids, and they know he meant this or she meant that. So they want to make sure it doesn’t go off on some tangent that is funny to us but doesn’t ring true to the stories. And it’s really funny how often it works, when you sense that things in rehearsal are veering off one way or another. It’s sort of a cliché to say, “Go back to the text,” because we hear that in our English class or whatever, but you’re like, “something’s supposed to happen here,” and you go and read the story and the next sentence tells you. And it’s like “Oh, oh yeah, well the mom was not there at the time and that’s why…” It’s amazing how much that will tell you.
What is it like to direct a rehearsal?
Fun fast, and crazy. It’s very hands on at times and at other times people come in with a very strong concept for a specific piece. So sometimes your job is just getting out of the way. Artistic director sounds sometimes like you should have the best idea all the time, or you should tell people what to do all the time or where to stand or what the piece is about, but some of the best pieces that we’ve done, an individual in the company came in and said, “This is my idea for this,” and it was just so clear that you just say, “Great, can you just stand a little more to the right?” You know, you just kind of back off and you let it work its magic.
Can you describe a time when that happened?
There was a piece we did in our Celebration of Authors show this year that one of our great musicians created this action movie soundscape for. It was based on a story this kid wrote called “The Time We Had a Snowball Fight,” and the story was just a description of all the action: “my friend hit me with a snowball and then I hit him with a snowball and then we chased each other and then a third kid came and then he hit us and it was a really big one…”. And so Curtis Williams, one of our musicians, created this soundscape. I think he took little pieces of Kill Bill and Terminator III and a couple other action movies and he just synched up this piece where three actors were playing the snowballs that would come to life and float across the stage. It was staged and coordinated and choreographed with the beats of the music. And then at the end the muscle guy came in, and he was Curtis, and he was the superpower snowball fighter. It was just awesome and everybody was cheering. And that was just, you know, getting everybody in the room and letting the ideas fly.