The Constructivists

From The Constructivists' popular production of Rajiv Joseph's Gruesome Playground Injuries.

Art is often an exploration of an artist s innermost thoughts and feelings in turns revelatory and cathartic. But art also can serve as a refuge for others, a balm to weary souls that helps them heal.

Both aspects of art are behind the new Milwaukee theater company Jaimelyn Gray helped launch earlier this year.

I thought about the work I was passionate about, and why I loved theater, says Gray, a Manitowoc native. I think good theater can be a service to society and because of that the word constructive came to mind.

The Constructivists

Jaimelyn Gray is the artistic director and co-founder of The Constructivists.

She and several colleagues arrived at the name The Constructivists for the storefront theater company, which she serves as artistic director. The company is committed to creating viscerally driven live theater, exposing and exploring the complexity of human nature and the perils it creates.

Company members include literary manager Matthew Ivan Bennett, advisory board members J.R. Sullivan and Amanda Bowen, and artistic associates Sarah Harris and Laura Sturm.

The Constructivists is a nonprofit and will be seeking grants. Gray also will likely launch a Kickstarter campaign and undertake other fundraising efforts this summer.

The troupe s first production, Rajiv Joseph s Gruesome Playground Injuries, ran for five performances in February at The Underground Collaborative in the Grand Avenue Mall, 161 W. Wisconsin Ave. The performances attracted strong notices, resulting in a seven-performance encore run in April.

Joseph s narrative tells the story of Kayleen (Solana Ram rez-Garc a) a masochistic, depressed self-cutter with an unloving father and Doug (Rob Schreiner), an unlucky, arrogant daredevil who courts disaster. The two gain an intimacy over 30 years of friendship not through sex, but through mutual sympathy and fascination with each other s wounds and self-destructive lifestyles.

When I pick theater projects, I tend to lean toward the dark side of human experience, Gray says. It s the complexity of human life that really attracts me to the scripts I read.

Part of that is due to Gray s background and training. She holds a B.A. in theater from the University of Wisconsin-Oshkosh and spent a decade on Chicago s theater scene, much of it working with The Utopian Theatre Asylum.

But there also is a darker side to Gray s personal life that makes theater s self-examination capabilities and healing powers critical to her emotional survival. It also makes Joseph s character of Kayleen a cathartic one for the artistic director.

Kayleen s journey feels very much like my own, Gray writes in her director s notes for the show. Parental abandonment and neglect are something many of us have experienced.

Gray says her early life was less than ideal.

I left my mother s house at age 14 to flee a situation that was emotionally, mentally and physically abusive and moved in with her second husband.

The man she moved in with was not Gray s biological father. That was her mother s first husband, who left when Gray was 2 years old.

My mother s second husband had a drinking problem, she adds. That wasn t a great environment, either, but it was safer than the one I was leaving.

Gray s mother and her three husbands struggled with alcohol and drugs. She no longer has anything to do with any of them.

Gray found her refuge in high-school theater, especially the evening rehearsals, which meant she didn t have to go home. The experience gave her a career trajectory and helped her address and examine the personal challenges she was facing.

Those challenges continued when Gray got pregnant at age 23 and gave birth to her daughter Aurora, who she describes as a special-needs child.

There s no specific name for (her condition), but she is overall mentally and physically handicapped, Gray says. She s a great kid, but she s never going to drive, never going to have a job, or do a lot of other things.

Today she s a strong-willed 16-year-old and her dad and I are doing the best that we can, she explains.

The theater lifestyle gives Gray the flexibility she needs to balance child care with her professional side, says Gray, whose day job is in credit-card processing for a small Chicago firm.

Deeper dive for fall, spring productions

In terms of personal catharsis, Gray may be taking an even deeper dive on The Constructivists next production of Irish playwright Martin McDonough s The Pillowman. The play is scheduled to run Oct. 26 to Nov. 10, once again at The Underground Collaborative.

McDonough s four-person drama is a dark tale of two brothers arrested in the wake of horrific child murders in a fictional authoritarian state. One writes stories that mimic the crimes and the other described as a slow learner is suspected of committing those crimes.

Martin McDonough is one of my favorite playwrights, Gray says. In this play, the one suspected of murder is a special-needs person, and past abuse of the character is implied. I am interested in how my own experiences can amplify the characters and their relationship.

At press time, Gray was in the process of completing auditions for the four roles.

Rather than being stuck in the mindset of how the role has been cast in the past, I will try to find the best actors possible, she says.

The troupe s 2019 spring production is To Fall in Love with Anyone, Do This, a work still in progress by playwright Jennifer Lane. The Constructivists will host the play s Midwest premiere next spring at The Underground Collaborative.

The play concerns the scientific conceit that 36 questions and four minutes of uninterrupted eye contact are enough to make two people fall in love. A version of Lane s work appeared at the 2017 San Diego International Fringe Festival, where it won the award for outstanding writing,

Like Gruesome Playground Injuries, To Fall in Love with Anyone, Do This is a two-character play. It s another style component to which Gray is inexorably drawn.

I look for scripts about people having difficulty with life, she says. I see a lot of people hurting in this world and, while theater doesn t solve everything, I do believe it can help people build a connection.

The Constructivists' production of The Pillowman runs Oct. 26 to Nov. 10 at the Underground Collaborative, 161 W. Wisconsin Ave., Milwaukee. Visit theconstructivists.org for more details.

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