Kate Bush-Inspired Play, “The Kick Inside,” Comes to Off-Broadway

The revered songwriter and singer Kate Bush is alive and well somewhere in England but a new play inspired by her work is something of an “exquisite corpse.”

The term refers to a collaborative process with multiple participants contributing to the narrative without seeing each other’s offerings, resulting in a unique, often surprising and spontaneous creative effort.

The 13 New York City-based playwrights who contributed to the play “The Kick Inside” —the brainchild of director Nicolás Noreña—are Noreña himself, Penny Arcade, Jess Barbagallo, Ethan Fishbane, Richard Foreman, Hillary Gao, Nazareth Hassan, John Jesurun, Marvin Just, Dhari Noel, Normandy Sherwood, Hayley Stahl, and Fiona Templeton.

The story follows Alenka, a woman who grows tired of the way that people talk to one another and begins experimenting with language in every scene. Visually rich and littered with strange phenomena, action sequences, dogs, algorithm possessions, hitmen, and a world that speaks back, “The Kick Inside” uncovers a lost city that tilts language to ask where words come from within us, and how deeply we transform each other’s emotional fabrics.

Noreña is a Colombian theater maker and performer as well as founder and Artistic Director of The Million Underscores, an experimental theater company that makes highly visual and physically eccentric, and original projects.

Straus Media sat down to talk with this ahead-of-his-time auteur, who has created a piece of work that at once pays homage to downtown experimental artists who paved the way, while devising a form all his own.

What was it about Kate Bush’s work that sparked the piece?

There was something about her debut album “The Kick Inside,” which I believe she was writing between the ages of 13 and 16. There was something so powerful in it. So raw and playful. So in and of itself, it seemed very deep and very personal and very hopeful as well. I was just very drawn to the music. I started thinking: how do we not replicate the album, but take that fun and free energy into a play?

What did that process give you with 13 writers that a single authorial voice couldn’t?

This play just started coming out in its own terms, and a lot of the process has been listening to what it wants. I started developing it in a room with a group of actors. I invited [playwright] John Jesurun to see what we were working on, and his response was “Hire someone to write it for you.” I thought maybe it would be interesting to try 13 different writers.

Was anybody privy to anyone else’s work during the process?

I did share with them a description of the characters and what happens in each scene, with a prompt for their scene. So, they knew more or less where in the context of the play it’s happening. But no, none of them really saw each other’s writing.

Alenka “grows tired of the way people talk to one another.” Where did that frustration come from?

I am Alenka. I am tired of the way that people speak to one another. I hear people repeating information that I have seen online. [They’re] possessed by algorithms. There is just this echo: people around you talking about the same people, about the same ideas, and it just feels so asphyxiating.

There feels to be very little room for transformation in a conversation or in a dialogue between people. It seems to be more and more rare.

Because of all the different writers, did anybody go rogue or come up with something “out there”?

Yeah, one of the first scenes that I got back was from Jess Barbagallo, who made this new character called “Her Room.” It’s the room speaking back, and I was like, this is huge. So that was something that I had to incorporate into the rest of the play.

As the director, you’ve got different scenes made by different playwrights. How do you make this thing cohesive?

I thought it was going to be very challenging. But then hearing the whole thing, there’s just this serendipitous thread that goes through it all, which is these performers who are going through all of the scenes. I have seven live actors, one in voiceover, and then I have one live Foley artist, [who creates sound effects like footsteps and doors creaking to match the action so the audio feels realistic.] It’s very interesting.

In the show’s description, it states, “The world speaks back.” What does that look like on stage?

On the one hand, there’s this character, Her Room, who starts speaking back and has some evolution as a character. The live Foley is basically where people’s actions meet the world -- a punch would be a sound, or people walking would be a sound. I started working with this idea of sound that the world makes when it’s met by human action.

Also, the set moves a lot; each scene happens in a different space. Very iconic New York places like a diner, a cinema, a locksmith, a dry cleaner, a bar, and all of the movement of the stage is done by the actors. So, there is a movable set that also gives the sense of this world that is very malleable.

What do you want the audience to walk away with?

I think with the effervescence of all these languages. It’s not only 13 playwrights, but also all the sound and all the movement in the piece. The lighting is also a language. The scenery is a language. So, it’s this big voice of fire. I want people to leave thinking about language as a medium with which they can experiment. With the joy of communication, with the subtleties of it, with the playfulness of it, the rhythms, and how reality can really become malleable through different ways of interacting verbally with people.

“The Kick Inside” at HERE Arts Center, 145 6th Ave., Oct. 21-Nov. 7. Tickets available at here.org

Lorraine Duffy Merkl is the author of the novel “The Last Single Woman In New York City.”