napoleon's process

in order to bring napoleon back to life he must be recreated.  in order to recreate him we must understand him.  the members of the production team immersed themselves in the study of theatre and the study of l'empereur des Francaises.  then they committed to conjoining the traditional theatrical roles of director and actor and designer into one production team.  the team wrote, designed, acted, imagined, and created this piece.  the benevolent dictator oversees the process and manages its evolution but gives great license to each artist to create without bounds so that all possible ideas can arise and the best can be weaved into great work.  it is no more easy than balancing a rhinoceros on a pin but it is exhilarating.  we used a series of workshops to develop characters loosely based on the napoleonic era and considered the thematic elements each would represent.  then we built scenes for those characters.  lastly from a generalized outline and character sketches we script a play.  while all this was going on and in some sense simultaneously through the process we design and built the show as well.  what you are seeing is the result of a process that took nearly a year and a half to produce and was born of a joke four years ago!