On both sides of my family, there are professors, teachers, teachers who teach teachers, superintendents and principals that go back generations. Almost all of the core characters in the play are Black academics, an identity that runs deep in my family. I felt uniquely qualified to tackle the play. Kennedy wrote dialogue and action as if she were writing lines and stanzas of poetry, incorporating purposeful page and line breaks. If I’m being honest, when I first read the play, it looked like word art on the page. Written in a prosaic style that reads a lot like her short story, the play functions by way of characters reading the narration of their lives or having their story read for them. Kennedy wrote this new work as an adaptation of her short story “Sisters Etta and Ella” from her publication The Adrienne Kennedy Reader. The process of putting the pieces together-following clues, understanding the shards of glass spilled on the hardwood floor-that Troupe puzzles over in the first half of Adrienne Kennedy’s Etta and Ella on the Upper West Side is unbelievably similar to the process of directing this play’s world premiere (in a CalArts Center for New Performance production playing Feb. Troupe is thrust into a role akin to a detective from a film noir, with a deep compulsion to discover more of what led to Etta’s madness. She’s a prominent Black writer-a playwright-who has a history of warring with her sister. Night after night she incessantly calls him to warn him of an upcoming murder. There sits a woman named Etta, one of his former colleagues. Troupe, a Black music scholar, peers through the curtains of his brownstone window at the apartment across the street. from Etta and Ella on the Upper West Side by Adrienne Kennedy With that in mind, the wrestler-turned-actor apparently came up with that third-act twist in which the terrorists take his daughter from him, which in turn brings the entire film to its explosive climax at the top of The Pearl.“Troupe was determined to discover more of what led to Ella’s strangling.” Most of the movie revolves around scenes in which he nearly dies while trying to save them, but while filming Rampage, it sounds like Dwayne Johnson was thinking one movie ahead to how he could make Skyscraper even more impactful. The emotional core of Skyscraper hinges on Will Sawyer's love of his family and his fight to get them out of harm's way. There's nothing gonna stop him from going to get her.' You get that great scene where they kind of hit him in the back of the head and they're pulling her away and she's screaming for daddy and you just feel that heart wrench of this little girl being pulled away and you just know there's nothing on this planet gonna stop this hero from hurting these guys and getting his little girl back. We were filming Rampage and as we were still kind of fleshing out the script and Skyscraper was prepping, Dwayne called up and he was like, 'We gotta have a moment where the audience sees them take her from me and they know. I remember, there was a specific moment, which was a Dwayne moment. I recently chatted with President of Production at Seven Bucks Productions, Hiram Garcia, and he explained: However, there's also a lot of emotional pain that carries him through the movie, and it turns out that the scene in which Will's daughter is taken from him was thought up by The Rock himself in order to up the stakes of the film. The one-legged Will Sawyer is far from invulnerable, and he gets his ass kicked several times throughout the course of the film. With the release of Rawson Marshall Thurber's Skyscraper, audiences finally have a chance to see Dwayne " The Rock" Johnson play the everyman in a way that they have seldom seen before.
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