With Ruth Griffin at the helm, this Selma ‘Curious Incident’ won’t stop moving

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“He can’t look into your face and know anything about a person’s emotional state,” she says. “He draws faces to recognize what a feeling looks like, because he doesn’t know.”

For her, the labels don’t matter much. Far more important is helping the audience establish an empathetic bond with Christopher. He is different, yes, but aren’t we all?

“We all have autistic aspects about us,” she says. “We all have our black holes.”

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The Broadway production of “Curious Incident,” which I saw in New York with the original cast, was breathtaking in terms of the production design. The lighting and scenic design dipped the audience into Christopher’s often overstimulated world. I remember thinking that it was almost too much — the lights and sounds sometimes so dominant that my brain would wander away with thoughts of “how did they do that?” and “oh, what a cool effect!” rather than stay with the drama on stage.

Griffin doesn’t have that problem with the Selma Arts Center production. She does not have a multi-million-dollar budget. But that’s OK with her.

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“There’s an advantage of seeing this show in an intimate venue,” she says. “There’s not as much danger of being overdazzled.”

Instead, she hopes to mine the play’s emotional material, bringing the audience in as close as she can. Griffin’s roots in classical Greek theater contribute to a key concept for her in this production. She envisioned the idea of a Chorus, made up of all the cast except Christopher, which is in on this journey with him, so to speak. In the script, various voices and characters often comment on the action. With the Chorus, that process is physicalized. The entire production is choreographed.

She also is turning to a significant Selma Arts Center resource: the work of Dominic Grijalva, whose projection designs can fill in a lot of the visual oomph that Broadway provided.

Here’s an illustration of how Griffin can deliver some of the same kinds of visual effects as the Broadway version. In one part of the show, a flurry of paper descends upon Christopher, creating a sort of whirlwind effect. On Broadway, that effect was likely achieved by stagehands tossing buckets of material from above, letting it float down.

In Selma, however, there is no fly space above the stage. So Griffin enlisted the Chorus to create the “whirlwind” in a stylized manner.

And by having the actors themselves contribute to the visual effects, it makes the little world created on stage even tighter.

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At heart, Griffin is much more interested in theater that is minimalist by nature instead of expensive sets that need their own computer software. (She comes from the school of what she calls “rough theater,” of traveling minstrels and commedia dell’arte, where you throw all your stuff for a production in the back of your car and just show up to the theater.) On a recent trip to the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, she spent a lot of time looking at the work of Sol LeWitt, known for his minimalist works. That aesthetic influences the Selma production.

Along with movement, Griffin is fascinated by time. The other major creative concept for the show can best be described as the Japanese concept of jo-ha-kyu. It’s a way of describing the intersection of space and time that is defined as “a concept of modulation and movement” applied in a wide variety of traditional Japanese arts.

Kyle Lowe

Terry Lewis in Selma Arts Center’s ‘The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time.’

Simply put, it’s a phrasing of time. Think of it like this: slow in the beginning, then a little bit faster, and then fast.

“When the people in the cast do this jo-ha-kyu, I think that space and time comes together,” she says.

Besides Serpa, a Selma Arts Center veteran who plays the pivotal role of Christopher, that cast includes some well-known Fresno-area theater names. Terry Lewis and Chris Mangels share the role of Christopher’s father. (Lewis plays the first weekend and Mangels the second.) The cast includes Diane Fidalgo, Julie Lucido, Camille Gaston, Juan Luis Guzman, Laramie Woolsey, Bryan Beckstrand, Michael C. Flores, Nwachukwu Oputa, Ben Applegate and Jessica Meredith.

One thing is for sure: They will be moving on that stage. This is a Ruth Griffin show, after all.

In her Fresno State production of “Tales from Ovid,” she had the challenge of turning one of the characters into a tree. She couldn’t afford to put together an extravagant visual effect, so she took the simple route.

“What I did was plaster all the bodies together to make the tree,” she says. “And the audience put it together. That’s what I’m really interested in: using the imagination of the audience.”

Show info

‘The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time,’ a Selma Arts Center production. Opens 7 p.m. Friday, Feb. 15. Continues through Feb. 25. Tickets are $19 general, $17 student/senior, $15 children.