Jamie McKittrick

Go Behind the Scenes of Jacked! with Director Jamie McKittrick

As the director of Jacked! I’m responsible for a number of things that mostly have to do with using my imagination to figure out how to best tell the story of the play and then communicating my ideas to all of the people working on the production. I need to make sure the actors, the designers, and the technicians understand what their individual jobs are on the production and then help them to accomplish these jobs and help them feel how important they are to the team. It’s also my job to make sure that all of the different parts that these artists worked on fit together to build the final product, which is what the audience gets to see.

The first big challenge I faced as the director was trying to figure out how to tell the story of Jacked! when it became clear that, like so many things in 2020, how we performed the play for an audience was going to need to shift. I wanted to be sure that we were making a performance that suited the mode of distribution. This wasn’t going to be a performance that would perform for live audiences of young people in their schools like other Metro touring productions. This would be “digitally” touring to schools where the audience members would be watching the performance on screens. I felt like it was really important that I started to create something that would be suited to watching on a computer screen with headphones, on a smartboard in a classroom, or streaming over a television in a living room at home.

I started with the play itself to look for inspiration for the “how” of telling our version of Jacked! Idris Goodwin, the playwright, wrote this play so that all of the text of the play is expressed through spoken word, hip hop, and rap-music is underneath the text for the majority of the play. From there, I knew that the music and the text were how we would get the details of the story. The music and voices needed to be the main focus. As a result, I started to think maybe the visual world of the play would be a little more abstract to leave room for the audiences’ imaginations while supporting the detailed, aural world of the play. As I sat and dreamed about that, I remembered all of the musical audio stories my mom would play in the car on road trips to visit my grandma and how they often had picture books to accompany them. I also remembered Harry Nilsson’s The Point and felt like that was a great touchstone of a way to tell a story that is music forward with evocative and abstract images for support. Thus, I was pretty sure we were going to need to go into a recording studio to make sure our sound was on point. I already had Jackie “Jackpot” Sharp on board as the musical director and soundtrack creator so I was feeling good about our ability to make an exciting and specific world of the play regarding sound. He also brought in The Knuckles, a virtuosic hip hop and pop duo he works with, to be actors on the project and join Jarris L. Williams, who I had already cast as Jack. The only thing I wasn’t sure about was how to make the visual world I was imagining come together.

Julia Flood, artistic director for Metro, and I had a conversation about my vision for Jacked! as a digital “touring” performance experience so she could help me figure out what that would mean in practice and how the capable staff at Metro could help make that happen. As I was describing what I imagined the visual world of the play should feel like, she thought of Nick Kryah. She shared some of his work with me and I felt like someone had been looking into my imagination when I looked at the fantastical, hilarious, and touching images he creates. Nick, then, agreed to come on board to create the visual world of our production, and from there, I could really feel our version of Jacked! start to come together.

Ultimately, working on Jacked! has been one of my favorite and most nourishing artistic experiences. That it happened during the challenging circumstances of the past year is a gift. The rehearsal process with the actors was a joy—even while following best practices in safety regarding COVID. We played with how to voice the different characters, mined the story for personal truths, and lifted one another up. Once we arrived in the Doorways Recording Studio, we had a really solid structure in place that was ready to be recorded with the freedom to let the characters and sound continue to grow.

One of my favorite parts of the experience, though, was making a new slow cooker meal to bring to the studio every day for lunch. Cooking for the people I care about is one of the cornerstones of my social and artistic life that has been missing since March of 2020. I found it so comforting to be able to put together a meal for my Jacked! family each day in the recording studio. If I could send a homecooked meal to every person who touched this project and every single audience member who chooses to take time to experience this production, I would. Just like, how when the character of Jack is hungry and bravely trying to solve problems that are older and larger than his age, all I want to do is feed him and bring him close to me and comfort him. Jack and his community, like all of us, can only move through difficult times when they immediately look to one another for support. We are all connected. I’m so grateful working on Jacked! reminded me of that connection both in process and in the final performance product. 

— Jamie McKittrick, January 2021