We've added an ENCORE performance of "First Love"!
All 4 original performances are sold out, so we are performing again this Friday night at 11:30PM. If you are interested, please email theater@brynmawr.edu for tickets.
Less than 24 seats available, so don't wait!
Thursday, April 12, 2007
Tuesday, April 10, 2007
SOLD OUT shows!
"First Love" is SOLD OUT on Thursday and Friday.
There are only a few seats left for Saturday, but there's a lot of room left for the Wednesday preview.
Reserve your tickets today if you don't want to miss out!
There are only a few seats left for Saturday, but there's a lot of room left for the Wednesday preview.
Reserve your tickets today if you don't want to miss out!
Saturday, April 7, 2007
That 70's Show
In some of the notes that I’ve been sharing with Abby during our past couple of runs and rehearsals, I’ve been talking a lot in terms of how Harold and Edith fall in love with each other at such an advanced age the same way that a pair of middle-school students fall in love with each other. They talk about communism, “Howl”, and their adventures in live, in a similar way to how pre-teenagers talk about movies, TV, cartoons, Nickelodeon, or whatever else middle-school students talk about these days. We see Harold and Edith being bashful with one another, awkward, shy, as if they were prepubescent. Yet they can’t walk without their canes, they have to take their pills, they change each other’s diapers, and they don’t hear or see a damn thing. We therefore find in them an example of ‘puppy love’ at the age of seventy.
I bring up the contrast between these two images we’ve created with these characters because I feel that unconsciously we have done the same with our set. We started out talking about Magritte and the juxtaposition of familiar images in an unusual context or proportion. This helped us develop our set: a sandbox bed, giant pillbox, a very well dressed bird-cage, etc. Indeed, all these images are use familiar items in rather unusual contexts. Yet, they have also created, in great part because of our color choices, a sort of coloring book set. It’s lively, colorful, and youthful: more like the waiting room of a pediatrician’s office than a geriatric center. Of course, we then encase all of these images in the ancient lobby of Goodhart (no offense to that wonderful building) and all these young-looking images clash with the oldness of the building. In our attempt to create a surreal landscape of juxtapositions we managed somehow to emphasize and/or underscore with the set the biggest juxtaposition of them all: the flimsiness of the love Harold and Edith share and their age.
Ultimately, I feel that this should help our audience ask one of the most important questions surrounding this play: did Harold and Edith truly love each other, or did they simply share an infatuation? As with saw with the Beckett story of the same title, the male lead did not truly love his partner, but merely became infatuated with her before running out of her life. Is this what Charles Mee is trying to do here? Present us with a 70 year-old couple that develops a ‘crush’ with each other and confuse it with love? Is it really love if it is so childish? Or is this precisely what love is? Why it’s no big deal? Both our performances and our set have evolved during the past few weeks to direct our attention to the clash between these two ideas: the maturity of old age and the childishness of love. I personally feel that after I started working with you on this production, this became one of the big questions that I wanted to present to the audience. We’ll find out next Tuesday if they really catch on to it.
I bring up the contrast between these two images we’ve created with these characters because I feel that unconsciously we have done the same with our set. We started out talking about Magritte and the juxtaposition of familiar images in an unusual context or proportion. This helped us develop our set: a sandbox bed, giant pillbox, a very well dressed bird-cage, etc. Indeed, all these images are use familiar items in rather unusual contexts. Yet, they have also created, in great part because of our color choices, a sort of coloring book set. It’s lively, colorful, and youthful: more like the waiting room of a pediatrician’s office than a geriatric center. Of course, we then encase all of these images in the ancient lobby of Goodhart (no offense to that wonderful building) and all these young-looking images clash with the oldness of the building. In our attempt to create a surreal landscape of juxtapositions we managed somehow to emphasize and/or underscore with the set the biggest juxtaposition of them all: the flimsiness of the love Harold and Edith share and their age.
Ultimately, I feel that this should help our audience ask one of the most important questions surrounding this play: did Harold and Edith truly love each other, or did they simply share an infatuation? As with saw with the Beckett story of the same title, the male lead did not truly love his partner, but merely became infatuated with her before running out of her life. Is this what Charles Mee is trying to do here? Present us with a 70 year-old couple that develops a ‘crush’ with each other and confuse it with love? Is it really love if it is so childish? Or is this precisely what love is? Why it’s no big deal? Both our performances and our set have evolved during the past few weeks to direct our attention to the clash between these two ideas: the maturity of old age and the childishness of love. I personally feel that after I started working with you on this production, this became one of the big questions that I wanted to present to the audience. We’ll find out next Tuesday if they really catch on to it.
Tuesday, April 3, 2007
Flowers as Pacifiers
We've done a lot of work on the flower scene since you posted your thoughts on Ophelia, Jorge, but here are some musings in the wake of our discussions and experiments:
Can this speech eulogize love (a positive thing in itself, the pure definition described in the "one pebble" speech) while at the same time mourning the way people have treated it? I think the negative things that have come out of it, exemplified in the "this is why a man" smashing scene, should certainly take precedence over the glowing, dreamy thoughts that may give way to those negative things. Still, I think it's useful to remember that, as you've pointed out, this is the sort of bad news, or death sentence, that can't be delivered too harshly, not without causing more smashing, more pain. To couples still in the fluff zone, still having their first picnic and "I cherish you" moments, the realization that sooner or later destruction will come is not exactly an easy one to take. The flowers can act as consolation - not to dumb the truth down, not to make it better, but just to show that what's dying is a beautiful thing, not a scary thing in itself. I am trying to tell this truth as gently as I can; I don't want to yank the growing weeds out of the ground but instead carefully make them aware of the ruin they're about to cause.
Selling flowers is one of the ways that I relate to the world. Just as making sure that Harold enjoys the tart earlier in the play gives me a boost, a sense of having done something productive, a reason to move on to my next task, giving people a nice bouquet helps me feel connected to those around me. In this case, my routine (giving flowers, finding those precious little moments to share with others) provides me with a context in which to place this darker news - the gravity of which I wouldn't usually welcome into my life. I need somewhere to hand off the things I've found out following the rejection, the disaster, and the recovery I've just gone through, and I need that handing off to fit into my personality. I am not going to scream at people or yell at them or force my warning upon them; I'm not going to outwardly condemn them or persecute them. I am going to walk up to them, carefully, knowing that they are on the other side, foreign. They're aliens or kittens, to use Mark's analogies. This is going to be as difficult for them as it has been for me.
This is not about delivering bad news to a specific couple or letting a certain person know about impending doom. It's about coming to terms with something painful, taking it in, seeing people who are still back where I was, before I knew the pain, and taking the opportunity to give them this news, to let them get out, to tell them what's to come, what not to do, what it's too late to avoid doing. The flowers give me a medium I'm used to as well as a way to establish the trust of my listeners before telling them what I have to say. Flowers are not immediately threatening; only when you see the destruction inherent even in them, even in the pretty and innocent things (even a child bears marks of uprooting, chopping, ruin), do you see the funeral going on everywhere.
Can this speech eulogize love (a positive thing in itself, the pure definition described in the "one pebble" speech) while at the same time mourning the way people have treated it? I think the negative things that have come out of it, exemplified in the "this is why a man" smashing scene, should certainly take precedence over the glowing, dreamy thoughts that may give way to those negative things. Still, I think it's useful to remember that, as you've pointed out, this is the sort of bad news, or death sentence, that can't be delivered too harshly, not without causing more smashing, more pain. To couples still in the fluff zone, still having their first picnic and "I cherish you" moments, the realization that sooner or later destruction will come is not exactly an easy one to take. The flowers can act as consolation - not to dumb the truth down, not to make it better, but just to show that what's dying is a beautiful thing, not a scary thing in itself. I am trying to tell this truth as gently as I can; I don't want to yank the growing weeds out of the ground but instead carefully make them aware of the ruin they're about to cause.
Selling flowers is one of the ways that I relate to the world. Just as making sure that Harold enjoys the tart earlier in the play gives me a boost, a sense of having done something productive, a reason to move on to my next task, giving people a nice bouquet helps me feel connected to those around me. In this case, my routine (giving flowers, finding those precious little moments to share with others) provides me with a context in which to place this darker news - the gravity of which I wouldn't usually welcome into my life. I need somewhere to hand off the things I've found out following the rejection, the disaster, and the recovery I've just gone through, and I need that handing off to fit into my personality. I am not going to scream at people or yell at them or force my warning upon them; I'm not going to outwardly condemn them or persecute them. I am going to walk up to them, carefully, knowing that they are on the other side, foreign. They're aliens or kittens, to use Mark's analogies. This is going to be as difficult for them as it has been for me.
This is not about delivering bad news to a specific couple or letting a certain person know about impending doom. It's about coming to terms with something painful, taking it in, seeing people who are still back where I was, before I knew the pain, and taking the opportunity to give them this news, to let them get out, to tell them what's to come, what not to do, what it's too late to avoid doing. The flowers give me a medium I'm used to as well as a way to establish the trust of my listeners before telling them what I have to say. Flowers are not immediately threatening; only when you see the destruction inherent even in them, even in the pretty and innocent things (even a child bears marks of uprooting, chopping, ruin), do you see the funeral going on everywhere.
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