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.