I am beginning work on two theatre projects:
1.
Rabbit Hole by David Lindsay-Abaire for my senior directing project. This play deals a lot with grief, but there is so much humor in it and it's beautiful.
My concept for this piece comes directly from the script:
Becca: This feeling. Does it ever go away?
Nat: No. I don't think it does. Not for me it hasn't. And that's goin' on eleven years. It changes though.
Becca: How?
Nat: I don't know. The weight of it, I guess. At some point it becomes bearable. It turns into something you can crawl out from under. And carry around - like a
brick in your pocket. And you forget it every once in a while, but then you reach in for whatever reason and there it is: "Oh right.
That." Which can be awful. But not all the time. Sometimes it's kinda...Not that you
like it exactly, but it's what you have instead of your son, so you don't want to let go of it either. So you carry it around. And it doesn't go away, which is...
Becca: What.
Nat: Fine...actually.
The show is in the NELKE/Margettes. The audience is going to sit in the Margettes in thrust (three sides) seating, but the doorway between the NELKE and Margettes will be open. I want the lift to be up and have that be Danny's room. Then on the Margettes floor will be the kitchen and the living room area. I want the bedroom to always be lit, but I want the weight of the lighting to change throughout the course of the show. I want the bedroom to always be lit, but have the lighting change to something that doesn't go away but is less lit. Just like the brick - it's always there, but it becomes something that you can deal with.
I've thought about colors of bricks: Brown, Red, Orange, Yellow. I am thinking about having the characters in solid blocks of colors of brick - like Howie in brown pants, Izzy in a orange blouse, Nat in a red something and Becca in an Orange something. Like a jacket. Or a skirt. But not real obvious. Still contemporary and hip and whatever. And then throughout the course of the play, have those colors become subtly smaller on each of them. Like the pant becomes just shoes. Or the blouse becomes a belt, or a bracelet, etc. The bricks are still with them, but smaller and it's fine.
From 7-7:30, I want to have a little boy (I know a 5 year old boy, acutally) playing on the set with toys and eating crackers or something, just living and playing in the space while the audience comes in. Immediately they're engaged in this cute little boy. And then, he's gone when the play starts and he never comes back. However, the toys on the stage the audience just saw this boy playing with. They see the world similarly to the way Bec and Nat and Iz and Howie see it. Does that make sense? And that way the things in the space are actually endowed with the memories of this child.
The grief cycle is a circle, right? But I think it's really more like a cone. At the base, it seems really long and big, but you move upwards and the grief cycle gets smaller until it's a point where it's fine - it's smaller and it's easier to live with it. All of the characters are on different points of the grief cycle. Howie and Becca move apart because they're not moving through the cycle together. They're moving in different ways. I think by the end of the play they catch up kind of? Come to an understanding of how to move together?
I love the idea that also comes from my concept about carrying a brick and how the brick is a burden, but that doesn't make it a bad thing. That's the theme that I want to explore: Not all burdens are bad. Trials are tragic, yes, but they're not unfortunate because they stretch us and make us grow in ways that we didn't expect. The trials are difficult, but do not have to be bad.
That's where I'm at with the show: a lot of pre-production conceptualizing. I'm loving it, so far, which is fantastic. I love the characters in this play. I love that we're seeing them 8 months after the tragic event, so they're past the point of crying and sobbing and instead trying to get through the day the best way the know how: using a lot of sarcasm and wit.
2. A highly personal project that will come about the same way that
The Laramie Project and
A Piece of My Heart were created. A lot of interviews with many different people. Males, females, LDS, non-LDS, bishops, counselors, mothers, fathers, girlfriends, boyfriends, husbands, wives, etc.
I want to explore pornography in a way that will open a dailogue about it. I feel very much like it's something that we don't talk about because it's bad. Because we don't talk about it, there is a lot that is unknown and there's no one to tell you or teach you until it's too late. We're only told "don't view porn." I want to open a dialogue that will help us think about how we can help those ensnared, how we can avoid the pitfalls, how we can find healing, etc.
I'm in the very pre-production stages of this project and I'm exploring the option of getting an ORCA grant for the research that will go along with this project. I feel like there should be some compensation for those that I inverview, plus I would love to get out of the BYU world and explore some other places, which could be funded by an ORCA grant.
