My intentions
With my interpretation of the play, I have needed to outline what I believe Williams’ own intentions were as writer. I believe that Williams set out to challenge his audience’s expectations about how a love story can occur and to ask them to take a moment to take stock of their own lives and relationships. Throughout the play, Lady examines her life and the actions that led her to arrive at its current form. I intend to focus on ways that I can use visuals to evoke emotional responses that will inform the audience's interpretation of the rest of the production. Set, lighting and design can put the audience in an uneasy mood, thus providing a sort of antecedent action without the need to explicitly describe. I want to show a dissection of character; I want to construct a staged analysis of decisions and impact of choice upon the nature of an individual. My version of Orpheus Descending is about not only love or tragic endings but the million tiny connections between residents of a small town. It’s about the smallest human moments; the breaths in between the dramatic climaxes and plot twists. Williams’ script allows for actors to step out of the climbing tension and discuss their own morality and mortality without a care for the world outside the general store, and I intend to make full use of that. Given the relative celebrity of the playwright, I expect that any production of Orpheus Descending would attract an audience at least partially composed of theatre-lovers. I suppose I’ve been imagining the college crowd—just the right group to have a prolonged discussion of potentially unresolvable moral quandaries. I intend to stage my production in a theatre space modeled off the University of Evansville Shanklin Theatre. I will discuss this further when I discuss set and staging but this choice is mainly based on my desire to use a thrust stage. Impact on audience My main impact goal with my production is to encourage my audience to question their own life choices and moral framework. Therefore, I think the feeling I want my audience to leave with is one of lingering internal conflict. Throughout the course of the production I hope to emphasize the tense and anxious moments, but these are intended to place audience members in a mental space where they are perhaps more open to questioning the moral goodness of all the characters. I want audiences to feel empathy for Val and Lady but also to condemn them for their transgressions of normalized social-moral code. Real human relationships and experiences are never innately simple enough to describe as either good or bad, and are perhaps too complex to fully describe at all. I would much rather use my art to encourage people to continue asking questions.
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Espen SwansonBloggin' 'bout theater.. Archives
February 2017
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