Bring on the Queer Dutchman: SLC theater has high ambitions
by Drew Paryzer
Thursday November 29, 2007
The fall season of theater at Sarah Lawrence promises to deliver the goods: sexual intrigue, inspiring humanity, compressed inspiration, and – yes – a Queer Dutchman.
The SLC Theatre Department’s fall season of three shows will be kicked off with An Authentic Relation of the Many Hardships and Sufferings of a Dutch Sailor; or, The Just Vengeance of Heaven Exemplified – formerly known as The Queer Dutchman Project – on the nights of Nov. 15 to 17. The devised piece, co-directed by new faculty member David Neumann and department stalwart Dan Hurlin, is inspired by the story of Leendert Hasenbosch, a native of Holland who was exiled to a small island in the Atlantic Ocean in 1725 as punishment for sodomy. The piece, currently in rehearsal, will examine how Hasenbosch’s story has been portrayed to the public throughout the past three hundred years – most notably, Daniel Defoe’s rewrite his the original journal and Peter Agnos 1970 novel which distorts the Dutchman story.
“We are playing with the idea of historical revisionism,” Cory Antiel, a senior and a member of the fourteen-person cast explained, “We are taking all these texts and organizing them into a performance – yet another level of revisionism.” The completed work will integrate puppets, music, text, and movement, organized via the Neumann-Hurlin directorial collaboration. “They both do movement with us, giving us suggestions. [Hurlin] does most of the text work. But they confer on most everything,” said Antiel.
Tallgrass Gothic, written by Melanie Marnich and directed by second-year graduate student Elizabeth Miller, will be performed from Dec. 6 to 8. Loosely based on The Changeling, a British play from the early 17th century, Marnich sets her lurid tale of infatuation and betrayal amid the pastoral backdrop of the modern-day Great Plains. At first blush, the play embodies the classic story of true lovers who desperately battle the external forces in their lives that threaten their unity; however, the director Miller perceives an urgent humanism to the work that belies the Romeo and Juliet cliché. “This is a character-driven play about six youths who lead deceptively simple lives,” Miller said. “Their rash choices lead to devastating consequences. People make decisions without thinking every day of their life – here is a story where we see the devastation we can affect.”
Miller’s production will feature senior Jillian Fisher as Kate, an impassioned and unhappily-married young woman who becomes erotically entangled with a man named Daniel, played by graduate student Gary Ploski. Other cast members include seniors Malcom Pepin and Aaron Matteson, as well as sophomores Kate Thomas and Winston Shaw. Miller’s cast will be engaging with a script full of raw poetry, sexual candor, and chop-blocked dialogue – a combination that gives the play a pacing Miller is excited about: “I am drawn to this play because it moves – from start to finish the story unfolds like the barreling of a freight train down a runaway track.” She added, “And, it’s a ghost story – who doesn’t love the mix of sex and murder!”
The final play of the semester, showing from Dec. 13 to 15, will be the acclaimed and highly topical 9 Parts of Desire. Originally conceived of as a solo performance piece by Heather Raffo, the production will be helmed by second-year graduate student Anna DeMers and feature a re-imagined cast composition. The work depicts the lives and struggles of nine women living in modern-day Iraq, as re-told and re-interpreted from the playwright’s own encounters in the war-torn country. DeMers chose to have the production feature nine women, reflecting upon the play’s title “There are three main actresses that will portray the nine characters,” DeMers says. “I have also added an ensemble of six additional women who will expand the world of the play and add to the multiplicity of the stories.”
DeMers will be working heavily with movement and physicality in her direction. Her three main actresses – Sarah Campbell, Paola Irun, and Liz Waters – will each have a distinct part to play. “It is important to find distinguishing qualities [between the roles], and this will be discovered through movement,” said Demers.
The six additional roles, which Demers calls the Vital Ensemble, will be directed with an eye toward physical composition. “The ensemble will help create and recreate the space as the stories progress,” said Demers, “accentuating the visuals that are so poetically described through the text.” DeMers seems to be providing the groundwork for creating effective, topically-relevant theatre through marrying her artistic choices with unsettling social realities. “These nine characters speak for hundreds and thousands of women who have not been given a voice . . . The United States is still at war with Iraq, and Iraqis still suffer and struggle to survive. And these 9 women tell these stories immaculately.”
