One Set, Three Worlds in Hepburn Zoo

Author: Kate Prouty

Harnessing the controlled chaos that is common in most Hepburn Zoo productions, "Zooprints" went up last weekend juxtaposing three disparate plays, an evolving set and a barrage of actors with relatively few flubs. Of course, some things went amiss in Friday night's performance — props came undone or broke and some lines were muffled — but they were quickly remedied and, in some cases, even incorporated into the message of the work.
Before the lights went down, the three directors — all experienced with acting but new to the directing process — Estye Ross '04, Sarah Peters '03 and Amanda Knappman '04, mulled anxiously around the room making space on the floor for an overflowing crowd.
A curtain (that was not to be used until the third play) fell out of place but was quickly swept up by the Set Designer, a calm Parker Diggory '04. A skeleton of the set (which was itself the mere bones of a wall — like a house half-built, a geometric wall of wooden beams erected with nothing in between) remained static as a backdrop throughout the three plays. Providing structural continuity through the plays, it was adorned with different props and thus different meanings as the plot of each play unraveled.
In the first play, "Women and Wallace," directed by Ross, the wall remained bare to expose the emptiness between the beams. In a play about a boy growing into a man while trying to reconcile his mother's suicide, the unfilled structure represented the emptiness of his relationships. Because women "desert," as Wallace repeatedly lamented, Wallace is never able to connect with the women in his life: his grandmother (Elizabeth Hammett '05), his psychiatrist (Jocey Florence '06), his childhood love (Retta Leaphart '06), his high school crush (Meghan Nesmith '06), the older sexpot at college (Lucia Stoller '05) and the drunken fling (Edymari Deleón '04). Wallace was not able to love or trust women until his girlfriend Nina, played by first-year Jeniffer Almonte, decided to "come back" instead of abandoning Wallace when he cheated on her.
"Women and Wallace" introduced the theme of relationships that exist between lovers, friends and enemies. Following suit, the second play, directed by Peters, examined how one person can represent all of those things at once.
"The Basement" reduced its cast down to three and its setting to one room: a "Pinteresque 20-something world" adapted from the playwright Harold Pinter's original middle-upper class British flat. In the single room, Law first loved Stott then loved Jane; Jane first loved Stott then loved Law; and Stott was in love with everyone, including himself. If this seems like a love (and sex) merry-go-round, it was.
According to Peters, "The play has a cyclical nature to it, as we end back where we begin." In fact, Peters "didn't want to rule out the possibility that Stott and Law could be one person — each of the characters represents one half of man. Stott is the physical, violent side who uses language of the body; Law is the more civilized, verbal side who uses the language of words and music."
This is a product of the original play in which Peters feels Pinter "leaves room for a multiplicity of different interpretations. The characters and their relationships operate on many different levels, and they all tie together in an expression of the competition involved with male-female relationships, male-male relationships and a man's relationship with his sense of self."
As this competition unraveled, the skeleton of a wall that remained from "Women and Wallace" metamorphosed. Stott (Jeff King '05), imposing himself and young lover Jane (Leaphart) on his old friend Law's (Jim Pergolizzi '04) life and apartment, changed Law's decorations to his liking. Stripping postcards and posters away from the beams, by the end of the play Stott's alpha-maleness (acting with no shirt on, drinking beers, playing video games, having sex and fighting) dominated the space. But, "what's important" about the changing of the set, said Peters, "is that they are only skeleton structures. The actual set walls don't really exist, they're invisible." Similarly, the threesome often created a skeleton of emotion, neither true nor false, just a desperate attempt to establish a human relationship.
The next play, "…thy name is woman," directed by Knappman, departed from this use of the emptiness of the set, letting drapes fall ornamentally from the ceiling. Adapted from Charles George's "When Shakespeare's Ladies Meet," the play imagined the conversations that would take place between William Shakespeare's leading ladies. Portia (Hammett), Katherine (Eliza Hulme '05), Ophelia (Sheila Seles '05), Desdemona (Stoller) and Cleopatra (Diggory) thus joined together on stage to give Juliet (Katie Peters '06) some words of wisdom in the way of the heart.
The most lighthearted of the three, "…thy name is woman" was not necessarily to be taken lightly. Knappman acknowledged that the "Elizabethan quality of most of the lines would be a challenge," as was taking on some of the most symbolic women in the literary world.
This final play cemented an idea that the previous two had introduced: There is a line (not so thick that it can't be blurred, but nonetheless a line) that exists between reality and theatricality. Knappman felt the point of her play, which especially at the end was blatantly theatrical, was "the actors are aware that they are going to put on a play, thus, the audience also sees and recognizes the actors' intention." She continued, "the idea of consciously 'acting' a play connected well with the idea of our set being the bare bones of a wall. The idea was (in all of our three plays) that the audience could see everything — the bare bones of the performance."
In this way, Diggory, as set designer, working with a confined space that needed to encompass the settings and themes of three separate storylines, thus defined the space in an intelligent and definitive, but malleable way.