Big Love

Charles Mee has long been a favorite playwright of mine. I find his writing style demands collaboration and creation, not simply interpretation. It requires me to use my best and favorite parts of being a theatre-maker. His daughter Erin Mee writes of his work thusly: "My father writes text for performance in which what he has written will be a fraction of the total experience. He sets up a situation that requires the director, in turn, to elaborate on what he has written."
Working on this production with this creative team and this cast has been a dream. All of them brought their most creative selves to the table. It takes a lot of precision to create complete chaos.

I chose to direct Big Love (a play written in 2000 as an adaptation of one of the earliest plays in the European tradition – Aeschylus’s The Suppliants) because, even though it is 17 years (or 2,500 years) after its creation, it still speaks to this moment in time, in fact, quite urgently. It’s about love and heartache, yes, and also about men and women, and refugees, and doing what is “right,” and figuring out whether you do what is right for yourself and your family, or what is
right for the state/country/world.

Big Love is a loose adaptation of The Suppliants (the first part of a trilogy of which the subsequent plays have been lost) in which 50 virginal Danaids, to avoid forced marriages, flee Egypt and seek refuge in Argos, the homeland of their ancestress Io, where they ask for King Pelasgus' protection. The king hesitates, for he knows that, if Argos gives them sanctuary, the grooms (sons of Aegyptus) and all their followers will attack the city; and then his people will blame him, saying he "destroyed Argos for the sake of foreigners.” He does not know whether to honor the right of sanctuary, even at the cost of war, or to reject his suppliants and see the altars of his gods polluted with their blood.

Mee’s adaptation deals with issues of nationality, religion, authority, political asylum, violence, gender relations and identity, whose power is inscribed on whose body, societal and individual decision, and how all these issues are inextricably connected. Big Love brings to the forefront of our minds the contradictions and extremes of being human. There are controversial characters that seem to fit stereotypical archetypes, but they too have a complicated relationship to what is “right,” reminding us – a lesson to be learned over and over again – there are no absolutes, so no single voice represents absolute truth or rightness. To save yourself/your family is potentially to damn the outside world, someone else’s family.

Like many of the best plays, Big Love provides no answers. It asks us to consider the answers we have made for ourselves and challenge whether we are looking deep enough, considering far enough. There are no winners, just different degrees of loss. Knowing this, how might we act to live a life that puts the least amount of evil in the world?