Information for Foreigners

Some thoughts as you consider this complicated, disturbing, and important piece of theatre.

1. Notes from the playwright
Gambaro writes that this play is preferably performed in a residential home, that the audience must be divided into groups, and that the order in which the scenes of the play are observed by the groups is left to the director's discretion until the last scene, scene 20, when all the groups converge.

2. Performed in a house
There are many reasons the playwright calls for her play to be performed in a house. No space is safe. The home contains the public and the private. There is the danger of invasion. Perhaps most felt is that the role of the audience is fundamentally changed from an audience that sits back in comfortable chairs and watches in a detached way and instead becomes an audience that is interwoven with the action and the performers.

3. Audience as bystander
With this new role for the audience, one intermingled with the action, the fact that the audience watches inside of and among this horror makes them complicit. By watching and doing nothing we realize we are not the good guys watching bad guys, we are perhaps included among the bad guys because we watch. As translator Marguerite Feitlowitz points out, the audience set up "raises questions about complicity, about the moral implications of leading, following, and baring witness. It's designed to make the audience members reflect moment to moment not only what they're watching, but *that* they're watching."

4. Violence
The violence and misogyny we see in this play are framed by a woman. This is not a reproduction or fetishization of torture, but an examination of demystification. Gambaro acknowledges that to depict violence realistically somehow legitimizes it. And so she employs a variety of ways to reframe the violence, to employ artifice that makes us examine how we see violence and how we recognize our role in it.

5. Fragments
The play is divided into 20 different scenes that the members of each of the three audience groups will encounter in different orders. The play is split across 3 floors and all performed by 12 actors. It is confusing, disorienting, overwhelming. No single scene lasts more than 10 minutes. Abrupt ending, overlapping actions, interruptions, constant movement, circuitous paths, obscured visibility, sound spillage from different scenes are all conscious choices. The audience will never see everything that is happening in the house around them at once.

6. Creations
For reasons dealing with cast and audience size, room capacity, and timing, in this production we are running 3 simultaneous audience tracks. Each track will give the audience a glimpse of new scenes and new contexts for repeated or overheard scenes. During pre-production, for a long time my pantry door was a mess of note cards, painter's tape, and colorful Post-Its as I tracked which scenes could happen where, in what order, and in which rooms so that all the tracks would last the same length, and our 12 actors could populate 50+ roles across different spaces and floors. This play, with so very many moving pieces, was no small feat to plan and execute and I am eternally grateful to the actors, stage mangers, assistant directors, assistant stage managers, designer and technicians who all said "YES" and created and environment of positivity, support, and determination.

7. Gratitude
I am grateful to everyone who helped this mammoth of a play come to fruition: Trish Reuss, for the continued support and thinking through of logistics; Karie Miller, for suggesting this piece when I told her I was looking for a play to perform in a house and for serving as dramaturg, empowering our students in their research; Raj Bellani, for listening to the crazy idea of performing a play in Monomoy, giving an enthusiastic "yes!" and connecting me with the right people to make that happen; Laura Rice, for coordinating schedules and our use of Monomoy Place; Mary Frazell and the Office of Alumni and Family Engagement, who enthusiastically agreed to allow us to use their offices as performance spaces; the translator Marguerite Feitlowitz, whose invaluable phone call and pronouncement of our undertaking as ambitious and courageous provided encouragement that lasted the entire process; and photographers, videographers, colleagues in Facilities, graphic artists, test audiences. Everyone who touched this piece, your work was vital and we could not have achieved this without you. Thank you!