by Emily Edmond, Source Intern
Yesterday, Amber Jackson—the director of Uses of Enchantment—sent us a music video to inspire her cast. In the video, paper cutouts are used to make cities and forests and a car and a deer and a beach and people walking. The cutouts are similar to what Amber is using to animate her play: shadow figures. It’s a great find. The song it’s set to is called “Love Is Making Its Way Back Home” by Josh Ritter (who I love). When I first heard it I thought the title meant that “to love” means to make one’s way back home. Upon repeat, that’s probably not the meaning Josh Ritter meant, but it stuck with me because it seems such a perfect summation of Jenny’s journey in Uses of Enchantment.
Jenny is trying to find her way back to a home that has ceased to exist because of a family tragedy. At the start of the play, she feels neglected and alone and unloved but as the play goes on, Jenny is pushed to look beyond the past, and create a new home with what she has. She must go on a journey, one that, coincidentally, involves “Dark pines the moonlit road”:
This song also got me thinking about our other full length plays, and what songs might capture their message.
For Qualities of Starlight I think it would be “A Case of You” by Joni Mitchell. It begins with a line from Julius Caesar: “Just before our love got lost you said/I am as constant as the northern star.” The singer quickly replies, “Constant in the darkness/Where’s that at?/If you want me I’ll be in the bar.” It’s a snappy rejoinder to a classic romantic notion: love is always there, even if you don’t know it. But what’s love if you don’t know it’s there? This a question that several of the characters in Qualities of Starlight have to grapple with. Polly has to ask it of Theo, when he shuts down after several miscarriages and Theo has to ask it of her when she runs away after seeing how messed up his family is.
The song also talks about love as an addiction, or that a person in love is like an addict. “A Case of You” refers to wine, but in Qualities of Starlight it’s crystal meth. Does Rose stay with Junior because she loves him, or because she’s addicted to him? Or does it even matter?
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0YuaZcylk_o
The last full length play, The House Halfway, is about death. When I was younger I used to think a lot about what songs I wanted played at my funeral. I was really into “In the Cold, Cold Ground” by Tom Waits. I also thought that a really good (or really inappropriate) song for a suicide would be “I Gotta Get Out of This Place” by The Animals. The House Halfway deals with suicide but I don’t think “I Gotta Get Out of This Place” would fit the tone. “I Gotta Get Out of This Place” is (true to its rock ‘n roll style) a desperate, aggressive song. It could be called “I Gotta Get Out of This Place [right now].” The guests at Dandle house (the inn on the Carribbean island where they go to kill themselves) may be desperate, but they’re not that desperate. They can take the time to fly to Caribbean and relax a little before dying. I think a better song would be “House Full of Empty Rooms” by Kathleen Edwards. It’s about the dissolution of a marriage, which one of the character (the wisest character, natch) uses as a way of explaining suicide. The marriage between a person and God, or a person and life, isn’t working anymore, so it’s coming to an end. You can hear some of the parallels in the lyrics of “House Full of Empty Rooms”: “You don’t talk to me/Not the way that you used to/Maybe I don’t listen/In a way that makes you think I do”—could be said by someone who’s lost contact with their God.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jFnKxjSF30Y
Our very own Source Festival intern, Emily Edmond shares her thoughts on Collider, one of this year’s 10-Minute Plays, written by Cullen T.M McGough.
Being an arts-and-humanities-type, I’ve always been a little in thrall with the sciences, and scientists. It seems so noble to me, and not just in a curing cancer kind of way. The inexplicable yet alluring terms, the symbols and scribbles in notebooks, quarks! And of course getting to pour colored liquid into a bottle filled with other colored liquid. I always thought that was really cool. So unsurprisingly, some of my favorite books are about people and science, like Alice in Jonathan Lethem’s As She Climbed Across the Table, who falls in love with a black hole or Dr. Leo Liebenstein who uses meteorology to track down his wife, who he thinks is missing in Atmospheric Disturbances by Rikva Galchen. The science in these stories is usually used to illustrate a point about human nature. In Atmospheric Disturbances, for example, the meteorological theory that “we cannot tell what the weather will be tomorrow (or the next hour) because we do not know accurately enough what the weather is right now” is applied to human relationships: we can not accurately predict what will happen in our relationship because we do not accurately know what is happening now (Tzvi Gal-Chen, “Initialization of Mesoscale Models: The Possible Impact of Remotely Sensed Data.”)
http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/b/bf/Assheclimbedcvr.jpg
Atmospheric Disturbances by Rivka Galchen
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/07/13/books/review/Schillinger-t.html?_r=1
It might matter to this guy.
http://www.phenomenica.com/2010/05/newtons-apple-tree-bound.html
It’s only in the last universe/scene that things get explained by Prius, and I admit that my understanding of the what exactly alternate universes entails gets a little foggy. I’d need to ask Prius some questions one-on-one. If we’re all our own little universes, why doesn’t time in exist there? Why are time and “our-own-little-universes” mutually exclusive? I do like the idea, or maybe just the phrase, that we’re all our own little universes, because it seems like an accurate description of human life in this universe. Each human being is a whole world or universe unto his or herself, and just like the universe we’re partly knowable and partly unknowable. How much of us is knowable, I don’t know.
—-And that, right there, is the kind of science-as-metaphor trope that I like so much. It’s a melding of the disciplines, if you will. I think one of the coolest things an artist can do is find meaning in unexpected places, like meteorology or theoretical physics. It brings us all, black holes and arrogant data-analysts, closer together.
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"Chupacabras and Risk in TYA" by Gabriel Jason Dean -
Source Festival playwright Gabriel Jason Dean wrote this lovely article about the risks he took to write his play for young audiences titled The Transition of Doodle Pequeño.
[video]
"I Interview Playwrights Part 454: Norman Allen" -
Norman Allen, playwright of “The House Halfway”, was interviewed by Adam Szymkowicz, author of the blog “I Interview Playwrights”. Get to know what he’s working on here at the Source Festival and the other projects he’s involved in!
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Get to know the 2012 Source Festival Artists! Round 2!
Rachael Murray (@Rachael_Murray), Jay-Jay in Cyanocitta and Prius in Collider
“ I am currently wishin’ and workin’ at becoming a good/mediocre hip-hop dancer.”
Janet Minichiello, Costume Designer for the 10-Minute Plays
” [I have] been known to have seven different kinds of cheese in the fridge at one time.”
Doug Eacho, Director, Answers, F2F, and Lisa Frank Virginity Club
“Prized Possessions: briefcase, portable wet bar, ’60s bathrobe.”
Stay in the know and check back next Friday for more Fun Facts!
[video]
Fight Choreography caught in action during rehearsal for The Uses of Enchantment, directed by Amber Jackson (@AmberDirector)
