Author: SteBos

Ibsen’s Hedda Gabler

Ibsen’s Hedda Gabler

SteBos

For this NCT production Kirsten Brandt adapted Ibsen’s play for a smaller cast, directed by Norma Saldivar. Here are the evening program and Know Before You Go Audience guide.
With such a complex main character, there have been so many interpretations, but here’s my take on Hedda’s motives:

Dramaturg’s Note: The Only Way She Knows To

“Hedda… Gabler! Hedda Gabler!” whispers Ejlert Lövborg to the play’s protagonist upon reconnecting with his former love interest, now married to another man. Indeed, Hedda never really transforms into Hedda Tesman, the last name of her new husband, who just splurged on a spacious villa and a lengthy honeymoon trip, counting on the money yet to come from a pending professor’s appointment.

But this couple is obviously sharply mismatched: Hedda is a member of the social elite of Norway’s capital, Christiania (now Oslo), treated like royalty as a young woman by her father General Gabler, and now skilled heir to his guns – an unusual break with traditional gender roles at the time. For a woman seeking thrilling experiences, however, her marriage is a not just a step down, socially – into a less prestigious family who needs to sign mortgages to sustain her demands for a lavish lifestyle – but also a plunge into social boredom. Tesman, a scholar of “the domestic industries of the Low Countries in the Middle Ages” couldn’t be more of an antithesis to his new wife. A “specialist,” in the belittling definition Judge Brack offers of him, he managed to combine their recent grand tour with a research trip that yielded a full trunk of archival documents: they clearly attract him more than anything else in his life. Hedda, however, is adamant she requires more “generalist” entertainment and enjoys Brack’s company, who offers to become the more stimulating third vertex of a social, if not (yet) openly sexual triangle.

Interestingly, the most expected conflicts in this play are soon deflated: Tesman is neither jealous of other men Hedda had previous flirts with, like Lövborg, nor of current social acquaintances; and although Lövborg has recently written a book that has become a sensation and surpasses Tesman’s yet unpublished one on a similar subject (with another even better one forthcoming), he is uninterested in competing for Tesman’s post at the university. Thus, financial ruin is easily dodged by the Tesmans. Instead, the most impactful events all stem from Hedda’s unbridled desire for power over others’ lives.

For an author like Ibsen who perfected the art of indirect allusion in regard to socially unpleasant topics, this play’s secret is in fact the most domestic: the forbidden words – never pronounced but always implied – are “mother” and “children.” If Tesman is slow to acknowledge that the remaining two empty rooms in their new house could be occupied by newborns rather than bookshelves, Hedda positively declines to confirm the conjectures of her new family members, who read her recent florid appearance as a sure signal of her pregnancy. If Nora in the same author’s A Doll’s House (1879) abandoned her children to regain her freedom as an independent agent, Hedda (1891) actively refuses to accept that her more nurturing role become a reality. Instead, she fantasizes about molding Lövborg’s destiny, whom she now decides to tempt to relapse into his former destructive habits in hopes to induce him to a beautiful, albeit tragic ending.

Yet, her (almost) perfectly conceived scheme, as you will see, doesn’t really go according to plan: a manuscript forever lost gets a chance at resuscitating, a former enemy turns into an admiring friend, a new triangle is formed, and Brack turns out to be more dangerous than expected. Hedda has no choice but to escape in the only way she knows to.

 

Agatha Christie’s Murder on the Orient Express

Agatha Christie’s Murder on the Orient Express

SteBos

For this large mainstage production of an Agatha Cristie clssic – adapted by Ken Ludwig and directed by Michael Lugering – the challenge for me was to introduce the show without spoilers, so I ended up with a rather tongue-in-cheek dramaturg’s note (also in the Know Before You Go Audience Guide), that offers questions and clues rather than definitive answers: 

Puzzling over Murder on the Orient Express

When dramaturgs write an accompanying note for a show it is assumed that they will enlighten the audience by explaining certain patterns, ideas, or hidden meanings. However, with that pompous, know-it-all Belgian detective Hercule Poirot around, the poor dramaturg just cannot compete. In other words, dear spectators, this time I engage YOU to find as many answers as you can to questions you maybe didn’t even know to ask.

Spoiler alert: some of the following could lead you to solve the murder mystery before Poirot, others are just to make you think, others still… just to throw you off the scent 😉. Here we go!

– Who’s the little girl and who’s that “hulking man” in the shadows?

– Why does the Orient Express travel from “the exotic city of Istanbul” to Western Europe and not vice versa in this play?

– Do you believe that this case was the most difficult of Poirot’s career or is he just exaggerating to boast of his achievement?

– Why does Colonel Arbuthnot identify Poirot as likely a “damned foreigner who probably doesn’t even speak English”? How is Poirot dressed or otherwise signaling his “foreignness” if several other characters are also foreigners?

– Why is it that the Orient Express’s first class is suddenly sold out?

– Why does Poirot sense that something is wrong, that one of the passengers doesn’t fit in, and something fatal is about to occur?

– Why do both the Countess and Poirot agree on the time of the murdered man’s death, but then something doesn’t add up in the timing?

– Why does Bouc state that the passengers “are all characters”?

– Why are there at least four Shakespearean references in the play?

– Why does Greta reminisce about an African train trip when she found herself sitting beside an old goat? Does the goat remind you of any sacrificial rites?

– Why does Poirot decline Mr. Ratchett’s case even after his offer goes from 5,000 to 10,000 dollars?

– Why does Poirot ask for a plan of the coach and everyone’s passports?

– Why is it important that Poirot speaks several foreign languages?

– Why does Poirot need to switch gears from psychology to science to find the solution to the mystery?

– Why is the snow so important for Poirot’s resolution of the case?

Thus, put on your detective spectacles and watch the show with your eyes peeled! And, sorry, don’t expect me to fill in the blanks: if you cannot find a clue, ask Poirot (if you can catch him), or the director, or the actors or someone else, just not this puzzled dramaturg!

Shakespeare’s The Merry Wives of Windsor

Shakespeare’s The Merry Wives of Windsor

SteBos

For this large-cast performance, I curated the evening program, interviewed the director, Sean Boyd, and wrote the following:

Dramaturg’s Note: An Entertaining School for Husbands and Wives

Shakespeare’s The Merry Wives of Windsor likely premiered on St George’s Day, April 23, 1597. Although staged at Westminster in London, in the presence of the Queen and on the occasion of the yearly feast honoring the Order of the Garter – an aristocratic fraternity – the play is the author’s only “citizen comedy,” a genre that hinged on the everyday life of the middle class. In terms of his intended first audience, Shakespeare thus seemed to heed the classical notion – at least as far back as Greek philosopher Aristotle’s Poetics (335 BCE) – that, while tragedies depict characters in higher positions such as kings and heroes, comedies should instead provoke laughter by making fun of those “lower” than the spectators.

This comedy – set in the countryside town of Windsor, west of the capital – also adheres to the precept that art should both entertain and teach, suggested by Roman poet Horace’s The Art of Poetry (19 BCE) and revived during the Renaissance. The main embodiments of these conjoined aims are of course the titular wives, Mistress Ford and Mistress Page, who orchestrate the juiciest opportunities for both fun and learning. Even though the Windsor society still revolves around marriages arranged around patriarchal considerations of how to accrue wealth, it’s women here who lead the action and have an equal say about dowry money.

As for the teaching, the title itself is a clue that the play is a “school” especially suited for married folks: by losing their competing bets to have their daughter Anne marry the men they chose for her, Master and Mistress Page learn that economic considerations ought not to eclipse the need for true love between husband and wife. In turn, Master Ford realizes that he must trust his wife more and that misplaced jealousy only reduces him to a fool.

The main target of the comedic medicine against interference with healthy marital relationships is of course Sir John Falstaff, the overweight, lying and cheating knight who is so vain and full of himself to believe he’ll seduce two married women at the same time. Instead, he is thrown into the river Thames along with dirty laundry, beaten up in his disguise as an elderly woman, and finally scared to death by town children dressed as elves and goblins. Instead of cuckolding others, he ends up wearing the horns himself.

If characters like Evans, with his Welsh accent, and Caius, with his French one, draw on more superficial national stereotypes to elicit laughter, Falstaff’s genealogy goes much deeper: not only did the same character appear in the historical plays Henry IV Part 1 and 2 – where he keeps company with Prince Hal, the future King Henry V of England – but his role is here firmly rooted in the Italian commedia dell’arte Capitano, an equally boisterous stock character whose primary dramatic function is to disrupt existing couples. Of course, instead of commedia’s naïve lovers, the women here are much more mature, wily, and persistent, unafraid of tempting Falstaff time and again as he never seems to learn the lesson.

And since there’s nothing more satisfying than making fun of an “immoral” scapegoat, Mistress Ford and Mistress Page eventually enlist not only their own husbands but the entire town to make the point that even married folks can be both merry and honorable. Indeed, the play’s only successful seduction of a married woman is executed by “Brook,” i.e., Ford himself in disguise tempting his own wife. In the end, in proper comedic fashion, no one is excluded from the collective joy of learning that the societal network has remained strong against attacks to its most precious connections.

Washburn’s Mr. Burns – A Post-Electric Play

Washburn’s Mr. Burns – A Post-Electric Play

SteBos

For Anne Washburn’s truly postmodern Mr. Burns – A Post-Electric Play, directed by Kirsten Brandt, I wrote the following Dramaturg’s Note and edited the evening program. The study guide is also essential to make sense of the multitude of cultural and artistic references in the play.
Read my interview with the director here.

Dramaturg’s Note: Mr. Burns: A Post-Electric Play

 

In her dystopian thought experiment, playwright Anne Washburn explores “what would happen to a pop culture narrative pushed past the fall of civilization.” And fallen indeed is the society she portrays, due to a slow-moving apocalyptic disaster whose origins and exact causes are impossible to fully fathom. One thing is certain: after some serious fires and the gradual interruption of nuclear plants’ regular operations, the lack of electricity has shifted priorities for everyone. Sunlight has regained its importance for activities that require sight. Without cell phones or internet, communications have broken down: news – both good and bad – travel very slow, fraught with uncertainty. Even commonly produced foods and beverages are in short supply and headed to disappearance: by the time of the third act – some eighty-five years after the epochal disaster – chic wines, hot cocoa, or even cheap bubbly sodas exist only as immaterial echoes of a distant past. Of course, appliances like refrigerators and TVs are hopelessly inoperable.

            With people fleeing the areas of nuclear pollution or social turmoil, the very fabric of society has broken down: in fact, the failing of the electric grid has brought about the collapse of social networks too, and returned interactions to their “natural” state without the protections of the social contract. New small communities form out of chance and necessity, outsiders could bring in precious pieces of information, maps, or tools, but could also steal or kill: you better watch out! Luckily, guns still work with their old-time mechanisms, and a chill night around a campfire can easily turn into a sudden shoot-out. But what is there to defend? For one, storytelling: it’s stories that provide a way to connect, remember, restore order to the sequence of cause and effect, and ultimately offer a measure of relief from the doom and gloom.

Something else happened after the disaster: in the absence of recognized cultural arbiters, no one can enforce established aesthetic notions. In fact, the playwright seems to suggest a material version of postmodernism: after French theorist Roland Barthes’s famous declaration of the “death of the author” (1967) and the subsequent critical questioning of all authorship/authority in many fields, who’s to say what distinguishes high-brow from low-brow art and culture? Just like, after the barbarian invasions and the Dark Ages in Europe, theatre was reinvented as performative broadening of the Church’s liturgy, Washburn’s literal dark age again recreates the form from scratch. Only, this time it starts from the Simpsons’ TV episodes, themselves a postmodernist pastiche of genres and trove of cultural references. Shakespeare continues too, but somewhere else, not for this group.

It’s theatre and it’s fun to make, but it also must be entertaining: as the author points out, success and audience retention is crucial for these troupes to survive. A whole market of new “lines” for the Simpsons’ characters is created, new forms of authorship develop, and competition creates a whole new genre of Simpsons-inspired shows, even while the characters lose their connection to the cartoon to become “Noble Tropes.” Eventually, electricity starts to come back, at least enough to make theatre spectacular again. In portraying the rebirth of drama from the ashes of our present civilization, Washburn celebrates an art form that proves to be more resilient than many would expect.

 

 

Happy Days by Samuel Beckett

Happy Days by Samuel Beckett

SteBos

For my first production as director at the Nevada Conservatory Theatre, I staged Samuel Beckett’s Happy Days, which ran September 11–17 in the Black Box Theatre in the 2023-2024 season at the NCT and later moved to the Vegas Theatre Company theatre in downtown Las Vegas. This was a tour de force for the lead playing Winnie, my colleague Kymberly Luke Mellen (and Martin Hackett as her patient husband), as we explored in rehearsal and performance the post-apocalyptic world portrayed by the playwright in a setting that hinted at 1950s Las Vegas. Notable were the stunning combination of Dana Moran Williams’s imaginative set and lighting design by Jordyn Cozart, and the intermission video put together by Brooks Mellen.

You can download the NCT Evening Program and the “Know Before You Go” guide, as well as the Vegas Theatre Company Happy Days Program.

Here’s what I said in my Director’s Note:

Inhabiting the two sides of the same low mound of earth, Winnie and Willie are an odd couple in a strange place: in Beckett’s minimalist Happy Days a “blazing light” never goes down and – without nights – the alternation of waking and sleep is strictly timed by a bell that “rings piercingly” to demand compliance. Winnie brushes her teeth but never really eats anything. Even more strangely, part of her body is embedded deep into the ground. Although her husband enjoys a little additional freedom of movement, neither of them seems able to leave the place after all.

Another oddity of their situation is the behavior of objects: when Winnie shatters her mirror on a rock and throws it away behind the mound, she knows it will be back intact in her bag the next time she wakes up. The same resilience apparently applies to her face and teeth, which temporarily calms her anxiety. And yet, significant adjustments do take place over time: just like the frog of the famous apologue, who doesn’t realize when the lukewarm water grows too hot to survive, Winnie is oblivious to the subtle changes leading to a degradation of her condition over time.

In this production, the passage of time between the acts is visualized during intermission through a collection of commercials from the 1950s onwards that offer purchasing suggestions as well as model family relationships, including how a perfect housewife should behave. And Winnie’s bag with her “resuscitating” objects becomes a metaphor for something gone wrong with consumerism tied to the American Dream: the belief that anything can be easily discarded and substituted, in blissful disregard of the environment and the people inhabiting it. Winnie’s infinitely productive bag thus operates here like a contemporary Amazon-like shop: the intact mirror is just the newly-delivered item, while the one previously broken contributes to an ever-swelling pile of trash. Ultimately, I see these layers of trash as the reason why the earth appears to swallow Winnie’s body, dehumanizing it to look like one of the objects around her.

At the time of Beckett’s writing, between 1960 and 1961, the inhospitable environment that engulfs the couple – with its implacable light and heat, scorched grass, and uncertainty about the future – could be viewed as a reflection of Cold War tensions over the dangers of nuclear war. This aspect reminded me of Las Vegas’s own past: starting in 1951 and over the next twelve years, the southern Nevada desert – just sixty-five miles from downtown – was the theatre of 120 nuclear bomb tests in the only permanent nuclear proving facility on U.S. soil. Yet, even today, the perils of environmental abuse are all around us, leading to desertification and climate conditions similar to those of Winnie and Willie. At the same time as we identify with and support Winnie and her dreams imbued with unrelenting optimism, we become aware of the dangers of a lack of ecological responsibility.

 

Photos courtesy of Kirsten Brandt ©2023

Photo: Shahab Zargari ©2023
Dietz’s American La Ronde

Dietz’s American La Ronde

SteBos

For Steven Dietz’s American La Ronde, directed by Michael Lugering, I wrote the following Dramaturg’s Note and edited both American La Ronde Program and American La Ronde Know Before You Go (7) supporting material.

Dramaturg’s Note
American La Ronde: The Pleasures of Adaptation

On the title page of his play, Steven Dietz makes no secret that his American La Ronde (2017) is an adaptation of Reigen (1900) – known in English as La Ronde – by Austrian Jewish writer and dramatist Arthur Schnitzler (1862-1931). Adaptation of existing works has been a pillar of theatre-making at least since ancient Greece. The approach has proved successful because adapting the same stories combines the familiarity of repetition with the novelty of variation while demonstrating the playwright’s individual point of view and artistic prowess.

As French theorist Gérard Genette suggests, “one who really loves texts must wish from time to time to love (at least) two together” (Palimpsests: Literature in the Second Degree, 1982). In fact, perceiving an adaptation as adaptation is part of the pleasure of engaging with this type of artistic production, one that can only be enjoyed by “knowing audiences” aware of the link between the earlier and later text (Linda Hutcheon, A Theory of Adaptation, 2006). For those unfamiliar with Schnitzler’s work, it is therefore essential to underscore at least two important aspects of his play: its unconventional dramatic structure and its history of censorship due to a titillating subject matter that unmasked the private lives of a cross section of Viennese society.

In contrast with the typical climactic structure that highlights the changed situation between beginning and end, Reigen hinges on a circular structure that concludes just where it started, thus signaling stagnation and disillusion in regard to human relationships. In a series of ten scenes, each time one of two interlocutors continues to the next dialogue with a different partner until the circle is completed.  With a single exception, the action progresses rather swiftly to sexual intercourse, indicated on the page by one or more lines of dashes towards the middle of each scene.

Hesitant about the literary value of his work, the author initially had it printed in just 200 copies at his own expense. However, following sanctions against a Munich student theatre that presented three scenes from the play, book sales were banned in Germany in 1904 and the official premiere in Berlin and Vienna had to wait until 1920 and 1921 respectively. Even so, due to right-wing antisemitic political demonstrations, the play’s cast, director, and theatre administrators in Berlin were charged with creating a public nuisance and taking part in obscene acts, even if the staging had simply lowered the curtains and played waltz music during the incriminated scenes. Even if the artists were eventually exonerated, Schnitzler’s embarrassment led him to wish the play would never again be performed. And yet, its shock value must have contributed to its continued appreciation.

In transferring the action to contemporary America, Dietz adopted the same circular structure but modernized both characters and situations, with the addition of a bracelet that constantly changes hands and becomes a common thread connecting all involved. Emphasizing the continuity of each scene and between them, this adaptation eliminates the need to censor sexual activities by instead staging the difficulties of “getting to the point” in today’s more permissive yet complicated society. But intimacy is nevertheless sought after, especially when, for instance, the author insists: “This is a really good kiss. It is not a ‘stage kiss.’ It is not fake.” And true intimacy is perhaps the most shocking today when our relationships are increasingly filtered and mediated.

SteBos

Nottage’s Crumbs from the Table of Joy (dir. Clinton Turner Davis)

Nottage’s Crumbs from the Table of Joy (dir. Clinton Turner Davis)

SteBos

Once again, for this show at the Nevada Conservatory Theatre I put together the full evening program.
I also interviewed the director, Clinton Turner Davis and you can find our conversation here.

Dramaturg’s Note

Lynn Nottage’s Crumbs from the Table of Joy premiered Off-Broadway at the Second Stage Theatre in New York City in May of 1995, directed by Joe Morton. Shortly after it was produced by Steppenwolf Theatre Company in Chicago, IL in March of 1996, directed by Leslie Holland, and by South Coast Repertory in Costa Mesa, CA in September, directed by Seret Scott. It was first published in Nottage’s first collection of plays in 2004.

The title is inspired by Langston Hughes’s short poem, Luck:

Sometimes a crumb falls from the table of joy,
Sometimes a bone is flung,
To some people love is given,
To others only heaven.

In the play, which takes place in Brooklyn in 1950, both Ernestine Crump, a young African American aspiring writer, and the other characters she evokes – her father Godfrey, sister Ermina, aunt Lily Ann Green, and stepmother Gerte, who is German – navigate the complexities of a world that does not yield easy answers as to why certain people succeed and others continue to struggle. Religion, politics, interracial relations, all weigh on decisions, hopes, and desires that may or may not be fulfilled and yet constitute a weave that brings people together in their effort to improve their lot.

Since the set itself is such an important character in the play, for this production we include here the notes of our talented graduate and undergraduate designers, who speak of their creative process.

Enjoy the show!

Stebos