How It Was

I started thinking about how to articulate this last night, when my friend Elizabeth (a loyal Dramahound reader!) and Jacob both mentioned the way that the installation worked with the play. Now in a way, that was our original intention- the night in July that Jacob, Tom and I were sitting at Cantina, and I was scribbling notes on a napkin. So I knew Jacob’s work, we talked about his favorite images, and the resonances that they have. And I lived with those images, and tied some other things both into them and relating to them, which is how I wrote the play.

What I first noticed on Thursday at the dress rehearsal, and saw again last night was how there is some kind of actual counterpoint between how the paint is used in the space and how the words are used in the play. I read Francis Ferguson’s “The Idea of a Theater: The Art of Drama in Changing Perspective” in college; I remember spending a lot of time thinking about Wagner and gesamtkunstwerk (total art work). That perhaps theatre in the last 40 years was trying to give birth to that. I can say that given Painted Space and given Brooklyn Lighthouse, it worked. I saw my work be part of gesamtkunstwerk in a way I haven’t before. Which if you‘ve being doing this for as long as I have, is pretty cool.