Our Zoom experiment explores Susan Glaspell’s Trifles. This canonical, feminist piece is about the murder of farmer John Wright and his wife who is a suspect and currently sitting in jail. The neighboring farmer’s wife Mrs. Hale and the sheriff’s wife Mrs. Peters are gathering some of Mrs. Wright’s possessions to bring to her in the jail. During this time, they both bond over and reveal the importance of “trifles.”

I am interested in exploring this bond and the solidarity that can be formed between those who have similar experiences of emotional distress and domestic abuse. Something I am interested in as a director and storyteller is sharing stories of abuse and trauma, as they deserve to be talked about, without recreating the abuse or trauma. As an ensemble, we spent the semester exploring camp and how to tell a story that’s categorized as a tragedy through humor.

-Avery

My ensemble and I worked on Adam Rapp’s The Sound Inside. The play is about two people, Bella Baird, a middle-aged creative writing professor at Yale, and a freshman in one of her classes, Christopher Dunn. They are both profoundly lonely people, isolated from the world by their own sufferings. Bella is battling terminal cancer, and Christopher is writing a novel that is consuming his life. For me, this play is about two lonely people finding solace and comfort in one another.

When I decided to work on this play back in January, I had no idea how resonant these themes would be with us today. This play became an exploration for us on how to find connection in an isolated world. The process centered around creating, in this digital space, a world that the audience would feel welcomed into, that they would feel a part of, and that for a moment, the weight of isolation could melt off their shoulders.

-Anna

Our Zoom theatrical explorations focused on Waiting for Godot by Samuel Beckett. The show sheds light on two days in the life of Gogo and Didi as they wait for Godot, a man who promises to bring them salvation but never comes. The men wait and wait, and they entertain many pastimes in order to distract themselves from their existential condition. Pozzo and Lucky come through once a day to break up their time with just each other, and the Boy comes as night falls to tell Gogo and Didi that once again, Godot cannot come until tomorrow. The show, repeating a constant theme, ends with the men deciding that they have had enough, and are leaving. They sit down and stay put, waiting for the next day to restart their waiting cycle.

In our shift to Zoom, we became interested in how this existential condition exists throughout this pandemic, and how we could show waiting on Zoom without losing the beautiful liveliness and humor that Beckett prescribed. This took the form of framing our scenework in "waiting games," and using those to further explore the play. As we used more allegory work and absurdism ideas to understand the text, we focused on how to have a contrast between overly thoughtfullness and erratic action, like the mind versus body allegory applied to Didi and Gogo. This focus manifested itself over Zoom via camera proximity, use of our bodies within our Zoom boxes, and exagerrated, ridiculous, pushes of each action Beckett wrote. We strived to make waiting interesting over Zoom and honor Beckett's themes throughout our process in these bizarre times.

- Izzy

My ensemble and I worked on a Zoom Production of The Nina Variations by Steven Dietz. The Nina Variations follows Nina and Treplev from Chekhov's The Seagull through 43 variations of their epic final scene together. They both come in a moment of artistic crisis to remember who they were, and hope to find confidence to go on with their lives and careers, and possibly each other.

We spent our time talking about this relationship. Why do they come together? What keeps them apart? What are they trying to get from each other? How do they communicate? What do they really know about each other? These were the questions we set out to answer in hopes of showing people in two very different worlds, trying desperately to come together.

-Isabel

My ensemble tackled SHIT by Patricia Cornelius. The play explores the lives of Billy, Bobby, and Sam, who are everything women aren't supposed to be. They're grimy, angry, poor, and tough. They take up space and do what they want (even when they want to fight someone). They think their lives are shit, they are shit, and the world is shit. Over the course of the play, we find that despite their boundless energy their lack of options begins to stifle them. They’re stuck in a world that wont give them the time of day. They turn on each other, refuse to allow themselves to imagine having better lives, and eventually provoke each other into senseless violence.

Because the play is almost exclusively dialogue between the three women, & I was interested in acknowledging the presence of technology in the performance, we chose to present the dialogue as though it was a Facetime call between the three. From there we focused on how the characters could still feel like they had a strong bodily presence & were attempting to control their surroundings. We settled on visual chaos & casualness. The three actors walked through different spaces in their house & haphazardly picked up their laptops while they were speaking (like one might do on an actual Facetime). At one point someone went into their bathroom to shave their toes. The remainder of the play is presented in a series of short movement sections and tableaus. We explored using shadows and darkness to maintain the sense of tableau-ness, while also furthering the women's dangerous quality.

-Liz

The Saint Plays is a collection of themes and variations on the narratives of saints in the Catholic Church. My company and I explored two of the plays in conversation with each other. PAIN is about a woman named Maggie who loses her daughter and imagines herself into the story of Saint Eulalia in order to cope with the grief. She sees reflections of her daughter throughout her own world and Eulalia's world. The Freak is about a young girl named Gunna born with wings who has recurring dreams where she helps a knight get baptized. In the end, the knight turns out to be Saint George and he cuts off Gunna's wings to claim that they are of a dragon.

We were interested in identifying and amplifying the moments of warmth and care amidst the confusion and violence of the two stories. We leaned into the fragmented nature of Erik Ehn's writing and reframed the Gunna story to be another iteration of Maggie's visions. In Zoom, we were specifically investigating the layers of story and reality that are coexistent in the text and how we could represent that layering in quasi-2D space.

I made the decision to let all our choices be guided by satisfaction in order to create visual "staging." Our aim was to sculpt a series of visual compositions that grounded the text and the story, using the tools of Zoom to create simple, mundane moments of (hopefully) wonder.

-Elijah

My ensemble and I worked on Anna Bella Eema by Lisa D'amour. The play follows ten year old Anna Bella and her single mother Irene as they are being evicted from their trailer home by the construction of a new interstate highway. In the face of this crisis, both women construct vivid fantasies including Anna Bella Eema, a creature made out of mud who comes to life. Anna Bella Eema becomes a catalyst, helping Irene face the forces lurking outside the trailer and helping Anna Bella grow up and learn to let go and move on.

We were interested in the ways storytelling, fantasy and imagination rise out of stagnation, disconnection and crisis in the play. Part of our investigation was finding a way to use the limitations prescribed by the play (all three actresses sitting in chairs the whole play) and limits of Zoom in order to transport the audience in unexpected and exciting ways. The spirit of resourcefulness and adaptation that runs through the play became an important part of our process. We created a forest out of house plants. The bottom of the ocean out of a blanket. The fangs of a werewolf out of hair clip. These moment of transportation and transformation were juxtaposed with jarring returns to the flat blankness of the actor's bedroom walls and the Zoom boxes constantly surrounding them. The shifts between possibility and hopelessness, agency and stagnation, hope and fear feel especially relevant in our own moment of stagnation and hope.

-Nathan

My ensemble and I worked on Dark Play or Stories for Boys by Carlos Murillo. At the top of the play, we see the protagonist Nick, in college, after a sexual encounter with Molly, who discovers scars on his stomach. Simply hearing Molly ask what the scars are, causes Nick to unravel, and make the difficult decision to reveal his darkest secret. In high school, he posed as Rachel to catfish Adam, an innocent teenage boy who just wants to find love on a chatroom. Adam’s desire for love gives Nick the perfect opportunity for dark play – a game in which one player doesn’t know they are playing a game – and a chance to explore his own deepest desire – a desire for love and intimacy and connection that he does not think could be available to him.

In a time when the majority of our connections have to be virtual, this play feels particularly exciting and poignant in how it shows us how much we lose in a virtual world – how much communication is inevitably stifled – in a search for instant satisfaction and instant connection. We shared two scenes - one from the beginning of the play when Nick, as Rachel, first messages Adam, and the second from the end of the play, as Adam begins to doubt his relationship with Rachel. We chose to present these scenes as I believe they capture many of my interests in this play, including exploring a teenage male impulse for love and connection, the false sense of safety in crafting these relationships virtually, and the women who become victim to these games.

-Betsy