Sexuality, subway rides, and Jackie Kennedy: A sneak peek of Barnard Theater's spring season

Upper West Side NY

15 February, 2022

2:53 PM

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Columbia Daily Spectator BY JANE LOUGHMAN FEBRUARY 13, 2022, 8:43 PM To Barnard adjunct lecturer Lisa Rothe, the theater maker's job is to reflect and hold up a mirror to human nature. This is the goal of Barnard's upcoming theater season, which will stage four productions touching on longing, trauma, and the harsh realities of the creative process. And the first musical on the docket, Lisa Kron's "Fun Home," achieves this beautifully according to Rothe, the show's director. This spring semester represents a revival of campus theater life after a year of virtual performances. Following Barnard's in-person stagings of "Orlando" and "By the Way, Meet Vera Stark" in the fall semester, the department is staging a musical in the Minor Latham Playhouse for the first time ever this spring. Additionally, the Senior Thesis Festival, during which graduating theater majors will collaborate with students, will return in person with three experimental productions exploring the hijinks of Romantic writers, the life of Jackie Kennedy, and the balance between grief and joy. "FUN HOME" - Barnard Theater Department Adapted from Alison Bechdel's graphic memoir "Fun Home," Lisa Kron's musical depicts Bechdel's discovery of her sexuality and relationship with her family, with a particular focus on her father. In 2020, before the pandemic put a halt to in-person performances, Lisa Rothe directed a production of the musical at the Kansas City Repertory Theater. Hailing from Illinois, Rothe felt at home delivering the production to a Midwestern audience of both LGBTQ and straight spectators. "Every night there were conversations with people who have not had these conversations, or queer people who were in the audiences who were incredibly moved by it, and then trying to figure out how to have conversations with their families or friends and invite their friends to it. It was just a very powerful and moving experience," she said. "Fun Home," which will be showing from Mar. 3 to 5 in the Minor Latham Playhouse, is a memoir told in a nonlinear fashion, with time jumps between "Small Alison" and "Medium Alison" narrated by modern day Alison. Rothe looks forward to bringing the coming-of-age musical to the Barnard theater department, as she believes a college-aged cast will bring a refreshing take to the script that lines up well with "Medium Alison's" plot. "[Today] the conversation is different," she said. "The language is different. The cultural experience is all very different. ... Alison Bechdel is a little older than I am, but we essentially grew up in the same era, and so I have a lot of cultural references that are just second nature to me, that [the students] don't have. But there are personal, very visceral experiences that these young people are having that I didn't have." Rothe's 2020 Kansas production featured a set in the shape of a Victorian home. Since Minor Latham Playhouse does not have the capacity for a similar set, Rothe and the design team are planning to integrate the musical's key themes with a modified production design. Using the story as an expression of memory, Rothe decided the structure of an attic would complement the musical's nonlinear storytelling. "An attic can house everything we need. ... It can be storage for furniture, for clothes, for photos, for boxes of anything, boxes of anything that ... we might actually need in the production. [The attic is the] place where memories are stored, and so [there is a] connection to the body when we kind of began to think about the house and put [the musical] in the attic," she said. Considering this is the Barnard theater department's first time producing a musical, Rothe and the design team also have to figure out where to place the orchestra, since there is no pit in the Playhouse. Her solution is to think about the role of the orchestra as related to the story of the musical itself. "The orchestra is in a liminal space, but they're part of the world—they're all part of that attic space," she said. "THE APPEAL" - Barnard Theater Department As part of the Senior Thesis Festival this April, Kate Purdum, BC '22, will direct Young Jean Lee's "The Appeal" for her directing thesis. The play depicts imagined alcohol- and opium-infused conversations between Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Lord Byron, William Wordsworth, and Dorothy Wordsworth. The characters' historically inaccurate musings on art transcend time: in one scene, Wordsworth drunkenly recites an Ezra Pound poem written almost a century after Wordsworth's death. As a theater and history double major, Purdum's dramaturgical brain is tickled by the script's defiance of historical boundaries. "As a historian ... I'm always trying to pin down what are the facts? ... I think [the unreliable historical narrative] blows [the play] up in a way that is challenging, but really, really exciting and juicy," she said. Along with dramaturg Camilla Cox, CC '22, Purdum is excited to play with the timeline defying, historically enriched script. While Purdum was drawn to the text for its dramaturgical richness, she also resonates with the play's dark meditations on the creative process. "I think a lot of the difficulty of [the Romantic poets'] processes gets sanitized from their stories. It's easy for us to sit in our English classes and look back on the poetry of Coleridge and Wordsworth and Byron and think 'Wow, this just must have poured out of them with such ease,'" Purdum said. "But what the play really dives into is how messy and dark and deprived a lot of the time that process is, and how fraught and inextricable [the process is] from self-hatred and from processes of doubt and anxiety and fear." Purdum plans to use the play's design to further explore its anachronism. Along with spooky witchy punk backing music, the set and costumes will be infused with recognizable Romantic period imagery. "[The sound design will include] artists who have beautiful, haunting, pastoral, pseudo-religious, lyrical imagery, and then really crazy, harsh, explosive music," Purdum said. "That contrast to me feels like so much of what the play is doing." "JACKIE" - Barnard Theater Department Thesis student and director Madison Hatchett, BC '22, and dramaturg thesis student Kristoff Smith, CC '22, have adapted Elfriede Jelinek's one-woman show about Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis to an ensemble-driven play. Hatchett plans to bring a refreshing interpretation of "Jackie" by separating the original solo part into its different iterations, from Jackie's younger self to the 1960s Jackie viewers may recognize. Hatchett adapted the script for multiple actors after finding the initial script too demanding for one actor. "[Jackie's] going on and on about these really aggressive memories, and it felt like too much for one person, for one college student in particular," Hatchett said. "It's a little too much for me. I was like, I don't know if I [could] do all of that." "Jackie," which was originally written in German and translated by Gitta Honegger, is part of Jelinek's "Princess Plays" collection, which communicates "messages about women who live through men" according to director Téa Alagic. The play portrays a vulnerable former First Lady experiencing her husband's infidelity and the trauma of his death. Hatchett plans to share a modern interpretation of the iconic figure, which she sees as a personal take that will be shaped by her ensemble actors. "I don't want a standard Jackie," Hatchett said. "It doesn't need to be true to life form. It doesn't need to be what Natalie Portman did in 'Jackie.' She did a fantastic job, but I'm not asking that of somebody, unless that's what they want to do" Hatchett said. During the first few weeks of online rehearsal, Hatchett prioritized encouraging her cast to get to know each other well. She emphasized that while they are an ensemble, each individual actor brings something different to the "Jackie" role. "I think when you are technically an ensemble, it's very easy for it to get lost in this 'we are one of a pack' [mentality]. That's not what this is. They're equally individuals and they're equally different versions of the same person—not a chorus," Hatchett said. "THE SONIC LIFE OF A GIANT TORTOISE" - Barnard Theater Department Thesis student Celia Krefter, CC '22, is drawn to narratives that depict the sweet spot between sadness and joy. Last semester, with the Columbia University Players, Krefter adapted and directed James Joyce's "The Dead," which balanced moments of deep contemplation with scenes of drunken party dancing. This spring, she will be applying insights from that production to her directing thesis production of "The Sonic Life of a Giant Tortoise" by Toshiki Okada. "When you're directing, I think it's easy to remove yourself from [the play], but then it just doesn't turn out as good because your heart isn't in it," Krefter said. "So I've [asked myself], 'What is in my being that I can put into work?' I've had some intense experiences with grief, and they've happened in moments when there has also been all this joy. ... It feels very defining to who I am." Okada's experimental play, which was originally written in Japanese and translated by Aya Ogawa, centers around a woman who travels on the subway, parties at an underground rave, then returns home to find her lover aged and dying. In addition to having actors switch roles throughout the production, Krefter will incorporate gestural movement work with her ensemble cast. Krefter's music and sound team will compose a score for the production. Just as Lorde was integral for Krefter's production of "The Dead," Madonna has served as a central inspiration for the upcoming show. Krefter is also working with another team on implementing the play's central themes into its design. "It's so much about longing and about wanting something extraordinary in a life that can feel so mundane," Krefter said. "We were talking at our design meeting last week about the feeling of water and being underwater is something that we all were experiencing while reading the play even though there's nothing in the text about water." Krefter and her team hope to convey the Studio Ghibli-esque, dream-like feeling Okada's script generates at the Thesis festival. – The plays chosen for Barnard's Spring 2022 season—with narratives that range from explorations of grief to queer coming-of-age storytelling to experimental portrayals of historical figures—reflect the questioning of the historical canon and the depictions of memory and trauma at the core of many post-quarantine produtions. As Rothe said, theater is not only a way for humans to escape and to experience joy, but also a way for human nature to be mirrored and for contemporary questions to be performed on the stage for the audience to ponder. Staff writer Jane Loughman can be contacted at [email protected]. Follow her on Twitter @queenofquirk. Founded in 1877, the Columbia Daily Spectator is the independent undergraduate newspaper of Columbia University, serving thousands of readers in Morningside Heights, West Harlem, and beyond. Read more at columbiaspectator.com and donate here.