CUTTING BALL THEATER NEWSLETTER
January 26, 2006 Volume 2, Issue 6
Contents:
1. The Maids opens this weekend!
2. The Maids: An Actor's Perspective
3. Upcoming...
Jean Genet’s The Maids, in a new translation by Martin Crimp, opens this weekend!
"The Cutting Ball is one of the more ambitious and talented companies currently presenting works in the Bay Area. They are not afraid to tackle the complex - indeed, they seem to relish the challenge."
"Cutting Ball's production of The Maids doesn't feel like a revival at all. It could have been written yesterday, and this staging could be its premiere."
(Pictured: Jennifer Stuckert as Solange and Linnea Wilson as Claire)
directed by Adriana Baer
January 27 – February 25
Fridays and Saturdays at 8pm
at the EXIT Stage Left
156 Eddy Street , San Francisco
Regular Admission: $25 Students & Seniors: $20
Next Generation (under 30): $15
For more information, please go to http://cuttingball.com/curProds.php#maid
The Maids
Actors’ Perspectives
Sigrid Sutter
The Mistress
Q: What were the initial reasons that made you interested in acting in The Maids?
A; I chose to take on the role of the Mistress because I was terrified of her. To play her with truth, one must forget the most basic things we're taught as actors: to listen and work off of our scene partners. Through the rehearsal process, I've learned that the key to the Mistress is her complete and utter self-involvement. She is so wholly disconnected from reality, choosing to talk herself into a reality she creates in her head. This is her coping method for her own emotional ill-being because she is incredibly alone, but she is also void of compassion. I think it would be easy to ignore the former and only play the latter. But I wanted to find the human being inside of Genet's layers. The Mistress believes she is honestly confiding in Solange and Claire; she believes she is doing good and is a blessing in her maids' lives. As the character, I must act on these ideals, even though as the actor I have a different insight.
But there is something I do love about her: the Mistress is always fabulous. She's always looks great, even when she doesn't. She makes smoking a cigarette in bed incredibly sexy. And now that I've discovered this, I can take a deep breath, have fun and keep playing.
Linnea Wilson
Claire
Q: How was your process for acting in The Maids different from acting in other plays?
A: Genet is a challenging playwright in the same way that he is a brilliant playwright. He is unforgiving of both actor and audience and does not give us any exposition to help us orient ourselves within the context of the play. He simply gives us the conversations and events as they would have played out whether or not an audience was there to view them. This was a challenge for me as an actor, because, in order to develop my character into someone with depth and humanity, it meant creating a history and a climate for these characters with very little textual information to go on. This same element of his writing also helped to inform my understanding of the play. Because there is no exposition, I felt as though I were a voyeur eavesdropping on these two women as they went through an hour and a half of their lives. For me, that feeling of voyeurism made me acutely aware of the fact that these two characters are not only trapped in their lives but have no privacy. While it was very challenging to fill in all the blanks that Genet did not give us answers to, it was also very informative and compelling to really feel that these two characters are struggling under the microscope of an outside world that does readily not understand them or relate to them.
Jennifer Stuckert
Solange
Q: What challenges does Genet provide an actor that other playwrights do not?
A: In what ways doesn’t Genet’s writing challenge the actor? In my work with The Maids, of course, there was the difficulty of deconstructing the text (discerning what’s happening in each moment) and understanding the relationship dynamics of the three female characters. Parallel to this, there was the challenge of identifying the significance of the various elements in Claire and Solange’s “real” lives versus their role-play, or “the game.” Agreement between the actors and director had to be made about what’s “reality,” what’s “play,” and what exists in a more liminal space - the axis where reality and play overlap. This was difficult, because what is clearly “play” in the beginning of the play begins to have more “real-life” implications as the play progresses; and over the course of the play, Solange loses grasp of reality because the despair of “reality” becomes too painful for her to face, and an imagined reality seems to be her only solution. Another challenge was delineating a specific, shared history between Claire and Solange because of the many private understandings that exist between them that Genet leaves undefined in the text. Usually, actors have more liberty to individually define their characters’ psychological development, but because these characters are so enmeshed, Linnea and I realized that we needed a more shared knowledge of the history underlining the text in order to make specific, authentic choices. After discerning Solange’s wide-ranging emotional arc (she experiences diverse emotions in the course of the play, from excitement, to despair, to rage, and many in between these extremes) there’s the challenge of truthfully playing/living it, which requires the actor to be quite emotionally labile, present, and able to believe in the imaginary circumstances of each moment in the play. This is important in any play, but is particularly important in this one; this play demands it because of its heightened circumstances and the tremendous psychological evolution that the characters undergo in the short life of the play. The Maids is wonderfully complex; as one layer of text becomes understood, a new layer reveals itself as yet to be comprehended. Perhaps this is the actor’s greatest challenge, to be conscious and accepting of this, and also determined and open to sussing out more and more of Genet’s textual gems.
Upcoming:
The Hidden Classics Reading Series at Modern Times Bookstore
Medea
by Seneca
Directed by Mei Ann Tao
A sorceress is scorned by her husband and exacts a brutally painful revenge. This is the Medea that Shakespeare read and on which he based his character of Lady Macbeth.
Feb. 21 7:00pm
888 Valencia St., San Francisco
FREE
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