An essay on the rules of The Moors
“Everything shall always be different now, and yet nothing changes,” Marjory reads from her diary in the final scene in The Moors by Jen Silverman. These final lines of the play validate the audience members’ shared experience for the past ninety-four minutes. Two sisters, a maid, and a mastiff welcome a governess to their home with the intent of continuing their family’s legacy and power. An unsettling departure to the play begins with a bird smashing into the window, igniting the two sisters’, Agatha and Huldey, tense relationship. The oddities do not end there as the mastiff recites poetry, a moorhen falls from the sky, a maid inhabits two personalities, and each room in the house is, in actuality, the same room. Lullabies turn into murders that are ensued by a murder ballad. There was a lot to unpack in this production of The Moors directed by Tommy Statler. The action onstage at the Hallberg Theatre showed how so much can happen to each character, and yet the system they exist within stays intact. This is how Silverman leaves her audiences with the same unsettling feeling that her show began with. The world that Silverman created in her play is unlike the reality we live in today. The women and mastiff of the house live their lives by specific rules: their maid must live as both a pregnant scullery maid and a typhus-ridden parlor maid, the same room must be treated as a parlor, scullery, and two different bedrooms, and Huldey documents each different thought as a different day of the week in her diary. When Emilie joins the household, she challenges these rules. Tommy Statler built his concept based on the conventions of Agatha’s household. Just like Silverman, Statler conceptualized The Moors by creating his own rules of the world and then intentionally breaking them.
Originally written for a proscenium stage, The Moors presents a lot of challenges in the round: Marjory cannot disappear for her Mallory switches as she juggles her props, Agatha’s murder being believable and visible on every plane of the stage, dropping Moorhen onstage in a crash-landing, transitioning from the house to the moors, and the general staging challenge of composing and moving in theatre-in-the-round. Under Statler’s direction, every actor and designer leaned into the challenges this stage presented for the script. The first rule Statler created was creating fake walls onstage. There are three river banks on the floor of the stage. This splits the playing space onstage into three different sections. For the house scenes, the moors would occupy one section of the stage while the two other sections were the house. Edgar Alamo’s lighting design gave a visible texture that delineated the moors and the house while the actors gave the illusion of fake walls by avoiding the river banks that were next to the moors section. Agatha would sometimes break this rule by entering the house through the moors section. The texture on the floor would disappear and the other actors onstage would interact with the space that they previously ignored. Agatha did this in Scene Seven when Marjory taunted Emilie. As Marjory placed her bonnet on Emilie, Agatha broke through the moors and opened up the room so that all three sections were in use. Agatha also called on Marjory to break through the moors in Scene Four after revealing to Emilie that Branwell is dead. Depending on the chair position, the room would also spin. Mastiff was the first one to move the chair after his speech about meeting Moorhen. He picked up the chair and turned it ninety degrees from where it was originally set. Alamo’s window and moors lighting textures also shifted ninety degrees so that the actors played their focal points on different walls. The room spun again by Huldey and then Marjory. Each time the chair shifted, the room spun ninety degrees. By scene eight, the house had spun a full three hundred and sixty degrees. After the scene outside in the moors, the house appeared to stop spinning based on the chair’s placement.
The way violence was portrayed in Statler’s concept was slow and tableau-esque. The biggest difference between Statler’s concept and Silverman’s script was the portrayal of Moorhen’s death. Silverman hints that Mastiff ate the Moorhen in scene fifteen, but it is not explained beyond his blood and feather-covered entrance. The relationship, as Silverman writes it, ends after scene thirteen. Statler continued this scene even after its dialogue ended by staging a slow movement piece to portray Moorhen’s death. Mastiff slowly pounced on top of the Moorhen and then quickly lifted her up as she tried to escape from him. She slowly fought her way onto the ground, but then had her wing swiftly snapped by Mastiff. He ripped open her rib caged and then slowly carried her offstage. There was dramatic underscoring and red lighting to this sequence. Agatha’s death was stylized as well. Instead of being beaten to death by Huldey, Agatha gets choked to death. Agatha got hit by a chair three times before falling to the ground. Accented with flashing lights, each swing of the chair took about five times longer than it would have played out in real time. Each slow swing would stop right as the chair hit Agatha’s head in a tableau, to which Agatha would react to the hit in real time. Once Agatha was on the ground, the normal rate of time resumed and Huldey would choke Agatha for a brutal minute and a half.
One of the smaller and simple rules that gets repeated was Marjory coughing every time she gets acknowledged as the scullery maid. Marjory is the scullery maid of the household while Mallory is the parlor maid. Marjory, being loyal to her household’s rules, plays along with the different roles she has been assigned. The coughing is derived from her prescribed condition of the typhus.
All of Tommy’s choices led up to an engaging production of The Moors. Using the river banks to split the house and the moors was successful in giving the actors’ interesting shapes and diagonals to play with. This concept was most successful in one specific moment where Marjory sat in the moors while listening to Emilie’s song in scene four. This gave me a glimpse into what Marjory connects with when she is alone and not being bullied by Agatha. She was onstage for us to see, but no one in the house saw her because she was outside their boundaries of the house. On a technical level, making the house spin gives the audience an opportunity to experience the action from every angle. In my experience, audiences like to sit on the same side as the stage management booth because they think that it is the best view of the action onstage. Statler’s use of diagonals and room-spinning makes it so that every side of the audience gets to see Agatha glare outside her window. I think it is worth to mention that the height of the fireplace obstructed the view for a few seats, however I cannot say that it was Statler’s choice. Conceptually speaking, Silverman hints multiple times in the script that the ladies are in the same room for all of the house scenes, and it was not missed by the audience’s ear everytime Emilie mentioned it. Because the chair is the only moving furniture piece onstage (and center stage for most of the play), I felt hyper-aware of its placement. Each time the chair got reset was a physical reinforcement of Huldey and Marjory’s recognition of the room being a different room, yet still maintaining the same structure that Emilie recognizes as the same room from before. It also established the chair as a symbol of power and greatness. Huldey does not sit in the chair when she is with Agatha, but does sit in it when she is with Mastiff. Marjory does not use the chair when anyone is around her, but plays with it when she is with Emilie or by herself. When Emilie comes into the last scene completely transformed, her claim of the chair spoke towards her achievement of greatness and power through the moors. Again, this was possible because Tommy made the chair a primary reference for the audience’s recognition of the spinning of the house. I did ask some of my friends what they thought about the concept of the house, and to my surprise, I learned that some audience members had not noticed it at all. What could have contributed to this are the moments where a character would break through the moors and shatter the “house versus moors” illusion. If you had not noticed the leafy lighting texture on the floor, you would miss that the specific section was meant to be outside. Even if audiences did not recognize it, it still worked well on a functional level to get the audience to see all of the action onstage.
Moorhen’s death was unsettling as an audience member and made Huldey’s immediate entrance with an axe so much more suspenseful. Moorhen’s death was the first time in the play that the audience felt the time moving differently, so it was a bit jarring to see such fluid and choreographed movements between the two animals. This did, however, make the stop-and-go timing of Agatha’s death easier to understand because we have already sat through a death. By that point, the audience had already seen the flashing red lights and the slowed down movement from Mastiff and Moorhen. I had accepted this rule and suspended my disbelief when it came to the most important death. The concept to draw violence out as long as it can be actually excites me as an audience member. Violence onstage happens fast to the audience’s eye and is over before you know it. This stylized way makes it so that no one misses these important moments of the plot. The death of Agatha and metaphorical death of Huldey allowed myself to accept Emilie as the new lady of the house. Overall, Statler’s stylistic conception of Silverman’s story was a success in the Hallberg Theatre. He gave the audience an interesting way to see Silverman’s imagery-rich script with the layout of the house, each character’s interaction with the set, and their violence.
