Fusing the Visual Arts and Theatre Through “Failure: A Love Story”
No one knows what dramaturgy is. I’m here to help. Its a really ugly word that means something quite beautiful- it is the theory and practice of theatrical composition- the art and science of theatrical collaboration and the research and historical context that places every play in an appropriate reality. I am personally still grappling with what a dramaturg keeps track of, because there are times when it seems that they are involved in each separate aspect of theatre making from sound design to season curating.
Often times the dramaturgy of a piece is spun by the entire creative team rather than one individual dramaturg. My first dramaturgical project was “Failure: A Love Story”, by Chicago playwright Philip Dawkins, which played at PURE Theatre in the fall of 2015. The story follows the lives and deaths of each member of the Fail Family, who live and work in Chicago during the Great Depression. I worked with fellow College of Charleston student Rachel Feldman for the duration of the project. Our casebook for the show was the final project for our Introduction to Dramaturgy course. Together we: Attended rehearsals, compiled a historical research packet with images and timelines for the cast, created a lobby display which incorporated set designer Susan Klein’s original concept art as well as a map of Chicago which highlighted the real locales mentioned in the play and ran a packed audience talk-back with the cast and director Rodney Lee Rogers.
Before rehearsals started, the creative team met once a week to discuss ideas and speculate over cost and efficiency. The first meeting centered around the art of Susan Klein, a local Charleston artist who designed the set. Her work was simultaneously being featured at The Halsey Institute for Contemporary Art, in a show entitled “Shadow Things”, which was being cross-marketed with PURE’s production of “Failure: A Love Story”. The images below feature Susan’s watercolor mock-ups of her initial design, which would later be featured in our dramaturgical lobby display.
The set pieces were individually cut out, which allowed the director and other designers to experiment with different setups and to see what might not work or fit. These images also led to the ultimate color choices. Time is a huge theme of the play, so indicators of time were included whenever possible- notice the hourglasses within the cubes, and the clock faces that are able to be placed anywhere. The play is presented as an ensemble piece, in which the actors work directly with the set and props to create situations and characters. This initial concept reflects that idea.
As dramaturgs, we observed everything as it came together and asked lots and lots and lots and lots and lots and lots of questions. Most of them were answered through rehearsal. The original design morphed to meet the demands of the actors movement and the visual aesthetic that occurred when the design met the space. The following images are taken about one week apart. The second image incorporates the lighting, wall decoration, and full paint job.
The car is obviously a central part of the set and plot of “Failure”. It is in this car that the Fail Family parents meet their demise in the first half of the show. The car veers off the road into the Chicago River. A driving idea behind the set design was to create the illusion of everything being underwater- including the car, which is why it appears to be sunk into the ground, as if sitting at the bottom of the river. The fabric draping on the walls reflect this as well, as did aspects of the sound design.
Our lobby display combined Susan Klein’s design concepts as well as her renderings of a heron and feral monk parakeets, which figure as prominent characters in the play. The parakeets fly around an old map of Chicago, and the production poster featuring actors (Top to Bottom) Evan Parry, Camille Lowman, Michael Smallwood, Mia Rogers, and Bella Rogers.
We decided to go with the second round of design concept art, as the floor painting morphed significantly within the first few weeks of rehearsal. We included color swatches and many of the individual, movable pieces, including many that ended up not being used. We wanted to communicate that many beautiful ideas had to be tossed as production continued due to practicality and time.
The second, more informative aspect of our lobby display was the vintage map of Chicago with the actual locations mentioned throughout the show marked and summarized. As dramaturgs, we were surprised to find that these places were real, especially in a play as fantastical as “Failure”. Grounding the play in reality, even a vague one, made the ethereal aspects of the show even more striking.
Accompanying the map is a lettered list of the locations with brief descriptions, as well as our dramaturgical note. Many of the locations have changed since the 1930′s, which made using an old map imperative, as the locations didn’t exist on more contemporary maps.
Overall, our dramaturgical input focused on the collaboration between art and theatre- Susan Klein’s work and the play. This is the core idea behind our lobby display and our research. We also wanted to ground the play in some kind of tangible reality, to allow the fantastical elements of the plot and quirkiness of the storytelling to shine.