Q&A with Pandora Gastelum

Q & A with New Orleans-based Mudlark Puppeteers’ Pandora Gastelum, director of Tennessee Williams’ A Recluse and His Guest

Q:  How is A Recluse and His Guest different from (and the same as) your previous work at the festival, This is the Peaceable Kingdom?

Pandora: Peaceable Kingdom is a meditation on an actual event in New York history. A Recluse and His Guest takes place in the heart and mind of its author, in a fantastical imagining of a locale out of time and space.  Both works are deeply heartfelt and condemn the social practice of institutionalization of those we deem to be “infirm.”

Discrimination is critical to the suffering in each piece. There is an argument, a protest, presented by both texts that we as humans, as a society, need to do better to accept and to acknowledge mental divergence.

Q: Who are you collaborating with?

Pandora: The Mudlark Puppeteers will be collaborating with Night Shade Shadow Theater. While touring their own work, Night Shade has collaborated with many bands of note to make music videos, as well as creating and animating puppets for such feature films as "Coraline," "Para Norman," " Wendell and Wylde," and more.

Q: In what way does working with puppets free the text?

Pandora: I can't envision this work without puppets although I know it's been done. The dreamlike quality of the text, the demand for shadows and smoke, the ambiguity and implied coercion of the sexual acts, which are so haunting, are so much more comfortable to receive from a puppet platform. The heart which Nevrika, “the guest,” brings to life in Ott “the recluse” arrives in the form of a red hen. It is this hen that opens a channel of affinity between these two outsiders. Such a love story deserves puppets.