Q&A with Green Eyes Director
Q: Green Eyes is part of a season of memory plays. What do you think the text has to say about remembering - and forgetting?
Green Eyes explores how memory and fantasy can fuse. How do fantasies invade our memories? How do our regrets disfigure our memories? How can we trust our memories or our fantasies when they can become so intertwined—dancing together, changing each other, in a never-ending, always-shifting loop? Maybe fantasies can help us forget the things we need to put away. Maybe they can be a healing process. Both our versions of Green Eyes and Suddenly Last Summer are certainly exploring that possibility.
Q: What would you hope the audience remembers?
I hope they will remember the two stunning performances of Steven Wright and Kishia Nixon in this piece. They are both so brave, curious, and specific in their work.
Q: It's in rep with Suddenly Last Summer, do the two plays connect in some way?
Both plays center a character who has been asked - or forced - to tell a story to a listener who does not want to actually hear it. Both are exploring what is true. Both also tell a story about a dark fantasy - or truth, depending on which character you are asking. Both venture into the tabu and into sexual desire. And both find a way to levy that darkness into a moment of healing. And both feature the same cast members!
Q: How did you begin your thinking/staging/rehearsing the text of Green Eyes? Physically? With the words? With stage images?
We started with music and another Williams text: a poem. The second half of the piece uses a lot of underscoring and music. After we had a sense of the sonic world, we started building physical proposals. Die-Cast uses a process called Collective Creation in our work. The choreography that an actor uses to perform characters has often been made by a few other bodies first. We actually took a bunch of Die-Cast company members on what we call an “away mission” to a beach house in May. There, we played with the physical possibilities of beds, music, and images from the poem and play. One artist would take another artist's physical proposal and make a second draft, all while our composer, Chris Sannino, watched and responded in turn. Once we had a sonic and physical world, we went back to the text to build the characters in this world.
Q: Anything else we should know?
Jarod Hanson, the creator and performer behind Flight, was part of our away mission in May! His work as a choreographer and director is still deeply embedded in the piece. It is so exciting to have these kinds of relationships sparkle through the festival.
You can purchase tickets to Green Eyes here.
