Q&A
Answers to questions from rehearsal as well as material I bring into rehearsal for you!
November 9- Heidi's Words
For several reasons, I've been revisiting interviews with Heidi Schreck this week. And in an interview she gave to The Interval back in 2018 that is posted on the page containing production history, she said a few things that strike me as both useful and poignant. They are excerpted below. The full interview is HERE.
[W}hen I was a high school debater, one of my favorite things to do was let people underestimate me. I always knew when I showed up in my little skirt with my long hair that the boys I was usually competing against would think that I was dumb when they looked at me. And that was my super power—that I knew I was going to come out and decimate them, and they wouldn’t expect it. So I remember that as a claiming of my more feminine side as a high school girl, like, “I’m going to show up looking as feminine as possible and then I’m just going to kill them with my arguments.” I might be playing with something similar in the show. I do play with the idea of sneaking truth in in a way that might be unexpected. I do think that the buoyant girly version of myself that starts the play is a little bit reminiscent of how it would show up in a debate, like I’m going to disarm all of you because you think that I’m not going to do anything scary or hard hitting here, so we can all be here together. And then it allows me to bring out deeper truths, scarier ideas in a way that you’re not expecting. I think I actually played with that a lot in the show.
I wanted to make something in a way I hadn’t made anything before. I didn’t want to know where I was going. The piece is so much about fumbling around in the dark trying to find answers, trying to find myself, that I didn’t want to ever know where I was headed. I committed pretty early on to letting the piece lead me instead of feeling like I was working in a familiar format. I knew I wanted to work in an unfamiliar way and to let the form show itself to me rather than creating a structure and then filling it in.​
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I suppose if I had to say what I wanted, it would be to wake people up to the questions and the conversations in the way I woke up to it by making it. To put us all in the room together with these questions hanging in the air. If those questions are different on any given night, that still feels good and important to me. I don’t mind if suddenly the play feels like it’s about this thing that’s happening right now, and then the next night it’s about something else. It all feels like things in the air that we need to be thinking about.
October 16- Rehearsal Visit on Castle Rock v Gonzales
October 14- "Wonder Twin powers activate"
Zan and Jayna, the Wonder Twins, were a part of the "All New Super
Friends Hour" created by the Hanna Barbera company which ran as part of Saturday morning cartoons between September 1977 and September 1978.
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The twins appeared with Superman, Batman, Robin, Wonder Woman, and Aquaman to fight crime. Zan was capable of transforming himself into any form of water (liquid, ice, steam, etc.) or an object made out of water--like an ice ladder or water wall. Jayna could transform herself into any animal or other earthling--as long as she knew their name.
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In the mid 90s the duo reappeared in the main DC Comics universe and have since appeared in things ranging from Justice League films to the television show Smallville.
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"Wonder Twins power...activate" was their signature line, after which they would bump fists, transform, and fight crime--assisted by their pet monkey Gleek.
CONTEXT- If Heidi is 15 in 1989, she would have been 4 or 5 when the series aired, prime age for viewing. And her documented love of monkeys might have made her an instant fan of Gleek as well.
October 8- Arthur Miller and The Crucible
(From UMKC Law Professor Douglas Linder) In 1953, Arthur Miller's play The Crucible ran on Broadway at the Martin Beck. Despite being a box office success and acclaimed by critics and audiences alike, it was considered second-best to his prior Death of a Salesman. As Brook Atkinson for the New York Times reported the day after the opening, "[T]he theme does not develop with the simple eloquence of Death of a Salesman."
Although the events of the play are based on the events that took place in Salem, Massachusetts in 1692, Miller was liberal in his fictionalization of those events. For example, many of the accusations of witchcraft in the play are driven by the affair between farmer, husband, and father John Proctor (Arthur Kennedy), and the Minister's teenage niece Abigail Williams (Madeleine Sherwood); however, in real life Williams was probably about eleven at the time of the accusations and Proctor was over sixty, which makes it most unlikely that there was ever any such relationship. Miller himself said, "The play is not reportage of any kind .... [n]obody can start to write a tragedy and hope to make it reportage .... what I was doing was writing a fictional story about an important theme."
The "important theme" that Miller was writing about was clear to many observers in 1953 at the play's opening. It was written in response to Senator McCarthy and the House Un-American Activities Committee's crusade against supposed communist sympathizers. Despite the obvious political criticisms contained within the play, most critics felt that The Crucible was "a self contained play about a terrible period in American history."
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Over twenty years after the opening of the play, the eighty-one-year-old Miller wrote the screenplay for the production of a film version As was the play, the movie is a fictionalized version of the events of Salem in 1692. Additionally, the movie was been changed from the play in some minor respects. For example, the movie opens with a scene of the town girls sneaking into the woods and participating is a ritualistic dance with the slave woman Tituba--until they are all caught by the minister. In the play this scene was referred to, but not performed. Another change is that the Slave woman Tituba is portrayed as black, when she was actually an Indian.
Upon the occasion of the film's release Arthur Miller reflected on how and why the play was original written in a remarkable essay called "Why I Wrote The Crucible" published in the New Yorker. You can read it in full HERE.
"The Crucible was an act of desperation. Much of my desperation branched out, I suppose, from a typical Depression-era trauma—the blow struck on the mind by the rise of European Fascism and the brutal anti-Semitism it had brought to power. But by 1950, when I began to think of writing about the hunt for Reds in America, I was motivated in some great part by the paralysis that had set in among many liberals who, despite their discomfort with the inquisitors’ violations of civil rights, were fearful, and with good reason, of being identified as covert Communists if they should protest too strongly."
-Arthur Miller (from the article)