[...]

 

But the Woman that God gave him, every fibre of her frame

Proves her launched for one sole issue, armed and engined for the same,

And to serve that single issue, lest the generations fail,

The female of the species must be deadlier than the male.

 

[...]

 

She is wedded to convictions - in default of grosser ties;

Her contentions are her children, Heaven help him, who denies!

He will meet no cool discussion, but the instant, white-hot wild

Wakened female of the species warring as for spouse and child.

 

Unprovoked and awful charges - even so the she-bear fights;

Speech that drips, corrodes and poisons - even so the cobra bites;

Scientific vivisection of one nerve till it is raw,

And the victim writhes with anguish - like the Jesuit with the squaw!

 

So it comes that Man, the coward, when he gathers to confer

With his fellow-braves in council, dare not leave a place for her

Where, at war with Life and Conscience, he uplifts his erring hands

To some God of abstract justice - which no woman understands.

 

And Man knows it! Knows, moreover, that the Woman that God gave him

Must command but may not govern; shall enthrall but not enslave him.

And She knows, because She warns him and Her instincts never fail,

That the female of Her species is more deadly than the male!

 

                                                                       

 

 

excerpted from "The Female of the Species,"

                                                            Rudyard Kipling 1865-1936

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

PRODUCTION STAFF:

 

Director............................................................................................................. Pannill Camp

Dramaturg....................................................................................................... Emily Drumsta

Stage Manager.................................................................................................. Kate Planitzer

Production Manager............................................................................................. Tess Lantos

Production Manager Mentor......................................................................................... Immer

Set Designer............................................................................................. Ben Bright-Fishbein

Tech Director....................................................................................................... Dade Veron

Master Electrician.................................................................................... Eager B. Freshmen*

Costume Designer.......................................................................................... Cassie Tharinger

Lighting Designer................................................................................................ Todd Lipcon

Sound Designer/Original Score.......................................................................... Brian Christian

Prop Designer..................................................................................................... Maya Bruhns
OVERVIEW: STAGING STRINDBERG'S THE FATHER TODAY

 

         August Strindberg wrote The Father in 1887, the year before he wrote Miss Julie, and ten years into his marriage to Baroness Siri von Essen, which was, by all accounts, a torturous affair. In The Father, as in much of Strindberg's work, men and women are locked in procreative combat, plotting to destroy each other with an animosity that is inextricable from sexual relations. The play, while widely considered a taut and compelling psychological drama, is sometimes derided for its overt psychologizing, a cool cerebrality that shapes the characters and a thinly veiled misogyny. The object and guiding principle of the production of The Father proposed here is not so much to overcome these shortcomings as it is to place them at the core of the directing strategy, to make the production a representation not of binary gender dynamics, but of the ideology that produced and reproduces this understanding of sexual relations in the modern era. Rather than hiding or de-emphasizing Strindberg's embarrassing loathing for women, we will make that fear the centerpiece of the production concept in order to update the show for PW 2004.

 

         The characters in The Father behave according to a set of parameters derived from Strindberg's complex, anguished, time-stamped views on gender, giving the play more of the qualities of an embodied thought experiment than those of a kitchen-sink drama. The Captain as archetypal male is literally and figuratively adorned with the markings of early modern linearity: he is militaristic and wears the uniform and title of an army captain; he is highly rational and pursues the goals of 'pure' science towards an understanding of other planets; he is abstract, and chooses his daughter's path of education through a systematic evaluation of the consequences. This condensation of pre-feminist masculine qualities into the single person of the Captain makes him more comprehensible as an avatar of positivism than as a specific person with a detailed existence. Similarly Strindberg's women function according to complex ideological schema. Laura is protective of her daughter's artistic development to the extent that she is willing to deceive and manipulate those around her; she misunderstands or is indifferent to the values of science and ration that enthral her husband; she is forceful, concrete and powerful in the model of Rudyard Kipling's sexist formulation of the feminine.

 

         It is precisely the problems with these formulations of gender difference that motivate the present proposal. Rather than produce a play in order to share its eternal wisdom with a contemporary audience, we would like to share the bizarreness and dubiousness of The Father with the PW audience.

 

         As such, The Father is a manifestation of a particular understanding of gender difference from a particular time and place. The assumptions that guide these formulations are suspect to us now. So why stage The Father in 2004, as the first show in PW's fall line-up? First of all, the notions of gender difference deployed in The Father continue to be propagated today. The heterocentrism, Hegelianism and rigid differentiation between men and women's capacities and behaviors are still widely distributed in our culture. A denaturalized[1] production of The Father allows us to put this ideology to trial-by-representation. It allows us to hold the belief structure up to view and to examine how the contemporary philosophical and political forces at Brown challenge that structure. By critiquing notions of gender that might have seemed intuitive in 1887 we can remind the PW audience of the need to continually critique the 2004 analogues of those beliefs. Second, PW 2004 is the ideal place to try a fresh staging of The Father. A venture of this type demands a sophisticated and open-minded audience able to apply critical thinking to what they see. It will offer the campus community a surprising take on a canonical play accessible to anyone that is willing to question habitual notions of gender.

 

         Finally, the work that this production of The Father will ask of our production collaborative is just the type of work that Production Workshop seeks to create inside its walls. On the one hand this play is a highly accessible family drama of the type that is still the staple of the regional theatre. On the other, our approach to this material will be experimental and provide opportunities for truly creative work. This production sets out from a place of skepticism and objective remove from the ideology that undergirds Strindberg's notions of gender, and makes the staging of that ideology its guiding concept. The practical development of that concept in design meetings and rehearsals will amount to an experimental approach to a play that is originally intended and still generally staged as a box-set drama. The design and acting challenges of turning a naturalistic play inside out will give our production staff and cast hands-on experience with a conventional playscript while demanding unconventional choices and strategies from them in order to execute it. To the extent that Production Workshop seeks to offer its collaborators both practical experience that will prepare them for careers in the theatre business and a venue for project that might not be produced in the mainstream theatre, The Father is an ideal PW project.

 

         Clearly that this approach would not work with every canonical play. But it is just what The Father calls for, and The Father retains many positive qualities outside of its gender ideology that will contribute to the project's success. The dramatic action of the piece begins with the Captain's discovery of and Laura's exploitation of a devastating idea: that a child's paternity is never certain. The kernal of distrust and loathing resident within this idea, and the emotional whipsaws that it unleashes are the specific weapons used in the warfare of The Father. The escalation of stakes and tactics, the spectacle of a family on the brink of dissolution and the breathtaking image of the Captain's ruin will make The Father a very engaging and watchable show. Our approach will not be to blandly subvert the play, but rather to own up to its hidden shame, to make public the secret of the paranoid understanding of femininity that courses through it. The action will be played straight forward and with full investment in the interior lives--however skewed they may be--of Strindberg's characters. We will take advantage of the play's many dramatic assets, while making new and surprising use of what would otherwise be its liabilities.

 

 

 

 

TWO MOMENTS FROM THE FATHER PW 2004:

 

                                                                                    Laura:             Can't one ever know who the father

of a child is?

                                                                                   

                                                                                    Captain:          Not as far as I know.

 

                                                                                    Laura:             Really? How can the father have

such control over the children then?

 

Laura confronts the Captain with the idea that he can't be certain that his child is really his own. This is the first implement of warfare--the first strike--and it sends the Captain reeling. On her line, after she speaks, she snaps the head off of a flower--probably a carnation (cheap, fragrant, edible)--and eats it with the nonchalance of someone taking a piece of hard candy or a peanut out of a bowl. Neither Laura nor the Captain register this action as unusual. For Laura it isn't unusual; Strindberg's Laura isn't quite human.

 

            The Captain is flustered. He leaves.    His return near the top of Act Two is a critical moment in the play. The balance of power in the house has tilted to Laura's side. The air has palpably changed. We are asked to believe that Laura is capable of an almost inhuman cruelty. Laura is manipulating the Doctor to get his help. War is breaking out all over. Before the Captain's entrance, Laura leaves the Nurse and Bertha in the drawing room and instructs them not to tell the Captain why the Doctor is there. This implicates these two women in her plot; already we have heard the Captain call women "the enemy." As the Nurse and Bertha chat, they begin to casually munch on flower petals.

 

This image has several functions besides being fun to watch: 1) It expands the sense of women as being of a different, animal and alien nature (c.f. Rudyard Kipling) to include the Nurse and Bertha. 2) It simultaneously breaks the frame of naturalistic staging. It's just creepy. Real women don't do that. 3) It enhances the sense that the women have a secret from the Captain, that they are sneaky, and spins the Nurse's line before the Captain's entrance: "Go to bed now and take the coffee-pot with away or the master will be angry."

 

As this line is uttered we can see in faint light the Captain approaching in his overcoat. As he approaches the platform for his entrance, one that must be read as a preparation for battle, the actor who plays Nojd squirts a stream of water in his mouth from a squeeze bottle; the Captain then spits it into a bucket just as a boxer does during a break between rounds. He is readying himself to return the assault.

 

            By weaving moments these that just don't pass for real life into a drama that is otherwise played for suspense and intrigue, we change the rules and keep our audience guessing.

           

ACTING IN THE FATHER:

 

In my experience, actors are happiest when they know what they're saying and why. This is not to say that getting to that point should always be easy and instinctual, but it is the precondition of a good performance.

 

My concept for The Father is to tease it out of its naturalistic shell like a snail, and expose it for the bizarre creature that it is. Let me be clear about what this does not mean in practical terms. This does not mean that we are undermining the play as such; it does not mean the actors can avoid the hard work of engaging the given circumstances of the play; it does not mean that the concept invalidates the suspense, changing stakes and personal relationships that Strindberg has written into this play.

 

            The Father is the bearer of sexist ideology, and we mean to deal with that by stripping away the decorations that would make it appear to be from real life. This is the only way to stage the play today: You can't play it straight ahead without implicitly endorsing Strindberg's skewed notions of gender, and you can't play it as a farce without making the entire enterprise seem trivial. We will instead play it as a psychological family drama infused with a pervading sense of otherworldliness.

 

Strindberg wrote a thought experiment, and his thinking about women is questionable--but it is really interesting and provocative. If I thought that the only thing that was interesting about The Father was its sexism, I wouldn't want to direct it. Like any good play, The Father keeps your attention by forcing characters to resolve problems that put stress on the relationships between them.

 

Actors in this play will get a workout. They will need to bring to bear all the skills needed to carry off an intense family drama, but will need to be elastic enough in their interpretations to live simultaneously in that world and another world, a world of ideas and experimentation.

 

THE SET DESIGN

 

            The space is arranged in ¾ round or thrust configuration, with audience on three sides of an 8' x 8' planked platform suspended by four farm jacks. Throughout the show, cast member will literally lift the platform off the ground from a starting height of 1' to a maximum height of 4'. The reasoning behind this choice, as elaborated in the Conceptual Material section of this proposal, is to 1) establish a vocabulary of verticality in relation to sexual difference, 2) literally escalate the action of the play as its stakes raise, and 3) suggest a boxing ring on which the Captain and Laura have it out.

 

There are more reasons why this will enhance the show: We are interested in aesthetics of industry and rationality--we want to interpolate the military-industrial complex and put it on trial. Plus, the alien look of the lifts enhances the denaturalization of the play. Finally, the sound they will make and the shuddering of the platform are all sensory elements that will keep the audience locked into the action.

 

            We acknowledge that the set for this show will be a challenge, and we have taken a number of steps to ensure that we will successfully pull it off.

 

Please consider the following:

 

1.     Michael McGarty and Keith Crowder have looked at the set design and they both believe it can work. They have consulted on the modifications we will make to the jacks to make sure the platform is safe.

 

2. Keith Crowder has agreed to let us use the Stuart shop to weld set pieces and has offered to help us do the welding before classes start.

 

3. Each farm jack is rated to support 3.5 tons of weight.

 

4. No one will be allowed under the platform for any reason except to focus lights, at which point the platform will be reinforced with cinderblocks.

 

5. We will build the set during the 10 days before classes start on September 7. The platform will be our first priority. The summer is a critical asset to this show.

 

6. IF THE PLATFORM IS NOT BUILT AND DEMONSTRATED TO BE SAFE AND RELIABLE ON SEPTEMBER 7, WE WILL CUT THE FARM JACKS. THE PLATFORM WILL BE LEGGED AT 3' AND THE PLAY WILL PROCEED.

 

This last point is non-negotiable. We will not send a show into tech with a set that may fail. If we can't use farm jacks, the show will still rock. The script, actors, concept and look of the show will be fundamentally the same.

 

While we believe that the farm jacks will be an asset, they will just make a hot show hotter. There is every reason to believe that we will be able to execute this set as designed, but an acceptable plan B never hurt anyone, and it eliminates the risk of a tech-week disaster.

 

 

A NOTE ON COMPOSING ORIGINAL MUSIC FOR THE FATHER:

 

 

A completely original score will add a vital piece to the denaturalization
of "The Father".  Electronic music's chameleon-like ability to mimic,
sample, assimilate and subsume all other genres makes it the perfect medium
for creating a musical dimension to the show that seems to come from no
single time period, geography, or culture.  And its fundamentally
scientific, mathematical nature makes it the perfect counterpart to a play
in which science and scientific rigor feature a prominent role, and a play
which almost feels like a scientific experiment itself.

Strindberg's endlessly clashing ideas of masculine and feminine will be
translated, roughly, into musical motifs which may at different moments
strain against each other, weave around each other, attempt to coexist or
agree, or collide violently.

I'm intensely excited at the prospect of undertaking a design of this
magnitude and with this much room for creativity, which only first slot's
long time-span for preparation makes possible, and which this production
provides a unique and important place for.

 

 

Brian Christian
CONCEPTUAL MATERIAL: VERTICALITY

 

...this is the song of the vertical field

once upright this field is now fertile and prone

with desire put forth for a field that will flower

one narcissus blooms in this untruthful tower

 

                                                -Matthew Barney

 

á       Verticality I: The stage--an 8'x8' platform suspended by four farmer's jacks[2]--graphically manifests the production's conceptual freight by traveling a vertical axis. As the play progresses, the platform is lifted incrementally by operation of the jacks. This motion literally escalates the action of the play as the stakes of the warfare between the Captain and Laura themselves escalate.

 

á       Verticality II: Verticality is an important motif within The Father, and is therefore a key schematic for theatricalizing our concept. Verticality is an expression of the Captain's empirical/linear career ambitions. His investigations of meteors embody Western ration's quest to lift understanding up to the heavens:

 

"you know what meteoric stones are--stones that fall from other heavenly bodies. I can examine them and learn whether they contain the same elements as our world. That is all I can tell."    (24)

 

The Captain explains that his work looks upward through the incidental fall of meteors. As the Doctor later observes, this work will allow him "to tell us what is happening on Jupiter." Moreover, the battle over how to "raise" Bertha linguisticly fuses precisely the motifs of verticality and sexual development (she is growing into an adult female). The battle over her upbringing (always figured in the vertical) become s the arena for gender battle. Conveniently, our stage, once elevated, mimics the square arena of a boxing ring.

 

á       Verticality III: More obscurely, verticality registers sexual difference. The ascent or descent of sexual organs in the later stages of embryonic development is a register of sexual and gender difference treated by Matthew Barney in his Cremaster Cycle. In a neat convergence of design and concept, the gradual escalation of the set platform will track the overt ascendency of the feminine to power in The Father. At the play's end, the Captain is suspended from the steel framing in a cruel application of the physical power of altitude. This image will mark his defeat through his suspension in the feminine ovarian heights. The Father witnesses the ascension of the masculine towards his immolation. Whereas in The Father as initially staged, the Captain's defeat and humiliation are expressed in his lack of vertical mobility[3], our production will invert this scheme: the vertical progression of Western empirical science becomes the space within which the Captain succumbs to the femininity around him and his own delusions.

 

AESTHETIC GUIDELINES:

 

á       Proximity: Nearness will be a guiding principle in our engagement with the theatre's space, both in terms of the audience's relationship to the stage and the playing space itself. We believe that an audience enjoys close proximity to the actors, and that the actors are galvanized by the nearness of an audience. The use of an 8'x8' platform allows seating to be crowded in on all sides of the playing space. It also forces actors to negotiate a limited amount of space together in a scene. Range of movement is curtailed, but this enforces creative decisions and leads to interesting pictures. The Father lends itself to a highly condensed playing space because it rarely puts more than three actors onstage at a time. A preponderance of the scenes take place between two people. Living creatures tend to seek out large areas of open space to alleviate the stress of interacting with each other. In The Father, compression, cramping and pressure leave the protagonists no choice but to deal with each other.

 

á       Transparency: For Michel Foucault, philosophy seeks to make visible what is visible rather than to uncover invisible knowledge. Our production will enhance the visibility of Strindberg's overdetermined and outdated concept of gender difference. The naturalist criteria of verisimilitude and fidelity to a sense of 'life-lived' will be discarded in favor of the criteria of unusual spectacle and denaturalized life. The set will not be designed to resemble any plausible drawing room, but rather to resonate with the ideology of the script. The ensemble's preparations for entrances will be marginally visible in the recesses of the playing space. Their participation in incrementally lifting the set platform, providing props and aiding in dressing the misŽ en scene will produce and effect of mechanical integration, military precision, relay and preparation. The mechanics of playcraft will be an open secret in The Father.

 

á       Affect/Empathy: This emphasis on the ideological foundation of The Father must never displace the fundamentals of good acting. The play is a family drama, and as such relies on the emotional investment of the ensemble in its characters, and the constant sense of immediacy and stakes in scenework. The misŽ en scene will convey a sense of preparedness and integration, but the work of the actors while on the platform must never lose sight of the imaginary world of Strindberg's play. This combination of burdens will demand much of our ensemble. They must be able to fully inhabit the characters even as they illustrate the dubiousness of the mindset that constructs those characters. The success of this show depends on our ability to compel our audience to invest in the stakes of the struggle happening onstage, even as they readjust to a bewildering arrangement of images.

 

á       Physicality: The platform stage, the compression of playable space, the challenges of moving on and off the platform, and of shuttling props to and from the stage will create an environment conducive to physical contact among the actors. This fact will enhance and theatricalize the dynamics of gendered procreative battle, drawing our ensemble into close quarters. The arena of gender relations is a battlefield in The Father. As a piece of theatre treating sexual relations as vexed and bound up with enmity, this play will be highly sensitized to the power of present male and female bodies. Physical contact, the medium of sex and of violence, will be a principle color on the directorial palette.

 

CHOICES:

 

As a collaborative project, much of the specific texture of the show will be determined in conjunction with designers and the cast during the rehearsal process. Nonetheless, an array of fundamental images can provide a mental glimpse of what The Father aims to be. The concept that binds these choices together is a desire to denaturalize the play. That is, to take a conventional box-set playscript and to stage it in a way that deliberately jettisons a sense of 'real' life in favor of an alien sensibility of peculiarity, starkness and spectacle.

 

á       Platform set and open 'backstage:' Actors will be visible and present when not onstage. They will be called upon to operate the stage platform jacks, aid each other with costume changes, shuttle props and help each other on and off stage. This activity must be constant and discreet, so as not to draw focus from the stage action. Critically, this facet of the production culminates in the ensemble working together to immolate the Captain by fastening him to the steel framing over the platform.

 

á       Real Coffee: At certain moments in the play, actors will enjoy hot coffee onstage. The idea behind this is a combination of the director's annoyance at seeing actors onstage routinely treating prop beverages like props, (waving them around, etc.) and a desire to amplify the sense of precariousness of the set platform. It should give a sense of hyper-similitude to the stage action which will play nicely off of the denaturalized tactics in staging.

 

á       Edible flowers: The end of Act Two, wherein the Captain hurls a lighted lamp at Laura, is an important moment in the play, and one that requires a strong choice to re-orient the play to our aims. We propose that Laura, the avatar of femininity, fecundity and traction, be aligned with flowers--fresh flowers to the extent that budget allows--and that she eat them. Many flowers available on the retail market are perfectly edible, and Laura will munch on them with cool nonchalance. Furthermore, we will overhaul the last moments of Act Two such that the act of violence that punctuates it will instead witness the Captain forcing handfuls of flower buds into her mouth.

 

á       Adaptations to the Script: The Father has been translated into English several by several sources. In order to streamline the language and filter outdated colloquialisms out of the script, we will use an original, freely adapted version of the script as our acting script. Our adaptation will use the Oland translation and the ISU Concordance version of the script online as guides. Ideally, the adapted script will disencumber the language of the play. Also, since the source works are in the public domain (the Oland script is from 1912), our original adaptation will be ours to use for free.

 

á       Spanish Military Sound Recordings: As a means of drawing the show into the contemporary moment, of highlighting the militaristic/masculine motif, our production will make use of a batch of audio recordings produced at the Spanish Military's School of War (Escuella de Guerra del Ejercito de Tierra) for training soldiers to use the NASAMS mobile guided missile system. These recordings--essentially excerpts from the instruction manual for the missile system read by female native English speakers--give an eerie sense of arbitrarily isolated fragments of a rigorously technical discourse and combine a rational mechanism for efficient death production with a soft, nurturing feminine sensuality. The effect is a stark juxtaposition of terms opposed in the play, and an invitation to meditate on the thematic material of the play.

 

 

 

 

BUDGET:

 

      We request slightly more than the typical PW budget in order to execute a challenging set.

 

 

      Set....................................................................................................................... $450

      Costumes............................................................................................................. $150

      Props..................................................................................................................... $90

      Sound................................................................................................................... $10

      Publicity................................................................................................................ $50

 

      TOTAL............................................................................................................... $750

 

      If approved with a $650 budget we will trim $25 each from set and props and $50 from costumes.

APPENDIX 1: THE 48" FARMER'S JACK:

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

                                                     

 

 

 

 

á       Great for lifting tractors or heavy trucks

á       Pulls posts and poles

á       Minimum height - 6"

á       Maximum height - 48"

á       Maximum lifting capacity - 3 1/2 tons

á       Ratcheting design

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

APPENDIX 2: CONCEPT SKETCH FOR THE STAGE PLATFORM:

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Please note that this illustration does not reflect bracing and supports that will be attached to the structure. It's just to give you a taste...