Tuesday, February 8, 2011

This Month's Title Photo

This month's title photo features a scene from Theaterlab's Three Sisters Come and Go, a tragicomedy drawing on the texts of Anton Chekhov, Samuel Beckett & Julia Kristeva. The photo is by Enrico Luttman. Three Sisters Come and Go was performed in September and October of 2010, and featured Liza Cassidy, Claire Helene, and Jackie Lowe.

For more information about Theaterlab and their current season, please visit their website.



THREE SISTERS COME AND GO follows the lives of the three archetypal women of Chekhov's plays read through the lens of Beckett's comic take on the existential dilemma, and Julia Kristeva's insight regarding the transformation of despair and loss into joy and acceptance. Bound to living together, each of the sisters is comically obsessed with being the most unhappy of the group.

“The sisters play the game of theater finding a future in the present of the stage,” explains director Orietta Crispino. “After all, there is life beyond despair.”

THREE SISTERS COME AND GO opens with Samuel Beckett’s dramaticule Come and Go, which serves as the model for a geometry of the unspoken, the unsettling reality of consisting beyond the veil of representation. Three women sitting in perfect stillness together repeat a cycle of the action, the revelation of a secret never heard by the audience. The remainder of the piece features recombined text from
Chekhov’s major plays.

The piece was devised through a collective process among director Orietta Crispino (who conceived the piece), Italian dramaturg Marco Casazza, and the three actresses: Liza Cassidy (Patricia Wilson’s Zia Dance Company), Claire Helene, and Jackie Lowe (Broadway: THE TAP DANCE KID, AIN’T MISBEHAVIN, EUBIE, THE FIRST, and WIND IN THE WILLOWS). The group scoured Chekhov’s work act by act, collecting lines mostly from the female characters. Through a cut and paste technique, each actress reordered the material creating one monologue and one dialogue scene (using only Chekhov’s words). Then, Crispino and Casazza shaped and developed the piece.

No comments: