Poster

For those far away, this production will be performed at Mary Baldwin College in Staunton, VA. Hope you can come!

On Publicity Photos and Plowing Ahead

At this point, we are quite in the thick of things. Clara is making paper hats and paper swords and pop-ups and paper paper paper. I am sewing endlessly, running rehearsals, and working to make sure everything comes together. It is a busy time three weeks before opening.

This morning, Amanda--our Helena--and I had a photo shoot so we would have a few shots to send out with publicity. So we traipsed about Staunton with pop-up books and paper stars. I thought I would share some of my favorites with you as a teaser for what's to come.

Tell me, who is Helena?

The paper has arrived! Clara and I have been fortunate enough to receive of gift of good, sturdy fine art paper from which to build our pop-up book. Clara's father, who is an art professor, insisted that a project this artful should, indeed, be a work of art and therefore must be crafted out of quality materials--so he sent us a generous gift of beautiful, strong bristol board among other papers.

Serendipitously enough, the box the paper came in is the perfect size for crafting an overlarge pop-up book and Clara and I are already plotting ways to paint it white and make it the cover of our book. As Clara begins to construct prototypes of the four sets that will form the pop-up book (you will see the pictures scattered throughout this entry), I have begun to think about the ways in which the book and pop-ups and writing will feature in the production of the play itself.

In a meeting at the beginning of the semester, my thesis supervisor, Ralph Cohen, challenged me to make sure that the concept Clara and I had created for the design of the production was a part of the directing of the production as well. This was something I had already been considering--in the early stages of this process, Clara and I tossed around

various ideas: having characters quite literally be on book, reading their lines, characters performing the act of writing in significant moments in the play, and even--in a wild moment--burning the entire paper set as a statement about the ephemerality of theater (something we have reconsidered in the face of our tremendous hours of work and the quality of some of our materials).

As we have settled into our ideas somewhat, it has become the connection between gender identities and paper and writing that most interests me and will be at the center of what I do as the director of this production. We have been thinking of pop-ups as feminine--paper telling its own story--and written text as masculine--the phallic pen put to passive paper. And what originally drew me to this play was the way in which Helena both does

and does not write her own story. She has more soliloquies than most of Shakespeare's heroines--she is certainly trying to tell her own story in a way so few female characters get to. But at the same time, once she has married Bertram, she must play by his rules--she must fulfill the story he creates when he writes the letter.

So what we will be playing with as we begin rehearsals in a month, is this very idea. Who opens and closes the pop-up book? Who turns the pages? Who, in other words, is responsible for the development of the story? I have begun to think more and more about which characters might interact with the book--Helena, Bertram, the King--and how and when they might do so. I have also decided that Helena will, indeed, be literally on book for parts of the play. She will be reading her lines from a text that has been given to her, delivered in or with Bertram's letter. Part of what we will explore in rehearsal is when Helena is on book and when she is creating her own story.

One of the effects of this choice is that--as Ralph Cohen put it--the actress playing Helena, in this case, the lovely Amanda Noel Allen, must perform the act of reading. This offers a lot of potential--when is Helena surprised? Delighted? Disgusted? When does she laugh at what she says? When does she resist saying it? And, more intriguingly, who, then, is Helena? If she is not the words Shakespeare (and his editors) have given her, who is she? Is she Amanda herself? Me? Some sublime combination of the two of us? Or the three of us? Whose story do we end up telling? As we consider these questions, I leave you with an Oscar-winning animated short. It has a lot to say about the act of reading.

The Fantastic Flying Books of Mr. Morris Lessmore (2011)

Thesis Festival

This past week we the MLitt/MFA program held our thesis festival, a marathon of scholarship where every MLitt student and every MFA dramaturgy emphasis presents his or her thesis in a combination of scholarship and stagecraft. Though I will be posting some more about many of the ideas in this thesis, I thought I would share Cass Morris' excellent summaries of all of the presentations so that you can read about my most presentation as well as the other exciting work going on in this program.

http://americanshakespearecentereducation.blogspot.com/2012/02/2012-mlittmfa-thesis-festival-session-2.html

Picture by Ralph Alan Cohen, for more pictures of the festival go to the program Flickr account: 

http://www.flickr.com/photos/mbc_sap/

Image sharing and idea sparks

Our semester is already in the swing of things; our colleagues’ productions are coming together, the Mary Baldwin Mlitt/MFA Thesis festival is fast approaching and Linden and I are working hard on designing for All’s Well, and really enjoying meeting with Jenny McNee every week. Some of the work we’ve been putting into this show is looking to find the best means of communicating our research, and we’ve decided to expand outside of this blog. We now have a Flickr account to share pictures of the things we are making as we make them, as well as many images of our sketches and plans for characters and costumers.

You can find our Flickr account here: http://www.flickr.com/photos/allswellindesign/ 
 

Additionally, Linden and I have dived into Pinterest, an online bulletin board or images, videos and project ideas. Not only has it been delightful to pin photographs and artwork which inspires our thoughts for this project it has also put un into contact with other pinners and their ideas and creations. For instance, one can make ordinary plastic toys look like ceramics with only the help of a can of glossy spray paint click here for details of that project: http://dreamgreendiy.com/2011/08/15/pinspiration-monday-white-horse/

You can find our Pinterest account here: http://pinterest.com/agenttam99/alls-well/ though you will need to sign up for Pinterest if you want to see it.

What is all this sharing and exploring doing for our process? It means not only that we’re getting lots of people to see at least pieces of our work, but that we can shape our ideas by the images we find. Some of our images are not based out of the words the characters say, (Helena will have stars because she is always talking about them) but the characters from other sorts of fantasy stories or fairy tales which the characters remind us of. LaFeu doesn’t share any lines with the White Rabbit from Alice in Wonderland, but those characters remind us of each other, so we’ll give Lafeu a pocketwatch, and maybe have some clockwork decorations on his jacket and his hat. The healing of the King in this play may also draw some inspiration from the Lord of the Rings and the Two Towers’ movie’s portrayal of Theoden returning to health and the costume choices for the king before and after Helena heals him. These images will morph in our ideas for the play as we keep studying its roots and other productions, but finding inspiration in this forum, (and now these others) is an adventure for us both.

Intro post

So who am I and what am I doing this project for?

My name is Clara Giebel and I am designing for a production of William Shakespeare's All's Well that Ends Well as directed by Linden Kueck. This project is in partial fulfillment of our Master of Fine Arts degree in Shakespeare and Performance. Looking particularly at what in this play is like a fairy tale I am working to give this production a distinctly tactile, papery visual aura, one which draws the audience's attention to the characters and also to our place in the history of books and paper industries.

Why All's Well?

All's Well that Ends Well provokes questions with its very title. As a story of a woman in love with a man who cares nothing for her, and ultimately coerces him into joining her an accepting marriage, the audience is often left wondering if all has ended well. The two young people are together at the end, but is that good for either of them? In a "talkback" with the actors after a recent production at the American Shakespeare Center, the actors playing this couple were asked point-blank if they thought it would work out, and the actors didn't have a straight answer. Helena's all in, but is that enough? These aren't questions that have clear answers, which opens up many doors to a variety and richness of interpretation.

Why this blog?

Linden and I will be using this blog to post information we are thinking about, images and media which play into our explorations of this play and the concepts we are playing with. There will be some scholarly writing, lots of pictures, photographs of the set, props and costumes in progress, and a lot of opportunity for discussion.

Image from Jackie Huang.