BODIES OF WORK
Director Lila Neugebauer first joined the Signature family in the summer of 2014, when she helmed Residency One playwright A. R. Gurney’ s The Wayside Motor Inn. This spring, she will return to the Alice Griffin Jewel Box Theatre with another ensemble production: Signature Plays, featuring Edward Albee’ s The Sandbox, María Irene Fornés’ s Drowning, and Adrienne Kennedy’ s Funnyhouse of a Negro. A few weeks before rehearsals, Lila sat down with Literary Manager Jenna Clark Embrey to talk about Signature’ s Legacy playwrights, and the common themes that bind the plays together.
Signature: What was your first impression of these plays as a single evening of theatre?
Lila Neugebauer: I first read Funnyhouse and The Sandbox in school, and I came to this evening as a huge Fornés fan, but didn’ t know Drowning at all. The prospect of investigating these three voices in one evening astonished me; it struck me as thrilling, daunting, and exhilarating. These are three seminal voices in the American avant-garde. It’ s remarkable to be reminded that this is what Off Broadway was once like... to encounter work that is this expressionistic, surreal, absurd, unabashedly theatrical in every moment, plays that invest so thoroughly in images that can only be found on stage, drawn from such singular authorial imaginations … to enter the worlds of these three visionary writers, all in one night, struck me as a monumental opportunity. And the invitation to be a part of an evening conceived to celebrate the history and legacy of this institution felt particularly moving and compelling on the occasion of the 25th Anniversary; it was something I knew I wanted to be a part of.
S: How do you envision these plays as being in dialogue with one another?
LN: When you look at these plays together in conversation, [ you see that ] they’ re each written in singular vernaculars. And accordingly, we’ ve been endeavoring to fully embrace and realize each of these plays on their own distinct terms. But it’ s been striking to me to feel powerful emotional throughlines in the evening. All of these plays strike me as grappling with the horror and difficulty – and also the beauty – of being bound to a decaying sack of flesh … which is to some extent the human condition, right? They’ re all investigating how resilient the human spirit can be. They’ re all on some level grappling with innocence and experience. There is a striking sense of the corporeal at the center of all these plays – the body is very important in all three. And each of these plays invests in stark, striking, almost totemic imagery; they’ re all trafficking in incredibly powerful images that communicate an enormous amount of meaning and emotion.
S: What can you tell us about the design of the production?
LN: The environment that we’ ve created for The Sandbox is fairly stark. It’ s presentational and confrontational. And it has a bit of a sense of humor. Like some of Albee’ s writing, the design both taps into something elemental and core to our humanity, but also has a kind of heightened veneer. My hope is that the veneer only sends you deeper into the human experience at the core of the play. In Drowning, it felt important to us that these men’ s bodies are operating as a physical metaphor, but that we locate these bodies in an environment that feels thoroughly of our world. They need to inhabit a space that is recognizable and familiar, so that the play’ s bodily extremes are grounded – so that we understand their world as our own. With Funnyhouse, it felt to us that if the design invested too heavily in the real or too exclusively in the surreal, that the event would collapse. We traverse an evershifting psychological space, but at the same time, we need to recognize that Sarah is a real person – not a symbol – speaking to us from our world. She is thoroughly rooted in our reality.
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