Author: Ella Larsen

7:30pm • Thursday, Feb. 15, 2023 • Lydia Mendelssohn Theater

The School of Theater, Music and Dance’s production of Arbor Falls this last week was a unique and memorable take on faith, community, and change. Arbor Falls tells the story of a small town grappling with change. A traveling stranger has come to town, granted refuge in the preacher’s small, failing church. The stranger’s presence in Arbor Falls resurfaces the old hurts and prides of the residents’ lineages, forcing them to reckon with what it means to preserve one’s history and when to move on. Having grown up in a small town, it was interesting to compare and contrast the world created in the play with my own personal experiences.

For me, the best part of this play was the script, the core around which the rest of the performance was built. The play was written by Caridad Svich, a much-awarded playwright who also translates works of theatre in English and Spanish. For me, it felt like she captured the essential characters and perspectives of a small town, then romanticized them into something altered but recognizable. Arbor Falls was like my home-town portrayed through an Art Nouveau lens, all curliques and flourishes. She wrote much of the dialogue in an unusual syntax, perhaps meant to evoke rural dialects, which engaged my curiosity. I could sort of imagine the script being read by people I grew up around, but those words felt awkward spoken in theatre students’ voices. Real but unreal.

Stylistically, the production felt untethered in time and space. The Arbor Falls onstage was like no small town I’ve ever lived in, but recognizable at the same time. Svich’s treatment of religion in the script merged the mundane with the otherworldly, and the set and costumes materialized this tension. The costumes were a bit bohemian–they reminded me of clothes you would see at a small folky music festival, or maybe a renaissance fair, made new to look old. Not like anything I’ve ever seen anyone wear, but they helped create the unique world of Arbor Falls. Similarly, elements of the set, like the preacher’s pulpit, appeared to in the process of sinking into (or emerging from) boulders. Or, perhaps, they were symbolically embedded in the land as a representation of the characters’ roots in Arbor Falls.

Overall, I thought Arbor Falls was a beautiful interpretation of how we might maintain or fail to maintain our values, how we grapple with the baggage of our heritage to navigate change. I wish I could watch it again to really grasp all of the nuances in the language, but I deeply enjoyed my experience watching this last Thursday.

Featured image from SMTD digital program.

The School of Music, Theater and Dance production of Imogen Says Nothing this past weekend was ferociously compelling. The play, written by Aditi Brennan Kapil, imagines the story of Imogen, a character listed in an early manuscript of Shakespeare’s Much Ado About Nothing who has no voice and appears to be a printing mistake. In Kapil’s absurdist revisionary take, Imogen (Brynn Aaronson) is a bear passing as a human who travels to London to request that her village’s name be restored from “Quaere” to North Burcombe on a map of the Theatre of the Great British Empire. Instead of the mapmaker, Imogen finds the literal theater in which William Shakespeare works. What follows is a creative, satirical critique of the misrepresentation, silence, and absence of marginalized identities in written word. 

My favorite element of the production was Imogen’s unapologetic, fierce presence. Imogen lumbers, she growls, she is blunt and direct and makes demands. In Imogen’s character, I saw the functioning of “pariah femininity,” a term coined by feminist scholar Mimi Schippers: a form of femininity which is constructed in opposition to traditional, “hegemonic femininity” (forms of femininity which uphold the gender order/patriarchy) and characterized by stereotypical forms of masculinity like authority, physicality and non-compliance made reprehensible by their female embodiment. 

Throughout the play, characters repeat the phrase: “It’s a frightful thing, to be absent.”  Many elements bring forward the idea of absence in the play. Quaere, the village Imogen comes from, is a play on the Latin word for query, suggesting that the mapmaker simply neglected to return to the location and find out its name. This brings to the fore the experience of people from lands which are constantly, often intentionally, overlooked, and the importance of being seen. There is an ongoing conversation which picks up in different forms throughout the play, about the tyranny of “ink,” and the significance and permanence of what is laid down in ink. Imogen struggles with William Shakespeare to be eternalized in the script of Much Ado About Nothing for her appearance in the first act of the play. In the end, her friend and client Henry Condell (Rohan Maletira) re-writes Imogen’s name into the play out of a sense of guilt, but as Kapil makes abundantly clear in the final scene of the play, his choice is not the point. Imogen’s subjectivity is the focal point of the play, and she reclaims her personhood (bearhood?) by meting out justice upon the men who tried to erase her.