Cavegirl Productions - Theatre
Three people... Three sins... One Hell.
One of my favorite plays of all time is the existential classic, No
Exit,
by Jean-Paul Sartre. I first read
it in high school, and found myself picking it back up about once a year
after. For the uninitiated, here's the play synposis:
"The play begins with a Valet leading a man named Garcin into
a room that the audience soon realizes is in hell (many people believe
that hell is portrayed as a gigantic hotel because of the "rooms and passages" mentioned
in the play). The room has no windows, no mirrors, and only one door. Eventually
Garcin is joined by a woman (Inès),
and then another (Estelle). After their entry, the Valet leaves and the
door is shut and locked. All expect to be tortured, but no torturer arrives.
Instead, they realize they are there to torture each other, which they
do effectively, by probing each other's sins, desires, and unpleasant memories."
(synopsis: Wikipedia)
One day in 2001, in the middle of a rehearsal for Twelfth
Night, I was struck
with the idea of putting on my own staging of the production. The ideas
came fast, furious, and impractically. My original plan was to have the
audience walk into the performance space 15 minutes before the show, through
a long hallway with "purgatory rooms" visible through plexiglass
doors on the sides! I later decided three freestanding "purgatory closets"
would do :)
I wanted to make the stilted language of the play a bit more palatable, but
quickly found out that I couldn't legally change a word of it and still call
it No
Exit. So I did what any rational person would do - I decided to
completely rewrite a classic play and make the characters and story modern
equivalents. Ack!
With the help of my friend Leo, we rewrote the play in just a couple of months,
and were still finishing up the final pages during auditions in November
of 2001. We called it Ellipsis,
and the production was first mounted for nine shows at three different locations
in February/March 2002 - the MetroCafe in DC, the Chesapeake
Arts Center in Brooklyn, MD, and the Greenbelt
Arts Center in Greenbelt, MD. We remounted Ellipsis in November
of 2002 for a ten show run at the arts festival, Art-O-Matic.
It was a fantastic, stressful, and exhausting experience, and I worked with many wonderful people who later would join me in creating the CP Film Team. Visit the Ellipsis site to find out more about the show. Also, take a gander at the review of Ellipsis in the Washington City Paper (by Sarah Godfrey, issue March 15, 2002).