cavegirl productions - theatre

Three people... Three sins... One Hell.

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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)...."

Kim T. Ha as Estelle. Photo by Peter Eichman.

"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).