Next up, I’ve got the second poster I created for Remy Bumppo Theatre Company‘s 2011/2012 Season. The first one was Eugene O’Neill’s Mourning Becomes Electra, but now we move on to the mid-season holiday-times comedy Changes of Heart by Pierre de Marivaux, a French playwright from the early 1700s. This one wasn’t nearly so difficult as Electra, but it had it’s challenges nonetheless.
The story of Changes of Heart is basically that a prince disguises himself has a lower-class guy, and while exploring the city, meets and falls in love with a woman from the lower-class. He decides to have her kidnapped and brought to the castle, but then cannot find a good way to introduce himself as the prince, so continues the charade. Meanwhile, the man that the prince’s love is engaged to comes looking for her. It’s a comedy of disguises and love across class boundaries, but a comedy along the lines of The Merchant of Venice, where some bits are left a little uncomfortable at the end. Remy Bumppo’s production will be set in Chicago in the 1960s and highlight the class differences by also making them racial differences between the city’s mostly-white north side and mostly-black south side.
Here’s the first of the show designs I created for Remy Bumppo Theatre Company‘s 2011/2012 Season, Mourning Becomes Electra. It was also the most difficult and time consuming.
Why? Well the main reason is the play itself. It is a loose adaptation of the Greek story of the Oresteia. It takes place in New England immediately after the Civil War and follows the Mannan family. It has Freudian overtones in that the main character, Lavinia, harbors an Electra complex, which is the female version of an Oedipal complex: she wants to supplant her mother and be the object of her father’s love. The irony is that, after lots of bloodshed, she really does become her mother in look and demeanor. So my task was to find a central image that captured many of these themes: two women struggling for the same position in the family, usurpation, the female sensibility overcoming the male within the family, the younger generation taking over from the older, jealousy, the cyclical nature of fate. Oh, and the play contains no real overt imagery, metaphorical or otherwise, except the green dress that both women end up wearing and the greek pillars of the Mannan house, the latter of which I was told not to use because we didn’t want people to think this was a Greek play. Oy!
