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NEWS & EVENTS >Newletters
>September 2001
(Associate Director David Travis talks about
how he developed the upcoming production of Bloody Poetry)
What attracted you to Bloody Poetry?
I love the play. It tackles so many great psychological and philosophical
issues all at once without being preachy or heavy. The characters
are fascinating and touching and funny. They struggle with the same
questions about obsession and passion and love that we all deal
with - can a man love two women at once? When do you give up on
somebody you're obsessed with? Oh, and another biggie: what is the
role of the artist in society? They all try so hard to make the
world a better place, and their idealism is really infectious. The
play explores these issues through fights and games and adventure.
How did you start to work on the play?
I was really lucky to spend the summer at the Williamstown Theatre
Festival as a member of the Directing "Corps." While I was there,
I got the chance to assist [the Broadway director] John Tillinger
on A.R. Gurney's new play, Buffalo Gal. I also had the fantastic
opportunity to direct two of my own projects with some of the best
up-and-coming young actors in the country. Bloody Poetry
was one of those projects. It's really unusual in America for a
director to get a chance to workshop a production. At Williamstown,
I had the time and resources at my disposal to research these famous
characters [Lord Byron, Percy Bysshe Shelley, Mary Shelley and Claire
Clairmont] both through library research and rehearsal discussions
and explorations with the cast. I also had a chance to experiment
with alternative ways of staging key scenes, like the climactic
scene when Byron and Shelley nearly capsize their sailboat in a
sudden storm on Lake Geneva. The Festival gave me an incredible
opportunity to develop ideas for this production, and we all had
a lot of fun working on it. In New York, we have only four weeks
to rehearse, and to have had those extra few weeks to play was a
huge luxury!
(Noah Bean, Jessica Dickey, Ben Fox, Pauline
Tully, and Nate Corddry performed in David Travis' workshop production
of Bloody Poetry at the Williamstown Theatre Festival)
How did you come up with this production's
striking visual imagery?
In Williamstown our abbreviated version was performed in a sort
of makeshift studio theatre. Well, to be honest, it was a converted
Williams College cafeteria. It was a far cry from the beautiful
proscenium stage at The Connelly Theatre - but it was an interesting
space because it presented its own set of challenges. It helped
me think about how I wanted to see our fully-designed, fully-produced
production of the play in New York. Adrian [Jones, Synapse's Resident
Designer] came to see the show - we performed it on a thrust stage
with the audience on three sides… Adrian and I discussed what had
worked about the design, and what we wanted to change, the sort
of aesthetic we wanted to go for, that sort of thing. At that stage
we didn't talk about cost, so we had some wild ideas! A few weeks
later we got together again in New York, with the other designers
[Thomas Dunn, Katherine Hampton, Jane Shaw, and Michael Friedman].
They had all been doing their own research, and so we looked at
paintings by [Caspar David] Friedrich, and [J.M.W.] Turner and talked
about color, and lighting effects, and period, and then when we
felt we had a really good idea of the sort of feeling we wanted
to create and the sort of playing space we wanted to explore, Adrian
created a model box, Katherine made drawings of the costumes, and
the ball started rolling…
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