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Saturday, December 09, 2006
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UD Shared One Legal Form With You... ...this morning (the one her kid, Mr UD, and UD, had to sign, promising not to demand a million dollars because their kid's face flashed on the tv screen during Wednesday's Christmas in Washington show); here's another one, also having to do with the stage. A Brown University student production of Sartre's The Flies will entrap its audience, throughout each performance, in a theater full of real flies. "There's a sense of containment and quarantine and pestilence," when you're in a small space infested with forty thousand drosophila fruit flies, "which ties in with the play very well," the director explains to a reporter from the Boston Globe. When you order tickets online, this disclosure appears on the screen: "I am aware that there will be 30,000 live drosophila in the audience area at this production." If you don't check a box confirming this, you can't buy a ticket. (There were only 30,000 flies when they printed ticket information. The drosophila reproduced faster than the producers anticipated.) @@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@ Update: UD's been trying to figure out why she finds this story so sad. She figures it has something to do with the assault on the imagination the gesture represents, the way the director considers the total literalizing of a metaphor clever or helpful or something. Is the imagination at this point so weak that we can't have an aesthetic experience without the theatrical equivalent of marital aids? Prepare for productions of Ibsen's Ghosts in which audience members are injected with spirochetes so they can understand what syphilis feels like. |