Nine brides, nine grooms, song, dance, physical aggression—and a sand pit.
No, it is not a third grade wedding on a playground. It’s Big Love.
Unrelated to the HBO’s show about polygamy, Big Love is the most recent graduate thesis production put on by Columbia Stages, the production arm of the School of the Arts theatre department.
An adaptation of Aeschylus’ The Suppliant Women, the play, written by Theater Arts professor Chuck Mee, captures the story of 50 brides who flee Greece when forced to marry their cousins. The story’s primary conflict erupts when the 50 grooms come to claim their women. An all-out war ensues, yet somewhere within the chaos, love blossoms.
Despite the play’s ancient origins, the characters hope to remain accessible and relatable to a contemporary audience. “The text and dialogue is both pedestrian and elevated at the same time,” wrote actor Gabel Eiben in an e-mail. Community Outreach Coordinator Adriana Baer hopes the production’s potentially broad appeal will attract undergraduates to the show. In an effort to further bridge the gap between graduate and undergraduate students, Columbia Stages organizes Talk-Forward events where playwrights can discuss the show and its themes. Big Love’s Talk-Forward event will take place on Feb. 20.
Although arranged marriages are not as common in this century, Mee highlights relevant contemporary themes in his interpretation of the ancient Greek play, including love, gender wars, and the plight of refugees. “It seems we are still grappling with all the same things that seized people’s attention two thousand years ago,” said Mee.
MFA directing candidate and director of Big Love Pirronne Yousefzadeh chose the show for her thesis in part because of these prescient themes. “I think that what the play has to say about celebrating our humanity and having a sense of openness and sympathy and compassion for others is a really timely thing to be hearing right now,” said Yousefzadeh.
“Every day you hear something about the economic crisis and the war in Iraq and I think we have a tendency to clamp up a little as people,” Yousefzadeh added. In contrast, in the world of Big Love people literally throw themselves on the ground to express what they truly desire. “It’s one of my favorite things about the show,” said Yousefzadeh, “It’s an extension of something that is very honest and human.”
Violent physical action is not the only way Big Love’s actors frankly express emotion. Using song and dance as extensions of the dialogue, Mee aims to illustrate the complexity of the story. “We need music and light and color and movement—and maybe that complex form feels more as though it expresses the full sense of being alive,” noted Mee.
Yousefzadeh takes full advantage of the raw material provided by Mee’s script. She uses a large, rectangular sand pit reminiscent of School of the Arts theater student Alicia House’s Medea, also a Columbia Stages production, to evoke a sense of play that enables the many different media to converge.
It is ideas like the sandbox that allow Big Love to be both fun and thought-provoking. According to Yousefzadeh, almost all the characters address larger questions and describe what they think it means to live life on earth, or what it means to be a man or a woman.
In the end, all the fanfare falls away to reveal one primal truth. In the words of one of Big Love’s characters, “love is the highest law.”
Big Love runs from Feb. 18-21 at the Riverside Theatre. Tickets are free with a CU ID or other valid student ID. The Big Love Talk-Forward event is free and open to the public and will take place Feb. 20 at 6:30 p.m. in the LeRoy Neiman Gallery in Dodge Hall.
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