Another Idea

And so, somehow, over the years, little by little, I found that I was moving all of my things from my own room in the main house across the garden to this little house, till I finally asked to have my bed moved as well, and so the little house became mine.

The shift from one thought to another to another to another can be imperceptible, blurry between slightly-the-same-and-slightly-different. How others shift our world view, our view of ourselves, our view of those around us, similarily functions through subtle transformations.

Using reflectivity and a series of abstracted slices, this Cornell Box attempts to express the imperceptible transformation of thought and also the blurriness between one’s views as they’ve conceived them themselves and how they’ve been influenced by others.  As we see throughout the play, Lemon’s impressionability is subject to Aunt Dan’s increasingly obsessive and unyielding views on society, Kissinger, morality and compassion. Where does one shape end, how is it reflect back onto others, what shapes and reflections can be seen through cracks and openings?

One Simple Sentence

Aunt Dan & Lemon is a play about how we individually reckon with the complex moral questions and decisions which form our society.

One Complex Sentence

Obsessions*, in that they rationalize a series of incremental and subtly unconscionable assessments of ourselves and others, can lead to a passive decoupling from morality.

*Obsessions being where we individually derive meaning for our lives: Aunt Dan’s infatuation with Kissinger, Lemon’s undying devotion to and adoration of Aunt Dan but also juice thing(?), Mindy’s thirst for money, the father’s fixation with work. Sidenote: I’m not convinced of my use of ‘obsession’ but I haven’t yet found a more precise term yet.

Three to Five Sentence Description

Through a series of fragmented flashbacks, Lemon illustrates how her detached and morally indifferent worldview has been shaped by Aunt Dan, a former friend of her mother’s. During a formative summer when Lemon was eleven years old, Aunt Dan captivated her with stories of self-indulgent friends and an irrational obsession with Kissinger. Now frail and isolated, Lemon remains firmly planted in the views offered by her Aunt Dan but extends them further. She expresses a sympathy and adoration towards the Nazis and justifies their mass murders as a simple human behavior meant to preserve their way of life.

Fusch’s Reading

Key spaces: the bedroom in the house in the garden, the garden itself
Key times: present day Lemon, childhood Lemon

The interior space are characterized by their edges: they are evidently contained, but dimly lit and blurry. These interior spaces remain fixed and unchanging over the course of the play. In contrast, the garden begins bright and seemingly vast and wide. Yet over the course of the performance, it becomes smaller and smaller. The spaces are private — apartments of friends, the family garden, Lemon’s bedroom, a kitchen.

Time is framed through Lemon’s flashbacks, noted by the performers position on the stage. The center down-stage is present-day while flashbacks play out up-stage. While Aunt Dan is presented through flashbacks, as her monologues become more obsessive and agitated, she occupies the front of the stage closest to the audience–in line with Lemon.

The play is punctuated by periods of silence and pause among long and occasionally breathless dialogue. The words of the characters are the dominant sounds of the play. Each characters has their own tempo and accents, like a composers’ notes within a musical score. Mother’s “sound” becomes less solid, more stop-starty as the play continues. Lemon maintains a consistency – a rhythm and beat, steady without dramatic swells or falls. Yet a sweet scent permeates the air when she speaks in present day.

The play begins agitated–Lemon flashes back to her childhood in which her father is obsessed with work and her mother obsesses with Lemon’s eating. The triangle they form is tenuous and brittle. Yet when speaking of Aunt Dan and her mother, the mood shifts to light-hearted and jovial through the tales of young lovers and friends. Yet coercion and indifference to the feelings of others ripple through these retellings: an affair with a professor, Mindy’s fallback to Andy. The mood and tone shifts to become heated, contentious, arguments erupt. Yet it ends seriously, deadpan, almost without emotion in Lemon’s final monologue. The shifts in character relationships play out among the shifts in space and sound.

While most of the characters interact in groups, when Lemon flashes back to her conversations with Aunt Dan, her participation in the conversation diminishes. She becomes a shadow to Aunt Dan’s stories. Spatial note: when Aunt Dan and Lemon are in her bedroom, their shadows are prominently projected on the wall behind them. While Lemon is the central figure in communicating to the audience, she becomes increasingly overpowered by Aunt Dan’s participation. It is not until Aunt Dan is dying that Lemon claims prominence in the their relationship.

The play asks its audience to question its own relations in the world: how we each address morality, how we evaluate the morality of others, and how these individual points of view shape the world around us.

Assuming that everything is written for a reason, I can’t figure out Lemon’s juice thing. Does it indicate how indifferent she is to killing and death? 

Any creative endevour prematurely dies when overwhelmed by the question of where to simply start. Brook remarks on the first day of any rehersal stating: “the purpose of anything you do on the first day is to get you through to the second one.” In a counterpoint to his examples of sketches, jokes, games, or activities for beginning a performance, Elinor Fuchs’s “Visits to a Small Planet” offers many questions to begin analyzing a play. As she mentions in the introduction, the template is not an ends but a departure point: a set of questions to help look for the evidence for analysis.

Although written for performance criticism, her approach also resonated with my thinking about an architecture or urbanism. In particular, the questions regarding the social world are foregrounded by questions of space, environment and time. This connected to my ongoing question of how social relations function through form (architecture, environment, and so on)? Social relations functions through architecture, it is not powerful in and of itself. Perhaps “character”–and relationships between characters–could similarly be said to function through a performance’s environment not only the performer herself? As discussed by scholars more broadly: subjects and their environments are co-produced–Stuart Hall, Foucault, Richard Sennett, etc. Note: by co-production, I’m roughly referring to the making identities, discourses, and material culture.

I found a related notion of co-production also discussed through numerous examples in Peter Brook’s  ‘The Deadly Theatre’ in The Empty Space. For any given performance the relationship between audience, performer, critic, writer, environment, place and geography, history and present is in process, different time and time again. “Life is moving, influences are playing on actor and audience and other plays, other arts, the cinema, television, current events…” Yet this idea of change and influence is at odds with the (perceived? desired?) repetition of performance. Brook writes, “A performance gets set and usually has to be repeated–and repeated as well and accurately as possible.” (Brook, 15) This desire for pure duplication is unattainable. However, the repetition in performance and rehearsal offer procedural attempts at “making better” through repetition and precise iteration.