‘Twas the day before thesis when I caught up with one of my favorite theater people, Lily Whitsitt ’06, to discuss her show, “Labyrinths,” going up this Thursday through Saturday in the ’92.
RA: Tell me a little about your Senior Thesis piece, and the texts on which it is based.
LW: “Labyrinths” is based on the poetry and prose of Jorge Luis Borges, the Argentinian Magical Realist writer. In a sort of cinematic way, it splices together five of Borges’ stories and two of his poems to juxtapose different perspectives and planes of reality, rather than create a linear narrative. You really have to put the vignettes together for yourself. As a cast, we are only just now figuring out its “story.”
RA: What were your goals in adapting Borges?
LW: To me this show is not so much an adaptation of his work per se, but a map of Borges’ literary and philosophical interests. About two years ago I decided that I wanted to create a theater piece based on Borges’ work that would convey as many of his literary themes as possible. I knew I didn’t want to just retell one story, but really try to capture on stage the bizarre quality of Borges’ writing. He creates these mythical universes that are actually very precisely determined and contain their own set of rules, but the reader is unable to identify them. I found a good example of this type of dramaturgy in Theatre de Complicite, a London based company that does a lot of this broader adaptation.
RA: Tell me a bit about your rehearsal process.
LW: In rehearsal I was primarily interested in exploring the use of physical actions. I was first introduced to this kind of work by Professor Claudia Tatinge Nascimento, and wanted to learn to understand it for myself. The actors and I initially worked on creating physical movements based on their own dreams and memories. It was important to me not to impose blocking but let them make their own discoverie—I find this to be much more organic than if a director tells the actors exactly what to do. After we had created a sort of physical vocabulary, we edited the pieces. Often we would come up with a movement first, and only afterwards decide exactly what text we wanted to use with it. I hoped that this would add layers to the performance and avoid making it too illustrative.
RA: What influenced your particular set design and stylistic choices?
LW: Zac Bruner [’07] and Sara Ross’ [’06] hexagonal design is inspired by Borges’ “The Tower of Babel,” set in a library of that shape, which holds a seemingly infinite supply of books. Stylistically, each of the play’s vignettes is based on the related idea of the eternal return, which was thematic to Borges. In his work, people and objects return forever, with extremely subtle mutations—for example, there may be seven editions of a book in the infinite library that are exactly the same except for a comma in a different place. The concept of eternal return really did apply to books for Borges. To him they were not just objects but fantastic worlds to which the reader could return again and again. All of the characters in Labyrinths are meant to be subtle mutations of Borges himself.
RA: Any final thoughts on Borges?
LW: Borges believed that the most important thing a person could be was a patient and kind reader. He certainly was. This show is in no way an overview of his work—if anything, I would hope that it gets people interested in discovering Borges for themselves.
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