lareviewofbooks:“Characters have to transform. Alison cannot be the same character she was at the be
lareviewofbooks:“Characters have to transform. Alison cannot be the same character she was at the beginning. In the book, that narrative voice is the same voice at the beginning as it is at the end. It knows the same things it knew. But for the show, Alison has to discover something new. This was very difficult to figure out.What Alison figures out in the course of the show — it’s not facts. She doesn’t learn any new facts. We played with that possibility for a long time, but it didn’t work. It was not convincing. It was outside of the story. So we had to figure out — what is her emotional growth? And how do you show it? How do you show a profound emotional transformation, and what would that be?The other thing about characters in the theater, the way they work, is that the audience has to know more about them than they know about themselves. I always tell my students that the play has to know more than any individual character knows. You have to make a context that’s bigger than the consciousness of that individual character.In early iterations of the show, the design was a realistic depiction of her studio. And this was the point where we realized, this is not a naturalistic story. You are inside her consciousness. That’s how the audience can connect to it. If you see her from the outside trying to draw her father’s story to make a book, you know, who cares? What if you go deeper than that so you are inside the primal need for an artist to make a connection, through art?When you’re making a work of art, it feels like it will kill you. It won’t kill you. But you feel like it will.”Primal Desire and the American Musical - Laurie Winer interviews Lisa Kron -- source link
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