BODIES OF WORK
Director Lila Neugebauer first joined the Signature family in the summer of 2014 , when she helmed Residency One playwright A . R . Gurney ’ s The Wayside Motor Inn . This spring , she will return to the Alice Griffin Jewel Box Theatre with another ensemble production : Signature Plays , featuring Edward Albee ’ s The Sandbox , María Irene Fornés ’ s Drowning , and Adrienne Kennedy ’ s Funnyhouse of a Negro . A few weeks before rehearsals , Lila sat down with Literary Manager Jenna Clark Embrey to talk about Signature ’ s Legacy playwrights , and the common themes that bind the plays together .
Signature : What was your first impression of these plays as a single evening of theatre ?
Lila Neugebauer : I first read Funnyhouse and The Sandbox in school , and I came to this evening as a huge Fornés fan , but didn ’ t know Drowning at all . The prospect of investigating these three voices in one evening astonished me ; it struck me as thrilling , daunting , and exhilarating . These are three seminal voices in the American avant-garde . It ’ s remarkable to be reminded that this is what Off Broadway was once like ... to encounter work that is this expressionistic , surreal , absurd , unabashedly theatrical in every moment , plays that invest so thoroughly in images that can only be found on stage , drawn from such singular authorial imaginations … to enter the worlds of these three visionary writers , all in one night , struck me as a monumental opportunity . And the invitation to be a part of an evening conceived to celebrate the history and legacy of this institution felt particularly moving and compelling on the occasion of the 25th Anniversary ; it was something I knew I wanted to be a part of .
S : How do you envision these plays as being in dialogue with one another ?
LN : When you look at these plays together in conversation , [ you see that ] they ’ re each written in singular vernaculars . And accordingly , we ’ ve been endeavoring to fully embrace and realize each of these plays on their own distinct terms . But it ’ s been striking to me to feel powerful emotional throughlines in the evening . All of these plays strike me as grappling with the horror and difficulty – and also the beauty – of being bound to a decaying sack of flesh … which is to some extent the human condition , right ? They ’ re all investigating how resilient the human spirit can be . They ’ re all on some level grappling with innocence and experience . There is a striking sense of the corporeal at the center of all these plays – the body is very important in all three . And each of these plays invests in stark , striking , almost totemic imagery ; they ’ re all trafficking in incredibly powerful images that communicate an enormous amount of meaning and emotion .
S : What can you tell us about the design of the production ?
LN : The environment that we ’ ve created for The Sandbox is fairly stark . It ’ s presentational and confrontational . And it has a bit of a sense of humor . Like some of Albee ’ s writing , the design both taps into something elemental and core to our humanity , but also has a kind of heightened veneer . My hope is that the veneer only sends you deeper into the human experience at the core of the play . In Drowning , it felt important to us that these men ’ s bodies are operating as a physical metaphor , but that we locate these bodies in an environment that feels thoroughly of our world . They need to inhabit a space that is recognizable and familiar , so that the play ’ s bodily extremes are grounded – so that we understand their world as our own . With Funnyhouse , it felt to us that if the design invested too heavily in the real or too exclusively in the surreal , that the event would collapse . We traverse an evershifting psychological space , but at the same time , we need to recognize that Sarah is a real person – not a symbol – speaking to us from our world . She is thoroughly rooted in our reality .
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