Sea Change

It all started a few days ago with my noticing that the stage directions mention a creel. When I looked it up, it turned out to either be a "large wicker basket for carrying fish." And it began to slowly dawn on me that these people are not only potato farmers, they are coastal people. They farm AND they fish.

Then two nights ago o I realized that I should look back at the photos I took during my 1999 tour of Ireland. We had spent some time up in County Donegal, exploring some of the islands there and checking out the Donegal Castle. And I began to realize how many of the photos show both ocean and farmland.



And I realized that I'd always visualized this barn as a farmers' barn, with scythes around and other farming implements. But now I realize there's another aspect: creels, fishing nets, etc.

Which led to a meeting today with set designer Melissa Elmore in which we reconceived a previous idea for a backdrop. It had been going to be burlap, but now will be both burlap and fishnet. The brown rusty tones of the burlap, and the bluish aquamarine color of the fishing nets.

Which made me realize that my Hawai'i connection is now richer. The ancient Hawaiians sustained themselves within their ahupua'a, their strip of land which included both farm land and ocean for fishing. From hawaiihistory.org: "Each moku was divided into ahupua`a, narrower wedge-shaped land sections that again ran from the mountains to the sea. The size of the ahupua`a depended on the resources of the area with poorer agricultural regions split into larger ahupua`a to compensate for the relative lack of natural abundance. Each ahupua`a was ruled by an ali`i or local chief and administered by a konohiki."

I remember a similar late-to-dawn realization in Streetcar that the lampshade that Stanley rips off the lamp should be globe-shaped and light-colored, to be the paper moon Blanche sings about. How many times have my eyes passed over that word "creel" without really seeing it? I love the process of SEEING every aspect of this play.

The Irish Three Sisters

Geoff Bangs, a Theatre Major who will be playing the role of Doalty, had these observations about the play in comparison to one of Chekhov's major plays, and said I could share them:

"Hey, im reading 'The Three Sisters' by Chekhov right now. If you haven't read it and you have some time i suggest you check it out. I think there are quite a few similarities to Translations. I thought the repeated speaking in Latin, the out of towner that comes in and falls in love with the lead female who in turn falls in love with him, and the fire in Act 3. Also there may be ties with all of their glorifications of Moscow to characters’ in Translations desire to get out and see the world, and the fact that Andrei is a insecure proffessor with an unstable emotional relationship. I haven’t read Act 4 yet. I will do that tomorrow morning and let you know if I have seen any others. But right now I’m seeing so many connections that I believe it could have easily been a source of inspiration to Friel when he wrote the show. Maybe Maire, Sarah, and Bridget are the three sisters!! :D

[about 12 hours pass] I just finished the show, I forgot to point out that along with the many familiarities between Vershinin and Yolland they are both also high ranked people in the army. I discovered they are speaking French not Latin in Three Sisters. Also the Baron was murdered in the end which could relate to what supposedly happened with Yolland. One thing that became very clear was that in both plays the characters spoke frequently of wanting to escape the place they live and the value that knowledge can have in their life and some of their desires to expand their knowledge.

I am attempting to make a connection with the motifs. At the end of Three Sisters Chebutykin says 'What does anything matter, anyways?' which has a different way of expressing itself in Translations because of the different characters and cultures but i did get a sense of 'lets get drunk, history repeats itself, what does all this drama really amount to in the end' kind of vibe from Hugh at the end."



Thanks, Geoff! Very perceptive! Friel is often compared to Chekhov, glad you can see it so well.
--Lurana

Translations Cast

Translations by Brian Friel

CAST LIST

MANUS Brad Larson

SARAH Eleanor Svaton

JIMMY JACK Tommy Barron

MAIRE Rikki Jo Hickey

DOALTY Geoff Bangs

BRIDGET Jenn Thomas

HUGH Craig Howes

OWEN Danny Randerson

CAPTAIN LANCEY Adrian Fiala-Clark

Lt. YOLLAND Nathan Garrett

Translated signs

I had a wonderful meeting yesterday with Jan Fried of KCC and her friend Missy Keast who is a storyteller and has done lots of work with deaf theatre productions. We are moving forward with a plan to have all 5 performances of "Translations" interpreted into American Sign Language. Lots to figure out, grant money to apply for, seating configuration to settle on, etc, but very encouraging to hear their ideas and enthusiasm for the project. And it was fascinating to watch Jan translating my words to Missy from spoken English to ASL, and telling me in English how Missy was replying. It was a thematic enactment of the play!

Jan sees parallels in the play to the historical suppression of deaf culture and language. She also had some great comments about how Hawai'i has a different local ASL dialect, which she tries to preserve in her own signing so that it will not die out.

Friel's diary notes on writing Translations

Friel kept notes during the process of writing Translations. These are excerpts:

15 May 1979
. . . One thing that keeps eluding me: the wholeness, the integrity of that Gaelic past. Maybe because I don't believe in it.

16 May 1979
I can envisage a few scenes: the hedge-school classroom; the love-scene between lovers who have no common language; the actual task of places being named. Nothing more.

22 May 1979
The thought occurred to me that what I was circling around was a political play and the thought panicked me. But it is a political play--how can that be avoided? If it is not political, what is it? Inaccurate history? Social drama?

23 May 1979
I believe that I am reluctant to even name the characters, maybe because the naming-taming process is what the play is about.

29 May 1979
. . . I am now at the point at which the play must be begun and yet all I know about it is this:
I don't want to write a play about Irish peasants being suppressed by English sappers.
I don't want to write a threnody on the death of the Irish language.
I don't want to write a play about land-surveying.
Indeed I don't want to write a play about naming places.
And yet portions of all of these are relevant. Each is part of the atmosphere in which the real play lurks.


5 November 1979
The play, named Translations, completed. . . .All art is a diary of evolution; markings that seemed true of and for their time; adjustments in stance and disposition; opening to what seemed the persistence of the moment. Map-makings.




source: Murray, Christopher, ed. Brian Friel: Essays, Diaries, Interviews: 1964-1999.

Sense Images

A list of sense images from Translations. I always compile these, in the hopes that looking at the sensory world of the play will aid me and the designers in creating that world. It's really in a neat chart, but I like how it comes out in a jumble below, more like poetry. In doing it, I noticed how much was broken or bitter.


Sense Sight Sound Smell Touch Taste
ACT ONE
Broken implements Gurnts Filthy smoke (Ulysses’ cloak) Wooden posts Pail of water
Soiled towel Nasal sounds Sarah’s flowers chains Bowl of milk
Dusty Music, hornpipe reel The sweet smell Ulysses: filthy hind skin Piece of bread
Shabby, filthy clothes Whistling through teeth “full as a pig” Pub drinks
Ulysses: fair skin, flaxen hair Bridget squeals Washing hands in water Strong tea, black
JJ: bald head Loud Lancey Cold bath whiseky
Flashing-eyed Athene
Hand-mirror
Black stalks
atlas
ACT TWO.i
Blank map Lancey’s screams Hot weather poteen
Black Ridge Music from Chatach house Wet dew Oranges from Dublin
Curly-haired laughter World’s old skin Potatoes
Fiddler, reel, guitar Warm Mediterranean buttermilk
Erosion “something is being eroded” Water in well
ACT TWO.ii
White skin Soaking grass, feet
clay
Soft hands
ACT THREE
Broken paper bag Whistling through teeth Sweet smell Rain Black tea
Fire Army tents building tears Soda bread
Fresh green land Maire’s invisible map
Fire
Hugh and JJ: wet
JJ’s spasm

to mix race

For some other research I'm doing this summer, I've been reading about miscegenation, a horrible word. The context I'm working in concerns the inter-marriage or inter-racial love between blacks and whites in the U.S. There are numerous plays about it in the late 19th and early 20th century. But in reading more about it, I realize that whereas I've only known it as applied to black-white relations, the word applies to all manner of boundary-crossing between all sorts of people (Jews and Christians, Asians and Caucasians, etc.)

Hugh O'Donnell would be proud of me here: the root of the word "miscegenation" is from the from Latin miscere ‘to mix’ + genus ‘race’

Anyway, I realize that to me, it's no big deal in Translations when Yolland and Maire get together, but of course in the world of the play their union is a form of miscegenation, a mixing of Irish and British, probably of Catholic and Protestant (although this play is oddly silent about religious matters). And a directorial challenge is how to convey the enormous significance of their taboo-breaking, for an audience who may not be aware of the chasm between Irish and British culture in this era. Although their II.ii love scene is so innocent and sincere, their miscegenation leads to the murder of Yolland.

JIMMY (to Maire): Do you know the Greek word endogamein? It means to marry within the tribe. And the word exogamein means to marry outside the tribe. And you don't cross those borders casually--both sides get very angry. Now, the problem is this: Is Athene sufficiently mortal or am I sufficiently godlike for the marriage to be acceptable to her people and to my people? You should think about that.

it reminds me of the problem of conveying to today's audience the taboo of a Montague loving a Capulet