Love's Labors Lost: Act 1, Scene 2 (draft 2)

May 22, 2008

Act 1, Scene 2 (draft 2)

(As Woman becomes Queen.)

Snow White awakens and walks amongst us, cleaning us off and dressing us up with flowers.

Queen summons Snow White. Snow White obeys and gets to work cleaning Mirrors. Queen leaves. A Mirror follows.

Near Mirror, Snow White finds a pair of Queen's shoes. She examines them as if they are relics. She slips them on, appraising herself in Mirrors. She seems more and more like Queen. It is an unsettling resemblance. Maybe the shoes are a bit too small, though.

Snow White daydreams about three PRINCES. There is nothing charming about them. They are hard and rough, maybe even a little bloody. Despite their royal attire, they are more like wild lions than men. Mirrors join us as SPECTATORS of a strange circus where . . .

The first Prince does various tricks with 3 eggs. At the end of his performance, he cracks them open. Instead of yolk, each one bears one kind of treasure: silver, gold, and gems.

The second Prince has a fine cloak. He puts it on and vanishes, reappearing in our world. He takes a few trinkets from us and brings them back to her. He gives the cloak to Snow White to try.

Snow White dons the cloak and goes to the underworld.

(Underworld. Spectators - and we - are GHOSTS floating in limbo.)

Snow White travels amongst us, retrieves an OLD WOMAN.

(World of the living. Ghosts become MIRRORS again, as do we.)

Snow White returns with Old Woman.

The third Prince has a simple bottle or skein full of water. He gives some water to Old Woman, who is instantly revived and rejuvenated.

Queen returns. Daydream disperses.

[Listening to: "Venus in Furs" by The Velvet Underground]

Snow White notices Queen and cowers at her feet. Queen beckons Snow White to return the shoes. Snow White obeys. Queen lets the moment hover.

Queen whips Snow White. Her measured strikes - and Snow White's carefully timed trembling - carry the weight of a religious ritual with a strong BDSM twist. Her strikes grow more feverish and unrestrained. Once exhausted, she dismisses Snow White.

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Words, Words, Words

. . . a lot of it [fostering rather than smothering students' playwriting] has to do with finding a way to construct a dialogue about ongoing work that empowers the writer. A lot of it has to do with making sure there's a diversity of voices around you. A lot of it has to do with thinking of the writing program as a brain trust for writers, not as some infantilization in which the dramaturg gets the power. And basically trying to find a place where everyone's aesthetic in the room grows larger rather than smaller. There are many ways to do that. It's really not a hard thing to do.
--Paula Vogel, interview with Ann Linden in The Playwright's Muse

Here is what seems to me an elementary truth that must precede any other: namely, that the theater, an independent and autonomous art, must, in order to revive or simply to live, realize what differentiates it from text, pure speech, literature, and all other fixed and written means.
--Antonin Artaud, letter, 9/15/1931

I can take any empty space and call it a bare stage. A man walks across this empty space whilst someone else is watching him, and this is all I need for an act of theatre to be engaged.
--Peter Brook, The Empty Space

My work is characterized by one thing above all --- invention. In theatre we imagine the world, we do not record it, we are not documentary makers. I hold all social realism and journalistic theatre in contempt. It is a sordid habit. And the social realists have the impertinence to pretend they are 'telling the truth…'
--Howard Barker, interview

Women and writers of color are still seen as threats because, in essence, when a woman or writer of color is defining a play world, there's another definition of what our society is, and that's very threatening.
--Paula Vogel, interview with Ann Linden in The Playwright's Muse

Through this experience [working on " . . . and last week it was a mountain"] I learned the importance of the life and the dynamics under the words, and began to see the power of working from the silent space within - the emotions, the images, the experience and the feelings - rather than relying on the words.
--Sande Shurin, Transformational Acting: A Step Beyond

How does it happen that . . . the Occidental theater does not see theater under any other aspect than as a theater of dialogue?
--Antonin Artaud, Theater and Its Double

All conventions are imaginable, but they depend on the absence of rigid forms.
--Peter Brook, The Open Door

I never 'say' anything in my work. I invent a world. Let others decide what is being 'said'. Nor do I claim to tell the truth or enlighten people. We are suffocated by writers who want to enlighten us with their truths. For me, the theatre is beautiful because it is a secret, and secrets seduce us, we all want to share secrets. That is also its politics, if it has any politics at all. And modern democracies hate secrets, they want everything transparent. Obviously the critics collaborate in this desire to expose everything to the light of day, they are the police force, after all.
--Howard Barker, interview

I think that form is content . . . I've always been more interested . . . in the formal devices and the structure rather than in the subject matter . . . I really am a follower of Viktor Shklovsky, who said that in some ways the subject matter doesn't even matter. It's whether or not we see the subject matter anew that matters.
--Paula Vogel, interview with Ann Linden in The Playwright's Muse

I am well aware that the language of gestures and postures, dance and music, is less capable of analyzing a character, revealing a man's thoughts, or elucidating states of consciousness clearly and precisely, than is verbal language, but who ever said the theater was created to analyze a character, to resolve conflicts of love and duty, to wrestle with all the problems of a typical and psychological nature that monopolize our contemporary stage?
--Antonin Artaud, Theater and Its Double

The mediocre artist prefers not to take risks, which is why he is conventional.
--Peter Brook, The Open Door

"Transcendence became my life theme. I wanted to be lifted beyond everyday circumstances and everyday reality."
--Sande Shurin, Transformational Acting: A Step Beyond

I actually think of writing for the stage as not writing . . . It's about structuring, about gaps between the language that are really filled in by the collaborators and the process. It's all about indirection rather than a direct statement . . . It's like a three-dimensional chess game in a way. If I say this, will the director go in this direction? If I say this, will the actor respond? And one of the delights of the process is actually not having your intention fulfilled, but finding out at times that other people's interpretation or intention is actually more interesting than you originally thought of.
--Paula Vogel, interview with Ann Linden in The Playwright's Muse

The person who has an idea of what this language is will be able to understand us. We write only for him. --Antonin Artaud, letter, 9/28/1932