It's about someone that taught here and has really made an impact on the world. Hallie Flanagan was really at the forefront of bringing experimental theater to Vassar and to this country. We're working on a show about Vassar, so that's something that has not happened here in a very, very long time, if ever. Everything's connected in this play. We are working with real professionals on this show.
Things just have to happen. Working with a great director is always refreshing and awesome. Usually the playwright isn't sitting in the audience. Three words for the play.
Whimsical. Playful. Fluid. Ensemble. Intimate.
Professional. Goofy. Fast-paced.
High stakes. Exhilarating. Fun. And fun. Fun.
I actually didn't remember that it was the sesquicentennial of the school and I certainly didn't know that word but I quickly learned it. I started thinking you know maybe we could write a new play about Hallie Flanagan. Hallie Flanagan was a professor of theater here.
She was actually Vassar's first professor of dramatic production. She started the Vassar Experimental Theater and mounted productions that would really still be considered avant-garde even by today's standards. In 1935, when the U.S. was still in the throes of the Great Depression, she was appointed director of the Federal Theater Project, which put thousands of actors and directors back to work.
The project was, unfortunately, eventually shut down by the House Un-American Activities Committee. They accused Flanagan of having communist ties and sympathies. But her impact on the American stage is huge and undeniable. At Vassar, her legacy is in the buildings as well as in really everything that we do here. Hallie, you say just like that?
Jen came to me with this idea of doing a new play about Hallie Flanagan. I learned that the first play Hallie directed at Vassar was A Marriage Proposal by Anton Chekhov. How? Hallie had been captivated by the groundbreaking theater that was being done in Russia the previous year when she was there on a Guggenheim. She was the first woman to get a Guggenheim.
I found this mention of this scientist that she had met, an American scientist who was working in Pavlov's lab. Our time in Leningrad together was isolated like that. Two Americans, two weeks in a foreign city.
I was excited to enter her life right as she was coming. coming back from that trip, which happened to be when she was starting at Vassar. Ultimately, Playground is an ode to theater and a love story.
I think that Maddie's done a wonderful job of capturing a woman who is on top of her game in many, many aspects, but also looking to find love as well. I think once you find that story, it becomes clear almost like constellations. Once you see what the pattern is, the stars aren't just anymore.
morphous stars, they are making their way into shapes in your head and you can use them to serve the story you found. Really exciting to us was the site-specific nature of this play. We're taking a production that actually did occur here at Vassar, directed by a Vassar professor, a very famous one, and kind of reviving it now with these students of 2011. Many of the characters in the play are actually students at Vassar and it's really fun to have students at Vassar playing students at Vassar. It's Emma St. Vincent Millay! Once in a lifetime champ!
It was really important to me and to Maddie to capture the energy of what goes into putting on a production. And really the whole theater we've turned into a playground and you never know where an actor is going to jump out from. The play within the play, A Marriage Proposal, by Chekhov takes place on stage but also in the aisles of the theater. We have action in the parterre area, people up in the higher level balconies where they run spotlights so you get to see the person running a spotlight because they're actually in the play.
We have action in the catwalk above the audience, people that will have to crane their necks a little bit just to see. So it's pretty fun, it's sort of like we're... You sit, you'll get a little bit of a different experience.
This is a site-specific piece. It doesn't mean you can't do it anywhere else, but it's written for Vassar on a certain stage, and we're doing it on the modern version of that stage. So it felt right because we decided to really root it in a place.
I think specificity always serves a story. Maddie was talking in rehearsals about how if you make a story really specific and small, then you actually wind up making it a bigger story. Not everyone has been the head of the Federal Theatre Project, but most people have had a broken heart or two.
Whether it's act in their role or hang some lights, they are just kind of up for anything. That is definitely something that I've noticed with our cast. You know, it's a group of just really game people. You know, they really just want to help make the production as good as possible.