Hello everyone, we are at our last video discussion lecture. Aren't you excited? We're going to be talking about one of my favorite plays we read in this course, and certainly the most contemporary play, Las Meninas by Lynn Nottage.
I'm going to dive right into this because I don't want to take too long. I want to remind us of our rules for creating an inclusionary theater space. Again, we are going to make space for each other's opinions. I'm going to use I statements rather than trying to generalize or assume that my neighbor thinks the same thing that I do. I'm going to acknowledge that this online classroom is a safe zone.
I'm going to have an awareness of triggers of others, knowing that what triggers me is not necessarily the same thing as what triggers someone else, and that I can respect and acknowledge that something might be triggering to someone. I'm going to speak through my lived experiences and I'm going to respect the lived experiences of others, understanding that I have no possible way of understanding the lived experience of someone else or having lived the lived experience of someone else because everyone's journey is unique. I can respect and understand the needs and nuances of other people's lived experiences. And lastly, I'm going to avoid abstraction or generalization.
so as not to stereotype or cause hurt using insensitive or overly generalized statements. All right. So let's talk about Lynn Nottage, our playwright.
We briefly mentioned her in our previous lecture when we were talking about Black American theater makers. Lynn Nottage was born in 1964. She is an African-American female playwright. She is the only female playwright to win two Pulitzer Prizes, one for Ruined in 2009 and one for Sweat in 2017. both extremely different plays.
Ruined is about the women victims of the civil war in the former Democratic Republic of Congo and them being sold into the sex industry and having to do sex work and being abused by the soldiers. And then Sweat is about American middle-class or lower middle-class blue-collar workers in contemporary America. So extremely different plays.
Lynn Nottage is currently. She is currently writing. She produces many things on Broadway and around the country. So she's a very successful contemporary playwright. She's also very politically active.
She was a key organizer of the We See You White American Theater Manifesto and Collective that we talked about in the last lecture. She was very prominent in that and very outspoken. And also, she puts her money where her mouth is in terms of when she was writing Ruined, she went over to the former Democratic Republic of Congo to do research interviews, similar to how Moray Neale Hurston did anthropological research in the southern states in America during the 1920s and 30s.
Lynn Nottage went over to the Congo and both did research with these women, actual interviews, finding out what their life was like, and then helped by providing some humanitarian aid and organizing humanitarian aid to help. these women move on with their lives from this trauma and get education and better lives. So again, she is both prolific as a writer as well as a social activist. And I love these quotes from Lynn Nottage. She says regarding her characters, I find my characters and stories in many varied places.
Sometimes they pop out of newspaper articles, obscure historical texts. lively dinner party conversations, and some even crawl out of the dusty, remote recesses of my imagination. And clearly, as we read this play, Las Meninas, we can see that obscure historical text, there is a reference to the character Louisee, and that Lynn Nottage has created sort of this whole play, this fantasy about what might have happened.
Similarly, she says, I am interested in people living in the margins of society. And I do have a mission to tell the stories of women of color in particular. I feel we've been present throughout history, but our voices have been neglected.
And again, I find that very interesting considering one of the four major characters of Las Meninas, this woman who's becoming a nun who has been marginalized, literally. She was known as the Black Nun of Moray, and we'll talk about that in just a second. and claimed to, it's possible that she was the daughter of Queen Maria. So there are many historical allusions in Las Meninas, specifically Louisee Maria Teresa, who is the younger character, the Black Nun of Moray.
This was a historical figure. She is mentioned in documents as belonging to a convent. And there were rumors that she might possibly have been related to someone at court.
Lynn Nottage went and did some research and spent, I think, a year or two researching. all the documents available and created this historical fiction of a play, which could or could not be true. She is not denying the possibility that Louisee Maria Teresa might be related to Queen Maria.
Obviously, King Louise XIV, the Sun King, he's the one who built Versailles. He was the most grandiose, the most opulent, fancy, lavish through ridiculous parties. He is a caricature in the play, his character, but he was a real character. And in fact, when I visited Versailles, the palace, and when you walk through that palace, you say, man, I now know why the revolution happened. He did not believe in holding back, let's say.
Very bougie would be the term we might use now. Queen Maria Teresa of Spain, who was married to King Louise and became the Queen of France. She was a real character and is portrayed.
very similarly to historical portraits of Queen Maria Teresa. And in fact, you'll notice that Lynn Nottage writes her, we'll talk about language, but Lynn Nottage writes her text in the play so that we are very aware of Queen Maria Teresa's accent, her being a foreigner from Spain, even though while everyone would have spoken French at this time, it's not as if the play is written in French. But Lynn Nottage very humorously conveys Queen Maria Teresa's accent.
Nabo Sensigali was a real documented character in history. We know that he died in 1667 is what the records show. We do not know when he was born, probably due to racial insensitivity.
No one in the French court would have documented when the African little person, what his origins were. They only know of him once he got to court as a present for Queen Maria Teresa. So he was a jester or an entertainer at court. in the court of King Louise.
And I love that she gives us this note about the setting. The setting of this play is 1695 looking back on 1664, which begs the question of whose story are we really telling in this play? Is it the story of Queen Maria Teresa and Navos and Sugali and their illicit romance, which is in 1664? Certainly that is where the brunt of the plot. is, and where certainly all the humor and the passion of the play is in the heart of the play.
And yet, Louisee Maria Teresa is the narrator. She's the one talking to us as the audience and explaining, here is my origin, here is where I come from, I want you to know this. And that's taking place in 1695, when she's about to become a nun.
So I think it's a really interesting that this is how Lynn Nottage chose to describe the setting. This is from the text of the play, rather than... She could have easily said the play takes place in 1664 and 1695, yet she makes it very clear which one is the focus.
And the very title, Las Meninas, is an allusion to the very famous painting by Diego Velázquez. Las Meninas is in art history. This is a very important painting, again from the 17th century, so right around the same time that this play takes place.
And this is a picture of the Infanta, the Spanish princess, daughter of the king and queen. And yet this portrait, this picture has mystified art historians for a long time because of the notion of perspective. We're not really sure what we're looking at. If this were a typical portrait, and here is the subject of the portrait with her servants, Las Meninas, where would the artist be?
Well, the artist would be where we are because the princess is looking at the artist, supposedly. And yet. If we, if where I'm sitting looking at this painting, if I'm the artist, who is this guy on the left?
Isn't that an artist who's painting on a canvas? And if that's an artist painting on a canvas, how is he, and he's looking at me just as the princess is, then how is he seeing what to draw? Oh, well, maybe he's looking in a mirror of the entire scene. And we, where we are sitting, the viewer is a mirror. But if we're a mirror.
then who are these two people in the mirror at the back of the room? Those are actually the images of the king and queen of Spain. They've been compared to the infantes, the princess's parents. But if they're in a mirror back there, then... Why are they not reflecting us?
Who is in the mirror here? There's all sorts of perspectives wrong. In addition, who is this random man standing on the staircase looking at the scene as if he owns everything? And it turns out that that is theorized to be the cousin of Velázquez, the painter, now being glamorized and being put into this painting. So there's all sorts of perspective issues about this painting.
And don't forget, there is a character in the play, Las Meninas, the painter. whose job it is to paint the royal portraits of the queen and the king. And remember the queen even says to him, I want you to paint me look, make me look better than I look, make my face thinner, make me look pretty. And the painter talks to Naboos and Sugali about this notion of disappearing and being present, commemorating a moment in time or being erased.
And lest we forget the theme of being created and erased. Louise, at the end of the play, literally erases Naboo Sensigali. He has him executed.
And frankly, it's as if he doesn't exist. Same with Louisee. When she becomes a nun, the whole reason she's telling us her story is that that's the last of the story. We will not know about it after she becomes a nun. And history has proven, correct?
There's a reference to the Black Nun of Moray, but we have no idea if she was related to Queen Maria Teresa or not. So this play deals a lot with theatricality versus realism. What genre would you describe Las Meninas?
Certainly there is over-the-top melodrama. There's some romanticism. There's also some mysticism, especially with Louisee as she's bathing and sort of becoming a nun and just talking to the rest of the convent.
There is lots of humor. There's a lot of comedy. there's also tragedy.
Nabooo is killed at the end of the play. And their love, Nabooo and Queen Maria, certainly is a very tragic romance, ill-fated, as it were. They seem to be the only comfort and solace for each other as strangers in a strange land. Language, music, and spectacle. Louise, especially, constantly complains about Queen Maria not speaking French.
and makes fun of her for her accent and for her poor language skills and for screaming, for shouting at him all the time. These are very explicit, direct references to language in the play. Music, we have some dances. Naboot does some entertaining dances as well.
And the audio landscape of the play. And spectacle, we have these incredible costumes of 17th century France. We have the court of Louise which was very opulent. Again, this is the man who created Versailles.
So depending on how the production is done, you can have very... I've seen a production done where there was an entire mirror on the ceiling so that you saw two versions of everything happening. And also the spectacle of Nabooo being a little person and having dark skin being from Africa compared to Queen Maria and the court of Louise.
who would traditionally have painted their faces white or powdered their faces white with and powdered wigs. Those are very different looks and there's a lot of contrast there. Is there a theme? Lynn Nottage opens this play with a Yoruba quote saying the white man who invented the pencil also invented the eraser and this notion of creation versus erasing.
And the victor writes the history, right? And when we don't get to necessarily, who knows who will tell your story? And certainly we see that about Naboot as well as Louisee. But also this notion of art versus reality, of ideal versus real. And the other, embracing the other and being a foreigner and feeling out of place.
There's a lot of themes going on here. What type of theatre space do you think would work best if we were doing this play? Would you like to see it in a large proscenium style theatre, where all the action is happening within a picture frame?
Maybe a three-quarter thrust, where a catwalk comes out into the audience, and the audience is on three sides? Would you like to see this in the round? There are some vulnerable moments that maybe we would want to watch completely surrounding the action. Would a black box where we're all right on top, only 50 people are in the space and we get to see everything as it's happening very intimately, would that suit this production well? Those are all decisions that a director and a producer would want to make.
And I love the way that time changes from 1695 to 1660 are handled in this play. Lynn Nottage does a lot with lighting effects to demonstrate when we're with Louisee in the convent versus when we're in a general wash of lighting. the whole stage is lit for the palace. I think those are some very beautiful moments.
So forget the working with a partner, but I really want you to think about here, and this might be one of our discussion topics in a different class, how evaluate the importance of cultural identity to at least two of the main characters, Louisee, Queen Maria, Nabooo, or King Louise. Where does their cultural identity fit into their character? We've talked about this in terms of diversity and inclusion. How important or not important is cultural identity?
to these characters. That's something I want to leave you with as we leave this play. And lastly, I'm going to shift gears here. This is the final lecture of the course.
So I want us to think about contemporary theater. This is an example. Las Meninas was written only a few years ago, and this is an example of contemporary theater. And speaking of contemporary theater, we have had some interesting challenges in the world of contemporary theater. So I want you to think about theater in the age of COVID.
physical limitations, whether that's how many people can fit into a space, can we have multiple people in a space socially distanced? How about actors? Do they have to wear masks? Are they unmasked? How hard is it to act with a mask on?
How do you test them to make sure they're healthy, et cetera? Costs. The cost of production has not gone down. In fact, it's probably gone up. And yet selling fewer tickets in order to socially distance.
means we're not making as much money in theater. We're not bringing in the same amount of revenue. How do we balance that? And can we balance that? These are challenges faced by theater companies.
Then there was the whole, I know, let's do a Zoom version of the play and we'll have everyone in their own living room and they'll chime in and read the parts together. Well, that gave you a very different experience of theater than sitting in the room, being in a live space where it happens. Some people enjoyed it. Most people didn't. Multimedia.
I know, let's... film theater and then let's broadcast it to the world. Hamilton did it and that was wildly successful.
Well, Hamilton was paid $70 million by Disney in order for the rights to sell that, to broadcast that recording. By the way, that was not live. That was a heavily edited and produced three-day recording of the original year and original cast of Hamilton 10 years ago, eight years ago.
had been archived and then Disney for $70 million bought the rights to play that video on Disney+. So everyone thinks that it's so easy to just video theater and then send it out to the masses. That is a very difficult and it's not free. And it's very different for a lot of theater companies than our example of Hamilton during the middle of the pandemic.
How do we deliver these things? Well, Netflix, Amazon, Hulu. These are all services that have subscriptions and you pay for them and they have codes and access codes.
For normal theater companies, it is very difficult to actually deliver these if not on a public service such as YouTube. How do you maintain, how do you manage who gets the codes and how we pay for that? There's no way to monetize these systems. And remember, theaters need money in order to operate, in order to keep doing what they're doing.
And lastly, attention spans. This is the age of TikTok. of Vine, of fast, fast, fast, get it done, 20 seconds or less. Theater usually is an hour and a half or two hours.
So how do you maintain someone's attention span when you're competing with TV shows on Netflix that maybe are 45 minutes long? These are all challenges that theater makers are facing today. They are addressing these challenges, but everything about this is changing the world of theater. And I challenge you all as people now who are theater appreciators, theater artists, theater innovators, you're going to be the ones that are going to tackle these problems, these issues, and find new and incredible things to do with theater. Which brings us to the end of the course.
We started this course with what is theater? What does theater mean? Why do theater?
And I leave you with what now do you think is the purpose of theater in the 21st century? How do we keep theater relevant? How do we make it important? How do we make theater something that is a vital part of all of our lives? For those of you who've been fortunate enough to experience a live performance, whether that was a concert or a theatrical production, you probably feel that there's something that you get from being there that you don't get from sitting at home and watching a screen.
How do we send that message out to the rest of the world? How do we get people to get off of their butts, get out of their homes, go out and support a live event? That is my challenge.
That's the gauntlet I throw to all of you. It has been an absolute pleasure having you in this course. I hope you've learned something.
I hope you've gained an appreciation for theatre. And have fun on the final projects, because these are fun projects where you get to exercise some creativity. Thank you so much for being with us. My name is Professor Cantor. Hopefully you'll come see a show here at IRSC.
We have an incredible performance season each year and all sorts of different styles of plays, musicals. music concerts, et cetera. We look forward to seeing you.
Thank you again and take care. Thank you.