Into the Woods
At its core, Into the Woods is a story about community responsibility, about what we owe to each other. We see both a heightened, fantastical world, but simultaneously see one that feels instantly relatable, where individuals make hasty and morally gray decisions in order to pursue goals they cannot quite explain why they want to reach in the first place. It asks us to consider the consequences of what we do and how we do it, both in our everyday lives and as we face threats to our own sense of stability and normalcy.
A Giant ravages the land in Act II, spurred on by anger, revenge, a direct and immediate physical manifestation of the wrongs the characters have done to their community, to their land, and to each other. In its original iteration assumed (perhaps, in light of all of this, inaccurately) to be a metaphor for AIDS, the Giant is not important for what it itself represents but what its effects are on the community. Whether depicting war, disease, the climate crisis, or just the vague concept of a threat, we see lives upended in the way our own were recently, in the way those displaced across the world continue to be, and the characters, once dissatisfied in their own stability are immediately flung into an uncertain future. And once again, they turn on each other, blame each other, cast doubt on anyone in order to avoid introspection and moral responsibility. That is, until there is no one left to blame but themselves. At first a comedy and then a tragedy, Into the Woods has everything a good story should. For the designers, it is a world waiting to be sculpted. We tell stories with morals, and everything we see onstage is a representation of something in our own lives; the design of the show will embrace both the fantastical and the literal, creating a heightened, absurd, dreamlike world that contains elements we all recognize. I imagine a set lined with elements from our story, each used by the characters as we progress until the world itself has started to fall apart in front of our eyes. I imagine found objects and crafts as props, things you could use at home to tell a story the way our Baker tells this story to his son. Lighting and sound will be both surrealist and literal depending on the moment. The joy and the beauty of this show is that we get to shape it, to decide what gets to be real and what is shrouded in fantasy. From a tower to a beanstalk to a Giant to a golden-egg-laying hen, there is so much here to create. Directed by Orly Salik Produced by Drew Lent Stage Managed by Joey LaScala Technical Direction by Molly Kenney April 13-16 & 20-22, 2024 Poulton Hall, Stage III |