Response to "Feel the Bend"

Affirmations:

I found both days of the “Feel the Bend” dramaturgical workshops engaging and productive in terms of the narrative terrain they traversed. On the first day, I was most intrigued by the use of our “personal beaches” to evoke sensations and serve as a precursor to the categorization of our own hairs and memories. We spoke briefly in class about the difficulty of trying to encapsulate something as monolithic as the beach in a small container, and difficult as this may be, I found it paralleled the activity of selecting, defining, and naming our hair/memories. Just as creating a hand-held beach required excising and reducing many of its components, cataloging our memories required breaking the memory down into disparate elements and then selecting which elements would fit (or we wanted to fit), onto the card.

I was struck by how different my personal beach was from my expectations. I’m from the fine, soft beaches of Florida and I had not identified Anna’s beach as one of the colder, rockier beach environments. One would be hard-pressed to find seaweed, shells, or any other natural elements in the beaches of Florida. Everything about her relationship to the beach (and her and Bettie’s relationship to the beach) seems to coalesce more with this image. I think this seascape, rife with seaweed and shells, grains of sands of an array of sizes, holds some potentially exciting energy. What is it like to spend a day at a beach and not know exactly what you’ll find, to not know what lies beneath you?

The second workshop explored various levels of intimacy (as dictated by space and location) in Carol and Anna’s friendship. I was struck by the incredible spectrum of possibilities for their friendship, ranging from a Carol who pines for Anna’s slightest acknowledgement to two women who know one another better than they know themselves. The improvisation generated a wealth of material with which to explore their relationship.

Questions:

What is Carol’s marriage like?
Is Carol homophobic?
Does Carol have a particular investment in Anna’s success with one partner over the other?
How does this play change if the main relationship investigated is Carol and Anna’s friendship?
Does the script need to explicate the type of beach Anna frequents?
How far do they live from the beach?
Are Anna’s former relationships/lovers amongst her already cataloged memories? Or do they have yet to be catalogued?
When Anna adds a hair/memory to her collection, does she improve upon it by what she writes? To what extent?

Opinions:

I really loved the moment when Daniel (and Soo-Jin, I believe) were improving and Daniel grabbed a bit of hair off of Soo-Jin. I can’t help but wonder what it might be like if more of this were sprinkled throughout. Even if we don’t learn how/why Anna collects and catalogues hairs, what might it be like as an organizing principle or structuring device to witness “hair moments” in scenes throughout the play?

I miss the poetic language from the beginning of the play and its relationship to scarcity, isolation, and the beach.


One of the questions I had from the first time we read this play in class and still have now is, “Does Carol have a particular investment in either of Anna’s relationships succeeding/failing?” I entered the improv on Day 2 with this as one of my questions, and I realized how difficult a question it was to answer, but I also realized how relentlessly it came up. Just as much as I (playing Carol) wanted to know what Anna’s status was with John at every moment, George (as Anna) wanted to know WHY I wanted to know. This question emerged several times throughout both of our scenes and in the scenes of some of the other Carols and Annas. I can’t help thinking that Anna’s “choice” has a specific impact on Carol—what power does it hold over her? Can it confirm/deny her homophobia (if she is homophobic?) Does she want to live vicariously through Anna? What exactly is at stake for Carol in this whole process?