(Commenting on an Ateneo thesis production, not the film adaptation)
A great script allows for great performances.
Ever since I discovered the play sometime last year, I’ve wanted to watch a staging of it. The play is right up my alley: a two-hander that allows for great performances, thanks to a stellar script.
This thesis production is spectacular because what playwright Marsha Norman did was already spectacular. However, director Marta Muñoz makes solid creative choices that really give this staging a lived-in quality.
For example: Jessie, the daughter who wants to kill herself, is antsy as hell. The director conveys this by Jessie’s incessant tapping of the telephone’s switch.
Marsha Norman also portrays Jessie as someone who is absolutely exhausted with being the doer. This is conveyed through her commands and reminders to her mom Thelma. It succeeds in conveying so much about Jessie’s depression.
Yet even though it is Jessie who says the line “‘night, mother,” and who drives the play, it is the character Thelma that really blew me away.
I will be vulnerable. As someone who had suicidal thoughts and as someone who had episodes of intense depression (bouts of sobbing), Thelma is written in an incisive way that really reflects the lived experiences of mothers who had an immensely depressed child. I saw so much of my mother in Thelma, down to the self-blame and the apologies. It was such an impactful character. Not because of the emotions she expresses, but rather how authentic her character was. It was so, so, sooo real, and it’s because of that character (and the marvelous Grace Nicolas Shuke) that I found myself with tears in my eyes.
So when the door is closed at the end, I just felt deeper for Thelma.
And the calm after the gunshot reinforces the authenticity overflowing in this stunner of a play.
(Commenting on an Ateneo thesis production, not the film adaptation)
A great script allows for great performances.
Ever since I discovered the play sometime last year, I’ve wanted to watch a staging of it. The play is right up my alley: a two-hander that allows for great performances, thanks to a stellar script.
This thesis production is spectacular because what playwright Marsha Norman did was already spectacular. However, director Marta Muñoz makes solid creative choices that really give this staging a lived-in quality.
For example: Jessie, the daughter who wants to kill herself, is antsy as hell. The director conveys this by Jessie’s incessant tapping of the telephone’s switch.
Marsha Norman also portrays Jessie as someone who is absolutely exhausted with being the doer. This is conveyed through her commands and reminders to her mom Thelma. It succeeds in conveying so much about Jessie’s depression.
Yet even though it is Jessie who says the line “‘night, mother,” and who drives the play, it is the character Thelma that really blew me away.
I will be vulnerable. As someone who had suicidal thoughts and as someone who had episodes of intense depression (bouts of sobbing), Thelma is written in an incisive way that really reflects the lived experiences of mothers who had an immensely depressed child. I saw so much of my mother in Thelma, down to the self-blame and the apologies. It was such an impactful character. Not because of the emotions she expresses, but rather how authentic her character was. It was so, so, sooo real, and it’s because of that character (and the marvelous Grace Nicolas Shuke) that I found myself with tears in my eyes.
So when the door is closed at the end, I just felt deeper for Thelma.
And the calm after the gunshot reinforces the authenticity overflowing in this stunner of a play.
