If I can't see your watch, how will I know if you are rich?
should we schlock up the stage like stanislavsky?
if the design reads ‘rich’, then we are empathizing with rich people with the resources to exert some control over their present and future.
if the design reads ‘elegant’, then we are saying that the ‘culture’ of a place is created by and belongs to the aristocrats.
Both of those interpretations were intended for The Cherry Orchard. Maybe Stanislavsky felt the coming revolution. Maybe he needed to be very clear with his audience that he saw them - how silly they are, and that he knows why they are wonderful, and that they will be missed when they are gone.
Makes sense for The Cherry Orchard. Reading rich is disastrous for a contemporary play like Prayer for the French Republic. A rich family deciding where to live is a hard sell right now. The loss of a place where you fit in because you participated in the creation of music funded by the aristocracy for the aristocracy, also not a good story for the current moment.
A double doctor household in Paris is not “rich”, though. They are well-off and financially stable. They have plenty of options. But their daily lives have been filled to the brim with making a living in a hard profession for decades. Just like New York City, LA, San Francisco and Boston; a double doctor family living in the city means many adults living in a 3 or 4 room apartment with a tiny kitchen.
If I were Stanislavsky directing and acting in A Prayer for the French Republic right now, I would insist on stuff. The stuff of a family making a life. And I would put it in the average square footage of a Paris family 2.5-bedroom - 700 sqft, 500 if we never see the bathroom or kitchen. Perfect for a 1,200 sqft small black box stage! 700sqft for seating, 500 sqft for being close-quarters city dwellers.
Look at these photos of a woman in her Paris apartment with her three grown sons. Look how much space they take up! I guess they cook, look at all that stuff above the stove. I think the guy on the phone on the couch is sitting in front of a photo of himself in that same exact spot.
The photographer is A. Abbas. I think he would have stood back further and gotten a wider shot if he could. These spaces are too tight for that.
Can you imagine how much heartbreaking work would go into moving out of that apartment? You would have to box up the photo of the kid on the couch and put the couch on the curb! Have you ever made a recipe that called for saffron? held that little box in your hand at the grocery store and asked yourself if this pasta dish is worth an extra $15? all those spices would hit the trash in a move.
How about this family below?
Again, he would have taken a wider shot if he could. This one below gets the most of the apartment into the frame.
If I just looked at the shot directly above, I might assume that this is a very well-off family. That maybe the woman in the glasses is a home-health aid. That the man with the newspaper works in finance. The proportion of this room, if we look at this shot, seem grand. Aristocratic. It’s that slim and tall aspect ratio. 1:3 or maybe even 1:4?
But, she is a teacher and that is her mother. We don’t know what he does, but they go grocery shopping together, which tells me that no one else is helping with the food prep. They have 2 teenagers that live with them, and 2 grown daughters that have 5 children that seem like they spend a lot of time at the apartment as well.
That is a lot of living for those few rooms.
“Josh says these are not fancy French elegant people. It’s not that kind of play.”
The director told me that. When I was asked to design Prayer for the French Republic. I remember that as the response to my suggestion that we find the networks of French and Algerian Jewish people in town. Fancy French-ness should not have been the knee-jerk reaction to, let’s talk to some folks in those communities. So, maybe there was something in between those two statements. Either way, the connection of French and French-Algerian Jewish people to fanciness is somebody’s knee-jerk reaction.
Some of the news from Paris in 2016 was about attacks or general terror, half were of labor protests and the rest looked like these:
Most families have migration stories. Dramatic ones are hitting their denouements in every city right now. The loud backlash in theater because shows about a financially secure population of people considering migrating are at best an error of omission, and at worst an act of aggression. Audiences and theater-goers are having that reaction that my 13 year old had to The Cherry Orchard - wait. why do I care about these rich people losing their 2nd! house? their vacation! house?
A Prayer for the French Republic is about a family giving up on their homeland and leaving. Theater audiences, especially in cities like Boston, are full of people with stories like this one. People with enough money or connections to get out with their lives…on an airplane.
If you design the family to be financially stable, but not elegant, because city living and more than full-time jobs don’t allow for effortless elegance - then you will get the empathy of the vast majority of the audience. And then, we can concentrate on why this show is actually worthwhile:
What principles did we build our society on? have we lived up to those principles? when we don’t, what do we lose?
not a family story. a society story.