And a big part of that is, get rid of the gap between audience and actor."Īnd it doesn't end there. One of the things you have to do is change the venue. "How do we make them adaptable? That can be through adaptations, such as what I'm doing, but there's more to it than that.
![ariel dorfman purgatorio ariel dorfman purgatorio](https://c1.alamy.com/thumbs/2ej1708/adjoa-andoh-woman-in-purgatorio-by-ariel-dorfman-at-the-arcola-theatre-london-e8-18012008-set-design-lighting-charles-edwards-costumes-jon-morrell-director-daniele-guerra-2ej1708.jpg)
"How do we take classical works and make them relevant to modern audiences?" Kanter says. Kanter, who's producing and directing Purgatorio as the graduate thesis for his MFA in Performing Arts from SCAD, has cast Amaya Murphy ( Agnes of God, The Three Musketeers) as Woman, and Daniel Thrasher ( She Kills Monsters) as Man.Īnd he's staging it - with set designer Chris Schenning - in the least likely place: The second floor "event space" at the Sparetime. It's not what we expect, but there's definitely a positivity involved. And therefore there's a positive - there's a hopeful, optimistic ending. "Dorfman writes with a very humanist perspective. This "therapy loop" just might result in some real understanding, he adds. "Is it a battle to the finish? Or is it a meeting of minds, a meeting in the middle? And I think that's universal." Whether the characters are named Jason, Medea, Man, Woman or You and I, their backstabbing back-and-forth is relevant to us all. It's a story about love and redemption - granted, they created some ridiculous crimes in their lives - not about the Greek tragedy of Medea." "Even once you find out who they are, the whole point of this play is it humanizes Medea and Jason. And we know something has happened the audience is trying to piece it together."
![ariel dorfman purgatorio ariel dorfman purgatorio](https://scholars.duke.edu/file/t3325252/thumb_image_3325252.jpg)
"When I first picked up the play, what I loved was that you didn't know it was Jason and Medea for the first 23 pages," says Alexander Nathan Kanter, who's directing Purgatorio Oct. With one or the other dressed in the clinical white coat of a therapist, they spend eternity interrogating each other. Two characters, called Man and Woman, are in that color-less, form-less place called Purgatory. The unspeakably tragic couple (Medea and her husband Jason) live again, in a sense, in the one-act play Purgatorio, from the Chilean playwright Ariel Dorfman. The yin/yang of the male/female relationship was famously explored by the Greek playwright Euripides in the tragedy Medea, which was staged here in Savannah, quite memorably, just about a month ago. It was Jean-Paul Sartre who insisted that "Hell is other people." Even so, we just can't stay away from one another, and the inherent drama in every human relationship works inexplicably like the petrol that keeps our internal engines running.