Two local theater companies are exploring dramas about romantic relationships between women in new productions this month, with a semi-autobiographical debut and a lesbian take on a classic tale.
“Luckiest Kid” is a world-premiere, one-woman play with a Greek chorus written and performed by Martha Kemper. It is the story of a young woman who is inspired to love theater by her high-school drama teacher, a lesbian who sleeps with the student.
“I’ve been working on this play for a while,” Kemper said. “It’s definitely a story and a play, but it has some autobiographical experience. I went back to high school and drew on memories from there, especially the passion and the importance of my high-school drama courses that moved beyond that period. When that Sandusky story came out, I felt it was really time for me to bring the story to the stage.”
Kemper said the tone of the play at times doesn’t match the seriousness of the subject matter.
“It highlights a story that is difficult but the overall impression and tone is one of redemption and healing,” she said. “There’s humor in it, definitely. Because it goes back to this high-school class in the 1960s, all the music is live and made by the actors. It’s really fun. We’re doing a couple of numbers from high-school musicals. The tone of that is very bright. The very subject of student-teacher boundary violation is a serious one. Sometimes having humor and other theatrical elements help an audience to look at a serious theme or topic, and perhaps engage more fully and willingly. One of the really important scenes where the subject is directly discussed is a scene where the girl brings some of her most difficult questions to a puppet. There’s humor and theatricality in that scene that helps the audience get closer to the seriousness of the subject.”
Kemper added that the play also asks audiences to consider how the situation would be different if the genders and the sexuality of those involved were different.
“We’re able to do things visually at different moments where the director heightened images where there are two men together or a man and a woman together and then the two women together. It’s sort of inspiring the audience to raise the question of, Would it be different if it were a male couple or mixed gender? So that’s definitely been something on our minds.”
Kemper’s hope is that audiences connect with the message of healing.
“There’s a line in the play that the relationship between a teacher and a student is sacred. It comes out of ‘Pygmalion,’” she said. “I hope the audience will have felt engaged and related to the protagonist and the story that she tells and recognize the healing process that takes place when a young person is violated by an adult, and also leave knowing that the natural strength to overcome something difficult is part of every human being. Life goes on and we are stronger and more resilient than we think.”
Also this month, Curio Theatre Company is giving a Shakespeare tragedy a lesbian slant with its production of “Romeo and Juliet.”
Director Krista Apple-Hodge said that changing the genders of some of the characters gives the classic story some new and interesting angles.
“We changed not only Romeo’s gender but Tybalt’s as well,” she explained. “I think all of us come to this play with some cultural assumptions about it. We all know that we have some reference to it, even if it’s just the name. It’s very easy for us as we are rehearsing it to take things for granted, to take moments for granted — how these two fall in love and why. Why this person, right now? Why is this person the person that is taking my attention and focus and inspiring me to risk my life to be with them? When we have two female characters, based on the text, it is clear to us that Romeo has been dating women for along time. She’s been dating for a long time but we also seem to know that Juliet has not. For Juliet, this is not only the first relationship that she’s ever had, this is the first woman she has ever had a relationship with. For Juliet, this is the first time that it even occurred to her that this is a possibility. So it raises the stakes. It forces us, moment to moment, to figure out how these two characters learn to love each other and why they are willing to risk the things that they do.”
Apple-Hodge said that, much like the audiences who will see the show, the actors had to examine the nuances that the changes in gender had on the interactions among the characters.
“For the woman playing Tybalt and for everyone that interacts with her, because Tybalt is an aggressive character, we had to address how does this violence erupt from a woman fighting a man as opposed to two men, which is the kind of aggression we’re used to in storytelling,” she said. “The actress that plays Romeo has been really fantastic in making specific choices to this woman, how she courts other women and how she chooses to play into a male or female stereotype or not. She also had some late-night conversations with a good friend of hers who is a lesbian and they traded stories about what it is like to be a straight woman in a relationship versus what it is like to be a gay woman in a relationship, and how those things are the same and how they are not. In taking on a character that is written to be male, that determines how the character speaks about herself and how other people in the world speak about her and behave towards her. It’s easy to assume that, because you are a gay woman, you must be taking on these male stereotypes. We’ve done some slight adjustments every step of the way and we ask ourselves, Is this male or is this Romeo? And does it have to be male? How does a woman court another woman? How does a woman kiss another woman’s hand? Does a woman have a different way of doing that and does this woman have a different way of doing that?”
Apple-Hodge added that changing the genders of some of the characters makes the story more relatable to modern sensibilities.
“I hope that it will be for the audience what it has been for us, which is a chance to look at this story we thought we knew through different eyes,” she said. “We weren’t surprised by the moments of the story we had to change with the gender switch. It was how much the story doesn’t actually change [that surprised us]. Looking at it as two women choosing to fall in love has made some piece of the story make sense to me in a way that, for a modern audience today, hasn’t always made sense. Why do these two families hate each other so much? We don’t live in a post-feudal society anymore. So in terms of differences in moral structure between two families, seeing a family who is clearly comfortable with a daughter who is out and dating women and seeing a family that is really closely connected with the church, I start to understand why these two families don’t see eye to eye. And I also start to understand why these two young women decide why it’s a better idea to risk their own deaths than to tell their parents who they are in love with.”
White Pines Productions presents “Luckiest Kid” through Oct. 20 at The Adrienne’s Second Stage, 2030 Sansom St. For more information, visit www.whitepinesproductions.org.
Curio Theatre Company presents “Romeo and Juliet” Oct. 11-Nov. 2, 4740 Baltimore Ave. For more information or tickets, visit www.curiotheatre.org or call 215-525-1350.
