Professional Documents
Culture Documents
In the Classroom
Using the Guide p.19
Theatre and Acting
Classes
p.20
English Classes p.20
About this
Production
Whos Who
p.21
From the Director
p.23
Scenic Design p. 25
Costume Design p.
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Pre and Post Show
p.27 Questions and
Activities
Introduction
Ancient Influences: The Suppliant
Women
Plot
Summary
Big Love is set on the coast of present day Italy. The
action begins with the arrival at an Italian villa of eight of
fifty Greek sisters who have fled (by yacht) their
wedding ceremony to their Greek-American cousins. The
sisters meet Piero, the wealthy owner of the villa and
supplicate themselves to him asking for asylum. They
claim international refugee status and seek Pieros
protection
Character
Profiles
Ferdinand Hodler
The Sisters
Lydia - A young woman in her 20s who is unsure
of her relationship with Nikos, the man her father
has arranged for her to marry. Although suspicious
of the situation, she lets her heart guide her.
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The Brothers
Nikos In love with Lydia, a talkative, sensitive
man who is reasonable and although confused, just
wants to do the right thing.
And I think sometimes I scare people
because of it
they think Im so, like determined
just barging ahead
not really a sensitive person,
whereas, in truth,
I am.
Oed
- the quiet brother who passively goes
along with the others but holds back his feelings of
rage, engaged to Olympia.
they know the pain,
they dont want to talk about it
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The Guests
Eleanor an English woman who delights in the
prospect of a big wedding.
Do we have a real happiness in being together,
talking, or just doing nothing together?
Do we have a feeling of paired unity?
The
Playwright
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so clear and clearly understood,
so rational in their structures,
in their psychological explanations of the causes of things.
And my life hadn't been like that.
When I had polio as a boy, my life changed in an instant and forever.
my life was not shaped by Freudian psychology;
it was shaped by a virus.
and it was no longer well made.
it seemed far more complex a project than any of the plays I was seeing.
And so,
in my own work,
I've stepped somewhat outside
the traditions of American theatre in which I grew up
to find a kind of dramaturgy that feels like my life.
And I've been inspired a lot by the Greeks.
I love the Greeks
because their plays so often begin with matricide and fratricide,
with a man murdering his nephews and serving the boys to their father for
dinner. That is to say, the Greeks take no easy problems,
no little misunderstanding that is going to be resolved
before the final commercial break at the top of the hour,
no tragedy that will be resolved with good will,
acceptance of a childhood hurt,
and a little bit of healing.
They take deep anguish and hatred and disability
and rage and homicidal mania and confusion and aspiration
and a longing for the purest beauty
and they say:
Here is not an easy problem;
take all this and make a civilization of it.
And the forms in which they cast their theatre were not simple.
Unlike Western theatre since Ibsen,
which has been essentially a theatre of staged texts,
the Greeks employed spectacle,
music, and dance or physical movement,
into which text was placed
as one of the elements of theatre.
The complexity and richness of form
reflected a complexity and richness of understanding
of human character and human history.
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The Greeks and Shakespeare and Brecht
understood human character
within a rich context of history and culture.
This is my model.
In 1906/07, Picasso stumbled upon cubism as a possible form.
Immediately, he made three pencil sketches
of a man,
of a newspaper and a couple of other items on a table,
and of Sacre Coeur that is, of the three classic subjects of art:
portraiture, still life, and landscape.
And he proved, to his satisfaction, therefore,
that cubism "worked."
My ambition is to do the same for a new form of theatre,
composed of music and movements as well as text
like the theatre of the Greeks
and of American musical comedy
and of Shakespeare and Brecht
and of Anne Bogart and Robert Woodruff
and of Robert Le Page and Simon McBurney
and of Sasha Waltz and Jan Lauwers and Alain Platel
and of Pina Bausch and Ivo van Hove
and of others working in Europe today
and of the theatre traditions in most of the world forever.
-Charles L. Mee, 2002
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Production History
Big Love premiered at the Humana Festival of New American Plays at the Actors'
Theatre of Louisville in 2000 (photo above) directed by Les Waters, and, in 2001, at
the Long Wharf Theatre in New Haven, CT, Berkeley Rep in California, the
Goodman Theatre in Chicago, and the Next Wave Festival at the Brooklyn Academy
of Music.
2001. Big Love directed by Brian Kulick and produced at ACT in Seattle and by
Darron West and produced by the Rude Mechanicals in Austin, Texas.
2001. Big Love directed by Betty Bernhard at the University of Calicut, School of
Drama, India. In Malayalam.
2002. Big Love directed by Howard Shalwitz at Woolly Mammoth Theatre Company,
Washington, DC and directed by Mel Shapiro for Pacific Resident Theatre, Venice,
CA and directed by Meg Gibson at the Salt Lake Acting Company, Salt Lake City,
Utah.
2003. Big Love directed by Richard Hamburger at the Dallas Theatre Center,
directed by Jiri Zizka at the Wilma Theatre, Philadelphia, PA, directed by Sarah Jane
Hardy at Theatre Vertigo, Portland, OR.
2004. Big Love directed by Jeff Griffin at Early Stages, New York.
2005. Big Love directed by Mo Ryan and Jeanine Thompson at the Red Herring
Theatre Ensemble, Colombus, OH and directed by Michael Fields at the Redwood
Curtain, Eureka, CA.
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In the Classroom
Using the Guide
This guide will help classroom teachers at both the high
school and college levels. The information is useful for
university theatre classes including acting, introduction to
theatre, history of the theatre, playwrighting and script
analysis. For teachers of high school theatre and English
classes information is included that introduces or integrates
the experience of the production into class content.
Below is a list of sources that may be useful to you and
were used in preparing this study guide.
Complete text for Big Love and other plays by Charles Mee
http://www.charlesmee.org./html/big_love.htm
Bogart, Anne and Tina Landau. The Viewpoints Book. New
York: TCG, 2005.
Cummings, Scott. Remaking American Theatre: Charles
Mee, Anne Bogart and the SITI Company. New York:
Cambridge UP, 2006.
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Directors Notes
I dont know when I first heard about playwright
Charles Mee but I was intrigued with his radical notion of
allowing anyone to rewrite or remake his plays. I visited his
web site and there for the taking were full text versions of
his plays, available to download FOR FREE! But then I
started to read his plays and the above became a footnote
to this story. His writing and approach to theatre was
revolutionary and thrilling to me. It also helped that he had
a close professional relationship to, for me, one of the most
daring and imaginative directors in American theatre today,
Anne Bogart. His was a voice from a world that I desired to
create on stage. The intriguing use of music, language, and
movement in Big Love results in a giddy yet solemn,
hilarious yet shocking, cerebral yet poignant play that
defies categories and slashes through audience
expectations. I wondered what life experiences had
informed this unique playwright and his work.
I read his autobiography, A Nearly Normal Life and
only then did his plays seem to make perfect sense. An
athletic, vital teenager Mee was changed forever by a bout
of polio in the summer of 1953. More than 50 years later
Mee still struggles with both selves in one body: the intact
14 year old football player and the almost 70 year old
disabled man, he writes, For myself, to this day I have
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March 2007
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Scenic Design
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Costume Design
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Chorus:
King of Argos:
Chorus:
King of Argos:
Chorus:
King of Argos:
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Piero:
Lydia:
Piero:
Oh?
Lydia:
Piero:
Lydia:
Piero:
Oh. But.
We are related.
I mean, you know: in some way.
Our people came from Greece to Sicily a long time ago
and to Siracusa
and from Siracusa to Taormina and to the Golfo di Saint
Eufemia
and from there up the coast of Italy to where we are now.
So we are probably members of the same family you and I.
Descended from Zeus, you mean.
Olympia:
Thea:
Yes, we are!
Piero:
Lydia:
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Piero:
Thyona:
From America.
They went from Greece to America,
and now theyre rich
and they think they can come back
and take whatever they want.
And the courts in your county:
they would enforce such a contract?
Piero:
Lydia:
Olympia:
Neysa:
Lydia:
Thyona:
Or else
all too usual.
[silence]
Piero:
Thyona:
Olympia:
Whose business is it
if not yours?
Youre a human being.
And a relative.
Piero:
A relative?
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Penelope:
Thyona:
A close relative.
This is a crisis.
Piero:
And yet . . .
You know, I am not the Red Cross.
Thyona:
And so?
Piero:
So, to be frank,
I cant take in every refugee who comes into my garden.
Olympia:
Why not?
Piero:
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