On Nov. 6, I quietly opened the door leading to Pigott Theater. Comments were interchanged quickly between Directors Leslie Hill and Helen Paris, two professors of Theater and Performance Studies (TAPS), and the back stage crew, while Michael St. Clair, a Ph.D. student in TAPS, worked to perfect the audibility of actors’ voices in a sometimes acoustically challenging theater.
This was Stanford’s Advanced Acting class’s (TAPS 122P: Undergraduate Performance Project) first formal dress rehearsal of Martin Crimp’s “Attempts on Her Life.”
Before the performance began, all that could be seen on the stage were three large, rectangular wooden movable pieces placed beside one another. The middle piece had a whiteboard with several differently colored dry-erase markers.
Hill explained the complexities of directing such an exquisite yet eccentric show: “This is a particular show to direct because Martin Crimp has written 17 scenarios for which there are no stage directions, no dramatist personae, no location or time or anything like that,” Hill said. “It’s one off the demands that he makes, one of the gifts that I think he gives the director, but also to the actors. That’s one very distinct aspect of directing a play like this.”
St. Clair, who managed the production’s sound design, wrote and composed the sets used throughout the show.
In the opening scene, the action takes place in an office with eight blabbering reporters attempting to uncover the strongest combination of words in order to create some sort of program about a younger woman and an older man coming into romantic relations. The ideas are more melodramatic than what you would find in a soap opera, yet their excitement ensues as the drama heightens.
This is just an introduction of the ways that Paris and Hill will create different images of human emotion and its corruptive nature within the framework of Crimp’s play.
In the next scene, three women in somber black dresses, including Annie, take turns at trying to be the perfect woman. One woman, stricken with looks of intertwined tragedy and terror, repeatedly called for lines, asking the lines to be dictated more loudly until her embarrassment tears her down and off of the stage. Her despair is written through every line of emotional anguish in her face, so much so that I actually believe that she had had a nervous breakdown.
Paris was greatly impressed by her cast of eight undergraduate students that managed to play 100 different characters in each of the 17 different scenes in “Attempts on Her Life”.
“Working on 16 set changes and costume changes,” Paris said. “That is quite something. That was one of my biggest challenges as a director.”
There was one scene that was particularly disturbing because of its dark, callous humor. A man and wife sit on a couch, holding one another and stumbling their words. Their conversation consists of deranged thoughts that make them both laugh eerily.
They refer to themselves in the third person until they come closer and closer to admitting to their futile denial of responsibility in their daughter’s suicide. Between their scattered thoughts of her past heroine addiction, a slithering voice is amplified, telling of how happy their daughter was, how much people loved her.
St. Clair explained that Crimp’s piece is a post-dramatic, post-modern play where twisted and at times sickening humor is not uncommon. Rather, it is one of the characteristics of this play that acts as a foundation for the show’s social critiques. For instance, racism, genocide, objectification of the female body, expectations of the perfect woman and mockery of social media and fame are themes dealt with in the performance.
However, these deeper meanings would have been impossible the efforts of Hill, Paris, St. Clair and the undergraduate cast and crew that were able to bring such a difficult play into fruition in just five short weeks.