Big Love mixes dance, theater and vaudeville with comedy, beauty and brutality. Honest and sensual, it captures the complexities of relationships with a brave and poetic take on how we live and love today. —Helene Kvale
By Charles Mee Scenic Designer, Tim Golebiewski Costume Designer, Pat Ubaldi Lighting Designer, Erika Johnson Sound Designer, Brandon Purstell Choreographer, Marie Boyette Photographer, Gerry Goodstein
All human beings are born free and equal in dignity and rights. They are endowed with reason and conscience and should act towards one another in a spirit of brotherhood. Article 1, The Universal Declaration of Human Rights, adopted by the UN General Assembly on Dec. 10, 1948.
Big Love was writtenin 2000, after Charles Mee was inspired by a production of Aeschylus’s The Suppliants at the Avignon Festival. He explained:
“I wanted to go back to what some people thought was one of the earliest plays of the Western World, which is The Suppliant[s] […], and see how that would look today. See if it still spoke to the moment, and of course it does. It’s all about refugees and gender wars and men and women trying to find what will get them through the rubble of dysfunctional relationships, and anger and rage and heartache.”
In Mee’s bold, contemporary adaptation, fifty brides flee forced marriages to their fifty cousins, seeking refuge in a villa on the east coast of Italy. Big Love incorporates the original poetic lyricism and choric dance elements of The Suppliants, but digresses in terms of character and content. As an ex-historian, Mee respects the past, but is not dictated by it. He acts as a collage artist, piecing together motifs from the classic play and then throwing a bomb into it. He celebrates humanity’s contradictions and extremes, by creating archetypal, yet controversial characters. He juxtaposes comedy with tragedy, indulging in anachronistic, often shocking choices of music, movement and ideas. He challenges us to question our uncivilized, hypocritical selves and the relationship between our private and public worlds.
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The issues raised in Big Love are tremendously pressing today. By changing the “suppliants” in the ancient context into the more modern “refugees,” Mee aligns the plight of the 50 brides with other historical refugee crises, including the flight of Tutsi’s from the Rwandan genocide of the mid-1990s and the Kosovar refugees of 1999, events that resonate particularly strongly today as over two million flee the conflict in Syria, more than half of them children. In this country, gender roles and rights are still hotly debated everywhere from the media and popular entertainment to state legislatures.
Our play is set in all periods and all places, but some of our scenic, sound and costume inspirations reference 1964. This was a time defined largely by our deepening embroilment in Vietnam when two U.S. destroyers were attacked in the Gulf of Tonkin. On the home front, second wave feminism was on the rise. Women gained increased freedom in their personal and professional lives with FDA approved birth control pills. The publication of Betty Freidan’s The Feminine Mystique sparked a nation-wide conversation on women’s lack of fulfillment with the limited roles of wife and mother. Lesley Gore’s “You Don’t Own Me” was number 10 on the Billboard Top Pop Hits. We select this moment not because it defines the gender conflict in the play, but because it acts as a touchstone between ancient Greece—home of Sappho, one of the earliest feminist voices—and America.
Our production of Big Love is a physical one, inspired by master German choreographer Pina Bausch (Tanztheater Wuppertal), as well as the Apache dance form. The latter was developed on the streets of Paris at the turn of the twentieth century and was recently used by P!nk in her music video “Try”. Both styles of dance resonate well with the themes of Big Love, in that they explore the delicate boundary between love and hate, romance and violence, laughter and pain. Dance allows us to express the multi vocal nature of the play through movement, while Mee’s text reminds us that no single voice represents an absolute truth.
