Life in a Box: The Sound of 'Chamber Music'

Theater department professor Sally Goers Fox does not do the kind of theater most people are familiar with.

"I don't do realist theater," Fox said. "I don't do what many plays are in American theater."

Students will have a chance to see how this affects her directing when the Department of Theater and Dance presents "Chamber Music," by Arthur Kopit, this week.

Kopit's 1962 drama was written when the civil rights movement and political distress of the Cold War caused a national headache of uncertainty and despair. Its plot revolves around eight women confined to a psychiatric ward. The existentialist treatment of the women sheds light on classical questions raised by the theatrical school of "theatre of the absurd."

"It addresses things that don't come up in everyday life," Fox said. "Why do we live? Why do we kill? Where are we here? Who are we?"

Perceiving a threat from the men's ward, the women assemble to discuss ways of frightening away their supposed enemy. Their motivation for seeking equality is masked by their insanity: Each woman claims she is a historical figure. Among the ladies are Joan of Arc, Queen Isabella of Spain, Constanze Mozart, Gertrude Stein, Susan B. Anthony, Pearl White, Amelia Earhart and Osa Johnson.

"These women are all archetypes of their gender," Fox said, pointing out that the iconography of these women makes their unique histories necessary to the existential questions the play asks.

Each woman came into a period of oppression during her tenure in history. Their gender and power were a double disenfranchisement, according to critics of Kopit's politically minded overtones.

In the play's script, the characters' names aren't referred to as the famous figures they claim to be, but as descriptive generalizations. Amelia Earhart is known as "Woman in Aviatrix's Outfit," played by Angela Cristantello, a junior theater major. Osa Johnson is actually "Woman In Safari Outfit," played by C. Mallika Pettegill, a senior theater major. Jen LaMastra, a junior theater major, plays a "Woman With Gavel" who thinks she is Susan B. Anthony.

Erica Giglio, a freshman musical theater major, plays the "Girl In Gossamer Dress," who thinks she is Pearl White, star of over 100 silent films of the 1910s and 1920s.

The bubbly personality of Girl In Gossamer Dress offers occasional comic relief during frequently heated dialogue. Giglio likened her character's insanity to the playfulness of a child: "We went into the rehearsals playing different characters. I brought out my inner-child," she said. "We created a world - we called it 'playtime' - where we could create relationships with each other."

The "playtime" Giglio referred to was more than an acting exercise for the agile cast. For Fox, it served as the final audition.

"Initially, I cast eight women. I didn't know who they were playing until we got into the rehearsal space," she said. This allowed for the relationships and personalities, like Giglio's inner-child, to blossom and the roles to almost cast themselves.

"We didn't pick up our scripts until weeks after we were cast," Giglio said. "We just 'played,' so we when we began using our scripts, we were already in our world."

The world of the psychiatric ward is one not only mentally and emotionally restrictive, but also physically. Set designer Dyan O'Connell, a junior theater major, describes her boxed-in set in the play's existential idiom.

"There are fractured elements. There's a fragility," O'Connell said.

Floor-to-ceiling steel wires, rectangular sheets of Plexiglas and metal bars represent the broken reality of the institution and the characters. O'Connell's research of abandoned asylums provided her with structural influence.

Some audience members will be forced to look through plastic sheeting to see the actors, while metal wires might sever the action for others.

O'Connell explained that the set makes the theater "a box that's not a box. For the audience, there's ambiguity, where they can imagine its meaning on their own."

Although the play begs answers to worldly and complex questions, Fox said the intent of absurdist theater - and "Chamber Music" - does not lie in the answers.

"I don't want answers. I want questions," she said.

With a cast of talented young men and women, those questions become easier to ask, if not harder to answer.

"You can see it in their heads," she said of her actors' ingenuity during the intensive rehearsal process. "They surprise you."

Forty-one years after it was written, "Chamber Music" still takes brave steps into a world where the uncertainty of our existence fuels the intellectual questions absurdist theatre begs to be asked.

The questions asked by both playwright and cast are not ordinary, or easy to answer, but Fox seems fine with the play's open-endedness. After all, it is the kind of theater she enjoys most.

"I'm not sure what you call what I do," Fox said. "Which is why I love it."