The Daily Princetonian
Thursday December 7, 2017
STREET EDITORS: JIANING ZHAO, DANIELLE HOFFMAN, LYRIC PEROT
page S1
the Arts
PAGES DESIGNED BY ASHLEY CHANG, WILL RANDALL
The Street takes a look into the Princeton arts culture and community.
A Conversation with Princeton Chinese Theatre about its production of “And Then There Were None” Allison Huang Contributor ‘21
When I first walked into Whitman Theatre, I was fifteen minutes too early and I thought I had stumbled onto a cult. The theatre was tiny—less than fifty seats—and everyone was speaking Chinese. As I commented to a friend of mine, like a true ABC Banana, “I feel like I’ve been transported back to China again.” If anything, the sense that I had been displaced and teleported to another country contributed to the feeling that I was closed off from the real world. All that existed was the dark intimate space of this small theatre in which I sat. The night began with a trailer for the show, shown from a small screen in the opposite corner of the theatre. Scenes of death flashed by in fragments; a countdown announced both the elapse of time and the number of survivors still left in the guest house. After twohundred-twenty-five seconds, I was aware that the characters had gotten off a boat and found their way into an empty mansion, that they were being picked off one-by-one, and that the murderer was someone among them. As someone who had never read the original fiction work And Then There Were None by Agatha Christie, I was paralyzed in my seat. But even those who had read the novel were promised (in the program) that the play would end differently than the book, so all of us followed the plot as detectives, trying to figure out who U.N. Owen (the pseudonym of the “Unknown” murderer) was and guessing at who would survive to the end (hint: no one).
The play, adapted and directed by Jianing Zhao ’20, has found its niche in the treasure trove of hole-in-the-wall theatre productions at Princeton that take on professional-level quality. “And Then There Were None” gave attention to the smallest of details to heighten the realism of the murder. Eerie music creeped out during silences and between acts, lighting ranged from bright day-time to stormy candle-lit black-outs. We note disheveled hair as Emily Brent, arguably the most put-together woman, devolves into madness at the hopelessness of her predicament. We see Dr. Armstrong drenched in rain after the storm, or sporting wet locks after a shower, or tugging at a damp collar
nervously as he contemplates his own dark past, sweat lines forming between his shoulderblades and leaking through his sweater. And the array of little Indian figurines sitting on a stand stage left: Each time someone died, one of these dolls would crash to the ground, ostensibly pushed over by a ghost. (Later Jianing reveals to me that a member of the cast had designed a remote-controlled lever that protruded and knocked the doll of its stand). When Emily Brent dies, she dies sitting upright in her seat facing away from the audience, a stiff doll. (She had been injected with Potassium Cyanide). No one realizes it until a figurine has crashed to the ground. Then, we are searching, searching, searching for the death.
audience of all being guilty (again blurring the boundary of stage and audience in true Tom Stoppard style) when Lombard—who is still alive because Vera is a terrible shot —raises his gun and shoots Wargrave in the head. The denouement of the play is marked by the two lovers embracing and limping— as Vera supports the wounded Lombard—to the back of the stage, farthest from the audience, when they gaze out onto the ‘ocean,’ depicted by a parting of the backstage curtain. The ‘balcony’ illused by the parted curtain succeeds in enlarging the space of a theatre I once thought to be tiny. In having the couple move from the back of the theatre to the back of the stage, move through the audience, collapsing their
Six become five, then four. The play slows down with the interactions between Dr. Armstrong, Judge Wargrave, Lombard and Vera. Each has a moment in which he/she accuses another, forming a complicated ‘love-rectangle’ (or more fittingly, ‘accusatory rectangle’) that mirrors the rectangle space of the room. Then four become three. Two.
plane of existence - and our plane of experience - into two meager dots, we are swept up, swallowed by the play. I could tell the play had bled into my sphere of reality when at the climax of the play, I could not stop laughing. Wargrave rages on madly and accuses the audience of unspoken sins, Vera whimpers loudly in the background, crying in
We arrive at the confrontation between lovers Lombard and Vera, who, realizing that they are the only ones left, accuse each other of being U.N. Owen. Lombard pulls a gun on Vera. She screams. They advance upstage, closer to the audience. Suddenly they are amidst the audience. Amidst the two lovers’ fight, the boundaries between audience and actor completely dissipate. Vera, struck by her urge to survive, grabs the gun from Lombard (now they are behind us — we crane our necks to look — Bang!), and shoots Lombard. He falls, presumably dead, and Judge Wargrave runs in from the opposite aisle and reveals himself to be the true U.N. Owen. Wargrave is about to shoot Vera after a long monologue accusing the
Image courtesy of Allison Huang
terror, and I cannot stop thinking: The cape, that cartoonish cape that Wargrave wears, it is just too absurd. But my guffaw is hysterical. The distressed psyche of the play has been creeping up to my throat and I find myself looking for any way to escape. In this play, laughter makes us terrified. Every time the audience laughs, we release some anxiety and free up space for the play to continue building suspense. Moments like Lombard snacking on Oreos (an obvious anachronism), or Dr. Armstrong rushing out in a bathrobe because someone stole the shower curtain, or even Wargrave shooting an audience member that fakes his death nobly—Everyone laughs in these moments,
but just like the characters in the play, we are trapped. Just as each character cannot leave the island, so we are unable to tear our eyes away. And when Wargrave accuses us all of being guilty, we feel we are the ones who have lost the chance for redemption. After the show, I interviewed Zhao, who adapted and directed this play. This was your first time directing a play. Can you tell us the process of directing for the first time and challenges that you faced? The biggest challenge I faced was resolving the discrepancy between artistic vision and the practicalities of carrying out that vision. Because I study literature, I’m used to reading a text, interpreting it, and forming a vision
of it in my head. I was also a choreographer in high school, but directing a theater show is more complicated than choreography because the latter is more focused on bodily movement while with acting there’s voice, movement, props, and an overall storyline. This time around, I would say that the props were the most tricky part. Props are things you don’t think consciously about while you’re watching a show—you just kind of take them for granted. But when you’re actually designing the set, you have to think about, for example, how to place a table so that the audience will be able to see the actors’ faces. At first we placed it horizontally, then we realized it was separating the audience from the couch. In the middle it obstructed the view of the couch. But completely vertically some people would only see the actors’ seated backsides. So we put it diagonally, which is not a very realistic layout in the living room of a mansion, but you
have to adapt certain things to the stage. For this show, we know you were translating from a work of fiction to a theatre production. Can you tell us about the process of writing/adapting the original work of fiction? Were you translating from English to Chinese? I wasn’t translating from English to Chinese because there are so many translations already out there from past adaptations of the original novel (films and dramas), but I read the English novel and spent much time cutting down the ten original characters to six. Agatha Christie writes in a very digressive style which works well for the novel—tangential conversations, false leads—but in the theatre you have to condense. A conversation that doesn’t actively contribute to the plot or character development easily distracts the audience and makes them lose interest. Adapting the play involved a lot of reorganizing of plot and dialogues, where the final product still had to flow smoothly and make sense.
And Whitman Theatre is a small space. I can’t imagine ten people all interacting on stage at once. Yes, every interaction has to have purpose. The more characters there are, the more tangential moments there are. Cutting ten characters to six limits digressions and gives each character more time to develop dynamically. Additionally, there is a consistent theme of twosidedness in each character that ends up showing through whether you have six or ten characters. Each character has concealed a dark, murderous past and found ways to suppress his/her experiences. These dark sides are revealed through the course of the play—if you look at our posters, you see black-and-white photographs that are partially torn, revealing chaotic images underneath. I wanted to show that underneath an utterly civilized facade [many characters were highly reputed members of society, from judges to doctors] there is always a darker side.
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