OnStage Magazine: University of Dallas Drama

ON STAGE

Thank you for reading the Fall 2022 edition of OnStage! In this semester, we celebrate what we hope is one of the last of the post-Covid milestones. Orphée is Professor Kyle Lemieux’s first in-person production since Spring of 2019 when he directed The Roaring Girl. He endured the cancellation of his adaptation of Antigone in Spring 2020, which he worked on with Dr. Teresa Danze of the Classics Department, and directed a series of radio plays in Spring 2021. Finally, as he took on the role of Acting Department Chair last spring while alumnus Dylan Key directed Woyzeck.

Jean Cocteau wrote Orphée in a time much like our own. The 1920s are often known as the Roaring Twenties, due to the intense party atmosphere and the rapidly changing social environment at the time. Paris, where Orphée was written and premiered, was crawling with artists and authors—F. Scott Fitzgerald, Georgia O’Keefe, Cole Porter, Pablo Picasso, Salvador Dali, Ernest Hemingway, Coco Chanel, and so on. Art Deco was the predominant art and architectural style of the day.

At the same time, the 1920s are often called the Age of Anxiety. Europe was still reeling from the effects of World War I. Entire cities lay in ruins. Traumatized and disillusioned veterans strug gled to return to society. The German economy was tanking, and the Great Depression loomed on the horizon. As countries like France, England, and the United States grew more liberalized, their neighbors and allies—Germany, Italy, Russia, and Spain—saw the rise of radical fascism and communism.

As the world continues to recover—economically, socially, and physically—from a global pan demic, we’re all asking ourselves the same that the artists and authors of a hundred years ago asked: “What does art mean?” “How can our society and culture recover after months and years of turmoil and division?” “What needs to stay the same?” “What needs to change?” and other huge philosophical and existential questions.

Orphée is the kind of play that deals with these questions. It adapts an ancient work—a tale as old as time—proving that it retains its cultural and psychological relevance after centuries, while also delving into the contemporary big questions. So if Orphée leaves you with more questions than answers, we would consider that a successful rendition of Cocteau’s work.

Happy reading, and enjoy the show!

Professor Stefan Novinski Drama Department Chair

Centerfold Image: Lynley Glickler as Death with Braden Barber as Raphael and Eoin O’Grady as Azrael.

TABLE OF CONTENTS

4 Greek Myth in the Age of Dreams and Meaninglessness: Contextualizing Cocteau’s Orphée

6 Is Translating Some Hokey Acrostic Really Difficult?

9 Featured Artist: Matt Nunn

14 Love, Loss, and Woe: Orpheic Renditions of Grief

15 Cheating Death: Orphée’s Journey as a Reflection of Cocteau

16 The Modern Renaissance Man: A Brief Biography of the Playwright

18 Fall 2022 Senior Studios: Monstrous Birth and Pariah

20 Building Magical Portals with Jean Cocteau: A Reflection on the University of Dallas’ Scene Shop

Contributing Writers

Photographer

Benjamin Michael Bledsoe

Vanessa Davila

Joseph Fournier

Phoebe Jones

Sophia Llanes

Áine O’Brien

Noah Newmann

Maria Camila Rodriguez

Amelia Ebent

Assistant Editor Maria Camila Rodriguez

Layout Editor Lauren Hill

Editor-in-Chief Phoebe Jones

Thanks to Professor Lemieux, Professor Novinski, Professors Cox and Kirk, Matt Nunn, the set and costume shop workers, Professor Ron Scrogham, and everyone else who contributed to the production of Orphée and this edition of OnStage.

For a digital copy of OnStage or to purchase tickets, visit udalla.edu/drama. To get involved with OnStage, email onstage@udallas.edu.

Greek Myth in the Age of Dreams and Meaninglessness: Contextualizing Cocteau’s Orphée

by Vanessa Davila

An artistic movement known as Dadaism came onto the scene between 1916 to 1924 as a response to World War I and nationalism. Dadaism viewed the war as point less and rebelled against nationalism, seeing it as a ma jor influence in encouraging the war. Dadaism started in Zurich, Switzerland and became a worldwide movement, mixing various art forms including poetry, photography, collages, paintings, sculptures, and plays. Dadaism sought to challenge societal norms of reason and convey illogical messages that rejected the concept of time with tactics such as shocking and outrageous art.

An important theme of the Dadaist movement was irreverence. Dada artists displayed blatant disrespect to the bourgeoisie because they felt the bourgeoisie’s support of nationalism had caused the war. Dada artists wanted to empower free thinking by emphasizing random cha os, which they hoped would spur philosophical thought. Each group of Dadaists had its own spin on irreverence— whether that be geared towards bourgeois ideals or art. The Berlin Dadaists showed irreverence towards the bour geois ideals of German expressionism because they felt it promoted an unawareness of social unrest due to hunger and poverty caused by World War I. Other Dadaists fo cused on anti-art—a response to pre-war art, which was characterized by visual aesthetics and beauty that stood for symbolism and expression, which tore attention away

from the effects of the war on civilians.

One of the most popular art forms in Dadaism was the “Readymade”: a slightly altered everyday object created as an art piece to spur questions about what art was and the reason for art. In 1917, Marcel Duchamp took a urinal, turned it upside down, and signed it with a fake name. He created this bizarre piece to rouse the question of what art truly is. He named this work Fountain to allude to the well-known Baroque and Renaissance fountains.

Overall, Dadaism achieved its purpose in catching au diences’ attention. However, Dadaism faded as Dada art ists joined the Surrealist movement, which looked more at the subconscious.

Surrealism came onto the scene from 1924 through World War II. Led by Andre Breton, the movement be gan in Paris and eventually spread worldwide. It rebelled against the society that sent thousands of innocent people to war. Surrealism centered around tapping into the unconscious to allow the imagination to flow and rejected rational thought, believing that it stunted the creativity of the mind.

The Surrealist movement grew stronger after the pub lication of Sigmund Freud’s The Interpretation of Dreams in 1899. Freud claimed that dreams held deep meanings and emotions attached to them. This concept allowed artists the freedom to focus on their dreams and uncon

Above: Charlie Spurgin as Orphée with Sienna Abbott as the Horse Right: Orphée set during construction

sciousness to create art and literature. Thus, Surrealist art began to appear ever-changing, eccentric, confusing, eerie, or even supernatural because the art focused on the psyche of the individual artist. These artistic images showed the pure state of psychic automatism without the constraints of reason, aesthetics, or morality that society placed on people. Surrealists hoped to use this freedom of psychological expression would transform society into free thinking and embrace one’s thoughts and dreams.

Salvador Dalí was a well-known Spanish artist who joined the Surrealist movement. His art, based on halluci nations and dreams, portrayed themes such as death and deterioration. One of his famous works was The Persistence of Memory, a painting of a deserted landscape filled with melting clocks and seemingly random objects. The lack of a central figure and the multitude of ongoing events in the Dadaism art form create disorder. This pushes audi ences to accept illogical chaos, reject the idea of the ratio nal, and consider time as a social construct.

Orphée is based on the Greek tragedy of Orpheus. The original tragedy starts with Orpheus’ wife dying due to a snake bite. Orpheus travels to the Underworld to ask Hades to grant Eurydice a few more days on earth since her death was too sudden. Hades grants Orpheus his wish only if he can travel out of the Underworld without look ing behind him to check if Eurydice is following him. Unfortunately, right before Orpheus steps out of the Un

derworld, he falls into temptation and looks behind him. Eurydice is forced back to the Underworld forever.

Orphée is a spin-off of this Greek tragedy with strong Dadaist and Surrealist influences.

The Mirror, which acts as the doorway to the Un derworld, resembles a stepping into the unconscious or dream world. Mirrors represent self-observance and re flection. Combining the two concurs with the Surrealistic view that advocated reflecting on dreams and the impor tance of the subconscious challenge against the restraints society placed on individual free thinking.

The horse is a Dadaist image because it causes be wilderment, which inspires internal questioning of the horse’s representation. The horse also seems to give Or phée inspiration for his poetry—without it, he cannot write. The horse could be a representation of society, and Orphée’s reliance on it could be a portrayal of people’s re liance on society to tell them what to do—how to act and how to write rather than thinking freely for themselves. Eurydice tells Orphée that his poetry was better before he started listening to the horse, which reveals Cocteau’s view of his society’s influence on art. The horse constrains Orphée’s creativity.

In fact, the Baccantes judge the art the Orphée creates with the horse to be obscene, demonstrating that creat ing according to the whims of society only leads to the destruction of the self, which is itself the destruction of creativity.

Above: Charlie Spurgin and Loretta Bond; David Huner and Hannah Kneen

s Translating Some Hokey Acrostic Really Difficult?

by Áine O’Brien

I recently had the pleasure of interviewing Professor Ron Scrogham, who works at UD as an associate librar ian and teaches a graduate-level course called French for Reading Knowledge. In this course, students learn to read and translate French texts, a skill which they often require and use in other areas of their research. As the instructor for this course, Professor Scrogham knows first-hand the intricacies of French translation. In particular, one of Pro fessor Scrogham’s students last semester chose to translate Cocteau’s Orphée, so he has experience with some of the more interesting and complicated parts of translating this play.

I started with a very simple question: What is so dif ficult about translating poetry? “Translating poetry is like taking a shower with a raincoat on,” said Professor Scrogham, quoting an unknown source, “When you are translating poetry…there is a strategy of whether you are trying to bring the text to the reader or if you are trying to bring the reader to the text.” These two approaches, he explained, involve taking on two entirely different tasks. Bringing the text to the reader requires “trying to make the language more normal,” which Professor Scrogham says involves great compromises, one of which might be the “artistic impact.” Thus, some translators opt for the other approach, which is “to try to remain as faithful to the source text as possible and expect the reader not to grasp the entirely of what’s going on.”

With regard to Cocteau’s Orphée, Scrogham said that it “offers a very interesting problem relative to translation because there is a key acrostic that…makes perfect sense in French… [however], unless you really know French, [it’s] going to escape the viewer of the play.” An acrostic is a type of word puzzle in which certain letters in each line form a word or several words. The acrostic in question, Professor Scrogham explains, appears in a poem that Or phée writes for a poetry context. Orphée claims that, after the death of his wife Eurydice, his horse—the source of his poetic inspiration—used its hoof to tap out the letters of the poem. In the original French, the poem is a sin gular line, which reads “Madame Eurydice reviendra des enfers,” which in English means, “Lady Eurydice will re turn from the Underworld.” The first letters of the French poem spell out merde, a French obscenity we won’t bother translating, as we would be forced to censor it.

Above:

Literal translation of the poem into English does not yield a meaningful acrostic, which presents a problem for any translator because the acrostic is of particular impor tance to the denouement of the play. Professor Scrogham’s student who translated Orphée grappled specifically with the best way to address this issue. He remarked that she struggled with the question of “how to approach that acrostic in a way that it will have the same impact in En glish as it has in the French.” In this way, the translation of Orphée involves the type of translation where the trans lator attempts to bring the reader to the text.

Past translators have dealt with this situation in different ways. One translator, as Professor Scrogham explained, opted for a more literal translation of the poem, then had the Bacchantes (the judges of the poetry context, whom the poem offends) show that the French translation of the poem yielded the original, offensive acrostic. Anoth er translator took “a real liberty” and chose to fabricate an entirely new English poem that conveyed roughly the same idea, and “lends itself to an acrostic that…is quite obscene.” She tried to allow for the acrostic in an English sentence to come across in a way that the English reader will see the problem.” Professor Scrogham’s student used the following method: go through as many English ob scenities and slurs as she could and come up with, then

try to use those letters to write a poem that would have meaning similar to that of the original play.

In many ways, the quality of a translation depends on

the rendering of the acrostic, and it will be interesting to see how this version renders it and how effective it is for the audience.

Above: The cast of Orphée

I had the privilege of interviewing this fall’s guest art ist in the Drama Department’s costume shop; Matt Nunn is normally a cutter/draper/tailor at the Dallas Opera. We are honored to have him here at UD as our guest this se mester, helping create and construct some of the unique costumes for Orphée.

Here are some highlights from our conversation:

BMB: How did you become interested in costume de sign?

MN: That would be way back to probably middle school. I used to stay up late to watch old black and white movies on TCM. And I remember one movie, it’s the 1938 or ’39 version of Marie Antoinette, and I fell in love with ev erything that they were wearing. I just thought, “I really want to start studying this.”

I was a total nerd! I would get a hold of any costume or fashion book I could and just read it from front to back. I started studying the periods and looking at the silhouettes and studying how fashion changed. And I knew I wanted to be something creative, but that was really the catalyst for launching me into costumes.

I didn’t want to be a fashion designer, because as I grew older, I found out that it was a really cutthroat business.

Above:

Featured Artist: Matt Nunn

by Benjamin Michael Bledsoe

I also took a technical theater class in high school. And I worked with a lady, who’s now my mentor, on Wuthering Heights by Brontë. I remember walking into the theater lab one day, and there was this rack in the study room of just costume after costume after costume that she’d built from the ground up. I thought, this is what I want to do; this is absolutely what I want to do!

So, she took me under her wing, and we’re still friends to this day. I worked with her in high school at the costume shop that she worked in in San Antonio. She took me in, refined my craft and told me how costumes are built, why things are sewn this way, what the silhouettes should look like, and how to cut fabric, how to alter patterns, how to make patterns, I mean you name it. We got so close after the years, I still refer to her as “mom,” and she calls me “son.”

Then I went to design school in Arlington. I knew that I didn’t want to be a fashion designer, but the registrar wanted to place me in a fashion design company. I said, “Absolutely not! That’s not what I want to do; I want to work at the Dallas Theatre Center.” So, she called them and she said, “Hey, we have this intern here, and we’d like to place him with you.” So they put me in touch with them, and I started my internship there in ’92, I think.

I’ve just sort of gradually evolved over the years, from be ing a stitcher. I was really strong at pattern making, and I was comfortable draping things. I eventually moved away from being a stitcher—which is sort of the natural pro gression of things—to a draper and pattern maker. And here I am today…

BMB: What would you say are your specific areas of ex pertise? From a particular era or region of clothing, or a particular aspect of the design process?

MN: What I’m strongest in, and what gets me the most phone calls these days, is tailoring. That’s a completely separate field in costume.

We did a lot of men’s tailoring [at the Shakespeare Theatre Company on Capitol Hill]. So, I hadn’t done much of it back then, but I learned a lot from the other cutters and drapers that worked there. There were five total, and I was the sixth. You work in teams of four: there’s myself, who’s a cutter, then you have a first hand. I draft the patterns; I decide how a costume’s going to be built. Then I make the patterns, and I give them to my first hand.

The first hand cuts the fabric, and adds all the seam allow ances, under my direction. Then she hands it off to two

stitchers who start all the work on it. I’m very technical, so tailoring kind of suits me. I like that; I like figuring out how things actually go together, from the page to a 3-D object. That’s what I think I’m pretty good at.

BMB: And when you’re not a guest artist at UD, you work for the Dallas Opera?

MN: I am the cutter/draper/tailor there. At the Opera, we generally rent shows from other opera companies. So, ba sically, if there’s a costume for a principal singer, male or female, let’s say the suit that was used in Chicago that was made for a principal singer who was a size 42-regular. In Dallas, we’ll have a whole new cast, and our guy may be a 54” chest and a 60” waist, and he might be 6’4”. I have to take that costume and copy it in his size. That’s what I’m responsible for there. The shows are already designed for us. Sometimes, the costume designers will come with the show, to make sure it’s executed the right way. Some times, they’re dead. In that case, I work under a supervisor who makes sure that everything still looks the same, so the show still has that essence and that feel of the original designs.

BMB: What makes opera costuming different from cos tuming other types of shows?

MN: In opera, it’s all about the breath, right? Actors go on stage under hot lights, costumes, makeup, wigs, and act. Singers go out there and do all the same things, except they have to sing. So, their costumes are fitted so they can take these deep breaths of air. They generally want their collars larger so their throat is free to expand and they’re able to hit the notes that they need to be able to. Everything is always just a tiny bit bigger so they can take these deep breaths, because they all breathe from their di aphragm. Otherwise, it’s really just the same thing: you’ve got people on the stage under lights and they’re putting on a show for you.

BMB: What brought you to be our guest artist this se mester?

MN: Susie Cox [associate professor, responsible for the UD costume shop]. I met her in November of 2011. We had just moved back from Washington, D.C., and the Opera contacted me and said, “We’re putting on this concert at the Opera.” It was Tristan and Isolde. Susie Cox was going to do the costumes for it. Well, the concert turned out to be a full-on stage production. She designed the entire production, and I came on. We’ve been friends ever since. This is her last year here [at UD], and I really wanted to spend more time with her here and see her interact with her students and how she does it. I love her to death!

BMB: What are your current focuses and projects?

MN: Right now, I’m making new tunics and scapulars for the very sweet monks over at Cistercian Abbey across the street. And then I’m jumping right into Susie’s show Orphée

BMB: What are your thoughts about the costume design being developed for Orphée?

MN: I think it’s great! It’s always a collaboration, right? As a costume designer, you are kind of limited because you’re really following the direction that your director wants. You have to take his ideas and what inspiration he has and

put it on paper. It’s always a work in progress, right? You may get into a first fitting and things will change there, or sometimes, we’ve even gotten halfway through a dress or a suit or even completed it, and the director changes his mind again. It just depends on the talent that you have and the time constraints that you’re working under.

I think they’re really cool! Susie’s a real artist. That’s what I love about her; I love working with her. She’s very free. She doesn’t think about limitations. She has incredible ways of coming up with making things work, like these puppets. I’m really interested to see what she comes up with on those. I’m horrible at that kind of stuff.

I look at her designs and I think, “Okay how am I going to make this? What is it going to be made in? Who’s wear ing it? What are they going to be wearing underneath it so it gets the right shape, and the construction?” That’s my job. I take her sketches, and I cut and drape and make patterns of them, and then we fit them to the actor, and then put them on stage.

BMB: What advice would you give any one who wanted to get involved in costume design or costuming?

MN: Learn how to sew! Learn how clothing is construct ed. Pay attention to how it’s constructed, why it’s con structed that way. Practice those skills a lot. I’ve worked with a lot of costume designers who are simply designers and can’t sew a single stitch. They might send you a sketch, and I’d look at it, thinking, “What is this?” and they can’t verbalize how it’s going to be made. A lot of times, all they see is silhouette, texture, fabric, and their design on paper, and they can’t sew a stitch.

But learning how to sew. You have to know clothing con struction; clothing construction is vastly different from costume construction, because costumes are built to last a long, long time. Whereas anything you buy from Old Navy or The Gap might last a season and that’s it!

Love, Loss, and Woe: Orpheic Renditions of Grief

by Joseph Fournier

The fateful decision to look back upon a loved one and the following abysmal sorrow upon discovering their loss—are these not universal human experiences?

While the whimsically surreal Orphée may be miles away from the ancient tale in Ovid’s Metamorphoses that serves as its seed and inspiration, the strangeness of sepa ration from a loved one is explored in both of these sto ries and felt in all of human life. Both works explore the unearthly grief that erupts from death with a fantastical rendition of the questions: what if the separation could be reversed? What would a human being do to bring back the dead, and what would it do to them? Is it possible to go on living, knowing that a loved one has been wrenched from their time of reposal?

Grief is not novel in the depths of the human experi ence, and it is grief that the original story and Jean Coc teau’s rendition portray, albeit in magnificently different forms and styles. In all its stages, the sorrow of loss is as impactful as the love for the other person was. The new reality of a loved one’s absence is as real and important to a person’s psyche as the person they lose. This loss is typ ically understood as following five stages: denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and acceptance. These stages of grief are illustrated by these two stories in vastly different but equally fantastical forms.

Ovid’s original story of Orpheus and Eurydice be gins with the god of marriage himself performing a wed

Above: Loretta Bond and Charlie Spurgin

Right: Maylis Quesnel, Prof. Lemieux, and Marcelle Van de Voorde

ding of the titular characters—a happy event for all that hearkens to all the joyfulness of love. A snake’s poison soon mars Orpheus’ bliss, ending the life of his love in as sudden and cruel a way as the universe could offer. His first denial manifests in drawing away from the world—a heart-wrenching experience felt by all who have lost loved ones unexpectedly.

Angry about his loss, he resolves to regain his wife from the clutches of death by traversing the underworld to confront Hades. Bargaining with the god of death, his efforts win him his goal, under the condition that he nev er looks at her until they arrive at the surface. Nearing the end, he comes to the fateful moment where, at the prec ipice of completing his wife’s resurrection, he looks back at the shade–and sees nothing. Finally, Orpheus confronts the full force of the reality of her absence, experiencing such depression that idly sitting on a rock becomes his whole existence. Orpheus is faced with a world that lacks Eurydice, and the choice to accept a world without her or remain in his rut. However, he never takes this step to its entirety, and his own life ends in bitter disappointment over his loss.

Cocteau’s rendition of the Orpheus tale may present it in a more eccentric and intellectually ticklish manner, but the theme of the earth-shattering effect of the loss of a loved one remains.

Cheating Death: Orphée as a Reflection of Cocteau

by Sophia Llanes

Jean Cocteau’s take on Ovid’s story of Orpheus is cre ated as much, if not more, from his imagination as from the myth itself. Hades and Persephone take a bow during Orphée and clear the stage for a new character: a femme fatale personification of death. A mysterious glazier named Heurtebise tells Orpheus—a poet in this version—to use Death’s left-behind rubber gloves to follow her into the Underworld to retrieve his wife Eurydice.

Strangely enough, Orphée is not as devoted to Eury dice as he is in Ovid’s and Virgil’s versions of the myth. Instead, their relationship portrays a more realistic ren dition of marriage—one with anxieties and arguments. This conundrum annoys Orphée enough that after a par ticularly stressful dinner party, he purposefully looks at Eurydice so she will disappear from the land of the living once more.

As many artists find that their work, in whatever form, is essentially a self-portrait, so does the entirety of the play reveal Cocteau’s faults and fears. Cocteau himself believes that this phenomenon was not unique to his work but was present in every creator’s art. During an interview with The Paris Review in 1963, he stated: “I [have] long said art is a marriage of the conscious and the unconscious...The work of every creator is autobiography.”

To understand the ever-present role of death in Coc teau’s Orphée and his other works, I sat down with Death herself—the talented senior drama major Lynley Glick

er. While Cocteau’s background exudes death—with the losses of family, friends, and lovers—Lynley pointed out that “artists tend to have a fascination with death and im mortality because their work survives them and achieves immortality.” Death plays an even larger role in Cocteau’s movie adaptation of Orphée, in which Death and Orphée briefly fall in love. Death leaves the couple happily in love in both the play and the movie. However, the play’s com pletion leaves Orpheus and Eurydice in heaven, while the film closes with the couple in the land of the living.

Through Death, the audience becomes very familiar with mirrors—her passageways to and from the Under world—upon which Cocteau built symbolism in his lat er retellings of the myth of Orpheus and Eurydice. The mirror goes hand-in-hand with death because it reveals mortality through aging. Cocteau alerts his audience to the underlying truth when Orphée discovers that he can only read the death threat he has received by holding it up to the mirror; it reads invertedly. The mirror does not only reflect ourselves but allows us to see ourselves more clearly than merely reflecting a simple inversion.

By the end of the play, Cocteau fully realizes Orphée as a reflection of himself and Orphée as his own autobiog raphy when the severed head of Orphée responds to the question of his name with Jean Cocteau’s and provides Cocteau’s address as his own. Orphée acts as Cocteau’s mirror in his comedic tragedy.

The Modern Renaissance Man: A Brief Biography of the Playwright by Noah Newmann

Born July 5th, 1889, in a village outside of Paris, Jean Cocteau was the son of a lawyer and socialite and spent his life in the theaters and salons of France. Jean was a sickly, nervous child, but spoiled by his grandfather, who taught him to draw and gave him a love for art. In 1898, however, Jean’s idyllic life would take a turn when his fa ther, who had retired in favor of more artistic pursuits, committed suicide, leaving Jean alone with his mother and two siblings.

Jean was on a downward trend in his schooling from that point on, continually failing at every subject other than art, in which he excelled, until he was finally ex pelled in 1904. He began writing for a local magazine after he and his mother moved into Paris, and, when he was nineteen years old, he published his first anthology of poems called, La Lamp de l’Addin (Aladdin’s Lamp). In these same years, he became intimately acquainted with the theater and ballet of Paris. The impresario of the Ballet Russes, Sergey Diaghilev, who directed such people as Anna Pavlova, famously challenged Cocteau to “surprise [him]” after he had heard the poet’s desire to create a bal let.

This challenge went on to shape the poet’s career after the Great War, where he served as an ambulance driver for the French armed forces in Belgium, during which time wrote two ballets and many other works of poetry

Above: Eleanor Hamlet and Kate Sullivan

Right: Annie Stepek, Rose Urbanski, and Emma Judge

and prose. After the war, he was accepted into the literary community of Paris, where he was introduced to a young man named Raymond Radiguet. Raymond was sixteen at the time and possessed a remarkable talent for compo sition. Eleven years his senior, Cocteau took the young Raymond under his wing and continuously pushed his work both in the public and private circles of his life.

During Raymond and Cocteau’s friendship, each be came dependent on the other to the point where each act ed as a muse to the other. Cocteau even commissioned the famous jeweler, Jean Cartier, to make a pair of rings com posed of three metals, yellow gold, rose gold, and white gold, for him and the young Raymond to wear. This style of ring, designed by Cocteau, has since become a popular wedding band in France.

Soon after their acquaintance, Cocteau got the young author’s work published and to wide acclaim, though Raymond was beginning to become uncomfortable under Cocteau’s obsession. Whether or not this dotage was an indication that Raymond was the poet’s paramour is still debated. However, shortly after the publication of Ray mond’s second novel in 1923, he died from complications due to typhoid.

Cocteau was devastated by the loss of Raymond and fell into the use of opium to escape the pain. After a pro longed period of abuse, the poet committed himself to a

sanitarium to recover. It was there that he met the French Thomist philosopher Jacques Maritian, and he briefly returned to religion. It was during this time in 1925 that he composed his long poem “L’Ange Heurtebise,” a work that showed the poet’s struggle with the divine and a deepening sense of personal tragedy.

A year later, he composed the play Orphée and had it staged, with Jean Hugo designing the decors, and Coco Chanel designing the costumes. The play delves even more deeply into the themes of myth and love lost. It would become the first major theatrical success of Coc teau’s life and pave the way for his later triumphs in both film and stage.

Based on the ancient Greek myth of Orpheus, Jean Cocteau drew on both his own experience with his family and the loss of his father and best friend, on whom he had become increasingly dependent for inspiration. The loss of these two figures spurred Cocteau to seek an escape, both in the composition of some of his greatest works and in the use of opium, an addiction he would battle

throughout the 1930s, bringing a temporary halt to his work until the 1940s.

It was his escapism that leaned an air of Surrealist sto rytelling—a kind of aesthetic purism that was inspired by his involvement with Raymond Radiguet. It was the vi sion that led to the creation of a world where a man fights with his guardian angel in the poem “L’Ange Heurtebise,” and where Death is a surgeon who forgets to put on her gloves before the operation in the play Orphée.

Jean Cocteau’s life was a parable of contradiction; his numerous trysts with actors and starlets, his addiction to opium, and the unbound way in which he led his life were destructive. Yet, his incessant drive to create art resulted in a body of work that was full of meaning and beauty both for himself and his audience. This dedication led him through a life peppered with destructive behaviors and personal heartbreak, into a career of almost continuous creative excellence, in film, stage plays, and even murals, till the day of his death, October 11th, 1963.

Fall 2022 Senior Studios: MOnstrOus Birth and pariah

by Phoebe Jones

Each year, the senior drama majors take on a daunt ing task—one they’ve been preparing for since fall of their junior years: directing and producing their Senior Studios. The Studio is the drama major’s capstone project, and it sets forth a simple task: choose a one-act play; write a thesis on it; assemble a production team; hold auditions and cast the show; run rehearsals and direct the show; hold weekly design and production meetings; write press releases and take publicity photos; find a stage crew including dressers and ushers; create posters and marketing materials; and, ultimately, stage the show. Oh, and con tinue taking a regular course load.

This semester, two drama seniors take on this chal lenge: Lynley Glickler and Jack Urbanski (both of whom are also acting in Orphée).

The process started last fall around this time. Jack and Lynley, along with the drama majors who will be direct ing in spring, made a list of ten one-act plays that they might be interested in directing. The plays cover a range of the director’s interests, and some are plays they have read, while others are new to them. From there, each dra ma major narrows down the list to three plays. During Christmas break, the Drama Department’s advising pro fessors (Prof. Novinski and Prof. Lemieux) choose which plays the students will direct.

Then, in spring, the directors study their plays exten sively, seeking to understand the literary significance of the play and developing design ideas. During this semes ter, they also write their theses.

Now, Jack and Lynley are deep in the process of building their shows. By this time, their actors should be mostly off-book (meaning they’ve memorized their lines), and their designers should be nearly ready to start gath ering props, costumes, and set pieces and programming light and sound cues.

“So,” you might be wondering, “who on earth would want to do such a time-consuming and intensive project?”

Lynley Glickler has been acting for most of her life, and she keeps track of every show she’s ever acted in us ing a spreadsheet. It has over 40 entries. She started her UD acting career in one of the fall 2019 senior studios, 7 Menus, and even took on a leading role in spring 2020’s unrealized Antigone (she was playing Ismene). Orphée is her fifth mainstage appearance.

Her senior studio is Monstrous Birth, an adaptation of

Above:

Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein that examines the infamous scientist’s life and project through the eyes of the women in his life. What’s more, Lynley authored this play herself. It’s loosely based on her twelfth show, The Secret Origins of Dr. Frankenstein—a play so terrible that even Lynley’s costume nauseated her (literally).

Jack Urbanski comes from a long line of talented ac tors and is one himself. His first semester at UD, he had a lead role in the other senior studio that semester, Dogg’s Hamlet, and was a member of Antigone’s chorus in the spring. Orphée is his fourth mainstage appearance. Why not five? Well, Jack has been working with Professor Su sie Cox in the costume shop his entire UD career, and he was the Assistant Costume Designer for spring 2022’s Woyzeck

Jack’s senior studio is August Strindberg’s Pariah, a philosophical drama in which two men of opposing tem peraments, by the names Mr. X and Mr. Y, each discover that the other is a criminal. Throughout the play, they discuss the nature of crimes, attempt to prove their innocence, and engage in a battle of wits to determine which of them is the better man.

The fall 2022 senior studios premiere on December 1 in the Drama Building. Tickets will be available on the Drama Department website.

Above: Lynley Glickler, Allison Peterman, Charlie Spurgin, Jack Urbanski, and Rose Urbanski

Building Magical Portals with Jean Cocteau: A Reflection on the University of Dallas’ Scene Shop

by Maria Camila Rodriguez

On October 26, 2022, the University of Dallas’ Drama Department will unveil its newest production: a dreamlike rendition of Jean Cocteau’s Orphée. As Cocte au’s first major attempt at the dramatic arts, he explores the age-old Greek myth of the musician Orpheus and his wife Eurydice through the lens of Surrealistic and Cubist artistry. Professor Mark Kirk—who recently joined the Drama Department as its official designer and technical director—is working diligently with his scene shop team to produce a portal into Cocteau’s fantastic vision through set construction.

Before any literal and figurative hammer hit the nail, Prof. Kirk—along with Orphée’s director Professor Kyle Lemieux and the production’s costume designer Profes sor Susie Cox—performed extensive research concerning the inspiration and the motivation behind his play. It was evident that magic, based on the time’s illusory shows, played a key role in providing a pathway into a past story using a then-contemporary viewpoint. “Now we’ve taken [Orphée] and transplanted it basically a century later us ing the same basic ethic—we’re taking an older story and restaging it in a more contemporary stylistic way,” Prof. Kirk noted.

“If you’re looking for a good adjective for the show, ‘temporary’ would be a good example—at least for the vi sual look,” he went on to remark. “A lot of it is temporary

Above: Prof. Kirk with Olive Smith and Sebastian Luzondo

in that [Prof. Lemieux] doesn’t want to see things used as they are intended.” In essence, Prof. Kirk and his workers were not tasked to create a traditional theater set, but a completely immersive environment similar to an art in stallation. In concordance with Cocteau’s view, the scene imagery will enthrall audiences with a hypnotic sort of magic: reality melds and layers with the artificial to create a new world that, while static, is completely harmonious with the actors and their costumes. This new world, in terestingly enough, includes strings upon strings of paper snow cone cups.

“We call them “The Matrix Strings,” Prof. Kirk joked. “The way they’ll be employed reminded me a lot of the cascade of code from The Matrix; all that code is not actu ally code, but sushi recipes…we’re using snow cone cups to create sushi recipes, essentially.”

Experimentation drove the early stages of this building process: contemplating ideas such as embedding computer code into the cups as a private joke and reviewing sample materials with Prof. Lemieux were common occurrences for Prof. Kirk, as the designer of the production. By the end of the second pay period, when he had already assem bled his team of student workers, they manufactured 300 strings using 5000 snow cone cups in approximately ten days. An unfortunate delay in carpet and lumber delivery was not enough to dampen the scene shop spirits; they

expect to have the set completed two weeks prior to the production—just in time for tech rehearsals.

“It’s interesting to see the direction the set is going in, because I’m also in the rehearsal room, so I get to see the development of all the weird elements of the plot,” said

junior Maylis Quesnel, a member of the scene shop team and the Orphée cast. “The set is the most concrete part of the theater, so it’s a very fun thing to treat this Surrealist, weird, wacky play in such a straightforward way.”

Above: Maylis Quesnel and Charles Hughes in the Scene Shop

Meet the Cast and Management

Sienna Abbott

Sophomore Drama Horse

Loretta Bond Senior Drama Eurydice

Eoin O’Grady Senior Business Azrael

Lynley Glickler Senior Drama Death

Braden Barber Sophomore Drama, English Raphael

Sebastian Luzondo Senior Drama Commissioner of Police

Allison Peterman Freshman Drama, Philosophy Ensemble/Bacchante

Maylis Quesnel Junior

Drama, Comparative Literature Scrivener

Olive Smith

Freshman Classics Ensemble/Bacchante

Charlie Spurgin Senior Classics Orphée

Jack Urbanski Senior Drama Heurtebise

Sophomore Undeclared Production Stage Manager

Marcelle Van de Voorde Junior Drama, Philosophy Assistant Director/Props Master

Rose Urbanski

Freshman Drama, German Ensemble/Bacchante

Eleanor Hamlet

Freshman

Theology Assistant Stage Manager

Kate Sullivan