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| THE SEA Edward Bond |
| Missouri Reperatory Theatre, April 18 - 5, 2000 |
| Directed by |
Leon Ingulsrud |
| Set by |
Designer |
| Lights by |
James Prim |
| Sound by |
Designer |
| Costumes by |
Designer |
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This production was the final project for the 2000 graduating class of the University of Missouri, Kansas City's Graduate Acting program.
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This was my first encounter with Edward Bond. Although he is primarily known for his tragedies, THE SEA is a comedy. It is easy to see why the play is often thought of as and performed as a tragedy, but Bond himself wrote infatically that it is a comedy and should be performed with lightness.
On several levels the play is based on Shakespeare's Tempest, and I think this was also the source of Bond's mixing of the elements of comedy and tragedy.
Whatever it is, it's a beautiful play. |
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Director's Note:
...without tragedy, no one can laugh...
THE SEA is a comedy. But comedy is not the absence of tragedy.
Rather comedy is the buoyancy that allows us to survive tragedy.
Tragedy, in a deep sense, is not so much a cause for despair,
as much as it is the precondition of hope. The traditional twin
masks of Comedy and Tragedy that have been the emblem for the
dramatic arts, like the circle of yin and yang, imply that one
cannot exist without the other.
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It is fitting, at the beginning of this new century, to meditate
on the nature of hope. We have just survived arguably the most
violent century in human history. We are now all too familiar
with the reality of unspeakable horrors. The characters in THE
SEA are looking forward to the very terrors we look back upon.
Looking back at history and what it bodes for the future, there
doesn’t seem to be much to laugh about. We either go mad, solidify
our morality to the point of inflexibility or we embrace it all,
the petals along with the thorns, and find ourselves both laughing
and crying.
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| I think it was Orson Welles who said that whether or not a story has a happy ending depends on when you decide to end it.
Leon Ingulsrud, April 2000
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Please feel free to contact Leon if you have any comments or questions.
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