The Gallery of Crossed Destinies
Video Transcript: Jenny Gersten
I think the idea of The Crossed Destinies is to keep viewing things in a new light, which is what I love to do as a producer. The plays that I picked to put on stage I always like to say, “Tell me a story in a way that I haven’t heard it before”, and I feel like this is a perfect example of that: It’s constantly theme and variation.
What’s the story here with this ice bag? Part of it is, “What did Claes Oldenburg think when he decided to take an ice bag and make it into an object of art?” and part of it is, “What does it mean when the ice bag inflates and deflates?” The head of a devotee—he has his head kind of wide open and it looks like he might be screaming, or laughing, or shouting…it’s not really clear. But it, to me, cried out for expression and that word kind of hit me and so I thought about calling the title of this Expressions.
I thought about how much I wanted to give these objects a voice. And so, what I did was, I contacted a bunch of playwrights that I’ve worked with. And I showed them particular pieces that I thought might match their kind of writing style and imagination. I said, “Do you have anything that you would want to write for this object, or these objects?”, because sometimes I showed them more than one. And so that’s, that’s what we did!
Actor 1: “Observe! Ladies and gentlemen! I am seated upon the turtle! Does the reptile reject me? NO he does not! Does he roll over and toss me off? NO! Does he sink like a stone? Most decidedly NOT!”
Actor 2: “When come those who knew me, perhaps even know me still, by sight or course, or by smell, it’s as though, it’s as if, come on, I don’t know…I shouldn’t have begun. If I began again…”
Actress 1: “I wanna put my hands all over the paintings. I can’t understand the impulse behind the work if I can’t follow my own impulse to…you know…touch it. Oh, the National Portrait Gallery, the Boston Museum of Fine Arts…they almost had me arrested.”
I’m not good with spatial relations so I had to make a foam-core model, which is what we do in theater; we make models of set designs. So, it’s nice to have worked with the model and then see that my ideas were right. I like how my ideas manifested themselves in reality.
I always think about “What’s the story behind that still life?” It’s so simple, but it’s got so much possibility and there is very little possibility for imagination anymore. It’s very limited. So this is one of the great opportunities to sort of, exercise your imagination. I get to do that with a script also—sort of see how that story gets told…because there is a myriad of variations on how you do anything with a script, and I think probably the same is true in the museum world.