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Big Love drills depths of humanity

From the Baton Rouge Advocate:

"The play is based on a trilogy by Escaulus, but we only use one play from the trilogy, Supplient," Ingulsrud continued. "It's the story of these 50 women who are being forced to wed 50 men, who are their cousins. They escape, and go to a man who is a distant relative and ask him for asylum.

"When he refuses to help because he feels his own safety is more important, the 50 brothers force the 50 women to marry them, and on the wedding night the women kill the men.

"The twist is that one couple falls in love. One of the 50 women chooses to go another way, essentially betrays her sisters and doesn't kill her lover. This results in her trial, and the trial is the development of the play."

The judge for the trial is an old women with 13 sons. She says what the women have done is terrible, but her verdict is that to love can never be wrong. For there to be healing, there may be no justice, so the women are allowed to go.

Ingulsrud said the play is so well written that he has always wanted to stage it.

"Mee excerpts from many sources and has a very contemporary way of writing, very up to the minute" the director explained. "It still has 50 sisters, which is absurd, and it's a theatrical world. It is not about reality, but can reflect real life.

"The author is a historian, and he has deep insight into the way the world works. He understands things that go on in society."

Using the Greek tragedy as a base is good, because the Greeks deal with fundamental issues that are inescapable, the director said, adding that works of art often concern horrible events, such as the hurricanes, and recounting them in art helps people to connect with reality.

Click here for the rest.

Just so you know, the article's writer incorrectly spelled the name of the Greek playwright on whose play Big Love is based: it's actually spelled "Aeschylus."

Anyway, enough of the ancient Greek lecture. The Advocate gave us a pretty good advance write-up. I hope the above excerpt will be enough to sway anyone who can't see the play to read the script instead. It's that good. But if you can see the show, by all means do so. We're in fantastic hands with director Leon Ingulsrud in the captain's chair--he's simply one of the most brilliant guys I've ever worked under in the theater. Then again, he'd better be: he's a founding member of the SITI Company, one of the premiere avant garde theater groups in the world. This is some badass stuff.


LSU Theatre actors, from left, Kesha Bullard, Derek Mudd, Anna Richardson, Reuben Mitchell, Nikki Travis and Mark L. Jaynes star in Big Love. (Photo by Vastine Stabler)

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