Portal de Periódicos da CAPES

The Sea Lady

2023; Penn State University Press; Volume: 44; Issue: 1 Linguagem: Inglês

10.5325/eugeoneirevi.44.1.0105

2161-4318

Christen Mandracchia,

Cinema and Media Studies

When it come to mermaids, the collective American imagination is dominated by popularized versions of Hans Christian Andersen’s The Little Mermaid, especially the 1989 Disney animated musical. Scholarly discourse on mermaid mythology ranges from investigations of the cultural trope as queer allegory to arguments about the extent or limitations of its feminist messaging. As a theater academic and practitioner whose research examines theater histories of the Walt Disney Company, I have considered Andersen/Disney’s mermaids both as scholarly problems and as challenges of stagecraft. Therefore, it was a joy for me to encounter a new kind of mermaid lore through the Metropolitan Playhouse’s virtual production of Neith Boyce’s The Sea Lady, an adaptation of H. G. Wells’s book of the same title.Carol DeBoer-Langworthy, who is working on a literary biography of Boyce, gave the evening’s guest talk. She generously offered background information on a play that—much like its titular character—seems to have come from out of nowhere: “[The play] has been lying at the bottom of the sea, so to speak, for a long time,” she noted. Boyce, DeBoer-Langworthy explained, was commissioned to write this play in 1930, with a possible Broadway production in mind. This would have been a breakout opportunity for Boyce, a founding Provincetown Player who had been writing plays for decades but had not achieved commercial success. Boyce’s plan for a production long on music and spectacle fell through in 1935. Thanks to Alex Roe, the Metropolitan Playhouse’s artistic direction, audiences were able to get their first look at this play nearly ninety years later.In some ways, an unstaged play is well suited to the digital format, because there are no former productions to compare it to—no pre-existing expectations of what it should look or sound like. This offers opportunities distinct from, say, a Disney animated film transferred to Broadway, to which an audience will likely apply preconceptions. In the Metropolitan production, the Medusa Studio’s digital backdrops served as the scenery for the costumed actors, each in their own “Zoom square,” framed by a period picture frame, and positioned around the background image to connote blocking. Each square was backed by a greenscreen; this allowed the back of the square to appear translucent blue against different scenic backdrops. One notable exception was Roe’s presentation of the Sea Lady herself (Elisabeth Ahrens), who—thanks to a greenscreen and some creative movements on screen—is pulled from the water by the aspiring politician Harry Chatteris (Bryson Bruce) and spends most of the play in a wheelchair, her tail covered by a blanket.It is thematically appropriate that the Sea Lady is not confined by a frame, since her character is not bound by the same social or cultural rules as the human characters. Much of the plot involves something of a cultural exchange between the mermaid and the human residents of this luxury-beach neighborhood. The well-to-do Bunting family, the press, the police, and Chatteris’s fiancée, the social activist Adelaide Glendower (DeAnna Supplee), continually speculate on the Sea Lady’s objectives in allowing herself to be beached by the handsome Chatteris, to whom she seems to have taken a liking. The Bunting matriarch, Amanda (Sidney Fortner), draws on German mermaid lore when she suggests that the Sea Lady has come to the human world to gain a soul. When the cousin Horace Melville (Kevin Bernard) asks the Sea Lady if she intends to marry Chatteris, the horrified mermaid responds that “there are better dreams” than drying up on land for a man. This is contrary to the Andersen/Disney mermaid, who comes to land to be with a human male and is one of many instances in which The Sea Lady defies cultural expectations. What better way for Boyce to question cultural and social norms than through a mermaid’s skeptical responses to human ideas about marriage, children, and money? Director Roe, also credited with production design, video manipulation, and sound, made a poignant choice to keep her outside of a square: free.Roe’s decision in this instance called attention to the opportunities of digital theater. At other times, the limitations of the digital platform undercut and undermined the excitement that the play’s originality should ideally generate. This was not so much a problem with directing, acting, and design as a consequence of healthy experimentation with emerging technologies. I don’t mean to criticize the technical glitches, delays, and overall flubs that come with multiple software programs running simultaneously in real time—and I add that the Metropolitan was kind enough to prepare a special glitch-free version after the initial performance. Rather, it is useful for critics, scholars, and practitioners to discuss the ways that digital platforms script actors’ interactions with the camera and, by proxy, characters’ interactions with other characters and with the audience. For example, Zoom naturally encourages actors to always face forward. This makes a longish production like The Sea Lady difficult to watch, given the unnaturalness of the constant frontal positioning. But I add that Fortner and Supplee, in particular, were able to use this limitation to communicate the characters’ enculturation in a rigid society.Another challenge was the unevenness of the sound quality that comes from actors doing a live show from different locations, on different devices, and with different quality microphones. A stage actor, when adjusting a performance for film, must make changes that accommodate the cinematic context, process, and equipment. However, the audiovisual equipment on a personal computer or similar device often requires additional adjustment because this technology was not designed for the performing arts. In Roe’s production, there were times when the actors would project their voices too loudly for the small onboard microphones. This is an understandable limitation of the technology currently available to theater-makers; however, like the forward-facing performances, it is difficult to engage with for prolonged periods. Natural setbacks like these point up the importance of continuing to experiment with digital theater, especially for underproduced or unproduced works such as this.The Metropolitan Virtual Playhouse showcased a dedicated group of theater artists boldly taking on an untested play with a lot of literal and figurative moving pieces. I hope this production inspires more companies to mount The Sea Lady, digitally or live. Boyce’s script suggests an abundance of critical and scholarly opportunities, as well as providing a historically interesting look at an unorthodox “mermaid” who almost made it to the mainstream. It both challenges practitioners to confront problems of live staging and points digital theater toward the realization of “better dreams.”