- OTHER MEDIA
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- article in the Marin Independent Journal
- by Elsa Knox Butler
- Objects are her desire
In the first scene of the unusual play, "Beauty and the Breast,"
a young woman sits alone on the examination table waiting for her doctor
to arrive, bored. With her back to the audience, she removes her bra in
preparation for a breast exam. What happens next is not what you might
expect. As soon as it is liberated from the owner's body, the orchid-colored
bra is transformed from an inanimate object by puppeteers onstage into
Bresty, the heroine.
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- "If you give an object animation, it lulls adult audiences,"
says Mill Valley playwright Liebe Wetzel, artist in residence at the Marsh
Theatre in San Francisco and artistic director of object theater company
Lunatique Fantastique.
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- "Beauty and the Breast" is one of six plays premiering this
week at the Exit Theatre's DIVAFest 2006, a theater festival dedicated
to new plays by women writers from all over the country. A Marin County
"Beauty" tour is expected next year.
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- "Beauty and the Breast" tells the story of a woman diagnosed
with breast cancer and the difficult decisions one in eight women who experience
it face. Wetzel's troupe of six young female puppeteers dexterously animate
lace bras, sports bras, a stethoscope, file folders, photographs, surgical
tubing, mops and an ice bag.
- By using puppets to tell a story, the difficult material is more readily
accessible. "A play doesn't happen on stage, it happens in your imagination.
It happens when you connect the material to what you see," says Wetzel,
45, a Dallas native and a molecular biologist.
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- Wetzel's style of anthropomorphic story telling is concurrently simple
and complex. Whatever formal sophistication the medium of puppetry lacks,
"Beauty" transports the audience into a fantasy world in which
a simple object conveys a spectrum of emotion.
- In preparation for the play, Wetzel and the cast interviewed more than
25 doctors and survivors of breast cancer in various stages, from the newly
diagnosed to those in remission for 30 years. The simplicity of the props
and the manipulators' deft manual articulations clearly communicate the
fear and pain of being diagnosed with breast cancer.
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- The object manipulators are an integral part of the visual metaphor
on stage. Bresty is an avid gardener; for Wetzel, a garden speaks of all
that is natural, beautiful and transforming. The object manipulators, whom
Liebe sees as "God's gardeners," larger-than-life forces that
tend to the soul, wear white coveralls with trowels stuffed in pockets
and floppy broad-brimmed hats. No words are spoken; instead the cast hums
tunes as background music.
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- "Liebe writes in three dimensions in time and space. She's more
like a choreographer than a playwright because she uses people and movement
to tell a story, rather than words," says Christine Young, associate
artistic director at the San Francisco nonprofit Playwrights Foundation,
who has collaborated on "Beauty." "Liebe is the only person
in the Bay Area working like this; she invented the genre."
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- When choosing a director, Wetzel jumped at the chance to work with
a fellow Marin resident, Jayne Wenger of Tiburon. "I hadn't clicked
with anyone, but Jayne and I established trust right away," Wetzel
says. "It's (choosing a director) like having an infant and giving
it over to someone to take care of. It's very intimate."
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- Wenger and Wetzel have bonded over their shared ZIP codes and their
passion for writing plays from images they draw on index cards - not at
their desks on computers like most playwrights.
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- Wenger, who was the artistic director of Women's Ensemble of New York
for eight years and a former artistic director of the Bay Area Playwrights
Foundation, has 30 years of theater experience. She focuses on developing
new work and emerging playwrights. "Liebe has a unique approach to
character development and storytelling. Her world is different than what
I've known; it's a world of objects, but it's a thrill working with a talented
playwright. That part is familiar," Wenger says.
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- "What Liebe's work does is make an audience see the world in a
different way. Not only is the topic important but she uses humor to discuss
a topic that touches almost everyone."
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- The she adds with a laugh, "Besides, I was ready in my career
to work with a cast of bras."
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- Wetzel says she is drawn to socially relevant and difficult subject
matter. She has written and performed plays about a Japanese internment
camp during World War II and a priest charged with pedophilia in Texas.
"Beauty" was inspired by a friend who was diagnosed with breast
cancer. "I was the friend who ran in the opposite direction,"
she says. "I was going through a messy divorce and had my life to
deal with. Having a friend get diagnosed brings it home in an unavoidable
way."
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- "Breast cancer is of interest to all women, particularly in Marin,"
says Exit Theatre founder and artistic director Christina Auguello. "Liebe
has found a new, innovative way to present the issue."
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