La/Dy/Da

During this semester-long production seminar, led by Professor Deborah Margolin, our company of actors, designers, a producer, and a director will spend the first half of the semester immersed in the work and techniques of experimental theater troupes of the past fifty years, and the second half devising our own production, taking as our source text Henry James’ novel “The Portrait of a Lady.” We will seek to not only adapt this seminal work, but to explore what exactly adaptation means. Which parts of a text do we preserve and which to shear away? When does being faithful to a text’s core mean revising or adding to its content? How can the interiority of this novel translate to the exteriority of a stage? It is in finding answers to these questions that we hope to devise our own “Lady.”