notlikecalvin

Chloe and Jacob are in love. The first time they meet, they end their lives.

The Bee follows Chloe as she becomes increasingly isolated from her family and friends in the wake of a local tragedy. The Bird tells how Jacob's extremely abnormal childhood has detached him from humanity. The plays deal with two sides of the same coin, with the same cast in two separate venues and using very different performance styles.

Of the two, The Bee was the more conventionally staged, with the four-strong cast taking a number of roles between them in the relatively small Iron Belly. But The Bird, performed with a larger element of physicality and housed in the empty cavern of Big Belly, was a different creature: almost entirely a monologue told from Jacob's point of view, it needed something different to fill the space and texture the story. Traditional theatre lighting wasn't going to cut it, and after a certain amount of knashing of teeth I lit the whole thing with a several industrial worklamps. Different, but certainly Fringe-y, and it gave the play and that space just the edge I was looking for.