Three Britney Spears fans are lamenting her conservatorship situation. “She is unwell,” one said. “Like everyone in the pandemic but worse. She’s trapped. How do we help her?”
“We love you Britney!” said Megan Tabaque, reacting to the three actors playing Spears super fans during a rehearsal, echoing a line that has been uttered endlessly by her devoted fans on social media videos in recent years.
Tabaque, a playwriting fellow at Emory University, is the creator and director behind the new play “Britney Approximately: A Pop Greek Tragedy,” which will be at the Mary Gray Munroe Theater at Emory University from April 6 to 16.
Credit: HYOSUB SHIN / AJC
Credit: HYOSUB SHIN / AJC
She was in tech rehearsals last Friday ensuring the lighting and sound cues were right. And she was feeling good about the play, which is a a blend of Euripides’ “Medea” and the struggles of Spears under the stifling 14-year conservatorship created by her father.
“I use the play as one part music video, one part Greek tragedy, one part love letter to Britney Spears,” Tabaque said.
The cast, made up of Emory University students, features four versions of Britney Spears played by four different women, each representing a different side of the legendary pop star. Her father is dubbed King Creon.
“Over the course of the play,” Tabaque said, “we see Britney topple King Creon’s empire and regain control of her own life. I wanted to give Britney some kind of happy ending.”
And having multiple Britneys, she said, “is to make it feel like we’re all Britney in a way. We’ve all been in positions where we have felt oppressed or not recognized for our talents or not able to be our full selves.”
Spears, 41, has been in the public spotlight for a quarter century, from her early days as a teen pop sensation with hit songs like “Baby ... One More Time” and “Oops ... I Did It Again” to her tabloid-splattered relationships and mental breakdown in the 2000s to her more recent battles to gain her own financial and personal freedom.
Filipina Canadian Tabaque, who at age 37 is a little younger than Spears, recalled seeing the 1998 video for “Baby ... One More Time,” where Spears dressed up in a naughty school-girl outfit, and feeling the urge to imitate her although she was only 12 years old.
“I learned every single one of her dances,” Tabaque said. “Then her life spun out of control and I had nothing but empathy for her.”
The kernel of the play came while Tabaque was living in New Mexico during the pandemic in 2021, feeling sad and isolated. She began following Spears’ efforts in court to free herself from a long-standing conservatorship that restricted her ability to control her own destiny on multiple levels.
“I started to make the connections,” she said. “Her life was so controlled and regulated and that mirrored in some ways what I was feeling. I funneled the tragedy of the pandemic into the tragedy of her life.”
Credit: HYOSUB SHIN / AJC
Credit: HYOSUB SHIN / AJC
Tabaque wrote a short play, then set it aside. But after she came to Emory for her fellowship, she heard the good news: Spears in November 2021 was freed from her conservatorship. This compelled Tabaque to revisit her play and expand it into a full-fledged production. She weaved Spear’s life into the “Medea” Greek tragedy and “it became a new animal,” she said.
Medea in the original tragedy loses her mind and kills her own children. Tabaque tied that in with critics maligning Spears in the 2000s for being a bad mother during the height of the paparazzi craziness, like when she shaved her head in front of the cameras.
Credit: HYOSUB SHIN / AJC
Credit: HYOSUB SHIN / AJC
The students playing Spears weren’t even alive when she became an MTV star and were too young to remember her biggest meltdowns. “But Britney has become this ubiquitous presence who has permeated generations,” Tabaque said. “She’s globally known. She herself has become mythic. For better or worse, she became a goddess.”
Kailey Albus, an Emory sophomore, plays Britney #3, who she defines as “Mental Hospital Britney.”
“A lot of kids my age only know her as a name, not a person,” Albus said. “Megan was careful to make sure the Britney she shows wasn’t someone losing her mind. Rather, she’s someone living through circumstances that keep happening to her.”
Credit: Alberto E. Rodriguez
Credit: Alberto E. Rodriguez
The play doesn’t ignore the role of pop culture consumers whose obsession with Spears fueled the tabloid exploitation. “What regret do we have going forward?” Tabaque said. “That is one of the questions very much alive in the play.”
The “Britney Approximately” set evokes ancient Greece, but the characters go on Starbucks runs, reference dating apps and use smartphones. The dialogue blends classic poetic language with contemporary verbiage. The play also messes with time and space, going from New Orleans (where Spears grew up) to Greece to Las Vegas, where Spears had a long-running residency. And Spears’ kids are depicted as puppets.
Elements of Spears’ music, so elemental in her fame, are slyly incorporated into the interstitial music. In one case, the three super fans sing and ape the choreography of her “Sometimes” video. But Tabaque also incorporated four original tunes composed by two Emory students Prerit Chaudhary and Willa Barnett and inspired by actual Spears tunes.
Credit: EMORY UNIV
Credit: EMORY UNIV
Tabaque sees this as a workshop production, a laboratory piece that could blossom moving forward. Once her fellowship at Emory is up, she plans to move to Los Angeles.
“‘Britney Approximately’,” she said, “can be sharpened and grow beyond this stage. I’ll be doing some rewrites and sending it to regional theaters. It will totally have a life after this.”
IF YOU GO
“Britney Approximately”
April 6-16. $15. Mary Gray Munroe Theater, Emory University, 630 Means Drive, Atlanta. arts.emory.edu.
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