This story was originally published by ArtsATL.
For Vernal & Sere Theatre’s 10th production ”The Glass Essay,” founding company member Sawyer Estes issued himself a unique challenge as a playwright: He wouldn’t actually write a line of dialogue within it.
Instead, the work — inspired by Canadian poet and essayist Anne Carson — presents Carson’s poem of the same title verbatim, delivered by five performers onstage telling a story conceived by Estes with multiple characters.
The play runs at Windmill Arts Center in East Point through March 17.
“It’s a peculiar thing,” Estes said. “When I was thinking about staging this, I would read the poem once, and I could see it in my head the way the lines break down. Then I would read it again on another day, and it would be a wash, and I couldn’t see anything dramatic. I went back and forth on whether it was really possible, and I decided to take the leap and figure it out.”
Credit: Courtesy of Vernal & Sere Theatre
Credit: Courtesy of Vernal & Sere Theatre
The resulting work features performers Kate Brown, Kayli Keppel, Erin O’Connor, Lindsey Sharpless and Mustapha Slack. It tells the story of a woman going through a breakup who returns home to visit her mother. She carries with her a copy of “The Collected Works of Emily Bronte,” and she tries to analyze the works — including “Wuthering Heights” — as a means of understanding the author and rediscovering herself.
“So it’s her life in relation to the work of Emily and the dark, Byronic characters of Emily’s world,” Estes said.
Often when we discover books that resonate, our connection to them emerges because of what they reveal within us.
“Reading is not a one-way street,” he said. “The book or the object is like a mirror or pane of glass that is reflecting yourself back onto you. It reads you while you’re reading it, and wherever you are in life changes how you look at a work.”
Vernal & Sere specializes in experimental, abstract theater, and Estes views “The Glass Essay” — which includes elements of music, dance, film, photography and lecture — as the culmination of all their efforts.
“With my work, I feel like this is everything I’ve been working toward in a piece of theater for the past 20 years of my life,” he said.
He discovered the poem over a decade ago and connected with it.
“About 10 years ago, I fell in love with Anne Carson, and I fell in love with ‘The Glass Essay,’” he said. “When my sister got divorced, I gave it to her to help her through her difficult time.”
Credit: Courtesy of Vernal & Sere Theatre
Credit: Courtesy of Vernal & Sere Theatre
Because of the emotional connection they both had with the work, Estes considered the challenge of presenting a nontraditional text as a work of theater.
“I wanted to be true to the power of the poem itself, and that power is in language,” he said. “And I wondered if I could convey that without changing a word of it. It’s all word for word. The process of adaptation was taking the poem from its single voice, that single perspective, and breaking that down into dramatic characters. It was about breaking it down line by line, determining that this line was spoken by this character or this line is in response to this character.”
Estes said the performers have worked hard to discover their characters within the work, wondering how to deliver certain lines because the poem is only from Carson’s perspective and in her voice. Vernal & Sere, though, has a fluidity in the way it presents characters within its work. In previous shows such as “The Exterminating Angel” or “Hurricane Season,” characters would often speak collective thoughts or echo each other’ sentiments.
“If you’ve seen our work and seen how a character can be both very fixed and totally in flux, you’ll be familiar,” he said. “If you’re not, it could be tricky. But I feel confident that it will be successful, even to audiences new to our work.”
The scenic design by Josh Oberlander is special, Estes said. The entire play will be staged within a large, metal box in the center of the stage, like a diorama, surrounded by scrim that will have images and video created by Haley James projected upon it.
“We’re coming to view and to analyze these figures just as we would in a zoo or a museum,” he said.
Audiences will connect to the emotion of the work, the director believes, and the power of Carson’s words.
“I like to think the best of my audience,” Estes explained. “That if I get it, then they’ll get it. And if they don’t, they’ll see it again and won’t just dismiss it.”
THEATER PREVIEW
“The Glass Essay”
Presented by Vernal & Sere Theatre through March 17. $20-$55. Windmill Arts Center, 2823 Church St., East Point. vernalandseretheatre.com.
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Benjamin Carr is an ArtsATL editor-at-large who has contributed to the publication since 2019 and a member of the American Theatre Critics Association, the Dramatists Guild, the Atlanta Press Club and the Horror Writers Association. His writing has been featured in podcasts for iHeartMedia, onstage as part of the Samuel French Off-Off Broadway Short Play Festival and online in The Guardian. His debut novel, Impacted, was published by The Story Plant.
Credit: ArtsATL
Credit: ArtsATL
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