Excess in Fefu

I keep returning to Emma's speech in Part 3, about environment knocking at the gateway of the senses. In Part 2, the characters find themselves in very different physical environments, and in a parallel way, very different subconscious/imaginative environments. Emma cries out that "society restricts us, school straight jackets us, civilization submerges us, privation wrings us, luxury feather-beds us." All of these images present different spaces that restrict a person's behavior and threatens to subsume their sense of the world and their sense of self. So for me, particularly in P. 2, because it's the place in the play where the environment changes most drastically for all the characters, it makes sense that these environments are so abundantly textured and diverse, that they almost overtake these women. Because in each scene the characters are almost overtaken by something from within: they are being threatened from within and without, something Julia's monologue captures really well the judges and the prayer are both something that has been imposed upon her and something that has come from her experiences. Much of the characters' language evokes this mediation between the exterior and the interior, and the loss of distinction between the two. So for the part in the play when the women are confronting these inner "demons" (that's not the right word but I'm still struggling to find it), they are also confronting these multiple interior spaces, these powerful environments that bombard them both with possibilities and dangers.

This makes me think there's more to be investigated in costumes with layers, though as Leslie pointed out nothing should be too overtly theatrical or disjointed: this play's aesthetic should be unified, with very specific interruptions. I don't have a sense that this would change the direction we've been pursuing in the lights, and it very much springs from the ideas that Greg has put forward with the set. Perhaps it means that Sean should make differentiations between the props used in each of these environments and the ones that are used in the first and third parts.