All the Lights On by Michelle Hensley

All the Lights On by Michelle Hensley

Author:Michelle Hensley
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-0-87351-984-7
Publisher: Minnesota Historical Society Press
Published: 2015-08-14T16:00:00+00:00


Then there was that giant man-eating plant. To try to believably operate and bring to life—let alone transport—some enormous gaudy puppet big enough to swallow people, especially without the help of any stage lighting or curtains, was clearly ridiculous and impossible. This was, of course, an irresistible challenge. My mind traveled to the very opposite end of the puppet spectrum. A bare hand. Four fingers opening and closing on top of the thumb in a talking beak, the kind every kid makes. We could make a flowerpot out of which grew a metal stem with a loop on top, a loop big enough to stick a hand through. The fabulously physically inventive actor playing Seymour, Jim Lichtscheidl, could just lower his voice and make his bare hand talk whenever the plant did. I knew Jim would relish singing both parts of Seymour’s duets with the plant. Every time the plant grew, we could raise the stem higher or move to a bigger pot with a taller stem and bigger loop. A piece of black cloth could cover those who got eaten as the plant grew, and I knew that our particular Seymour would take great delight in figuring out how to get his hand to eat himself at the end.

Without that big gaudy prop of a flower puppet in the way, a metaphor was revealed. Wasn’t that big hungry plant just an extension of shy, uncertain Seymour? His suppressed hunger for love and attention an alter ego manifesting itself in a flowerpot? The connection between Seymour and the ravenous man-eating plant became clear, and the childlike theatrical trick delighted the audiences.

Musicals always demand the most in terms of set and props, no matter how much we try to pare things down. We let ourselves go a little wild on such shows, though we still remain, as an actress once declared in a moment of exasperation after being denied a request for a prop, “The Amish Theater Company!” The Most Happy Fella tells the story of an unlikely romance growing out of correspondence between an elderly Italian immigrant vineyard owner and a young (in our cast, African American) waitress. Unlikely romance is something we all yearn for, and in our production I wanted to focus on the fears that kept getting in the way of love’s blossoming generosity.

Most of the play takes place on a Napa Valley grape ranch. I was drawn to the Y shape of the wooden supports of the vines. They seemed like two generous outspread arms, echoing our exploration of abundance and giving without fear. In addition to supporting vines, the bare wood Y-shapes could support little round tabletops in Rosabella’s restaurant as well as the street sign on the town corner where ranch hands stood “watchin’ all the girls go by.” To create the rows of the vineyard, we made nine wooden Ys and stuck them in bare wood boxes, or planters, on wheels, three in each row across the playing square. Against all this bare



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