Thrush

Caridad Svich

Thrush by Caridad Svich predicts a barren America after the horrors of natural and human disaster have left their mark on the land and its survivors. The director, Jaclyn Biskup, looked to the state of American politics and saw this play as a prediction of what will result if the present administration’s actions are permitted to snowball. There is a resonance with the current housing crisis overwhelming U.S. neighborhoods. Thousands of families, unable to pay their mortgages, are forced out of their homes leaving entire communities vacant. What will happen to the land and its people if the situation is never rectified?.

The characters of Thrush exist in an America that has degenerated to an anarchistic state where its inhabitants are nomadic survivors. They travel for miles as a means to physically and emotionally escape. Although they are in a constant state of migration, the description of the terrain never changes. We stay with them throughout the play in the same space that neither they, nor the audience, can escape. In the final moment Minerva and Keck leave America for Skye. They break over the last hill and walk side by side towards the sea.

Floods of violence and storm have left their scars on the land leaving it arid. The challenge was to facilitate the actors’ sense of travel within a proscenium space. When looking to my research I found that many images contained a strong frame; a doorway, an underpass, a bridge, behind which the image of the landscape is able to stretch infinitely. I applied this concept by restricting the visual envelope to control the audiences’ point of view. I brought in the proscenium and repeated the portal as the set recedes in space. Behind these portals the hills are able to stretch out of sight lines, creating a strong horizontal in contrast to the vertical terrain of the hills. It was an experiment to see if the concept so often used in photography and painting could be applied to a 3-dimensional space.

The hills demanded a lot out of the actors who moved horizontally and vertically across the terrain, having to adjust their movement in reaction to the land. The chorus, an ephemeral judge of the events onstage, used traps and escape stairs to fluidly travel through the space. During the city scene the characters were trapped between a fence and the front of the stage, which restricted the actors’ movement while detained. Within this scene we are re-introduced to Furst; the tyrannical leader of the camp who built his status through violence.

I was interested in this society’s use of currency and what becomes precious in a world where so much had been destroyed. For Furst’s cubicle we wanted to create a rich atmosphere in contrast to the dusty landscape. He is a collector and accumulates fine liquors and imported goods in a place where basic food is scarce. I thought of the light bulb and its fragility and used them to surround him, creating a false sense of warmth that he mirrors in his demeanor. This unit moved on and offstage carrying with it a symphony of sound as the light bulbs rattled together which was recorded and emphasized by the sound designer. Minerva strangles him and with a final thrust he is pushed against the back of the unit, shaking the bulbs in unison with his collapse.