Big Love
Flexible Performance Space, LASALLE College of the Arts, Singapore, April 2011
Director: Adam Marple
Set Designer: Aaron Yap
Lighting Designer: Petrina Dawn Tan
Produced by BA(Hons) Acting Programme, LASALLE College of the Arts
Based on the concept of “Baroque” and the director’s vision of a clean space is this “white box” that utilised almost the entire black box theatre from wall to wall. Instead of the usual ornate decorations one usually identifies “Baroque” with, the set goes for maximum dramatisation while trying to be minimalistic at the same time.
Almost the entire theatre is painted white, with the exception of a small corner of a wall at upstage right that is painted with an artwork that is not meant to be instantly recognisable, but when looked at closely, one will realise that it is a superimposed map of Italy and Greece. The brides ran away from Greece, a territorially well defined-country, to Italy, another territorially well-defined country, to get away from their prospective husbands. However, while they ran away from their marriage, they could not run away from their fate, and hence this superimposed map is an abstract representation of the blurred world they are in: they may have fled to Italy to seek asylum, but the feeling is still very Greece (still oppressed by their prospective husbands like back in Greece), so are they still in Greece or already in Italy, or in a mysterious “Greetaly”?