December 5, 2012 | Theatre,

Interview with Polly K. Carl on LA BELLE ET LA BÊTE

Emerson student and Creative Producer in Training Stefan Martin interviews Polly K. Carl, Director of the Center for Theater Commons and consulting dramaturg on La Belle et la Bête. 

Stefan Martin: How did this collaboration between you and Lemieux Pilon 4D Art come about?

Polly K. Carl: What’s so powerful about the work that Victor and Michel are doing is that they really have such a strong sense of the spectacle and the kind of transformative power of the image, and I think that the instinct was that there were a lot of words getting in the way of the power of telling the story. So the collaborative work on the script that Rob Orchard, Victor and Michel, and myself did really came out of a sense that it could be stronger if we could lift the images more from the stage. After Rob had gone to see the production in an earlier form, Victor and Michel got in the car, came from Montreal and we just decided to spend a couple days in a room together. We watched every scene from the production, and we talked about each one. But it really started from that sense that the power of the story was diluted a bit from the language.

SM: What do you mean by “lifting the image?”

PC: There’s a way in which these guys work in almost a filmic, 3D kind of experience. There’s a way that if you have to listen too much, the power of those images doesn’t come at you in the same way. I think by simplifying the story, the images really have the impact that they’re intended to have.

SM: Did it feel counter-intuitive for you go to in being aware of listening too much?

PC: Yeah, you know it’s weird, for me as a dramaturg-type, what you’re really listening for is the story, how is the story being told. In the room, I was trying to see the images. Dramaturgically, I’m trying to hear all the words still, so I can make sense of which ones should stay and which ones aren’t essential, but in a weird way I’m trying not to get too swept up in the images because I was really trying to hear which words matter. But in other ways, it was a pretty conventional process for me because I’m always thinking about, “What’s the best way to tell the story?” along with the director and the writer and whoever is in the room.

SM: Have you worked in this way before?

PC: I have never had the experience before with people who are making a sort of 3D theatre, so that part of it was new. I’ve had a lot of experience in the room, whether it be how to scale back or amplify text, or whether it’s about finding text in relationship to music, text in relationship to image, or text in relationship to performer. That I’m pretty adept at, but the 3D part made it sort of like, “whoa, how do you do that?” There’s a level of spectacle there that you don’t get to work with in the theatre unless you’re in big huge projects, and those tend to be few and far between.

SM: Did you feel like you could connect to those images like you could connect to an actor?

PC: Yeah, so I watched it on video, and Rob actually saw it in person. But even on video, there are some moments that are just unbelievably lovely, and you can really get a feel for place. I felt there are some times when you’re heading to the woodsy area where [the Beast] lives, out in the middle of nowhere into his castle area, and you really feel, in a fairy tale way, the depth of the dark and the traveling to the woods. There are some wonderful things they do to make you feel like you’re on the journey with [the characters].

SM: Is there anything you learned from this experience that you’d like to share about this function of dramaturgy to a process?

PC: In this case, these guys are really making theatre for an audience, and a large-scale audience in many ways. What is always reiterated for me in that kind of process is, “how do we do right by the audience?” I felt that the labor here is to go, “How do we take what we know and give the best chance of this story succeeding for the audience?” I feel like that’s what came out of it. And there was something about this process that was particularly wonderful in the generosity of spirit – that everyone came into the room not with the desire of holding onto what was theirs, but with the desire to have the best thing in the end for the audience. That’s what you hope for.

SM: Yeah, and hopefully making the piece more specific about what they originally wanted.

PC: I think that was the biggest thing. When you’re the dramaturg, it’s never about the story you think should be told, it’s really about supporting, “What is the story they want to tell?” In the room I would say something like, “Is this essential to the story?” And there were moments, like I had a question about whether we needed a whole character in the story, and they talked passionately about why that character mattered, for example. So then you go: OK, then we definitely need it. A lot of times when you’re working with artists in that capacity, it’s really about supporting them to tell the story they intend. There was this one time I was talking to a writer about a play, and I suggested that a character maybe wasn’t necessary, and the writer said to me, “Actually, the play’s about her.” And I said, “Whoa!” That led us to the most interesting conversation where [the writer] had been afraid of his character, and his fear of her had led him to write her in this way that made her unessential, and in fact he was actually writing around that. That conversation led us to say, “Well, I missed the boat there.” And then, we were able to have a really fruitful conversation about how he could make her what he intended.

SM: In a way, you’re supporting them in allowing for whatever their intention is to blossom.

PC: Yeah, exactly. You want to just support the writer, and the director, and the actors, really, in telling the story they want to tell. So you’re both inside, in some ways, and trying to stay just a little unemotional about what your own desires are.

SM: How do you feel like this project was different than Lemieux Pilon 4D Art’s typical show?

PC: Well I think they work in very different ways, but they did The Tempest, so they do work with scripts. I think the script piece for them is challenging; the more words there are, I think for them is more challenging. I think that, although they’ve certainly done this before, trying to figure out that balance when they’re working from a set script is different from when they’re creating a visual experience. My sense in talking with them was that that tends to be the more challenging piece. And playing around with Shakespeare is a little bit different than what they’re doing with La Belle et la Bête. You can cut and paste Shakespeare however you want, in a way, and in this case they were working with a playwright who adapted the piece.

SM: Can you introduce the piece and describe what it is in your view?

PC: I did a great podcast and [Michel and Victor] can really talk about it better than I can– about all the research, all the different versions historically of Beauty and the Beast, and then going back to a kind of original French text to tell that story, which I have not read, so I feel less able to articulate it. In this case, it was me just coming in at the very end, along with Rob and doing this. But, when I hear them talk about it, it’s a retelling of Beauty and the Beast, and there’s a bunch of retellings of fairy tales right now, there’s actually a new Beauty and the Beast out there. From that version of it, it’s really about how we’ve become obsessed culturally with appearances and the surface, and I think for Victor and Michel, they wanted to look at this idea of how to get to a deeper level of what beauty means. This is more about the human question of how we relate to people.