February 20, 2013 | Theatre,

Labor Pains: Ken Prestininzi on his Birth Breath Bride Elizabeth

 

Local Boston fringe theatre troupe Sleeping Weazel is presenting Birth Breath Bride Elizabeth at the inaugural The Next Thing (TNT) Festival. Ken Prestininzi, author and director of the hour-long one-woman show, provides ArtsEmerson audiences with exclusive insight into his creation of this one-of-a-kind performance piece.

How would you characterize Birth Breath Bride Elizabeth?

It’s definitely an unconventional play. The plot centers on “mad” academic Mary Shelley-Breath who is undone by her own lecture and unleashes in front of us the monsters that we all try to hide under the bed— monsters made from our identification with and irrational horror of feminism, Frankenstein and a young bride’s wedding anxieties.  It’s a crackpot lecture gone awry. The play is harrowing and absurd. We watch a creative mind become possessed by today’s fears of what a Woman might think, do and be.

What or who inspired the piece?

The play is composed of the many voices that possess the heart, mind, body and soul of the character Dr. Mary Shelley-Breath and of feminist scholars today. I was a scholar and fellow for a year at the Pembroke Center for Teaching and Research on Women at Brown University and I wanted to put on stage the great arguments and emotional upheavals that true scholarship can cause.  Ever since I learned about her life as a child, Mary Shelley has always fascinated me. Her creative process (the story that possessed her, that came to her unbidden) and her relationship to her mother, the feminist Mary Wollstonecraft, drew me in. Marriage and creation, love’s imagination and monsterhood, the need to create, the want to control what one feels with will and reason—all of these were opened up to me by Mary Shelley’s story and made me look at my own creative needs and relationship to my emotions centered on my mother.

I also always thought Elvis Presley moved like Boris Karloff, and he elicited an emotional response from me like the Creature played by Karloff did. I wanted to simply bring that to the forefront.  I wanted to understand why Princess Diana was a pop culture Monster and Saint. I’m a big fan of Alfred Jarry’s Ubu Roi, and the clown monsters of appetite Pere Ubu and Mere Ubu in his plays. The battle between reason, will, anarchy and appetite rages in all these images and icons. The relationship of mother and daughters, and how that love can be inarticulate and overwhelming beyond reason intrigues me.

Of course, my own wild imaginings and supernova failures as a professor trying to give a lecture that makes sense of my inner truth enters into the piece as well.

Which landmarks in popular culture is the show riffing off of?

With love and fierce admiration:

• Brides magazines
• Camille Paglia
• Judith Butler
• Germaine Greer
• Our obsession for Princess Diana
• Jackie Gleason, Roseanne Barr, Mae West, Betty Boop
• Our swoon for Elvis Presley
• The novel Frankenstein
• Every Frankenstein movie ever made
• Horror movies

How has the show changed from its original incarnation to what will be seen at TNT?

The play was once a lecture happening at the same time as a bridal shower. A group of young women would switch back and forth between being at their graduation or at the shower.  Spurred on by that conflict, they eventually went into a bridal-scholar coma, basically becoming a manifestation of Dr. Mary’s thoughts and id. The show is now Dr. Mary Shelley-Breath and her need to give her lecture to a room of young women scholars (the audience), not knowing she is about to give birth to her wildest imaginations, dreams, desires and fears as well.  It’s Dr. Mary who transforms the audience into being scholars or bridesmaids.  The battle between reason and the female body is played out in the actress playing Dr. Mary and not by a chorus. The creative mind is located in the many parts of her female body.

The journey that Mary Shelley-Breath goes on and invites us to go on with her has become one of self-willed transformation versus something that happens to her.  It’s a performed and physicalized transformation, a liberating one, for both performer and audience, and no longer just a breakdown beyond her control.

What have you learned most in the process of writing and directing BBBE?

One should create a monster when making theatre, to quicken the beating of our hearts.  We need to call out to our Mommies and our Monsters.

Birth Breath Bride Elizabeth will be playing Friday, Feb. 22 at 9:00PM and Saturday, Feb. 23 at 6:30PM as a part of the TNT Festival, presented by ArtsEmerson. For more information and to order tickets, click here.

Daniel Jones is a Dramaturgy and Outreach Assistant at ArtsEmerson. He is the Creative Producer-in-Training for Birth Breath Bride Elizabeth. In May, he will graduate from Emerson College with a BA in theatre studies: dramaturgy and writing, literature, & publishing.