Stage Directions: Since its premiere at Cincinnati Playhouse in the Park in 2016, Native Gardens has proven to be widely popular, receiving many productions throughout the country. This season it made American Theatre magazine’s list of the Top 10 Most Produced Plays. You never know, you might be called on to make stage-appropriate potting soil for this play. (Or for other productions where you need realistic looking dirt. Houston’s recipe may just come in handy, so be sure to file this away for future reference.)
4 comments:
Native Gardens is quite a show. It has interesting premises because the messages it sends don’t quite mix with people today as much. I don’t see neighbors interact as much anymore like people’s homes are black hole that once enters shutters the outside premises. While the more forward messages probably don’t get through, there are other messages that I am sure deep dive their way into your thought and that message would be the more important within the show and deals with how you treat people, specifically dealing with race or other visually measurable assumptions. This is important I am sure and exists within the dirt. It makes me think that this dirt is quite important specially to create your own recipe so that real dirt is on the stage. Very rarely do we ever do things like that. It has to be vital to the show in some way and really say something in addition to usually having a practical use to it as well. While this was quite an interesting topic, I wish the article would have talked more about why this dirt was so important because as a theatre artist, that is something I want to know because it wouldn’t be worth it to put dirt on stage just do have dirt – there are alternatives.
I found this so interesting. I really would not think that if dirt was a prop in a show they would not just go out and buy it, but what Houston said about how real dirt will cause bugs to be on stage and since there is water in the show they don’t want to have the mess of making mud makes so much sense. I would be very interested in knowing the process that went into finding the perfect dirt recipe for this show. How did they decide on those specific ingredients? I am sure there were properties to each substance that went into the dirt that they needed to have to achieve the desired texture and look. I just really want to know what all of those properties are. Also, this article mentioned that this show has a design team of all women of color, and that makes me so happy! I’d say it is fair to say that women of color are the most underrepresented group in theatre, so having a show where they make up the entire design team is a really good step towards equality in theatre.
Nicolaus, I do not understand anything in your comment. I disagree with your statement about the message of this show. I can clearly see how the plot and themes in Native Gardens could be paralleled to current conversations about race and border control and people taking land that is not theirs. Someone in the article is even quoted saying that the playwright, Zacarías, “gets at ageism, gender politics, colorism. I love theatre that not only entertains, but also educates you in a way that you might not realize at first.” It is pointing at a larger issue using a smaller more relatable example. Also I think that they had dirt on stage not for any meta reason, but because gardening seems like a pretty essential to the plot. Like the video describes, it makes much more sense to make a primarily cork based dirt over using real dirt so that there are no bugs or actual mud on stage. This is a classic props tactic, and I too would be interested to see what the process was to get to this recipe. I also want to echo how great it is that the whole design team are women of color!! It is incredibly important for a play written by a Mexican immigrant about topics of racism, privilege and borders to have a design team like this.
One of the problem solving things in theater and entertainment is how to make something look real without using the real thing. Often the properties of the real thing are extremely unideal for the situation (like bugs and mud on stage) or the object is just unobtainable (for money or accessibility reasons). I think it’s one of the areas that brings out the most creativity in people because the most obvious easy answer is to find what you actually need but you are forced to really study what it is you need and what properties you need to replicate. I too am interested in the experimentation process that got this props team to their dirt recipe. It seems that they were interested in replicating the visual texture of dirt as well as its not perfectly homogeneous color. I know cork is commonly used for things like sand, but I wonder how they got to coconut fiber or decided to mix cornstarch soap and water.
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