Long after Christina Ciocca (CAS ‘05) finished reading Emily Mann’s Still Life, the play remained on her mind. Its imprint persisted and months later, when she had to choose a play to direct for her senior thesis, she chose Still Life.
Still Life is a drama of brutal honesty. Mann interviewed three people in the late 1970s: Mark, an emotionally scarred Vietnam vet; his Catholic, pregnant wife Cheryl; and his lover, Nadine. She pulled the conversations apart and stretched them over the dramatic skeleton of a play. Ciocca describes the play as a “heightening of a moment in time when people were telling their stories.” Still Life melds the theatrics of dramatic structure with the reality of documentary theater, and its power rests in this marriage.
When writing Still Life, Mann was coaching actors in Shakespeare on the side, and the play resounds with Shakespearean rhythms. At the same time, she rubbed shoulders with jazz musicians, which influenced Still Life’s narrative structure. According to Ciocca, “at the best moments the monologues should sound like extended riffs.” In her direction, Ciocca utilizes both music and movement to punctuate Mann’s agile script.
The play is simple and stark. Talk and action, often functioning independently of one another in the play as in life, define the characters as much as the war did. Their relationships, complex and thoroughly developed, circle around one another until the audience understands the universal quality of war: That it doesn’t stop at countries’ borders. Rather, war can exist within a country, within a home and within a person.
Understanding that it would be a challenge, Ciocca chose Still Life for its astonishingly pertinent themes, especially considering the current political climate.
Ciocca’s production of the play is both an academic and theatrical endeavor. In lieu of a theater major, Ciocca created her own in Performance and Culture through the Interdisciplinary Studies program. Many of the themes she highlights in her direction of the play were born of the research she did with her advisor, Maya Roth, the Director of Georgetown’s Theater program. Her classes-primarily English, philosophy, psychology and theater-have centered around the concept of performance within culture. Ciocca’s interdisciplinary approach to studying theater is reflected in her direction of the play.
Under her leadership, cast members researched multiple facets of the moment in time reflected by the play. The cast spent six weeks spent talking about such issues as traumatic stress, domestic violence, Catholicism, the effects of drug use and alcoholism to deepen their interpretation of a thematically heavy play. Mark Ipri (CAS ‘05), who plays Mark, spent time with two veterans to solidify his interpretation of his character. Displays outside of the theater will offer theater-goers access to the same research that deepen the characters onstage.
Watching the cast of Still Life in rehearsal, I was reminded of what makes student theater great. In the Village C Alumni Lounge, the Nationals battled the Braves on a flat screen TV. Two girls played pool in the middle of the room. And in the corner, three students ran through lines about shrapnel, repression and pregnancy as the announcer’s voice blared.
Still Life will premiere on Wednesday, April 27 at 8:00 p.m. in Walsh’s Black Box Theater and continue every night through Sunday. Tickets are $5 for students.
