Tarantist

Birdwatching

Summer 2016

Directed by Willow Hayes

Birdwatching utilized a non-speaking, masked crow character to symbolize the protagonist’s mental health struggles. My primary goal was to give this non-speaking character a voice, and one that would lend weight to the character in oppressing the protagonist. The play focused on the protagonist’s internal experience as we witnessed them moving through difficult experiences relating to showing up for a partner. Sometimes their crow would show up in the middle of conversations to haunt their day to day, like mental illness often does. Sometimes they were medicated, in hospital. Sometimes we were brought into nightmarish dreams where the crow would harrying them, dancing around in frenetic and terrifying movements. The director had the song “Dream a little dream of me” in mind as a leit motif that would connect this bittersweet relationship that the protagonist had towards their omnipresent oppressive crow, and I worked that into the design in various ways by deconstructing the song and hinting at it at various points (C & H Dream).

Crow Entrance, Sc. 1