Directing

Interview with Melissa Thompson
Director for The Plays of Mina Loy

The first reading I did of the plays was through a futurist lens because that’s what I had worked with before.  I knew of Mina Loy as an experimental poet, but had not encountered her plays.  Collision and Citabapini are obviously written as futurist sinesti in the traditional futurist style. On first reading of Pamperers and the Sacred Prostitute, appear to be traditional plays where the characters are talking about futurism. All of Loy’s plays are feminist dramas that grapple with questions of who is allowed to be an artist, who is allowed to be brilliant, and the answer is never women, at least during the period in which Loy wrote. This led me to investigate how the prominent women in Loy’s plays exert their power. Pamperers and Sacred Prostitute model the historical ways that women have had to find back doors to exhibit their excellence because they’re just not allowed to be straightforwardly excellent. Sacred Prostitute essentially looks at the dynamics of a heterosexual relationship, a battle of the sexes which isn’t really about love, it’s about genius.

To see what Loy is saying about the nature of genius, we can look to how Sacred Prostitute pits Love against Futurism.  Loy wrote Love “as a creature of hermaphroditic aspect” but as an audience, we still read Love as feminine, Futurism as masculine.  In the dialogue, Futurism does not understand how to interact with women and his talk is all about sex.  Love talks about philosophy and creates an intellectual space; Futurism just tries to bring it down into the carnal. As a director, I feel it is important for Love to be played by someone in a male body.  If this character is played by woman, nobody’s going to pick up on her arguments. All the dialogue will be read as a traditional battle of the sexes that goes all the way back to Restoration Comedy. Certain things need to be twisted around for things to be obvious and to register with a contemporary audience.  Even if we are aware of sexism or misogynistic dynamics as they play out in performance, we are not as aware as we need to be.

There are certain things that became very important to experiment with to access things that I’m assuming were more easily accessible at the time that Loy wrote them. One element was connecting to the futurist source material in the work. Loy is not just writing about relationships, or the power dynamics of art. Loy is rooted in the very specific, tiny genre of Futurism.  The things the Futurists celebrated; chaos, aggression, became clear as essential to the character of Looney/Futurism in Pamperers and Sacred Prostitute.  When performing in the 2020s, how do we approach that aggression and not look like he’s just a domestic abuser? How do we get at aggression as a way of life versus a singular aggressive man? In Sacred Prostitute, having a woman playing Futurism and acting super entitled and aggressive, that stands out to the audience a lot more because they’re reading the body of the actor.

Loy’s commentary on the futurist aesthetic is very clear in Collisons and Cittabapini but can also be seen in Sacred Prostitute.  All those men sitting around the brothel parlor, talking about how to abuse women correctly, that is absolutely grounded in Loy’s experience with futurism.  I don’t think it would have been as polite to be as obvious about it if she weren’t hanging out with a bunch of futurists who felt very entitled to embrace not just aggression, but outright misogyny, and feel like that is a virtue. These are critical elements for us to be able to start with to be able to access the contents of the piece.  We must have that foundation understanding of the genre that inspired Loy to be able to decode what she is telling us.

There are many historical references to access that are purposeless like Diana wearing a chameleon on her clothes. There was a very brief period in the 1890s when very wealthy women would chain either a chameleon or sometimes a color-changing beetle. They would put a little gold chain around its neck and pin it to their clothing as a living accessory that would change color with their clothing.  These beautiful examples of ridiculousness and excess gave us license to go even bigger. How more ridiculous can we get? If they’re just doing snippets of gossip at the beginning, why don’t we have them prance around in circles and only stop to pose and then say one of their lines. Let’s just make them even more of what Loy’s saying to amplify her message for a contemporary audience. There are a lot of really exciting opportunities that she presents for us as long as we remember the spirit of experimentation. If we did Pamperers or Sacred Prostitute straight out as a dialogue based script that has some comedy in it would be incredibly boring.  I don’t think we’d be able to access just how much she’s getting at this idea of creative license as super empowering. It’s the kind of trappings and the posturing and the claiming of exclusive genius that then makes it ridiculous. How can we get these conflicting things into the same space? We have to do that through nonrealistic experimentation. And if we just read those last two scripts, we might not realize that they are nonrealistic experimentation unless we know about the futurist movement.

There were a lot of challenges just because Loy did not approach these plays from a theater background. She’s wrote them from the multi-disciplinary arts movement of futurism. Take the 47 windows shattering all at once, in Collision, as an example.  We, as theater artists have to figure out how can we get at the energy or the image that Loy’s going for on stage when these images are literally impossible. I think these difficult challenges are really rewarding. In one version of Collision we explored the metaphor for childbirth, with the character of Diana portraying a scientist who gave birth to a plastic baby doll with a giant mustache symbolizing Futurism. While this is not necessarily in the play as written by Mina Loy it did allow us to access something about the idea of an explosive creation leading to something beyond that individual.