Lilly, May Seek Refuge in Hepburn Zoo

Author: Suzanne Mozes

In a culmination of their senior work, Ami Formica '03 and Alaina Buckland '03 performed "Lilly and May," written by Patricia Cornelius, strove to accomplish quite a lot this past weekend in the Hepburn Zoo.
Originally, the two seniors planned on directing themselves in a collage work. However, when Cornelius' play and Sarah Peters '04 entered the project, they decided to focus solely on "Lilly and May," and Peters assumed the role of director.
Lilly and May portrays two women living a deliberate homeless existence in the depths of subways, train stations, and streets. With sociopolitical and feminist undertones lacing Cornelius' dialogue, a complex, twisted relationship, never really completely comprehended by the audience, binds the lives of Lilly and May.
Formica and Buckland chose this play for their senior work for this very reason, Buckland explains they wanted to perform "an intensely emotional play that had a political message, too, not just emotional for its own sake. The political/feminist notions were important to us."
In developing a concept, Formica and Buckland hoped to break down the "wall" between actors and their audience. To accommodate this goal, platforms were set in the corners of the Zoo space.
The discomfort of Lilly and May's lives mirrored in the seating arrangements for audience members. Students hunched alongside parents and professors on backless seating, that basically put them on the same level as the actors. Making eye contact with their spectators, speaking to them and sitting among them, the actresses entered into the audience's space. As a result, just as Formica and Buckland hoped, the production became a community experience, fusing actor and audience.
This concept actually emerged before the actors walked into the space. Playbills, torn and grimy, lined the staircase up to the theater as they do in the staircases of subways in New York City.
The set within remained simple. More playbills flapped on the walls and scattered across the floor. Ribbons of CAUTION tape added a little color to grubby squalor suggested by the planks of gray hanging from the walls.
Cornelius' original script calls for a musician, but this the playwright leaves the role in a vague, unidentified relationship with Lily and May.
Abe Streep '04 performed this unspoken role with grace and talent. Playing the mandolin and fiddle, he welcomed the audience members into the space, leaving his instrument cases open for change.
Composing his own music for the play, with the exception of the two songs Cornelius designates, he used the short ballads to unite the separate and multiple worlds in which Lilly and May exist and therefore allow them to live together.
Unfortunately, however, in striving, and succeeding, in creating this particular environment that satisfied both the play's demands as well as the pressures of their own concepts, Formica and Buckland's performances seemed scattered.
Both completely aware of the demands of the emotional content, and even understanding the complexities of their characters, they failed to connect onstage with the relationship to each other. As individual units, their performances provoked thought and emotion.
However, Cornelius' play centers on a cyclical model for their relationship that constantly develops from chaos, builds to love, and breaks down again. Lilly and May constantly threaten each other with leaving, and their performances required more in these emotional protrusions of dialogue.
Because this production has only been in the making for about two and a half months, Formica and Buckland set a high bar for themselves in such a short period of time.
Yet they should be applauded for jumping face first into such a complicated project. While they succeeded in their concept and actually performing their own show, time, too often, makes something yield to the greater objective.
Regardless, Lilly and May ended with applause that extended far beyond the norm, and even after the actors left the stage, nobody moved. Nobody wanted to stand and leave.
It would mean that they would be invading the space that Formica, Buckland, and Streep had created.
The space had become a communal area, and the audience respected that.