THE JUILLIARD SCHOOL

NOV 2017 

Set Designer: Grace Laubacher
Costume Designer: Amanda Seymour
Lighting Designer: Anshuman Bhatia

Finta takes place in a passionate world, where violence and comedy alternate outlandishly; genuine communication is thwarted as the characters pretend to love the wrong person in a garden as artificial as their chicanery.  Grace Laubacher and I decided to root our production in the relationship of facade to depth, a relationship which (like the theatre itself) is a paradigm of the conflict between appearance and reality. We asked ourselves the question: how can a garden exist in unexpected dimensions?

The story of the false gardener speaks to those times in our lives where the protective structures we have built for ourselves break down, and we are forced to become beginners again. Much to our dismay, growth is not linear. Flowers do not stay where you plant them and weeds spring up, creating unexpected beauty. We go into the garden to be touched by the unpredictable.​ ​Mozart reminds us that a​ ​close brush with mother earth always​ ​involves wrestling with chaos.