Spotlight

Damaged Ground is a student-written play with impressive ambition. Kaye's creation is a "multi-media dance-theater piece" principally dealing with the circumstances and characters in Apartheid South Africa. The piece is dream-like and non-linear, aiming to question Apartheid and involve the audience in an emotional environment filled with conflict and tension evident in the country. Damaged Ground promises to be an experiment, given the mix of straight theater, straight dance and abstract movement theater. On a technical level, engineered and live sound, video and creative lighting and set design will be integrated into the production. The performance will most likely be precise and well-directed, given Kaye's South African background and the emotional importance the piece has to her own life.

The story of a ruler who accosts ladies-in-waiting and lashes out profanities at his court sounds vaguely reminiscent of a recent political scandal. But the first Mainstage show of the fall season is not a political satire but a sympathetic and often funny look at 18th-century England.

Alan Bennett's The Madness of George III opens shortly after England has lost its American colonies and shows the Establishment gone amuck. The King is mad, the Prince of Wales is scheming to displace his father, the Queen and the Prime Minister are determined to keep him in power and a host of incompetent doctors and parliamentarians wander in and out of the center stage. Politics as usual.

Who can save the king and England itself from this madness? Enter Dr. Willis, a physician with modern notions of psychology, who manages to restore George's reason by forcing him to behave like an ordinary man. Willis shocks the king back to sanity; he reduces the king's aura until what is left is but a lonely and slightly cynical old man. In the end, the clouds dissipate as George again takes the reins of power and administers a hilarious lesson to Cabinet and Parliament.

While the king's madness is resolved, the play leaves open a host of insidious questions about leadership and its dissimulation. The crux of the play lies in the king's remark as he recovers his sanity: "I have remembered how to seem; that is the important thing." Sanity, for George III, involves maintaining a public persona. The king's dilemma, and the question that Bennett throws out at his audience, is where does a suitable public face begin and sanity end?

"What is so fascinating about the interaction between the king and his doctor," Hood says, "is that Willis cures George not by making him seem like a king, but by forcing him to behave as a normal man, bound by the laws of society, propriety and humility. It is only when the king can beg forgiveness of his own servant that he is fit to resume the character of a pompous, eccentric, yet charming monarch. The interaction between Willis and the king is crucial to the arc of the play and for the restoration of order from the political turmoil of the king's madness."

The Madness of King George III will be the first student production on the Mainstage this fall. Hood's choice to put up The Madness of King George III was "informed chiefly by the space [he] wanted to use." In Hood's opinion, the Mainstage warranted "a show that is epic in scope, with a large cast and incorporating the elements of 'total theater'." Hood looked for a story that is played in a variety of locales and whose characters are allowed full development.

Bennett's The Madness of George III and Peter Shaffer's Amadeus both fit these critera. Shaffer's play was at the origin of Milos Foreman's Academy Award-winning film Amadeus, and has recently been staged on Broadway. Although The Madness of King George III came out as a movie in 1993, it has not been recently staged on Broadway. As such, Hood decided to direct The Madness of King George III.

The size of this production has been the main difficulty for Hood's team. Rehearsals for the 22 actors started only two weeks ago and have been accompanied by many technical challenges. Hood's vision for the production is that of an aesthetic experience, where the stage, sets and lighting are as important as the text of the play itself.