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Director's Note:

In choosing Seven Homeless Mammoths Wander New England as a mainstage directing project for Cornell University’s Department of Performing and Media Arts, I initially thought I was trying to get away from the pandemic. I was eager to dive into a play about queer love and life, and the play is delightfully quirky and funny which felt like the perfect antidote to our collective pandemic blues. However, as Madeleine George poignantly reminds us in this play, a story about life is also inherently a story about death. Through our rehearsal process with this outstanding cast and crew, I realized that this play’s meditation on living with potentially terminal illness, on coming to terms with our mortality, on the importance of endings, as Andromeda might say, made a production of this play feel urgent in the face of our shared global tragedy that is this pandemic. While this play certainly speaks to endings generally, it also raises specific questions about how queer people navigate illness and death in particular ways outside of a heteronormative nuclear family dynamic. In Mammoths, George offers us one example of how love can look and feel among countless “alternative kinship structures”.

 

This play also explores the structures and substance of memory and how the spaces we create to house the remnants of the past always collect more than we anticipate or intend. Like Greer, the museum in this play is facing its impending demise. It not only contains seven, soon to be homeless, mammoths and some dubious dioramas, but has also absorbed the everyday conversations and events that have occurred inside its walls. George offers us moments of these conversations, certainly in part to satirize our “human condition”, but also to consider the importance of space in the stories that make up our lives. This museum houses the first date between Wreen and Greer, as well as numerous sexual escapades of Andromeda, all memories facing displacement along with the mammoth skeletons when the museum is destroyed. Through these memories, George demonstrates the value of such spaces beyond the collections they house. Meanwhile, The Caretaker of this museum forms an archive of a different kind. Only ever reciting from print material, The Caretaker brings the voices of the local community of this college town into the play through letters to the editor and town board meeting minutes. By storing print material in a human character and memory in a physical space, George upends our assumptions of how the archive and the body operate as discrete spaces of memory production and storage.

 

Mounting a play in an ongoing pandemic presents several challenges. The most pressing of these is how to convey physical intimacy between characters in a safe way? This question would be a challenge for any play during Covid times but is particularly fraught when dealing with lesbian romance and sexuality because desire between women has historically been overlooked and erased in theatrical representation. After experimenting with various ways to simulate intimacy without contact, we arrived at our current staging. While not precisely what the script calls for, I hope our staging imagines new ways of how we express intimacy and acknowledges that, for many, intimacy is not synonymous with sexual contact.

 

The pandemic's disruption of our ability to do and see live theatre has had such a toll for all of us who love this art form. It is such a pleasure to be able to work on live theatre again and I could not have wished for a better cast, crew, and production team to join me on the adventure of working on what is for me, and many of us, the first play since the pandemic started. It is a joy to share with you the fruits of our labor.

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