REALLY REALLY REALLY REALLY REALLY

DIRECTOR'S NOTES FROM NATHANIEL QUINN

Can we truly capture what is important to us through art?  If art mimics life, and life mimics art, then art is life. Since life is a living, breathing, changing, organic creature. Therefore; photography is art is life. But a photograph is unique because it lives in all time. Take out your phone, and open the first image of a person. It can be a partner, friend, lover, child, parent, quick selfie, it doesn’t matter. What matters is this person is in a state of all time. When was the picture taken? This morning? Yesterday? A week/month/year ago? The point is, even if you snapped a quick selfie while reading this, that picture happened in the past. But the photo is currently in the present. More difficult to fathom, is that the person in that image is no more. They have moved into the future and changed, grown, breathed, stopped breathing, loved, lost, moved on.  Therein lies the question: The moment we capture something important, it both exists and ceases to be. How then does that affect how we live as human beings? Do we live in the past with our happiness, sadness, arguments, or bereavements? How do they shape us as we move forward? Hopefully we are better because of them, but what about the pictures that reflect the negative? Abusive relationships, racism, sexism, ageism, elitism, do they help us move forward, or trap a past version of us? Any way it works out, I know you’ll be a different person by the end of this production, thank you for sharing the past, present, and from the moment I’m writing this, the future you.

ADDITIONAL RESOURCES

Jackie Sibblies Drury Explores the Role of Art in ‘Really’ - American Theatre Magazine
The playwright discusses why the New York production was unique, the role of race in her play, and why she doesn’t consider herself a career playwright.

‘Really’ Meditates on History’s Forgotten Subjects - The Village Voice
Photography can be a way to control reality. By stealing an instant from the ungoverned stream of time, photographers impose order on flux. And by artfully posing their subjects, they can transform a living, changing person into a static image of their own imagining.

Really asks what do we try to leave behind, what do we actually leave behind, and how do we deal with being left - Undermain Theatre
What can you see through a camera lens that you can’t with the naked eye?  Is what you are seeing “real” or is it just a flash of the subject? 

Rereading: Camera Lucida by Roland Barthes - The Guardian
Grieving for his mother, Roland Barthes looked for her in old photos – and wrote a curious, moving book that became one of the most influential studies of photography.

​Jackie Sibblies Drury: Thinking and Feeling - American Theatre Magazine
Her Pulitzer-winning play ‘Fairview’ is about why white people should make space for people of color; she’s amused that it’s controversial.