‘EXPOSURE’ DEVELOPS AT NJ REP
Sitting pretty: John FitzGibbon, Andrea Gallo, Jessica Howell and Adam Jonas Segaller star in EXPOSURE TIME, the play by Kim Merrill that makes its world premiere in Long Branch this week. (Photos by SuzAnne Barabas)
By TOM CHESEK
Who says Alice doesn’t live here anymore? As movie audiences look forward to director Tim Burton’s star-studded, three-dimensional riff on Alice in Wonderland, interest is once again heightened — as it’s periodically been since 1865 — in the concepts and characters created by the parson, poet and portrait artist who wrote under the pen name Lewis Carroll.
Meanwhile, on the intimately scaled but expansively visioned stage of New Jersey Repertory Company in Long Branch, the story of Alice gets viewed through an altogether different looking glass — the glass plates and heavy lenses of the Victorian camera — in a drama that centers around the competition between Carroll (a/k/a Charles L. Dodgson) and the pioneer photographer Julia Margaret Cameron. The prize? The favor of the girl who would serve as the real-life inspiration for Alice.
Yes Virginia, there really was an Alice — Alice Liddell, a clergyman’s daughter who grew up to be a noted society hostess (and who died in 1934 at the age of 82). In Exposure Time, the play by Kim Merrill that kicks off its world premiere engagement with a pair of preview performances this Thursday, she’s a maturing young thing (portrayed by Jessica Howell) who becomes something of a muse to Dodgson/ Carroll (Adam Jonas Segaller) — the daughter, in fact, of Dodgson’s superior, and a figure who fascinates the man who’s torn between his church career and his artistic impulses.
Andrea Gallo, who co-starred in a couple of previous shows at NJ Rep (including a weird and wonderful show called Tilt Angel that pretty much no one saw) plays the amazing Cameron, and the cast (under the direction of Alan Souza, who helmed the Rep musicals The Little Hours and Cupid & Psyche) is rounded off by another stock company stalwart — John FitzGibbon, whose plummy-toned vocal prowess and grand characterizations (as everything from The Butler to train-wreck poet Delmore Schwartz) have graced many a local production. He’ll be playing the famed Charge of the Light Brigade poet Lord Alfred Tennyson — a match-up that already hits the spot, sight unseen.
Red Bank oRBit spoke with New York-based playwright Merrill — a sometime actor, mother of two, and otherwise author of contemporary dramas with names like Criminal Acts and Sex, Death and the Beach Baby — about the seemingly miraculous process through which this picture of bygone people emerged. Read on.
Pioneering photographer Julia Cameron meets celebrated poet Alfred, Lord Tennyson in EXPOSURE TIME, going up at New Jersey Repertory Company.
RED BANK ORBIT: Like so many of the mainstage productions at New Jersey Rep, your play was first seen there as one of their little script-in-hand readings. Has it changed much since that time, or were you pretty well satisfied with what you had?
KIM MERRILL: I’m not one of those writers who think what they’ve got is perfect from the start, so I’ve done a fair amount of rewriting since they presented the reading, back in August of 2008, I think it was. We had a two week workshop in Minneapolis also — I even made some more changes before rehearsals started.
It’s been interesting, revisiting these characters that I began writing years ago. Going back to an old play is like going back to someone you broke up with!
Take us back to the beginning of the project — what was it about Julia Cameron and Lewis Carroll that struck you as a worthwhile dramatic subject?
I read an article about a display of Carroll’s pictures — I hadn’t even known he took photos before that; he really considered himself a professional, and he was meticulous about archiving his work — and in this article there was a mention of Julia Cameron. I thought she’d be an interesting subject, not only because she was a woman who was very involved with the early days of photography, but also because of the impact that photography had on the Victorian era.
I’ve always been interested in that era, when the seeds of our current culture were affected by all this new technology. A comparable thing would be the introduction of the internet to our society.
So you must have done a fair amount of homework before starting in on the script.
I researched it for about a year. This is my only historical play, so even though I made a lot of it up — in particular, I pumped up the competition aspect for the sake of the story — it’s based on things that actually happened.
One of the things I looked into was the whole process of photography as it existed back then — I found a woman who’s an expert on Julia Cameron, and I spent a day with her taking my portrait as it would have been done back then. I learned how complicated the chemicals were; how time consuming the whole process was…
We’re talking about the days before film, when she and her contemporaries were using, what, daguerrotypes? Glass plates?
She used what was called the wet collodion process, which involved glass plates and a silver nitrate solution; a lot of dangerous chemicals — it was a pretty difficult method of taking pictures, but it was popular for a while.
There was an argument going on back then over whether photography should be considered an art or a science, given how complicated the process could seem at the time. Ever since she was rediscovered around the 1940s, Julia is known primarily in art circles; a lot of her work wasn’t archived but the photo albums that have survived are well known with collectors and museum people.
One of the more interesting things about those early photos is that, because of how they were produced, they’re really not captured moments in time — they’re actually very orchestrated events.
Those old photos look weird to us because they’re so staged and constructed — personally I find them to be very orderly and creepy! I also admire the Alice books, but they’ve always been scary to me!
There’s also a creepy undercurrent to the whole story of Lewis Carroll and the real-life Alice, if you believe a lot of the more recent biographical material. Do you address that here, in the midst of this story about the two photographers who are kind of competing for the attention of this girl Alice?
The play’s not realistic, although I stay true to their story — they did actually meet, and both of them photographed Alice Liddell. Most of the fictionalizing here is in Carroll’s relationship with Alice.
I’m aware of the stories of pedophilia that have circulated about Lewis Carroll, but in the course of my research I found that there was this aesthetic back then for taking pictures of naked kids. Julia took these too, but being that she was a middle aged woman I guess that she hasn’t come under the same sort of scrutiny. I think there was an idealization of innocence in the way that many photographers portrayed children back then, although our modern eyes would see things differently.
I’m more interested in them as artists anyway — I did my best to make this a story about aspiration. Julia Cameron was obsessive about photography.
I know that you’ve taken an active interest in watching this production develop, as it were — so how’s it been seeing the show come to life on the stage? And working with a director who specializes in musicals?
I think in an ideal world I’d love to be able to do this on a big stage, with big projections of photos behind the actors. But working with New Jersey Rep has been a great experience, just as working with Alan Souza — the play as I said is not realistic, so it does present some of the same directorial challenges that a musical can present. We received an American Play Award, which allows for extra collaborative time, so we had some extra weeks to work with Alan. And I’ve learned a lot from the rehearsal process.
Exposure Time offers discounted previews at 2 and 8pm on Thursday and Friday; opens Saturday, February 13 (sold out) and continues with a 2pm matinee on Sunday; running through March 21 with performances Thursdays through Sundays. Tickets for all regular performances are $40 and are available by calling the Box Office at (732)229-3166, or visiting the NJ Rep website. There’s also a special performance with Mad Hatter Party on Friday, February 26 at 7pm!
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February 09, 2010
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