MARISOL
written by JOSÉ RIVERA
Director: Wendy Dann • Scenic: Rodrigo Hernandez • Costumes: Nico Gonzalez • Lighting: Shane Hennessy • Sound: Ron Ziomek •. Multimedia: Raven Bartlett •. Photos: Connor Lange
Marisol follows a young woman who loses her guardian angel at the end of the millennium and the beginning of a revolution against God. She fights to reorder violence, destruction, homelessness, hunger and apathy - and loses. Finally, she joins the angels’ revolution to fight for a new order and enlightens us to do the same. This play combines fantasy with our very real everyday life, and explores themes of environmental, moral, social, and political decay, cultural identity, power (races, gender, class etc.), violence, love, religion & the afterlife, and the American Dream.
Through our design we wanted to use video to assign and respond to power - the power of characters, power of the city, power of God etc. Within this, we focused on highlighting movement throughout the piece - Marisol’s journey, the movement and flow of the world, and how the people who had power were constantly in flux. With our content we were looking at the macro/micro world, and exploring natural vs. chemical decay, i.e fungus, rot, rust, and then parasites, cells/viruses, infections and infestations to texturally support the universal decay, “The universal body is sick”, and looking at how we could visually represent the scope that Marisol has on the world - an actively ignorant micro scope in Act 1, and a forced obliteration of that scope to a macro view in Act 2.
