An American studies major with a concentration in comparative race and ethnicity, senior Zoe Marmer is new to directing. For her senior project, though, she has decided to take on Dael Orlandersmith’s heavy 2002 Pulitzer Prize winning love story “Yellowman” in an effort to educate a Tufts audience on the play’s themes.
Marmer decided on the play after becoming familiar with it during a final project in one of her classes last year. Marmer said that with “Yellowman,” she wants to create an interactive work that would incorporate all the knowledge she had acquired over her years at Tufts.
A tragic love story, the play addresses race and discrimination through a relationship between Eugene and Alma: Eugene is fair skinned, while Alma is comparatively darker skinned.
“Their entire love is trying to move past the legacy of discrimination that had been passed down,” Marmer said.
Marmer hopes that her final project will educate her audience about racial discrimination and seeks to produce a final project that will affect her audience in a meaningful way, she said.
Five different couples — all Tufts students — portray Alma and Eugene, and each pair conveys the emotion of the play in a way that works well with Orlandersmith’s writing.
“The play is very heavy, but it’s written in a way that holds the audience accountable,” Marmer said.
The opening scene of “Yellowman” is Marmer’s favorite, she said. The poetry in the script coupled with the scene’s blocking make it both heartbreaking and heartwarming, and it sets the tone for the rest of the performance.
“Yellowman,” sports a strong cast. Watching them perform particular scenes in their technical rehearsal, it’s apparent that the actors are wholly committed to their roles and their director — even though many of them have never acted before. For Marmer, watching her cast bloom into actors over such a short period of time was an enlightening experience.
“I can have an idea, an actor will be inspired by something I say and [they will] take it to a whole new level,” she said. “They are pretty much unstoppable.”
“Yellowman,” written by Dael Orlandersmith and directed by senior Zoe Marmer, will run tonight, April 26 at 9 p.m. in Balch Arena Theatre. Admission is free.
