Pen, Paint, and Pretzels' spring major production, "The Illusion," may be about ethereal visions, but its message is one of the reality of emotion.
The play opens with a lawyer, desperate to find his son, entering a magician's cave. In the boy's youth, his father tried to kill him and so he ran away. Now, the father has announced that he is changed and wants his son back. After exhausting all earthly options, he turns to a magician for help. The magician, as characters with magical powers are wont to do, does not make the father's search very easy. Instead, he shows the father three visions of his son's life, all with the same characters but with circumstances and names changed, leaving the father to work out his son's story for himself.
The meat of the play is these illusions. The first two are highly romantic, and the last brings the sentiments cultivated in the previous ones to reality. Through all the illusions, however, forceful dialogue covers very real emotions and situations.
The magician and the lawyer serve as extremely interesting commentators on the illusions playing before them. The lawyer, at first, pesters the magician with dozens of questions about name changes and other inconsistencies but is silenced by the magician's demand that he leave his scholarly nitpicking behind and "concentrate on the general outline and leave the details" to the magician. This, in many ways, frees the audience to let the fantastical stories wave over them and be affected more by the piercing and beautiful language than by the insignificant, often inconsistent details.
The play was adapted in 1990 by Tony Kushner from Pierre Cornielle's original 1636 version. Though the story is based on Cornielle's play, Kushner has truly made the piece his own.
"The plot is Cornielle's but the emotions are written through Kushner's language," said director Lisa Goldberg, a senior. "My biggest hope is that people catch all of the words. The language is so intricate: it has triple, quadruple meanings. Kushner is a true poet."
Cornielle's original play was famous for being forward-thinking for its time, and Kushner has not let the tradition die with his adaptation. It is a period piece ("We have corsets!" Goldberg rejoiced), but the language is modern and penetrative while easy to understand. The writing may be brilliant, but that doesn't mean it's dense.
The cast consists of only 8 actors. This small size gives actors an essential degree of comfort with one another. And, though the play deals with some very serious content, it is by no means a downer. Short, quick and modern exchanges, ridiculous characters and well-played slapstick are all present in the play and are portrayed successfully with this small, committed group.
Though the cast is comprised of actors from all class standings, the production staff is made up entirely of freshmen.
"I have the best production staff I could wish for," Goldberg said. "Because a lot of them are new to this space and this experience, they've been coming up with the most original and expansive ideas. Because we've really been reaching for the sky so much, it's turned out to be the maximum version of what we could imagine."
The Balch Arena space is a fortuitous setting for "The Illusion," as it is easy to transform it into a cavernous magician's lair. Circular platforms and pervasive shades of grey give the audience the impression that they are seated in an outer chamber of a cave. The lighting also adds eerie ambiance, and with 140 cues, it changes frequently and effectively from the warm glow of the illusions to the sparse bleakness of the lawyer's world.
"The Illusion" entertains, but it is also thought-provoking and includes a surprise ending. "We've been trying to make sure people keep an open mind about every possibility," Goldberg said. "We've made it a magical experience while simultaneously emphasizing reality of emotion."
"The Illusion" opens tonight, and will also run Friday and Saturday, all at 8 p.m. in the Balch Arena Theater. Tickets are $7 with a Tufts ID, and can be purchased at the Balch Arena Theater Box Office.
