My own solution to the challenge of staging The Verge was inspired by two very different books: Michael Vanden Heuvel's Performing Drama/ Dramatizing Performance and Diane Elam's Feminism and Deconstruction. Vanden Heuvel's notion of dialogic performance contributed significantly to my understanding of, and approach to, the play's formal demands. Rather than trying to create a consistent, unified stage illusion, Vanden Heuvel suggests that much is to be gained by developing situations in which text and staging exist in a kind of double-exposed creative complementarity, each informing the other with neither assuming final (monologic) authority. This principle proved fundamental to the development of our production concept. Without Diane Elam's anti-essentialist exploration of gender identity in Feminism and Deconstruction, however, the production itself might never have happened. Elam countered the concerns I had as a male director.....
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