Marguerite French is 5 feet 5 inches tall and of slender build. Yet she played a large, intimidating man and murderer in a gender-reversed production of the “The Revenger’s Tragedy.”
French changed the way she walked so that she would appear bigger, and she spoke in a deeper, more confident voice to create the persona of a man. She relied on the manipulation of movement to fully embody her character, she said.
The play challenged French to examine the physical movements that formed her identity in order to bring justice to the role, she said.
“You can kind of sort of make yourself look smaller, but making yourself look bigger is almost impossible,” French said.
French, who graduated from UCLA with a master’s degree in theater, uses movement once again to form her onstage persona of the character Mother God in a modern rendition of John Milton’s “Paradise Lost.” The show is a silent twist on the epic poem, relying solely on the actions of its characters to tell the story of creation.
“Paradise Lost: Reclaiming Destiny” opens Friday at the Greenway Court Theatre in downtown Los Angeles. The cast members narrate the fall of humanity with their bodies, relying on movement to share the story of the fall of humanity and modernize the 17th century text.
Angels swing across the stage in aerial dance and Satan twirls large chains over his head. Intensive training was crucial for the cast to master the many forms of movement seen in the show, French said. The physicality of the roles led head choreographer, director and creator Jones Talmadge to hold fear training at the start of production in addition to rehearsals, she said.
Fear training consists of conditioning cast members to face their fears, Talmadge said. The sessions were devoted to activities such as high falls and tree climbing, during which the cast would scale fake trees and balance on high beams to train for the show. The performers had to be confident with heights and physically prepared to portray angels battling demons in the sky, he said.
“We needed to get them to the place where they could grab the rope, be in character, swing across the stage and not think twice about it,” Talmadge said.
The constant movement occurring on and above the stage posed challenges across all aspects of production. The cast and choreographers follow a detailed script that maps out the location and timing of each performer who flies through the air or tumbles across the stage, said co-choreographer Anne-Marie Talmadge.
“At every moment, you’re working with 10 other bodies on stage, moving around in space,” Anne-Marie Talmadge said.
The movement in the show helps the audience members follow the plot and relate to the celestial characters despite the lack of dialogue, French said.
French’s character, Mother God, was particularly difficult to perform without dialogue because she is written to exist in a timeless world, she said. French had to appear godly and powerful through her onstage presence and physicality, while also being able to connect to audiences on a human level.
“To find a way to ground my work on stage into something very realistic, very natural and very human, but playing such an unnatural character was very difficult,” French said.
French said modern audiences will be able to relate to the performance through the show’s themes. Feminism and female empowerment – themes of the 21st century – shine through the movement of the characters, French said.
Milton’s 17th century text is a patriarchal representation of the creation story, in which Eve is responsible for the fall of man by giving Adam the forbidden fruit. Women are seen as temptresses rather than equals, Jones Talmadge said.
But the updated theatrical performance uses dance to tell a version of the creation story that reflects the current state of femininity in the modern world by promoting a greater sense of equality for its female characters, French said.
Jones Talmadge focused the choreography on balancing the physical strength of the male and female performers so that both of their movements appear powerful, but never completely dominate the other. The men in the show perform the majority of the lifts, but the women display their strength in equally impressive forms: Anne-Marie Talmadge, who also plays Archangel Michael, dances across the stage with a sword made of 30 pounds of metal, she said.
While no words are spoken, French and the cast portray the story of creation in a fresh form, relevant to the modern world, Anne-Marie Talmadge said.
“An expert actor can dissect what little movements make a story,” Anne-Marie Talmadge said. “Movement creates the world.”