Poetry and painting in plays

I’ve seen several plays in the past few weeks that integrate other art forms.
Letters from Max at Seattle Public used poetry and letters. Max and his teacher, Sarah make sense of Max’s impending death from cancer by writing to each other. The original poetry, written by the playwright and attributed to the character Max, provides a perspective that neither conversation nor action could give. Audience and actors lose themselves in the rhythm and depth, together.
Blue to Blue at Annex through April 12, incorporates the poetry of Emily Dickinson. Beryl is adrift in the wake of her mother’s death. Two characters are described in the program as a Greek chorus, but function more like a different Greek character, Charon, by ushering Beryl across the river of grief. They do this by producing snippets of Dickinson’s poetry. It’s essential to get Beryl to where she needs to be.
The third show, Cornelia’s Visitors, by eSe Teatro is still playing. You have a chance to see it at West of Lenin though April 19. The other art form here is painting: Picasso’s Guernica, pictured here. It depicts the bombing of a defenseless town in Spain during the civil war in that country in the years before the Second World War.
The painting inspires two brilliantly written and performed monologues, which in a way are as central as the poetry in Letters from Max and Blue to Blue.
Cornelia’s Visitors is the story of novelist Isabel Inchausti and the artificial intelligence, named Cornelia, that helps run her home and life.
Cornelia is bored, it seems, and wants to create, just as Isabel does. She does this, as an AI would, by digging deeply into Isabel’s best-selling novel and going a step further by empathizing (maybe?) with two of the minor characters and bringing them, literally (maybe?) to life in Isabel’s apartment, where they tell their war stories.
It’s science fiction mixed with magical realism. I think the latter keeps it from being just another warning about technology gone out of control like 2001 A Space Odyssey or Solaris and turns the attention back onto ourselves, people, and what our responsibility is as creators.
Isabel seems interested only in exploiting her talents to acquire money and fame. Cornelia sees more possibilities. You get to see how it ends up.
You might ask, why not just read the original poetry from Letters from Max, or the Emily Dickinson, or go ponder Picasso. But all three shows leverage these pieces perfectly.

Pictured, the set of Cornelia's Visitors, photo by me

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