'Big Love' premieres in new Berlind Theatre

Princeton students bring one of the most inspiring, poignant and beautiful productions to campus this weekend — "Big Love," Charles Mee's renowned play, is the first University production staged in the new Roger S. Berlind Theatre.

"Big Love" is based on the Greek play "The Suppliant Women" by Aeschylus, one of the oldest plays known to civilization. It is a pastiche inspired by multiple other texts, the first play out of a trilogy of "Big Love," "True Love" and "First Love."

Set on the west coast of Italy, "Big Love" tells the story of 50 brides who are escaping prearranged forced marriage — which they claim is essentially rape — to their 50 cousins. Given no other choice but to stop at a stranger's mansion, they ask for asylum. The attitudes of three sisters, the female lead characters, toward marriage, love and men become increasingly different, extreme and pointed as they interact with each other and with their prospective grooms.

"'Big Love' brings together two questions," director Davis McCallum said in a Modern Drama lecture. "What are our relationships to people we've never met?" What kind of "responsibilities, space, resources, time" do we owe strangers like "people on the subway" or "on vacation"? On the opposite side of the relationship spectrum, "What really happens between us and the people we're most intimate with? How do power, love and pleasure get shared?" McCallum asked.

Mee's play, and the phenomenal acting in this production in particular, portrays life and human relationships through a combination of postmodernist symbolic scenes and some of the most real, moving dialogue in drama. The cross between the lyrical and the contemporary post-modernism is evident as soon as the curtain rises on a set that consists of a terrace with gauze curtains and jagged sheets of metal immediately to the right. This is the antithesis between tenderness and violence that "Big Love" addresses.

Princeton's production combines the actors' strong and well-matched chemistry, connection, passion and drive with eclectic yet beautifully fitting arrangement of musical offerings. From Mozart's "Marriage of Figaro" to the popular "You Don't Own Me" to deafening helicopter noise to Handel's "Air" from "Water Music," music plays an integral part in this play. Here, music is more than a mood-setter – it drives pain, desperation, tenderness and love straight to the audience's senses.

The play's uniqueness stems in part from the fact that it is an unusually physical play. Mee uses [extreme] and realistically absurd physicality to accurately denote the magnitude of our feelings, whether of despair, love, or anger. Such actions as violently and repeatedly throwing themselves on the ground actually make the actors physically tired.

This effect reveals how much strength, be it physical or emotional, we exert when we are angry, desperate, or pained. The impression is unforgettable – the actors' physical fatigue transfers its drive to the audience's emotions. These violent scenes are juxtaposed with a number of intimate dances that show passion in a quieter, tenderer light.

"Big Love" is a play about big love, for it sends the message that love is inherently all-encompassing. Its characters long for love, deny love and share love. This production's power surpasses description — the acting, music and directing are truly incredible.

Movement and dialogue excel in this professional-level, moving production that combines humor, desperation and hope, which is sure to deeply touch the audience from the rise to after the fall of the curtain.

The play opens this Friday and runs through the weekend; this Saturday is the sold-out gala opening of the theater. For those of you who cannot make it this weekend, "Big Love" will also be at the Berlind next Thursday through Saturday, November 20-22.