1853 --> 2023: 170 Years of Villette

A Conversation with Playwright and Artistic Associate Sara Gmitter  
and Ensemble Member Kareem Bandealy 

KB: Sara! 

SG: Kareem! I love your hat! 

KB: Haha, thanks! It serves its function. Hey! We’re here. Finally. 

SG: Yes, if by here you mean we’re talking about a moment that I won’t fully believe is real until I’m reading this conversation in the program, rather than simply having it with you. Yes. We’re here. Almost. 

KB: I know, I know. Yes. Well, let’s start there then. You wrote this play in 2014. The Lookingglass Ensemble first voted it onto the production track during our 2016 retreat. And for some reason or other, the “pandy” being the most recent, it has been deferred and deferred and deffered…until now. Speak to me, if you would, a little bit about the emotional roller coaster that has been for you, and what it means to finally see your work being realized. 

SG: Well, I mean, name literally any emotion, I’ve had it about this play and this process in the past nine years. And I’ll be honest, it’s still hard to talk about what it means to ‘finally’ be here. Because one of my coping mechanisms to deal with each setback or delay was to stop envisioning the future, to just take each moment for what it is. Even as we’ve been moving forward and getting further than we’ve ever gotten before, each milestone I’m still telling myself, maybe that’s as far as we’ll get this time and that’ll have to be enough. One of the four or five times the play was going to happen before, it got swapped out for another show and THAT show had to close after its opening night because it was March 2020. So if there’s one thing I’ve learned from this whole saga- though I hope I’ve learned more than one thing- it’s that nothing is for sure. I think of theatre and dance as the two most ephemeral art forms. We really only truly exist in the moment. So I’m trying to just take each moment as it comes, and love it for what it is, even if it’s the last moment I get.  

KB: Wow, Sara. Thanks for that access and for your loving candor. We can all, I think, find ourselves more peace this approach. Let’s shift to the actual stuff of the story now. I know Charlotte Brontë’s Villette has deeply personal resonance for you. Can you put your finger on what it is that drew you to this tale and its heroine, Lucy Snowe? 

SG: The Indigo Girls have a song about Virginia Woolf and there’s a line that’s something like- “You sent your soul like a message in a bottle to me and it was my rebirth.” That’s the closest I can get to describing how I felt when I first read Villette, except it was more like Charlotte Brontë sent MY soul like a message in a bottle to me. Lucy Snowe got under my skin the way no character ever had before. She thought things I had thought, she did things I had done. And maybe most significantly- I could imagine that she looked like me. Because unlike just about every other female character I’d ever read, she was not introduced with descriptions of her particular loveliness; no other characters were enchanted by her face; she was not desired or trusted or protected by anyone. Her story unfolds differently than stories about pretty girls do because people treat pretty girls differently. As I know very well. As Charlotte Brontë knew. I have such intense admiration for her ability to articulate her experiences with such passion and clarity.  

KB: Agreed. And I love that every time I’ve read it or heard it read, Lucy sort of “emerges” for/to me. That process of revealing oneself (to oneself and to others) is just…so delicious. 

SG: Yes, that feeling of truly being seen is delicious, but also terrifying! Every time I talk about how Lucy Snowe is basically me, it feels like I’ve just revealed in one sentence what it ought to take a person a lifetime to get to know about me. 

KB: Terrifying, yes. And by virtue of this, quite courageous. To me, that’s when an artist is their most powerful, beguiling, and effective self – when they are their most vulnerable self. Now, Sara, let’s talk “context.” It’s 2023. This story was first published in 1853. In that 170-year sweep, much has changed…or has it? What about Villette feels contemporary to you? How do you hope a contemporary audience will receive your adaptation? If you wish, I encourage you to use this space to talk a bit about the state of contemporary femme folx as relates to this tale. But, only if you wish… 

SG: Much in our world has changed for sure- history, technology, all sorts of things. But Charlotte Brontë was writing about her experience of being a human and I don’t think that has changed at all. She writes about how the traumas of her past weigh on her and affect the way she feels about her present and her future. That’s a human experience that anyone from any time could understand. She articulates her experience of unrequited love and I defy anyone who’s felt that particular exquisite pain to tell me that the current price of gas (or the fact that cars now exist) changes that feeling one iota. She tells this story about a young woman whose present situation is so bleak that risking everything for the chance of a better life in a different country doesn’t seem like any risk at all. There are tens of millions of people who make that same calculation every day. The circumstances that cause their desperation are different but I do believe the feelings- the anxiety and the not-really-daring-to-hope determination are the same. So I hope today’s audience will recognize a lot of Lucy’s story as parts of their own story. 

And as for how the state of contemporary femme folx relates? Let me tell you all the ways things haven’t changed or haven’t changed nearly enough. There’s a point in the novel (and there’s a more streamlined version in the play as well) where Lucy is in a museum surrounded by images of women and the lives of women that were all painted by men. And she not only doesn’t recognize herself in any of the paintings, she doesn’t recognize any actual human woman that she knows. She sees what is wanted and expected from women but not their true selves. And that was still my experience of so much popular culture as I was growing up. Even as a child I was so perplexed by the disconnect between what I was being told about what it means to be female and what I knew in my gut to be true.  

KB: There! Right there. Proof of concept. Art is not only a reflection of culture, but a reinforcer. So it takes as diverse a collection of artists as possible to not only get us closer to some fidelity in that reflection, but to mold culture into a more…let’s say “inviting” shape. I’m glad you expressed that last bit (in such crystalline fashion, too), Sara. I hope it deepens the experience of the story for folx who don’t walk in those particular shoes. I’ll certainly be thinking of it in each of my viewings. Speaking of “reinforcing culture,” I kind of want to grapple with a theme in this story that has long intrigued me. It is summed up in the word “foreign.” Foreignness, to me, suggests a certain idea of what’s at the center…and what isn’t. Approaching that can be tricky, and I can tell you’ve taken some care with it in the adapting. Explain to me how you understand the concept of “foreign.” How does it work for/against the story you want to pull out of Charlotte Brontë’s original text? How does our casting of this production support or complicate this? 

SG: So first, I think my concept of ‘foreign’ has been most shaped by my experiences as a student at a small international graduate school in Costa Rica. My fellow students and I counted 55 different countries as our nations of origin and figuring out how to live and learn and collaborate together was probably a better education than any class I took. All of us arrived with certain simple assumptions about each other and over time we figured out that our actual web of interconnecting similarities and differences across nations, continents, genders, sexualities, ages, degrees of privilege, what have you were so complex the only generalization you can make is that each of us is a sovereign nation unto ourselves. Now Charlotte Bronte’s text certainly includes some very 1853 generalizations about ‘Continental’ people in contrast to ‘English’ people and she’s got some pretty judgmental thoughts especially about the hedonism of Catholicism in contrast to ‘sensible’ Protestantism. None of that is of any interest to me and in making choices for the adaptation I left that all out. What I AM interested in is Lucy experiences as a stranger in an unfamiliar place, trying to move towards making a home for herself. So if we come back to that concept of what is ‘foreign,’ Lucy both observes the differences between herself and the people around her in this new country, AND she has always felt herself to be a ‘foreigner,’ the one ‘out of her place’ because most of her life she hasn’t had a place of her own, she’s been a sort of guest in someone else’s house, whether with relatives, her godmother, or as a caretaker.  

In casting the play, first and foremost we wanted the actors who could best bring these characters to life. And there are probably some folks out there for whom this cast is a challenge to their expectations about who they think they’re going to see in an adaptation of an English novel from the 1850s. But for me, and I’m pretty sure I’m not alone in this, what I want to see on stage is a cast that reflects what the community I live in looks like. Because I’m not really trying to tell you all a story about 1850s Belgium; I hope we’re telling a story that resonates with the here and the now. 

KB: Strongly agree. Everything is always happening “here and now.” The past is memory, and the future is fancy. I got a few more and then we’ll shut it down. Cool? 

SG: Well you’re gonna have to do the shutting down because I have nine years of thoughts I’m absolutely not done sharing.  

KB: Haha, ok! I accept the charge. Adaptation has always been more daunting to me than making one up out of “whole cloth.”  

SG: See I have the exact opposite feeling! 

KB: To which you are entirely entitled, my friend. But one of the reasons I tend to feel this is because one is faced with such an extensive menu of characters and moments when pulling from the novel form. I mean, how to choose in the face of such abundance? Of course, I’ve seen several of our colleagues (David Catlin, Heidi Stillman, and more) pull this off beautifully. And so have you with Villette. Explain that curation process a bit. How did you go about essentializing this novel into a stage play focused on just six characters? 

SG: Even as far back as the very first draft of the play, it was always these six, essential characters, I never wrote so much as a single line for anyone else.  

For me it started from- what are the scenes from the novel that absolutely must be in the play for us to first, have a satisfying emotional journey, and second to understand and move through the story. And it was very clear that these were the only characters I needed.  

I did cut a huge whole side-story where Lucy purposefully puts herself in the back seat of her own narrative, but I knew in the play that I neither wanted nor needed to do that. Which is not at all to say that the play has always been as essentialized as it currently is. I would happily watch a six-hour play that included every single scene that Lucy has with Monsieur Paul or with Ginevra. The really difficult choices were not about cutting characters, it was about condensing multiple scenes into a single scene or deciding which of all the great Lucy/M. Paul exchanges the play would die without and which I could console myself by just re-reading in the book when I missed them.  

There is one character in particular that I think other book readers may be surprised to find was left out but if they think about it, they will realize as I did, that she’s just not nearly fun enough as a character to hold her own with the other six, each of whom I absolutely adore. 

KB: Thanks for indulging me. Alright, here’s the final one. A friend of mine recently told me that a mutual friend of ours likes to think of actors as the best playwrights, because they understand character. For a long time, you operated in our company as a stage manager. And working with you in that context, might I add, was such a positive experience. You always managed to facilitate a patient, loving room. So, now: take our anonymous friend to task on this observation. How might working in theatre as a stage manager advantage you as a playwright? Does the experience and insight you gained from practicing theatre in that capacity help you in your writing endeavors? 

SG: OMG, being a stage manager is THE. BEST. Playwriting school and I say that as also an actor who very much takes an approach to character and dialogue informed by my experiences as an actor. 

KB: Sara! I didn’t know that about you, forgive me. 

SG: You are very much forgiven. But, as a stage manager- especially here at Lookingglass where I primarily stage managed new works- I saw 40 plus plays go from their very first reading of a draft all the way to their closing nights. I saw writers writing, adapting, cutting characters, adding scenes, murdering their darlings and sometimes clinging way too long to some darlings that needed murdering. I also became very familiar with all the ways that costumes, lights, sets, sound, circus, and spectacle make some words unnecessary. All great lessons for an emerging playwright.  

But Kareem, for real, the single greatest gift of being a stage manager who wants to write plays is that I also saw every single performance of those plays. I saw the good nights and the bad nights, the nights something went wrong and it turned out to be amazing, the nights an actor discovered something new in a line they’d said fifty times. And from that I learned how monumentally, irreplaceably important the audience is to any play’s realization of its full potential. You can do everything ‘right’ but if the audience isn’t with you, it won’t matter. A million things can go wrong, but if the audience is with you, the play can still move people to tears. My whole philosophy as a playwright about why I do what I do, was forged by each one of the thousands of nights I’ve spent watching audiences watch plays. 

KB: F*cking fascinating. Ah! Thank you, Sara Gmitter. This has been a full meal. I’m soooo satisfied. I hope you’ve found it worth your time/energy. 

SG: Absolutely! 

KB: Well, I know the people reading this will. Speaking of whom. Hey, you up there! Put it away, friend. The show’s about to start. And the proof of the pudding is in…well… 

…bon appetit!