Luis Carrasco                                                                                                10/1/14

Professor Natov

The Valley of Astonishment.

Costumes:

The play explores the human mind and how we look at things. Words are seen as pictures for some people (Ms. Costas) and others see color or hear music when they look at things or hear things.

When the actors started to talk about the Phoenix, they immediately caught my attention because I used to like mythical creatures a lot. I wanted to know how that was related to the Phoenix. “He knew the exact time of his death and would gather leaves to build a pyre and burnt himself up…But every time he burnt himself up he sprang out of the ashes, he got himself born all over again.”

Then learning about Ms. Costa’s amazing memory and seeing her re-discover how her own mind worked was neat.

In the beginning they had this floor that was about the size of a small bedroom and a moving table. They had a coat hanger with doctor jackets and other types of jackets too. These I felt were the most important costumes. If we looked at the characters individually, they all had similar regular clothing of jeans, sneakers and a dark color shirt. One of the exceptions was the businessman who was the boss of the company who Ms. Costas originally worked for; he had brown shoes rather than sneakers. I noticed that it was the jacket that turned them into the character that they had to be seen as. Who they were was reflected into that singular piece of fabric and their voice, dialect and tone created the persona they wanted to be. With Ms. Costas, when she was just an employee, she had on all black clothing and once she entered the showroom, where she was a performer, her jacket had a strip of silver plated sparkles around the border of her blazer; she was no longer a laborer and now a performer. We can see that off stage she didn’t have her jacket and when she was with the doctors she didn’t have it as well. I thought it was a way of showing she is still human and that she has flaws just like all of us, because she couldn’t forget and she was going crazy. The boss at first was funny and intimidating and had a casual look to him, and then as a doctor’s assistant, with the lab coat, he was always asking questions and trying to observe every detail about Ms. Costas. Then the actual doctor had a lab coat too, but in the transition where he was a magician, he was wearing a blazer with a hat, and he performed tricks with his sleight of hand and the cards. When he was being an ordinary man who had trouble walking, he did not have his jacket on, he had a grey collar shirt. Then the man who could see painting and each color made him hear a sound was dressed in an ordinary fashion as well, because he was an “ordinary” person with a single role. The character of John Kelly, also had a jacket that made him seem like a performer, and when he was performing he took it off and wore a vest underneath it. The other man, he could see color once he heard sounds. That man had a leather jacket, which was making him look cool and he was locked away, but inside he was one of the people who had a special way of seeing and hearing in their mind. He had not told anyone about how he sees colors when he hears words because someone told him he was weird.

The play was very well done even with the limited costumes and it left me with a puzzling feeling of what is what in my brain and how is it that I forget? Overall it was interesting and made me wonder about the limits of our own language.