Developing a Seed and Pitch

I knew that I wanted to focus on destiny almost immediately after reading the play, but on the road to finding a seed and developing a pitch, I decided to do some research to help guide me to some ideas.

First bit of "Googleing" The Pavilion resulted with a review from The New York Times writer, Charles Isherwood, who stated, "Mr. Wright's observations about the elusive nature of contentment and the merciless tread of time are not what you would call shattering revelations, but they do qualify as plain and painful truths...[a] slowdance of sorrow and regret." This statement helped steer me to believe that this project needed to be portrayed as a simple situation without the bells and whistles of a normal production. I wanted to make apparent that the audience were bystanders listening in on a real-life conversation.

With some general ideas in my head, I went back and dug deep into different sections of the script in order to find the true message I wanted to get across in ten minutes. I kept asking myself, "What about destiny to I want to say? Is there even such a thing as destiny? Do we have free will if there's already a chosen path we're supposed to take?" The last question, in tandem with Peter's line, "[Are we] just trapped in a net of what we've done forever?" lead me to finally come up with my seed: Malleability of Destiny. I wanted to tell the audience that nothing in life is fixed; that our actions in the present may not take back or rewind our actions of the past, but they can shape our future into the fate we choose.

The next step to develop my pitch was to relate to two different movies. I thought it should resemble Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind meets The Time Machine. The themes and ideas extracted from these movies are the failure in attempts to erase your past in order to change your destiny. In Eternal Sunshine, the main character attempts to literally erase his ex-girlfriend from his memory in order to get over her and stop the painful memory. However, they end up back together even with no memory of each other. In The Time Machine, the main character goes back in time to try to stop his wife from getting killed, but, as he finds out, time is fixed, and every time he saves her from imminent death, she dies a different way. Eventually, he realizes that he cannot change anything in his past, but the future holds enormous potential for happiness. Both films display the immovability of your past and the actions you need to take to change your future.

To drive me to the design elements of the project, I attempted to find some pictures that would inspire the visual aspects.

This image helped focus the ideas of destiny (the circle), time, and the constant reiteration of the "universe" as an immovable idea. This drove me to want an empty set, and, initially, the desire for the setting of the play to be purgatory or a vacuumed space.

The next image is the epitome of my "perfect world" set.

One of the many reasons I felt like this image encapsulated the message of the design was the absolute blank slate that it represents. Peter is driving to change the universe, to have it all start over again so he can have a new beginning, and that's what this exemplifies. It drove me to the initial decision to have both actors in all blacks, which turned out to change in the end product. For a practical reason, I felt that the emptiness of this picture would provide excellent focus on the conversation, disallowing any visual distractions.