Approach:

Sonia Flew is a play about memory and trauma. Memory can carry profound truth. Through tradition, these characters seek to find stability and to make family/community—even when such tradition comes with pain or when it has become unmoored from its original meaning. Memory is also unreliable, contingent, and subjective. Memories of trauma, barely understood and repressed only with great struggle, prevents these characters from honestly interacting with their pasts or each other. These characters revel in memory and push it away. They are both nurtured and harmed by its refusal to stay repressed.

This relationship with memory/trauma raises a core question, both in the play and in everyday life: How do our fractured memories of past traumas condition our ability to engage with the present?

The burden of memory creates a divide between young and old. The older characters are weighed down by their memories. Their experience of these traumas cannot be expressed or explained. Only the weight of these burdens can be shared, in silence, with others who carry similar weight. The younger characters are blissfully unaware of the severity of this trauma, of the capacity of memory to condition every aspect of life. In their naivety, they rebel against the cautions, the plans, and the warnings of the older characters. The only way to understand the burdens their parents hold close is to experience it for themselves, to see what cannot be unseen and to experience what cannot be forgotten. These burdens create a series of walls, which stand between the past and present, as well as between each of the characters.

Though the first act references the tropical and the second act immerses itself in it, there is a great deal of discussion about snow, water, loneliness, alienation, desperation, etc. Throughout, the warmth of the traditional tropical palette is traded for a much cooler array of blues, grays, greens, and whites. As such, the design aesthetic for this production should not be too inviting- the audience shouldn't see a tropical paradise or a vacation destination. Likewise, in act one, they shouldn't see a perfect, happy, nuclear family. Instead, like the situation of the characters, design elements should demonstrate a certain degree of isolation, a floating sensation that emphasizes the fragmentary nature of memory and of these relationships.

To a certain extent, I'm imagining this as if the only "present" experience in the play is with Sonia at Arlington Cemetery (II.v). The rest of the scenes are her memory of the events that unfolded to lead her to this situation, this place. The stronger the memory, the sharper the scene- this leaves room for the convoy/explosion sequence to be incredibly minimal (she has no first-hand memory of the event) and for the seamless incorporation of the dream/memory sequences/isolations.