The unusual experience of Parallel Lives
By: Joanna Arcieri
Issue date: 4/17/08 Section: Entertainment
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Originally a two-woman show written and performed by Mo Gaffney and Kathy Najimy in 1986, Parallel Lives is a series of vignettes that address and poke fun at topics including abortion, menstruation, sexuality, gay rights, gender and family relationships. Hannah Scarritt-Selman '09, Rosie O'Shea '11 and Leah Minchello '08 have reworked Gaffney and Najimy's Parallel Lives.
Director Scarritt-Selman first worked on the play as her senior project in high school. "I wanted to look at this piece again from a different perspective and with different elements," she explains. Using improvisation, a fourteen-member cast, dance and music Parallel Lives has been updated for today's audience. "We cut a lot from the original play," explains assistant director O'Shea. "[It] is a little dated in terms of where they were in terms of gay rights and abortion." By making the scenes more lighthearted, it allows for the subject matter to be more affecting.
Improvisation has reshaped Parallel Lives. It provides unexpected moments of humor about everything from love and homophobia to sex and tampons. The cast are primarily members of Mount Holyoke's improv group, The Unusual Suspects, and their expert ability to improvise scenes is seen throughout the show. "We told the actors early on they could do whatever they want [when] improvising the characters." says Scarritt-Selman. "Every moment in the show is different each time they do it and I think that's really exciting for them."
Like improvisation, music is incorporated throughout the play to offer a new way of looking at Parallel Lives and in a greater sense, the world. The music is all mashups, combining everything from hip-hop and indie rock to Broadway show tunes. It pulls the seemingly unrelated scenes together in a way that provides an abstract reading of the world. "The idea of using mashups in the show gets to the whole idea of bringing things together in a unified sense," explains Scarritt-Selman. "What we're doing in the show is providing a new way of looking at the show and this a new way of looking at the music."
Reworking Parallel Lives in this way could be viewed as removing relevant social commentary from the original and highly feminist work. Scarritt-Selman explains, "I think that it is [a feminist play] and I'm proud that it is. I think it deals with a lot of the same issues as [the original], but in a way I'm more comfortable dealing with it." O'Shea agrees, "It's not about making it [the play] less feminist." Improvisation and music in this sense are used to draw attention to difficult subject matter in a different light.
As Scarritt-Selman says, "I want it to be fun for the audience because it is fun for the cast. I want people to dance in their seats and to sing along if they want."
Parallel Lives is sponsored by Project Theater. Performances are on April 14, 15, and 16 at 8 p.m. and on April 17, at 3 p.m.