Staging Proposal

To transfer the novel My Love, My Love into stage adaptation, the setting of the stage becomes really important because how the stage looks or feels like conveys essential emotions or information to the audience.

For the whole stage, there are mainly two scenes. One is the place where the village is, and the other one is in the big hotel. When the stage is set in the village, trees, huts, and farms are the background of the stage. When the scene takes place inside Desiree’s hut, there are some old props shown to the audience, such as shovels, hoes, and straw hats hanging up on the wall. There are only two wooden beds lying on the ground in the hut, a bigger bed and a smaller one. Tonton Julian and Mama Euralie sleep on the bigger bed, and Desiree sleep on the other one. There is one table in the middle of the hut, which is also a wooden one. Being placed on the table, there are some wooden cups for drinking tea. When the story takes place in the Beauxhomme hotel, the background is made up of the black, twisted mountains and the well-ordered streets. The hotel looks similar as Napoleon’s Château de Fontainebleau. Inside the hotel, especially in Daniel Beauxhomme’s room, there is a huge sandalwood wardrobe, velvet curtains, and silver or golden tablewares. The props show a distinct difference between the poor and the rich, and this helps tell the audience how each world looks like.

For the lighting on stage, there are also differences in the village and the hotel. In Desiree’s village, most of the time the warm orange or yellow lights are projected above the characters. When at night, the lights become caliginous. White light is projected from the ground when the story takes place in the forest in order to make a scary and sombrous atmosphere. In the hotel, unlike in the village, there are more cool colors such as light purple and blue instead. I use these lights so as to make the whole atmosphere of the hotel looks more quiet, gentle and solemn, making a contrast to the active, down-to-earth village.

For the sound effects, I will produce various sounds in the village because it is directly in touch with the nature. As a result, there are many sound effects such as the buzzing insects, twittering birds, whirring wind, and also the sound of river flows. In the hotel, however, in order to emphasize its quietness, there are only some light music playing throughout the scene. When the guests are dancing and cheering Daniel and Desiree up, the music turns to be active and joyful. After all, the whole hotel still sounds elegant and peaceful. When different Gods show up on the stage, each of them has different background music. For Papa Ge, there are some scary sounds playing on stage, whereas happy and lyrical music is with Erzulie. Sound effects are necessary to promote the plot and convey the emotions at different time to the audience.

For different characters, they are distinguished by their noticeable clothes. The villages usually wear brown or grey linen clothes without shoes. This shows their poverty and contradicts them to the wealth. Citizens and the people in the grand hotel wear either silks, satins, velvets, or the finest cotton. All of them have shoes, and this is the most obvious difference between the poor and the rich. Characters in hotel wear the luxury suits or colorful gowns. Ladies have shiny jewelries with diamonds, gold and silver. Even the nurse Madame Mathilde wears fastidious dresses. As for the Gods, Asaka is in green long-sleeved dress, Agwe with light blue robes with gold tassel, Erzulie with white long dress with pink roses stitched on, and Papa Ge with black, exquisite suits with a sickle holding in his hand (to get dead people’s souls).