Staging proposal

After reading the book My Love My Love, it gives me a special feeling, which is I don’t like the main character DDD. From my point of view, DDD is the most selfish and egocentric person in the whole book, so my personal preference is to make the play a totally tragedy. She disregards her mom’s warn, the god’s war, and even rejects Daniel’s grandma’s kindness suggestions. The whole book is a story to teach a girl how naive and normal she is. Even though DDD is surely saved by gods, it is DDD’s choice to go to the big city and be betrayed: No gods helped her in her life process. If I were the director of this play, I would make it as an ironic musical, and the god in the book only exists in DDD’s dream.

I really like the idea of changing background through the moving triangular prism. One said could be drawn with forest, which represent the poor village. Another side could be drawn with ocean and forest to show the path to the big city since the book describe DDD’s destination as a place where ocean and forest reach together. The other side could be drawn with fancy buildings, which represent the big city. Another is that two big screens is needed on both side of the stage so that the facial expression of characters can be clearly shown. For instance, when Daniel opens his eyes and look at TiMoune, audience may not able to see unless there are screens. When DDD is in the village, a tent and a grass mat would be used as her home. To show the wind and the tsunami, the light and the sound effect is really important. When the village is peaceful, the normal warm light and bird chirping sound would be needed to show that the village is in harmony. Then the really dark red light would be used when the big storm comes. Under the dark light, actors’ face can’t be seen clearly and hard to distinguish, so that the idea that all lives are equal in front of danger can be shown. The sound effect of thunder and rain should definitely be contained. When DDD gets on the way to the big city, the round white light is casted on the background and disappear every 20s to show a day has past. The third scene happens in the big city where people are all rich and cold blood. To show this feature and as a foreshadow of DDD’s death, blue light would be use since it gives people the feeling of coldness and isolation. When DDD comes into Daniel’s room, fancy furniture like bed and sofa would be used. Also, a fake balcony, a candle, and a bottle of red wine would be needed to bring out the romantic atmosphere.

The main characters are DDD and Daniel. Mama, Tonton, Daniel’s father and grandma are secondly important. Then the extra characters are the vendors in the big city and the peasants in the village. For TiMoune, her life has a really big change before and after she lives in the Hotel. She is really poor when she was in the village, as a result she doesn't have any nice clothes. So I think she should wear a ripped dress and with a hair band on her hair. Since she is black, she could keep her hair to be curl. Another really important point is that TiMoune should be bare foot since in the later of the book when she comes to the Hotel of Daniel, other peasants mock at her feet. To make her character reliable, she should have some dirt on her foot. When she lives with Daniel together, the book says that people made dresses for her, she no longer have to wear plastic shoes, and she starts to be over confident. As soon as Daniel falls in love with TiMoune, she claims the Hotel belongs to her. To portrait this kind of character, TiMoune needs really fancy dress with fabric, wearing comb that was decorated by jewelry, and ties her hair up, maybe makes her hair straight. For TiMoune’s parents, they are just normal peasants. Therefore, they should wear dark yellow or brown color clothes to represent their social status. For Daniel, he was born to be rich so he should wear shinny light blue tuxedo, just like what princes in Disney movies wear. His father should wear almost the same as Daniel but in brownish red color and have less decoration on his clothes to show his age and wealth. 

I really hope the play could be musical so that people could make their voice deeper to show there depression and when they dance and sing can show their happiness. Also the reason why I want it to be a musical is that DDD has lots of part, which she sings to Daniel. It would be too weird to suddenly sing a song while reading scripts. Therefore, singing all the time can not only explains why she sings but can also easily show emotions.