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Death is a tough subject — apparently it’s not one complicated enough to stop one student from writing and producing her own play on the topic.
“She Looks Good in Black,” which opens tonight in the Black Box Theater, is the first student-written, student-acted and student-produced show in recent University of Maine history. It’s the brainchild of Sarah Mann, the play’s author and director, who first got the inspiration for the work about a year ago when she read “Mourning Becomes Electra,” a modern retelling of the Greek myth of Orestes written by Eugene O’Neill.
“The idea of reinventing yourself through someone else’s death was really interesting,” Mann said. “When we were talking about the play ‘Morning Becomes Electra,’ [my teacher] said, ‘It might as well be called “She Looks Good in Black.”’”
After claiming the title for herself, Mann began working on the script.
According to her, the play is about a woman whose closeted gay husband accidentally kills himself during autoerotic asphyxiation. He leaves behind a legacy — a series of erotic animal paintings — and she buys a funeral dress she believes she looks so good in, that she won’t take it off.
Meanwhile, her openly gay brother comes to visit but only makes things worse. She also falls in love with her husband’s gravedigger who has a much different outlook on life than those around her.
It all starts the day of the funeral and follows the lead character as she deals with the absurdity of the situation.
“When the play starts, everybody has changed. It’s really interesting to kind of try to communicate who they were beforehand without ever showing it,” Mann said admitting death has always been an intriguing concept for her primarily because everyone has an opinion on it.
“You have people that are completely terrified of it; you have people that accept that it’s a part of life; you have people that are excited by it,” Mann said. “It was really interesting to write characters that all think about death differently.”
Death, illness and bathroom trips were all private matters in Mann’s British household growing up. Not only was death never discussed, but when someone did pass away, everyone was quick to forget their faults.
The play was finished over the summer, and plans were slowly set in motion to put it on stage this school year. Mann won an on-campus playwriting contest for a different play she wrote, but it was this show she really wanted people to see.
“The other stuff I like and I’m proud of, but this is something that I feel like people would really be able to relate to,” she said.
Mann’s play is being produced by Maine Masque’s sister group SUMMIT. She said the Black Box is an ideal location because of its intimacy — actors can’t fake the emotional intensity of the dialog with their audience so close.
“There’s really no fourth wall,” she said.
Primarily an actress, “Black” is Mann’s first attempt at both directing and at producing her own work, though she had some experience directing smaller scenes and rewrote some of her monologues for the stage during last semester’s “The Boys Next Door.”
Mann allowed the actors to add their own life and dimension to the characters she wrote, making compromises on her ideal vision. At the auditions, Mann said she was looking for a glimpse of the perfect character — a spark leads actors Allison Smith and Ed Benson had when they first read together as the woman and the gravedigger.
In Mann’s eyes, actor Caleb Perry was the closest to her ultimate portrayal of the openly gay brother.
“I assigned them all to bring in a character history, which was interesting because a lot the information that they came up with from the script on their own was stuff I would have never thought of, or contrary to stuff I believed,” Mann said. “So then I started working with those characters that they created, applying it to my word, and those are the performances that you see.”
It’s been necessary for Mann to leave her ego as a playwright behind while directing the show — she’s just now getting excited about the effect her story can potentially have on people. There was an emotional audience at their test performance last week.
“It’s always really odd to think that I could make someone cry with something I wrote,” Mann said. “It’s just as exposing to have people hear my words as it is for me to perform. I’m really excited, but it is very nerve-racking.”
“She Looks Good in Black” opens in the Black Box Theater on Thursday at 7:30 p.m. with performances continuing Friday and Saturday night at the same time as well a matinee at 2 p.m. Saturday. Tickets are free, but donations are accepted to help support SUMMIT.
