Prop: Peacock
Appearing in: “A Still Life in Color,” TUTA Theatre Chicago
The birth of the peacock in “A Still Life in Color” was arduous.
Playwright Philip Dawkins envisioned the brightly plumed bird as a puppet that would appear at the end of the fairy tale-like story about a young couple cursed by a woman in love with the man. “The peacock puts to rest some ugly feelings and some beautiful feelings, and brings closure to these characters who have struggled for closure for thousands of years,” he says.
He also imagined another puppet portraying an old man who would introduce the play.
Prop designer Helen Lattyek started by making a toy mock-up of the peacock puppet. But since director Zeljko Djukic had decided to cast an actor in the role of the old man, he had misgivings about the bird puppet. “He didn’t want to introduce an element at the end of the play that we hadn’t seen before,” says Dawkins.
So the artistic team thought about having an actor in the play take on the additional role of the peacock. But they were afraid that audience members might think the bird was just another aspect of his original character.
Then the peacock became more amorphous. Since the lovers shed the outer layers of their Kabuki-inspired kimonos during the play, the discarded garments where hung on a stick to represent the peacock, carried around by the actor portraying the old man. “It was very beautiful but it didn’t feel right for the performers,” Dawkins recalls.
Since large panels of fabric appear and disappear during the play, Lattyek next cut out from green fabric the shape of a peacock about 4 feet tall and attached it to a beige panel. An actor hidden behind it would provide the bird’s voice.
Lattyek and costume designer Natasha Djukic, created the bird’s beautiful plumage and tail feathers by piecing together leftover scraps from the costumes of the two lovers. The young man’s costume was made of metallic blue material, the young woman’s silky green–and both included gold accents, thus matching the shimmering, natural colors of peacocks. “The peacock becomes a magical representation of the love of both of the characters,” Lattyek says.
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“A Still Life in Color,” through Sunday, Chicago Dramatists Theatre, 1105 W. Chicago Ave., $20; 773-680-0826.
