"Art should disturb the order of things.”
As an award-winning playwright and journalist, Lojo Simon knows what it’s like to be surrounded by successful people — and how it can help or hurt a career.
“You want to feed off that energy,” she said, but it can become all-consuming.
Add competition into the equation, and the pressure builds. Add intimacy, and someone is going to get hurt.
The struggle to maintain creative independence while attempting to cultivate a relationship was what attracted Simon to the story of Dora Maar. Already a professional photographer, Dora Maar was mistress to one of the most widely known and successful painters of the 20th century, Pablo Picasso.
Simon’s thirst for knowledge spurred her five-year writing process and was a driving force behind her induction to the University of Idaho Masters in Fine Arts program in dramatic writing.
The play, which opened the 2011 -2012 mainstage season, took on many surreal elements that put the technical teams to the test and pushed audiences to look past their sense of reality.
Director and UI Associate Professor of Performance Robert Caisley said creating and coordinating the imagery within the play was labor intensive, but added a unique aspect to the production.
“We’ve never done anything quite like this,” Caisley said. “There were some bizarre twists and turns that don’t follow logic.”
Adoration of Dora featured six women playing multiple roles in the production. In many of Picasso’s paintings of Maar, he envisions her as a fractured woman seeming to have two sides. To illustrate this, two actresses played Dora Maar, one as “Dora” and the other as her fractured self, “Maar.”
The antagonist, “Picasso,” never officially appeared on stage. But his character, seen only in silhouette, “takes up a lot of space” with his influence alone, Simon said.
“Creativity was an all-consuming passion for him ... in his personal life he was a nightmare,” Caisley said.
His effect on “Dora” makes it apparent her days of success as an artist are numbered.
“(Picasso) was much older ... a success already ... How could she find her own path?” Simon said.
The trials “Dora” faces are not very different from the tests faced in any relationship.
“There are compromises we make when we enter into any relationship,” Caisley said. “The struggle is not to lose yourself ...”
Simon said the play presented its audience with a lot of concepts to mull over and opportunities for self-reflection.
“I wanted to present something more than simply an entertaining night at the theater,” she said.
The play has been submitted to the Kennedy Center American College Theater Festival for consideration in this year’s region VII competition. The play will be judged against others from Idaho, Washington, Oregon, Montana, Northern Nevada, Wyoming, Colorado, Northern California and Alaska. KCACTF was created in 1969 to encourage quality theater in the U.S. There are currently 18,000 students involved in the program nationwide.
Adoration of Dora was presented as part of the Humanities Exploration - “Turning of the Wheel: The Interplay Between Our Diversity and Universality.”
