In the depths of Irish folklore lies the tale of Bridget Cleary. A young, healthy woman one day and a hallucinatory invalid the next, Cleary awakens to find her family, friends and fellow townspeople claiming she is possessed by fairies. Her frighteningly true story haunts Northwestern's Struble Theatre this weekend.
In the lobby of the Theatre and Interpretation Center sits Kathryn Farley, a Performance Studies doctoral candidate. She is the person responsible — as writer and director — for bringing Cleary's ghost to campus. Her creation, "Away with the Fairies," breaks ground by integrating a live stage production with a taped video presentation and even an interactive Web site.
Based in part on Angela Bourke's book, "The Burning of Bridget Cleary: A True Story," "Away with the Fairies" reconstructs the peculiar circumstances surrounding this late 19th century Irishwoman's painful demise. After making a trip to her neighbors' house to deliver eggs, Cleary rapidly falls to an inexplicable illness. Her loved ones attribute the disease to the Irish fairies, who they believe overtook her body. This weekend's performance reveals the family's solution to Cleary's possession: an exorcism.
To prepare her cast members for their roles, Farley had them perform several undirected, improvisational exercises. Speech sophomore Liz Lytle, who plays the narrator Elizabeth, says these extemporaneous video-recorded sessions helped direct the actors in their character work.
"We actually try to become the characters," Lytle explains. "That's helped to keep us on our toes. In certain scenes and certain relationships, we're able to build through the improv."
With such heavy subject matter, "Away with the Fairies" delves into the psyche of each character by incorporating these innovative video techniques into the actual performance. Throughout the show, the taped improvisational interviews, alongside other pieces of video footage, are projected on to the backdrop amid the live action. According to Nicole Stewart, who plays Mary Kennedy, this media integration is one of the production's most defining features.
"This is an unorthodox performance," says Stewart, a Speech senior. "We're introducing and juxtaposing video and live action. It's like seeing a movie but having actors play it out in front of you. Sometimes the information on the video is contradictory to what happens on the stage, largely because some historical documents of the event are conflicting."
Farley says the only way she could accurately portray the significance of fairies in Irish culture was through the use of alternative media.
"We're using technology to go from a physical place onstage to a metaphysical place somewhere in another dimension," Farley explains. "The video will bring us into the unknown space that exists between the living and the dead, knowing and not knowing, male and female — all these places where the fairies live."
Perhaps the most unorthodox and modern element of this performance is its Web site. Farley's team has created www.awaywiththefairies.org, an Internet page that includes a project description, a director's diary, video archives and a feedback section, where cast members chronicle their rehearsal experiences.
Even more adventuresomely, Farley uses the Web site to correspond with Bourke, who teaches a Celtic folklore class to college students in Ireland. The class checks the page on a daily basis and will be viewing the performance via digitized video.
For students on this campus, though, "Away with the Fairies" provides an interdisciplinary examination of Irish culture.
"I think it's a great performance to do at a college because it's integrating theater, performance studies and history," Stewart says. "It's not a play. It's not a movie. It's not performance art. It's all of these things." nyou
Speech senior Kris Kitto is an nyou writer. He can be reached at k-kitto@northwestern.edu.
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