In the script Aaron describes the end of the play as follows:
Ben knocks out the American Dream. He’s down. And on his fall, everything else stops,
the song, the striptease, everything. The work lights come on and the
costumes come off, the wigs, the makeup, everything. The vaudeville
show is over. The characters are gone, now it’s just the actors playing
them as each becomes the other, Sam and G and C and Maude and Ben
Franklin, all but David, they’re all one, they’re all each other, they’re all of
us together. And as the American Dream slowly, so so so very slowly rises
up from the floor, the others repeat the whole show, a whirlwind, acts
from before overlapping, multiplying, reversing, everything wrapped up,
torn apart, coming together, again and back over, the never ending story
of us.
And yet as it all falls apart, these layers of reality collapsing onto and into
themselves, one thing remains – or perhaps becomes – startlingly clear:
the present moment of us, here, together, pretending. Here we are, a
bunch of people, in this room. We feel it in our bones, all the way down to
our unearthly cores, blinding us and binding us.
And then as the actress playing Maude comes back to the third verse of
“Only Money,” we see the American Dream has risen almost all the way
back to his feet. The other actors stop to watch.
Jenn and Krissy have chosen to explore this moment by having each actor re-act their character tract in the show. With importance paid to location and dropping characterization. Which creates a super interesting experience as an audience member. We tracked the audience member's journey as: Confusion, Delight, Confused, Absurdity ie "are they really going to redo the whole play?", to a meditative state, then you come out of it and the actors are still redoing their characters and then everything stops when Annie/ Maude begins to sing. And the pay off in that moment is really internalized, making a very personalized audience experience out of chaos and spectacle.
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