In music, an aria da capo is a composition with three movements. Movements one and two are independent of each other, while the third is a variation of the first.
"Aria da Capo" was written by Pulitzer Prize recipient Edna St. Vincent Millay in 1919 as a stylized anti-war one-act play. Senior Kate Burns decided to take its title literally and wrote two acts of her own to accompany the original piece.
The resulting production, "Aria," will make its debut in the Balch Arena Theater this evening as Bare Bodkin's fall major. In "Aria," the audience encounters a rare brand of theater: the play within a play within a play.
Burns developed the piece as a project for the Summer Scholars program. Summer Scholars conduct research and create a project or paper with the help of a Tufts faculty member.
After coming up with the initial framework for "Aria" during the spring, Burns spent the summer and fall writing the final two acts and developing a concept for the show that compliments Millay's play.
"Aria" did not exist in its final form, however, until recently. Burns held off from writing a definite draft of the third act until the play had already been cast and the actors had become familiar and comfortable with the first two acts.
As senior director Stefanie Schussel described, the third act "couldn't be written effectively until the rest of the process was complete." The final act, she said, "had to come from the actors and us [the writer and director] in order to be a natural trajectory of the first two acts."
Act one of "Aria" is Millay's play in its entirety. The script and stage direction were all left exactly as is. Schussel explained, "With the political climate as it is, we wanted to keep her [Millay's] message intact." Millay's one-act draws attention to the frivolity of the characters and exhibits the age-old axiom that history is bound to repeat itself.
In Act two, the audience hears the complaints of five college students. This act relates to the first one in that these students are meant to be the actors who just put on "Aria da Capo." Now, however, they are seen in their street clothes, each griping about a specific problem.
During the course of the third act, said Burns, "the boundaries between the first two acts are broken down, letting the actors themselves speak, move, and change the outcome of the play." The characters in the third act return to Millay's lines and become caught in the loop of the play but then free themselves of the stasis with which Millay's play ends.
In an interesting twist, during the third act the college students of the previous scene dissipate and the five actors become themselves: five Tufts students who signed on to be in Kate Burns's play.
In keeping with the idea of an aria da capo, this act is a variation of the first while maintaining its own distinct feel.
While "Aria" provides quite a bit for the audience to take in, its whimsical tone and entertaining delivery keep its viewers from feeling at all overwhelmed. Quirky costumes, the sheer peculiarity of actors playing actors playing actors, and the visual components of the set make for an engaging and fun final product.
"Millay's play warned the audience that they would forget [her message], and we wanted to make sure they wouldn't," she said.
Indeed, with charming dialogue and one of the more notable curtain calls in recent memory, "Aria" will leave a lasting expression.
