What I Love About Playing Luisa
by Julie Doud
It’s been a dream of mine to play Luisa in the Fantasticks for a long time now. What I love about Luisa is that she is sort of a heightened version of my young dreamy-eyed self. The Fantasticks in general takes you back to a time when life was simpler. It makes me think of the way that time for children is so expanded. A week for a child or a teenager is just so much longer psychologically than it is for an adult. And every interaction carries so much more emotional weight when you are young. And playing Luisa is like a ticket to go back to that mode of thinking and feeling. Everything is so vibrant for her. Everything she wants she wants with such a deep and pure passion. And she wants so much more than ordinary life! Being Luisa is like entering into that feeling you have after you read an amazing work of fiction. The characters are so real to you in that moment, the tragedy or the adventure or the romance cuts you deeply, makes your heart pound, and takes your breath away. You just want to dwell in that aftershock – your mind and your heart are excited and you are more alive than you are in ordinary life. And Luisa lives in that heightened mental space in a sustained way. She is, as the play says, “a fantastic.” It can actually be emotionally exhausting to an extent. But it’s a very invigorating.
Another aspect of this role that I love is that as far as musical theatre heroines go Luisa is a bit more quirky than your typical ingenue. As a woman who loves being on the receiving end of great story-telling, and particularly of women’s stories, I love it when ingenues are a bit more three-dimensional. I hope her quirks and her particular brand of insanity resonate with people when they think about their own experiences as young people just waiting for life to begin. It’s also incredibly freeing playing a character like Luisa because she imposes far less restrictions on herself than I would on myself. She is much less self-aware than I was at that age! She’s an open book – and as such is vulnerable which I think is so fun to see on stage.
Apart from that heightened head-space Luisa lives in she also experiences a beautiful story arc. During the course of the show she goes through experiences that change her in profound ways. I love that the way she experiences them is very visceral and theatrical as well – the whole show uses poetry, metaphor, music and theatrical devices so well to get across the feeling of the pain and joy of the growth process across to the audience.
A post about playing Luisa also wouldn’t be complete if I didn’t mention how much I love the music. The show is full of beautiful songs. And in many cases they are so contextual that you can’t appreciate them fully on their own. I remember running across sheet music to “Much More” when I was in high school and didn’t know the show – and I just found the lyrics quite strange. But once you see the songs within the show – they just belong and are so beautiful musically. So that is very gratifying as a musical theatre performer – to be able to bring these beautiful pieces to life within the context for which they were designed. The duets between Matt and Luisa are especially stand-outs in my opinion – Metaphor, Soon It’s Gonna Rain, and They Were You – and they each tell the story of different stages of love so well musically as well as lyrically. The songs performed by the parents are also quite fun lyrically and comical pieces about the challenges of parenting – Never Say No and Plant a Radish – and I get the sense that I will begin to relate more and more to the parent characters as my own children get older. And just to close out this blog – I would like to add that I am thrilled that we will have live music for this production… many thanks to the talented Kathy Buell for being intrigued enough by the chance to play the score for The Fantasticks to join us in this endeavor!
2017-01-30 22:44:22
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