Posted on 12/08/2006 2:46:03 PM PST by Snickering Hound
PROVIDENCE, R.I. — Play or plague?
Producers of the Jean-Paul Sartre play, The Flies, at Brown University will subject the audience to 40,000 fruit flies to bring to life the existentialist work about flies sent to plague the city of Argos in ancient Greece.
Production Workshop, the student-run theater producing the play, built a "cage" of netting 10-feet-high by 16 feet by 22 feet to surround the stage and about 70 audience members, and to keep the flies from infesting the theater.
"There's a sense of containment and quarantine and pestilence, which ties in with the play very well," said James Rutherford, a senior theater arts major who is directing the play.
Rutherford hit on the idea a long time ago, he said, but finally decided to do it when he talked with a friend who studies drosophila fruit flies at Brown's Biomed Center.
She told him it was easy to breed fruit flies, and it was.
They planned to have 30,000 flies at the play's opening Friday, but Rutherford said they got 10,000 extra because the flies reproduced better than anticipated.
The play tells the story of Orestes and Electra, and Rutherford said the flies represent the Greek furies and people's feelings that they are unable to act.
What's it like to be in an enclosed space with 40,000 fruit flies?
"Basically, like a co-op kitchen in the summer," Rutherford said.
Brown required the students to spray the netting with flame retardant to satisfy fire codes, and Rutherford said it was perfectly safe to sit with the bugs for the hour-and-45-minute play.
"They're not drawn to blood or anything, or people or meat. It's like vinegar and grapes and that kind of thing," he said.
Theatergoers know what they're getting into. Rutherford said the flies' presence has been heavily advertised, and anyone who reserves a ticket on a Brown online ticketing service is greeted with a disclosure:
"I am aware that there will be 30,000 live drosophila in the audience area at this production," the message reads, next to a box that must be checked before reserving tickets.
After the production's six-play run ends Monday, the theater will leave the net up and freeze the flies to death by turning down the heat. But Rutherford said people shouldn't feel sorry for them.
"They're vile," he said. "They're really disgusting little creatures."
What do they do when making a play about a flood?
Dollars to donuts the theater will have to be tented by summer.
Praise the Lord they were not making a production about lice or crabs.
Good thing they chose Sartre instead of Rent.
/sarcasm
If they show that musical "Urinetown" at Brown University, I am so NOT going.
"They're vile," he said. "They're really disgusting little creatures."
Where's PETA in all of this insanity? Don't they want to add some of their own?
Sound like he's talking about RATS, not flies...
Like being in a 55 gallon garbage bag with Hillary Clinton.
How can you tell you have an extra 10,000 flies? Did they count them?
Well at least they didn't choose The Metamorphosis by Kafka.
Flies are one thing, cockroaches an entirely different matter, LOL.
Wimps.
"To Be is To Do" - Sartre
"To Do is To Be" - Camus
"Doo Be Doo Be Doo" - Sinatra
Oh, all that life! Killers! I'm going to call PETFF, People for the ethical treatment of fruit flies.
Guess what, theater folks? When I was a kid, we used to put fruit flies in a jar and leave them overnight in the freezer. When we took them out and let them warm up, the little suckers started flying again. Good luck!
They should have people walk through the place with ripe bananas and then walk outside. The flies will follow. There's probably a law against that.
Doesn't exposing these flies to a bunch of Brown students constitute cruelty to animals?.......
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