© 2024 Louisville Public Media

Public Files:
89.3 WFPL · 90.5 WUOL-FM · 91.9 WFPK

For assistance accessing our public files, please contact info@lpm.org or call 502-814-6500
89.3 WFPL News | 90.5 WUOL Classical 91.9 WFPK Music | KyCIR Investigations
Play Live Radio
Next Up:
0:00
0:00
0:00 0:00
Available On Air Stations
Stream: News Music Classical

For Theatre [502] Director, 'Too Much, Too Much, Too Many' Is Personal

Courtesy Kentucky Center

Theatre [502] director Lucas Adams says that he was initially drawn to the play “Too Much, Too Much, Too Many,” for its deeply poetic language. But Adams says the play also touched him personally.

“I was drawn in after having experienced loss of my own recently and it immediately became a very personal story to me, one that I felt I wanted to tell,” Adams says. “To honor the people that I lost recently and to address my own grief, and to be able to put that grief into a constructive project.”

"Too Much," written by Meghan Kennedy, opens on Rose, a recently widowed woman who has locked herself in her bedroom and refuses to come out. Emma, her daughter, spends the duration of the play attempting to coax Rose out with the help of the new, local pastor. The scenes weave in and out of past and present -- in which Rose recalls experiences with her father as he slipped deeper into dementia.

The play will be performed in the Boyd Martin Experimental Theater. "The MeX," as its referred to, is a small black box theater in the far corner of the Kentucky Center for the Performing Arts, above the administrative offices. Adams says this is the ideal location for the the play.

“So much of this play is about characters who are hiding themselves away in a smaller location, be it a house or even smaller than that, a bedroom,” he says. “So as we moved through staging the show, we wanted to make sure that it was very specific and that we practiced an economy of movement and only moving when necessary.”

One of the main criticisms of the play's script is that it -- as the New York Times puts it -- “sometimes strains a little earnestly for the poetic.” Adams says he has mitigated this by always bringing his actors back to the original intent of their lines.

“You have to want something from the other person in the scene, you have to want something for yourself,” Adams says. “Use the language as a means to propel your wants and your needs, not necessarily just to be flowery and poetic. If the poetry has purpose behind it, reason and intent, it doesn’t feel too flowery.”

“Too Much, Too Much, Too Many” plays June 10 -- June 19 at the Kentucky Center (501 West Main Street). More information can be found here.  

Tags