Double Bill – Glimmerglass Festival: A Blizzard on Marblehead Neck & Later the Same Evening – Erhard Rom

A Blizzard on Marblehead Neck by Jeanine Tesori and Tony Kushner

Later the Same Evening by John Musto and mark Campbell

Description: In a 2011 Glimmerglass Festival production directed by Francesca Zambello with Scenic Designs by Erhard Rom, the environment of an art gallery collides with real life storytelling. Characters emerge from the paintings of Edward Hopper in part one of the Double Bill and ultimately find themselves in a rainstorm. The rainstorm invades the interior space of the art gallery itself, blurring the lines of reality between exterior and interior space and interior storytelling. In part two of the Double Bill we find ourselves once again in the art gallery, only this time it is the story of Eugene O’Neill. The turmoil of his life is expressed with a small house-like shape onto which there is photographic image attached of storming waves of the New England coast. The gallery is further invaded upon with a snow storm and blizzard that is the reality of this tale. The juxtaposition of the interior world of the art gallery, which is a place where our imagination can open the doors to our inner world of dreams, is quite literally brought to life with the invasion of weather throughout the piece. First the rainstorm in the Hopper gallery, then the storming ocean with wild thrashing waves in the Eugene O’Neill house and finally the ongoing blizzard outside of his home. The world of the interior environment and exterior forces of nature and weather are in this manner brought face to face in one magical environment.