WARNING: this film contains adult content, the use of fire arms, and depictions of violence.
‘L’Etranger/The Stranger’ is a world premiere production by Michael Haverty and The Object Group combining puppetry and cinema to adapt Albert Camus’ complex cautionary novel of 1942. The result is a timeless and challenging performance about cultural alienation, the brutal lack of empathy in Western history, and the devastating effects of oppression on individuals and society as a whole.
Led by artistic director/adaptor/sound and video designer Haverty, director Bryan Mercer, assistant director Marium Khalid, performer Jake Krakovsky, performer Luis Hernandez, and puppet designer Jeffrey Zwartjes. Our production is told with a combination of Punch and Judy-style hand puppets and projected cinema, allowing for animations, images, and film to interplay with live puppetry in multiple windows and stages. Combining Camus’ characters with traditional Punch and Judy archetypes, we take the anarchic and absurd energy of this puppetry tradition and channel it into satire and socio-historical context throughout the play, so that the audience can begin to see the messiness that is Camus’ philosophy reflected in their own relations with race, class, and privilege.
The story follows Meursault as he attends to the details of his life in the French-colonized city of Algiers. After attending his mother’s funeral with a peculiar detachment, Meursault inexplicably kills an unnamed Arab at the beach. When he is arrested and brought before the court, he betrays no guilt over the shooting, which the judge also dismisses as meaningless. However, in an absurd twist, Meursault is convicted and sentenced to execution for the crime of not loving his mother.
Our investigation and re-imagining of Camus’ story focuses on disrupting the violent treatment of Arabs/Africans in colonial territory on the ground and on the page, and the bubble of white supremacy which the main character and author live within. Foregrounding the historical framework of colonial conflict hidden within the novel, we seek to expand our audience’s understanding of this widely read ‘text of decolonization’, offering audiences a glimpse of the varieties of perception brought about through systemic oppression. Co-produced with 7 Stages Theatre.
PROCESS
The Object Group follows a 2-year process for creating new work. This development time included detailed research of the French-Algerian conflict, French philosophy, New Wave cinema of France, Czech Republic and Brazil, and studies on colonial sociology and psychology by Franz Fanon, Paulo Freire, and other scholars. A profound influence is the novel ‘The Meursault Investigation’ by Kamel Daoud, which reimagines Camus’ text through an Arab point of view.
After a year and a half in development, which included residencies at 7 Stages Theatre and the Arts Xchange in Atlanta, and the Hippodrome Theatre in Gainesville, Florida, on March 12th our creative team was wrapping up our final filming weekend in Atlanta when quarantine was declared. We were lucky to be in the editing stage for the rest of Spring, but by June we realized our planned rehearsal and live premiere would have to change.
Puppetry has a natural flow into cinematic expression, and our production was already half projections, so we decided to shift to a full film format for our premiere, with the hope to submit to festivals and other theaters interested in digital content. Our original plans was for this to be our entree to international puppetry festivals, which proliferated in Canada and Europe before COVID. It goes without saying that this dream has been extended, though not lost.
A small team of four rehearsed and filmed for three weeks in September. Performers Luis Hernandez and Jake Krakovski, and video/sound designer/adaptor Michael Haverty met in person in Atlanta, and were joined by director Bryan Mercer, streaming online from Gainesville, Florida on a laptop. Onsite we used COVID precautions developed with input from SAG puppeteer Raymond Carr, the CDC, and any information we could get our hands on, leavened with a dose of criticality. We were tested for COVID twice before our work period. We took temperatures every day before entering the studio. We wore masks and gloves throughout rehearsals and in all filming not requiring a mouth instrument. We sanitized puppets and sets throughout the day. We were blessed to experience no illness during this period.
