BY ADRIENNE URBANSKI
“We’re all going to die.”
This foreboding line, exclaimed by both main characters within the first ten minutes of “Still Life,” gives you a clue as to just what awaits in this death-fixated work.
Death, it seems, is close at hand for both characters. World-renowned photographer Carrie Anne, coping with the death of her father, is paralyzed; unable to take a single shot. Jeff, daunted by an x-ray with a mysterious shadow, wonders if cancer will soon tear apart his life. If it sounds all a bit dramatic, it is — but thankfully, New York City based playwright Alexander Dinelaris gives the tear jerker material a dose of believability that makes the drama palatable.
Dinelaris took a page from his own life when writing “Still Life.” Like Carrie Anne, Dinelaris experienced an artistic block following the death of his own father.
Not able to pen a eulogy for the funeral, “Still Life” was the first thing Dinelaris was able to write. Using the loss of his father as a base, Dinelaris extends the theme of death to explore human connections, creative paralysis, and life-stalling anxiety.
“My father and I were very close my whole life. When I lost him I sort of lost my best friend, my mentor, and my hero. I was in a very lost place, we were close. We even have the same name. I’m a Junior. So we were close down to our names. I became very aware of death for the first time. I wondered how I was going to survive without that anchor in my life,” said Dinelaris.
These questions were at the forefront of his mind when he attended a Memorial Day party at the home of photographer Tamara Staples. While at the party, Dinelaris saw Staples’ photos of dead animals, which are the same photos used in the play for Carrie Anne’s show. Just like Carrie Anne’s love interest Jeff in “Still Life,” Dinelaris felt an immediate emotional response towards Staples’ work.
“Her photos, which we used in the play, are photos of deceased animals posed like Victorian Memorial Portraits. I was so moved by the dead animals and how beautiful and dignified they looked. It just clicked for me, this idea, that there can be something dignified in death. Especially since my father’s death was less than dignified, as he died from pancreatic cancer. I saw how just me being there during my father’s death made it somehow dignified,” he said.
The idea for “Still Life” came together when Dinelaris jokingly told Staples at dinner that he was going to write a play inspired by the photos, centering around a photographer dealing with the death of her father. Although he meant it as a joke, Dinelaris later came to realize that it was in fact a legitimately good idea for a play, and after suffering for nearly a year from a creative block he was finally able to write again.
Within “Still Life” however, Dinelaris extends the emotional exploration past that of death and loss. Dinelaris also uses his characters to examine what he sees as a fear to live that paralyzes those of his generation.
“I wanted to investigate this thing within my generation; this world of fear that we all live in.” While coping with his father’s death, Dinelaris began watching a lot of television — and came across two commercials in succession that he says illustrated the conflicting philosophies on life being shown to his generation, that of the carpe diem, live in the now perspective, and that of constant paranoia and caution.
“In the first commercial the man says goodbye to his wife in this traditional suburban home and walks to the edge of a cliff and jumps off with a parachute, landing in his hummer. The commercial is saying, ‘Seize the day! Don’t worry about tomorrow! Drive a Hummer! Who cares about the environment? Live today! And the next commercial was this cartoon butterfly flying around while it asks do you ever get headaches, and all these other things people experience every day. This could be a sign you have a terrible disease, take Digitalfilis, or whatever. Then it lists this whole litany of terrible side effects, telling you to be careful, be afraid. These commercials played back to back just struck me, it struck me how trapped we are when we’re just trying to enjoy and live our lives.”
Dinelaris says that these mixed messages plague his generation — sending them in two directions, leaving them paralyzed and confused. He explores this conflict within his work through the juxtaposition of the characters Jeff and Terry. While Jeff looks to the future, moving with absolute caution and forethought, his boss Terry lives in the moment, hedonistically thinking of only what he wants within the present moment.
This contrast in world view is illustrated most clearly in a cleverly staged scene which shows Carrie Anne and Jeff arguing over feminism and the state of gender relations, while at the other end of the table Terry is seducing a married woman. While Carrie Anne and Jeff carefully dissect modern gender roles, Terry and the woman are thinking only of the moment.
“On the other side of the table you have Jeff’s boss Terry seducing the girl he’s with. He’s saying to the girl, seize the moment, you want this now. You want this tonight. You want to just be free and live in the moment for once. Forget your fear for just one night. He’s talking about the moment. Then on the other side we have the opposition, we have them [Carrie Anne and Jeff] talking about the long term, talking about the feminist movement, basically they’re having intellectual foreplay. These two conversations draw the same parallel as the commercials.”
Later in another scene, Terry drunkenly discusses life paths with a bartender, telling her that she could have done more with her life, but she had been “afraid to live,” afraid of her potential.
Since his penning of “Still Life,” Dinelaris has long since moved past his creative block, and recently worked on a script with producer-director Alejandro González-Iñárritu (“Babel,” “21 Grams”).
