DEAD DOG’S BONE

by Veronica Tjioe

The Attic Collective
Hollywood Fringe Festival
The Broadwater Mainstage

Los Angeles California
June 2015

“Juniper, a pensive twenty-something, struggles with an inherited inability to commit—a quality passed on to her from Iris, her free-spirited but absent mother. Juniper and her good-hearted fisherman father, Atlas, and love-stricken corduroy- wearing boyfriend, Timothy, must come to terms with the fate of the family dog which, as the title implies, is less than promising. The play transcends time and space, weaving in and out of the present, guided by a boisterous, omnipotent, cut- the-shit reimagining of the Virgin Mary. Upbeat and clever, touching and silly, Dead Dog’s Bone asks questions about growing up, the quest for happiness, and how not to lose sight of joy in life’s most trying moments.”

In this dreamlike production of Veronica Tjioe’s play, the liminal space of being a young person on the precipice of change was highlighted by an exaggerated clutter of cardboard moving boxes, which served as the show’s only furnishings. This inherently transitional landscape was the ideal location for the play’s magical realism to thrive, with the characters' individual dreams and nightmares being played out differently on top of the same cardboard canvass. A large open cardboard box was also where the title of each scene as well as select stage directions were projected, as was specified in the script. In a non-linear play marked by whimsy, the characters ambitions were deepened through theatrically deconstructed physicalizations of their most emotional activities. In a memory of one of their earliest dates, Atlas remembers skipping stones with Iris on a lake. The memory is warm and romantic, but also one of the first clues that they are out of sync-Atlas is content where he is, while Iris yearns to explore. In a moment of gorgeous metaphor, the script describes Iris’s stones skidding across the lake at increasingly further distances while each of Atlas’s stones sink immediately.

To elevate this memory and allow the audience opportunity to feel the marked difference in result of the characters’ efforts, the lake was deconstructed into four transparent, glowing buckets filled with water, with an actor stationed at each of them holding a stone. When Iris flicked her wrist to throw a stone, each of the actors would take turns splashing their stone in the water of their bucket, creating the sensation of Iris’s expanse. When Atlas made the same motion, the actor stationed at the first bucket dropped a stone inside, the thudded splash emphasizing his stasis. A similarly evocative moment happened where the script specified that “apples fall from the heavens” in a moment when Atlas stops metaphorically holding up the world and allows himself to fully succumb to Iris. This moment is about the totality of giving oneself to another person and the feeling of allowing the swell of the outside world to fall by the wayside. This was demonstrated in this production by spinning a large beach umbrella with apples on fishing line sewed to the brim around the actors playing Iris and Atlas as the words “Apples fall from the heavens” was projected. This deconstruction of the image of their connection shielding them from a maelstrom of apples falling around them allowed the audience to more deeply connect to the complexity of their ultimately failed relationship.