SALT LAKE CITY, Utah, July 12, 2023 (Gephardt Daily) — For those that would love to enter a fairy tale world this summer, the Sting and Honey Company is bringing “Snow White” back to the Regent Street Black Box at the Eccles Theater in downtown Salt Lake City after last producing the show in 2018.
The play, based on the classic tale from the Brothers Grimm, is written and directed by the company‘s artistic director Javen Tanner. It opens Friday, July 14 and goes through July 29. “To escape the witch Fand, Snow White hides in the woods, where she meets new friends, finds the strength to confront evil, and learns the power of love,” is how the play is described. The aim of the company, its website says, is to produce a body of work that includes classical and contemporary plays, new works, and educational outreach. It has also presented adaptations of classic fairy tales with “Sleeping Beauty’s Dream” and “Cinderella,” written by Tanner. In addition, he wrote the company’s annual Christmas show “This Bird of Dawning.” Sting and Honey has also produced classics by authors such as William Shakespeare, Samuel Beckett, Eugene O’Neill, Peter Shaffer, Henrik Ibsen and Anton Chekhov.
Gephardt Daily spoke over the phone with Tanner, who is also the theater department chair at Waterford School, and he told us more about the show and its background. He explained that he based his version of ‘”Snow White” on a satyr play, which is a genre of ancient Greek drama that preserves the structure and characters of tragedy while adopting a happy atmosphere and ending; essentially, a tragi-comedy.
“I wrote it about 12 years ago,” Tanner said. “And what happened was I was working on a production of ‘The Winter’s Tale’ a couple of years before and as I was working on ‘The Winter’s Tale,’ I just saw these similarities between the story of Perdita, Leontes’ daughter, and Snow White. And then I just started to see these connections between all of the young princess characters in Shakespeare’s romances, and the famous princesses of the Western fairy tales. This idea of the girl that gets lost and then returns kind of a different person. And so I just noticed that as I was working on ‘The Winter’s Tale,’ and then, a couple of years after that, I decided I would write a version of it.”
Tanner added: “So what Shakespeare does in ‘The Winter’s Tale,’ he creates a satyr play. So we only have one surviving satyr play; they’re a certain kind of play in ancient Greece. And, you know, what happens is you have the festival of Dionysus, where the playwrights would put up three tragedies and it became this competition. But as the plays became more about social issues and how to be a good person, how to be a good citizen and how to be a good follower of the gods, they kind of strayed from what their original purpose was, which was that it was a festival of Dionysus, it was specifically to worship Dionysus. And so, for them, it was a specific sort of worship of Dionysus and they were coming to see these performances that you know, gave them a sort of transcendent experience. But more and more the plays that we know from Aeschylus, Sophocles and Euripides, it’s a lot of propaganda in these plays.”
He added: “So what happened is in order to appease the audience, a new kind of play was born and this was the satyr play. And the purpose of that play was to reconnect the festival of Dionysus to its ritual roots.” In “The Winter’s Tale,” two satyrs show up in the middle of a sheep shearing festival and ask if they can dance.
“He has the satyrs come in and dance in the middle of it for no reason,” Tanner explains. “Other than to say this is a satyr play. And so I saw that and then I started reading, you know, and I saw the connections between prototyped Snow White, and I thought, how fascinating, what if Snow White goes out into the woods and instead of seven dwarfs, you have seven satyrs? And so she spends her time out there with the seven satyrs and she dances with them. And that’s the experience she has. And it has tragic elements to the play, but it’s ultimately a happy ending. So it’s ultimately a comedy. So as such it’s a tragi-comedy.”
The play was first produced with Tanner’s students, then Sting and Honey staged it five years ago.
Tanner explained that some key roles are played by the same actors as before, but most are newly cast.
“You have like a few who have taken up their roles again; Deena [Marie Manzanares], Bijan [Hosseini] and Kathryn Atwood have all returned to their roles, but all the other roles are played by… Rain [Tanner] who was playing Snow White this time? She was she was in it last time, but she was a different role,” Tanner said. “But other than that, they’re all new actors. It’s been fascinating. It’s been really nice to have this mix of new and old. Because you know, what’s been nice is that the actors who were in it last time haven’t been territorial about how we did it last time. They’ve just been like, oh, yeah, this is cool. Let’s mess with this and this and, and yet, they’re also able to say, but remember last time we did this and it was a good idea. And so it’s been actually a really great experience.”
Tanner also spoke about why he thinks the story of Snow White remains so relevant to people.
“So Snow White was the first of this trilogy that I wrote,” Tanner said. “After I wrote Snow White I wrote a Sleeping Beauty, which is called ‘Sleeping Beauty’s Dream.’ So it delves into her dream, so she’s not just this passive character asleep. She’s the main driving character. And then I did a Cinderella as well. So it’s a trilogy and they’re all connected through the ideas of the Fates and Furies, the Three Fates and the Three Furies. So again, it goes back to the thing with Shakespeare’s leading women and his romances. Perdita, Imogen, Marina and Miranda, those four characters they’re, I call them lost daughters. And here’s the thing that happens. When we hear about these characters, and you read about, you look at academic work on them, we get stuck in what I think is a very myopic way of viewing these characters, which is essentially this is what you hear all the time, that their stories are about sexual awakening.
“And it’s not that I have any problem with seeing that in any of these stories, right. I have no problem with that. I think that’s interesting. I do have a problem with that we consistently reduce them to that because what I think is really going on in these plays is just like a story with a male lead that goes on an adventure. But these are stories for all of us. They’re not stories for women’s sexual awakenings. You know, they’re stories for all of us about this thing where we have to leave the comfort. We have to leave the structure. We have to leave safety in order to really face dread and to face down what life is really about and to begin to become ourselves. And I think that’s what these stories are really about.
Tanner added: “I wrote all three of them for my daughter so they’re these stories that are about, like in ‘Sleeping Beauty’s Dream,’ there’s this poem spoken of the end, it’s about the girl coming home. And the last lines are: “that same girl is never coming back.” So that’s kind of what they are and why I think they’re relevant and I think they will continue to be. I think we’ll get away from Disney. You know, like, for the past century we’ve, it’s been Disney who has been the main interpreter of these stories. In the century to come, it’ll be some other version of these stories.”
Sting and Honey has done all three shows twice, except “Cinderella,” which has been produced once.
We also spoke to two cast members; Manzanares, who is reprising her role, explained how her perception of the show has changed since she first played Fand five years ago.
“Five years ago I played Fand,” she said. “I had a 2-year-old at the time. Here we are half a decade later, and I now have a 7 and 2-year-old. Life is completely different than it was, in many ways. The more time passes, the more life experience accumulates, and you carry your history with you each time you step onto the stage. Depending on your season of life, different lines hit you in different ways. I’ve found some moments still live in my body, but others are new, never to be recreated from the previous version. I hear things differently, I respond differently, I have the same amount of fun with this deliciously wicked role, but there’s even more of an ease. I know Fand well. She’s been a part of me this whole time. I’ve cherished her, and the role Javen has written which is an absolute powerhouse of a female role. It allows the actor playing Fand to reach into a bag of all kinds of tricks, and truly show off the unexpected.”
She also spoke about who the show is suitable for; those who are 5 and older.
“I’m bringing my 7-year-old, but I would say young audience here may mean a little over than when you think of ‘children’s theater,'” she said. “It is an attention holding 80 minutes to be sure, but it could be a little spooky for a child too young, or sensitive. You know your kids best, if they can sit quietly for the duration, introduce them to Snow White! If you love fairy tales, love the tale of Snow White, enjoy performance, laughing, feeling, thinking, want to support local, and have an unforgettable summer experience, this is for you.”
Hosseini, who is reprising his role as King Hyperion, Snow White’s father, spoke about how his perception of the show has changed.
“Heraclitus said, ‘no man ever steps in the same river twice, for it’s not the same river and he’s not the same man,'” he said. “I imagine this would hold true for most anyone after any given five years, but after the past five that we’ve all had… how could it not? Everything has the capacity to hit you differently than it once did for a myriad of your own personal reasons. Now add in all the new people — and not just the brand new ones to the show, but the 2023 versions of those of us who came back to reprise our roles too. It’s comfortable and familiar, but with a lot of new surprises — much like I imagine the play itself will feel to our audiences.”
Tanner also talked about what’s coming up for the company.
“This is the 400th anniversary of Shakespeare’s First Folio. And so, I’ve been thinking that we would do a play I wrote called ‘Kempe’ which is about Shakespeare’s famous clown Will Kempe, who played all of his rustic clowns from the first half of his career. So it’s a play I wrote about that guy. And you know, it’s funny and it’s tragic and I, my thought is that we would do that this year this fall. To celebrate the 400th anniversary. A few years back when it was the 400th anniversary of Shakespeare’s death, we did my play ‘The King’s Men,’ which is another play about Shakespeare’s company. But the tricky thing is, I’m waiting for Utah Shakespeare Festival to get back to me on whether they’re going to use ‘Kempe’ this summer. It’s for their Words Cubed program where they take a play and they workshop it and they invite an audience to the reading. So waiting to hear from them on that. And then I’ll make a solid decision about what we’re doing in the fall.”
Sting and Honey will also be presenting a filmed version of their Christmas show “This Bird of Dawning.”
“I got funding through generous donation,” Tanner said. “I’ve always wanted to put ‘Bird of Dawning’ on film, and you know, so more eyes can see it. And I got funding for that. And in January of this year, we shot it and it’s been in post production for the last few months and we should have it all finished by end of July. And then this so it’ll be in the Megaplex theatres locally, between Thanksgiving and Christmas, so I think what I’m going to do is not do the live one this year so that we can put all our focus on like, hey, come and see the film version. And then I’ll probably bring the live version back next year.”
Tickets for “Snow White” are available here.
