"NOVELA"

I wrote “Novela” as a full-length play in graduate school and I decided to direct this play to introduce my own work to the Bellarmine community.

The set depicted a middle class family home while parts of the stage were also used as different locales such as a café, a hotel, a bar, and a restaurant.

The title refers to Mexican soap operas. With that in mind, I decided that the acting needed to be a combination of realism and melodrama. And to take advantage of the many students' bilingual abilities, the dialogue was trilingual: English, Spanish, and German. 

This play is a "play within a play," so the used of working lights vs. stage lighting, as well as mixing realistic acting when the actors where playing the company vs. melodramatic acting when they actors were rehearsing their company's play was an important element to work with and to differentiate.