Estancia's Drama Department Kick Starts their Season with the Greek Tragedy, Big Love!

Estancia High School’s award winning drama department kicks off their season with Big Love, by Charles Mee. The play is a fiercely extravagant adaptation of the oldest existing Greek tragedy, The Suppliants, by Aeschylus. Mee believes “there is no such thing as an original play” and gives permission to further adapt his writing as inspiration leads. Director, Pauline Maranian, took full advantage of this and brought in Estancia alumnae Nicolas Juarez to make some changes. Juarez added characters, created back stories for key characters, and made it more age appropriate. The story remains the same, in which 50 sisters are being forced to marry their 50 cousins. Together these women must decide how to respond when their bodies and futures are promised to men against their will.This dark comedy dives head first into timeless thought provoking topics, such as love, friendship, revenge, power, war, battle of the sexes, blood and family bonds – it’s all there. The themes in Big Love resonate with challenges young people face today and pose important questions regarding the meaning of marriage and the importance of love. Big Love asks big questions: What does it mean, in this day and age, to be a woman? To be a man? To be a soldier, a protector? What does it mean to be married? Mee himself has said, “I like plays that are not too neat, too finished, too presentable. My plays are broken, jagged, filled with sharp edges, filled with things that take sudden turns, careen into each other, smash up, veer off in sickening turns. That feels good to me. It feels like my life. It feels like the world. In this way, Big Love presents some of the most familiar male and female stereotypes and literally smashes them up against each other to see what will happen.” Big Love will run for two weekends, November 15-16 and 22-23. Curtain is at 7:30 pm. Tickets are $8 for students and $10 for adults and will be made available at the ASB office at Estancia H.S. from 8:00 am to 3:00 pm.