As a serial overthinker, developing and understanding a character at the root has always been difficult to me. So, I wanted to challenge myself to try a new approach when asked to visualize the world of the play, specifically Catharine’s experience, as part of the process for Suddenly Last Summer.

When I work creatively, I love to set the scene with some music. My playlist ended up a mix of dissonant scores from movies such as Poor Things and The Wonder, as well as songs in the southern gothic genre, such as “Go Dig My Grave” and “Down in the Willow Garden.” While listening to this playlist, I scoured my personal stock of photography and online catalogues of paintings in museums. Then, I started Frankensteining images together, until I had something so macabre and disturbing that I felt a little untethered myself. I’ve entitled this collage, Postcards from a “Mad Girl”:

“A sweet, sweet place” The original painting Strandgade, Sunshine by Vilhelm Hammershøi, emulates a sense of surveillance and loneliness. The painting represents the atmosphere of the sanitarium Catharine stays in, and the sketches added on top are a manifestation of how she feels being confined there.

“Forget Everything You See” illustrates how Catharine is being told over and over to forget the terrible things that have happened to her for the benefit of those who hold power over her.

“She” explores how it feels to derealize and see yourself as an entity and not an individual. I achieved this by sketching over a picture of myself and remaking the word “she” hundreds of times until it became its own image.

“Do you want to bore a hole in my skull…” I replaced the whites of my eyes with photos of beaches, to symbolize the memories of Cabeza De Lobo that live engrained in her head. An ice pic pierces the eyes, because when all else fails in the 1930s…a lobotomy might be the answer, which is what Catharine fears is next for her.

“I was procuring for him” perhaps the most upsetting of the work generated by my artistic trance. I won’t go into this image too much as it gives much of the story away, but perhaps when you come to see Suddenly Last Summer, you’ll understand why this one unsettled me the most.

After hours of this bizarre arts and crafts session, I was reminded of the line “Is there no way out of the mind?” from a Sylvia Plath poem called “Apprehensions,”which captured her experiences with depression.

The mind is a very elaborate maze, and unsupported it can trap you inside its darkness. Catharine has become a bird stuck in the cage of her trauma with no way out. The portraits I assembled in this exercise brought me closer to a character than I had experienced before, and though it left me shocked at moments, it helped me engage with Catharine and burn to tell her truth.

"IS THERE NO WAY OUT OF THE MIND?" - BY KIERSTAN KATHLEEN CONWAY

STAY UP TO DATE