DARK ROOM | by Edith Podesta

Searching for Acceptance (18 Apr 2016)

Edith Podesta shares her motivations behind creating her verbatim theatre piece Dark Room. Her objectives for the work are to break the cycles of shame and judgement that often accompany incarceration, and to help convicts – past, present and future – and their loved ones find acceptance in society and in themselves.

Searching for Experiences (18 Apr 2016)

Edith Podesta talks about the research interviews with individuals with prison experience in crafting Dark Room. She shares how she sought out her interviewees, how she put their experiences together in the play, and how she tried to retain the veracity of the accounts onstage.

Searching for Subtext (18 Apr 2016)

Edith Podesta relates her experience converting the audio recordings of her interviews into text. For her, transcription was ad verbatim, so she included fillers, pauses, slangs and swear words. While she found the process to be painstaking and frustrating, it was ultimately rewarding to be able to communicate the essence of the characters to the actors. She also touches on the subtext of performance, which emerged in preparing for the full staging of Dark Room in 2016 when the actors could perform without the script.

Searching for More Stories (18 Apr 2016)

In this second iteration of Dark Room, Edith Podesta added three new characters to the play – a pair of parents and a female inmate. She discusses the additional interviews she had to conduct to gather these new stories, and how they added to the emotional depth and range of the prison experiences in Dark Room.

A Straits Times Life article on the Esplanade Presents: The Studios, on its theme and the artists involved. Read it here.