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Unveiling the Inner Artist: InterArts Cabinet of Curiosity

Faith Monahan

From just outside of Boston, Faith Monahan began participating in performing arts at the Boston Stage Company in her hometown of Stoneham, MA. Prior to entering Trinity College this fall, she was a recipient of the Hallowell Award for highest contribution in theatre during her senior year of high school. Her medium of choice is acting, but she also has experience in stage management and technical theatre with a special curiosity for stage lighting. In her work, she searches for contrasts and parallels, whether they be found in colors, emotions, words, or staging. Currently, she hopes to explore the mediums of poetry, creative nonfiction, and playwriting.

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Squirrel in the Concrete Jungle: A Gift to Mihika
By Faith Monahan
Mihika told me that she always looks at the squirrels on campus to check if thee have 3 strips going down their backs. Although she has yet to find one, the impulse still remains. Although the squirrels in Hartford, Connecticut do not have this marker, the Indian Palm Squirrel does. Mihika told me the story behind this; a deity caressed the squirrels back and painted three white strips with his fingers. For her gift, I decided to paint in one of these squirrels in a tree on campus.

Thanks to Spring, the tree outside of Jackson and Wheaton halls has begun to gain more attention. It has large, blooming white flowers, and it appears to maintain grandeur over the surrounding buildings even when it is actually the same height. In late March, the tree struggled to bloom because squirrels climbing up it would shake off the bulbs, but the tree has now found its stride. I was entranced by the shape of its branches as well as its petals. The way each type of tree bends appears different, but I admire the resemblance it holds to the joints, bones, and curves of a human body. Trees have their own anatomies that do not always appear obvious to me when I attempt to draw them or paint them. I had to stop and look at each part while painting this tree and ask myself, “How thick is it here? How smooth is it here? How twisted is it hear?”

Below the tree is an abstract appreciation of the Concrete Jungle, or the freshman dorms on the South side of Trinity College’s campus. I do not have the skill to paint a realistic version of this landscape, but I represented it in a style I’ve used before when painting buildings I am fond of, such as the main street of my hometown. The tree and the concrete jungle contrast sharply in color and shapes, as I painted the tree in shades of gray across a blue sky and the concrete jungle as an artificial orange with blue windows. For Mihika’s gift, I wanted to incorporate something from home, such as the Indian Palm Squirrel, with the contrasts found on campus.
Hearts of Stone
By Faith Monahan
In middle school, I bought a small, smokey rose quartz at the Burlington Mall in Massachusetts. It’s just a simple commercial item, and there are thousands of them, but this one has stayed with me throughout the last 6 or 7 years. From middle school until freshman year of college does not sound like such a large span of time, but it’s been almost a third of my life. Looking back on the arc of this incredibly transformative chapter, I am curious which symbols will shortly conclude their stories in my life and which symbols will I continue to find and attach meaning to as they arise.

In senior of high school, my friend Moni gave me a rose quartz necklace for Secret Santa that I wear often. At Trinity, I have a friend who happens to keep a small rose quartz stone on her desk as well. Pink continues to be one of my favorite colors. I guess that means this symbol will continue to still go on with me. Noticing these symbols feels like I’m finding satisfying life parallels. I also just find rose quartz to be very pretty, and it’s something that feels very poetic to me: the color is a soft and blushing pink, but the surface is hard and textured. Although pretty, her weight is not airy or light but solid like a rock. It’s semiprecious: she is not a precious diamond, but she’s more down to earth than that. Rose quartz have often been used to symbolize love, and some even claim that the stone can bring love about. I don’t really believe in the supernaturality of rose quartz but considering the prompt of a “found” object, I wonder if it helps people “find” the love in their life. It may not actually bring it about – or maybe it does, who am I to say – but it may help some people pay more attention and give more thoughtfulness to love. I struggled to find historic and researched information about this object, but I did find lots of small statues and dishware carved out of rose quartz often originating in China. Here are two examples from the Metropolitan Art Museum and Harvard Art Museum.

During class on the 26th of March, my response to a prompt asking what I would like to do before I died or something I would like to do on stage was, “to be in love.” Sometimes I wonder if I will feel love: is it rare? Some people go their whole lives without falling into romantic love, and I wonder if I would be okay without that. As a young woman, marriage and being love obsessed gets pointed out again and again through studying roles of women in history or discussing gender when reading about past literary periods. In my economics 101 class, I can feel a very masculine dominance/presence that sometimes makes me feel out of place. As my self-esteem as improved over the years, so has my comfortability with being a young woman in male dominated spaces. During my junior year of high school, I played Ophelia in Hamlet, and I recently revisited this character in a class at Trinity on Shakespeare. I thought about the ways I relate to her more and less now that 2 years have passed. This may sound like I take myself too seriously, but my favorite characters often become semi-people to me: they are part me, part something else, and they haunt me like friendly ghosts. My characters and I have had very unfortunate romantic relationships. They poignantly remind me that, “Life mimics art.” Although I have played characters in relationships, I am not sure if I have ever played a character who falls in love.

Bibliography

Flower holder with pomegranate. 18th century. The MET Museum, www.metmuseum.org/art/collection/search/44113. Accessed 26 Mar. 2021.

Rose Quartz Stand for Small Jade Circular Covered Box. 1644-1911. Harvard Art Museums, harvardartmuseums.org/collections/object/205589?position=198. Accessed 26 Mar. 2021.
Edward Albee, Monologues, and Practice
By Faith Monahan
Edward Albee was an American playwright known for Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? (1962) and Three Tall Women (1994). He attended Trinity College in Hartford, CT, but he was expelled for skipping classes and refusing to attend compulsory chapel (Boehm). In this interview, a panel of four students in high school and college sit down with Edward Albee to discuss theatre in 1965. They also take questions from an audience comprised of students as well. The episode focuses on the question, “Is American Theatre really in a vacuum?” Edward Albee expresses his thoughts on educating oneself in theatrical arts:
There are two phases for really knowing about the theatre. One is what you do at home primarily is to educate yourself as much as you can to what’s been going on in the theatre from Sophocles on up to the present, reading plays, and then the most exciting theatre to see fortunately is the least expensive, the work that is being done off Broadway and in the café theatres, the work of very young playwrights.
Reading this transcript brought to mind conversations I have heard about theatre in the present. It surprised me how the thoughts expressed almost 60 years ago align with much of my own today. In one of our readings for the InterArts program, an author made the comparison that theatre is to film as prose is to poetry. Because of the limitations of theatre, the medium may never capture naturalism as a film can. In that limitation, however, theatre can take on new meanings.
In the past year, I have read and watched a great deal of theatre due to the confines of the pandemic. I have to thank a teacher I had during quarantine last year, Mr. Grimm, who provided me with many plays to read and performances to watch. I still carry some contemporary favorites with me such as Indecent and It’s True, It’s True, It’s True. This term, I am taking Shakespeare as a Philosophy taught by Professor Dan Lloyd, and I reconnected with the tragedy King Lear.
As I read more plays during the pandemic, I also started writing poetry. Performing monologues on a zoom camera gets old quickly. I have wanted to try playwriting, but I find it to be intimidating. This project challenged me to put words not just on paper, but then to take them off of the paper once again. In attempts to write spoken lines in the past, I found myself getting caught up in how people should speak. I always felt like writing provided me the space to put down what I cannot say. I see it as an opportunity to take real, isolated moments and feelings, but to mangle them together into a hypothetical web that can connect them. I would ask myself in previous attempts to write a monologue what do people say? In this project, I tried to transform that question into what do I want to say? In this attempt at monologue-writing for the transformation prompt, I am hoping to add a third phase to my education of theatre on top of the two that Edward Albee advises: practice.

Bibliography
Interview, 1966, Box: 2, Folder: 1.The Dorothy Gordon Youth Forum, Edward Albee Collection. Watkinson Library Manuscripts. http://localhost:8081/repositories/3/archival_objects/3113. Accessed April 24, 2021.

Boehm, Mike. "Edward Albee, three-time Pulitzer-winning playwright and 'Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?' author, dies at 88." Los Angeles Times, 17 Sept.  2016, www.latimes.com/local/obituaries/la-me-edward-albee-obit-20160916-snap-story.html. Accessed 23 Apr. 2021.
A Poem for the Earth
By Faith Monahan
A Poem for the Earth
Her axis, strong. Her tilt, a few degrees.
Life evolves by her patient solar turns,
Her species have no afterlives, no reprise.

Mountains, deserts, birds singing in our trees,
Seas blue green, coral bones, our moon churns,
Her axis strong. Her tilt a few degrees.

The migrating monarchs moving by breeze,
Thermophile microbes who know no burns,
Her species have no afterlives, no reprise.

Barren Mars of War, Beautiful Venus,
No seasons reflect in their oaks and ferns,
Her axis strong. Her tilt a few degrees.

We lick her ice caps until they unfreeze,
Ignore the stop signs that read “no returns,”
Her species have no afterlives, no reprise.

We have CRISPR, DNA, and disease,
In her body, we bury ash and urns,
Her axis strong. Fevers by two degrees,
Her species have no afterlives, no reprise.
Reflection
In pictures of the earth’s landscape, so much diversity can be found. Every corner of the earth appears different. The Moon, Mars, and Venus look the same all over, but earth has a beautiful amount of life.

The alphabetic code of AGCT can spell more words than we can name, and evolution brought us to the environment we know. Whether in the Marianas trench or the Sahara, life exists. When a species adapts to a place, the environment shapes itself in return, and this cannot be plagiarized. Life may come again, but due the number of combinations of DNA, life can never evolve in the same exact way twice. The DNA variations of life are unique and invaluable. A species may evolve to be similar but never identical, like snowflakes. Coevolution, convergent evolution, and parallel evolution all appear as magic to me. The amount of beauty in the uniqueness, specificity, and diversity due to evolution is insurmountable. Climate change threatens our societies, but it also threatens the diversity of nature. Life may survive it through resilience, but the numerous expressions of DNA found in endangered species will not.

I have taken biology since middle school, but the beauty of life and evolution only struck me recently thanks to my habit of binge-watching Netflix documentaries. In the past 20 years, scientists have developed the ground-breaking technology of CRISPR:  clustered regularly interspaced short palindromic repeats. With this advancement, the whole meaning of life opens up. Its strands unravel, quite literally. CRISPR allows DNA to be inserted into a cell, changing its pattern, and the field of genetic engineering will change exponentially in our lifetime. CRISPR may cure many diseases and change lives, but these changes could have irreversible effects on ecology and ethics for better and for worse.

This poem follows the structure of a villanelle which consists of five tercets followed by one quatrain. The structure follows an ABA rhyme scheme for each stanza, so the same two rhymes occur throughout the entire poem (“degrees” and “turns”). The first and third lines of the first stanza are the refrains, so they repeat throughout the poem in a specific pattern (“Her axis, strong. Her tilt, a few degrees,” and, “Her species have no afterlives, no reprise”). The earth turning around the sun and the simultaneous resilience, evolution, and temporality of life and species parallel the repetition of these lines. I have attempted this structure before, but I have never gotten far with it until now. Traditionally, villanelles contained pastoral themes such as rustic landscapes. As this poem contains images of the earth’s landscape and nature, the themes build off this structure’s history.

Netflix documentary recommendations: Unnatural Selection, Human Nature, and My Octopus Teacher.