Avanti: A Postindustrial Ghost Story
by Jessica Chalmers
Performance dates: September 24, 25,26,26,27,30 October 1,2,3
All shows begin at 7:30 p.m. except matinee performance on September 26, which begins at 2:30 p.m.
Avanti: A Postindustrial Ghost Story is large-scale multimedia
production that depicts the 1963 closing of the independent automobile
maker, Studebaker, as an event foreshadowing later plant closings in communities
across America. Named after the stylishly futuristic car that was the
company's last-ditch effort at financial solvency, Avanti is a
story about the remains of industry – stylistic, architectural,
personal, economic – haunting the landscape and psyche of this country.
Moving between the more prosperous past and the current situation, the
play is a fact-based fiction that leaves its audience with a question:
how can we remember the past while also letting it go and moving on?
In the play, a demolition team discovers a ghost in a residual pit of
toxic fluids in one of the abandoned factories. It turns out to be the
ghost of Studebaker, a being who has been fitfully dreaming of the plant
closing for more than forty years. When one member of the team is mysteriously
transported back to the last days of Studebaker, he understands the legacy
that his job has required him to destroy. He witnesses executives –
including the famed industrial designer Raymond Loewy – hatching
a plot to save the company by marketing its new luxury model, the Avanti.
As the company's financial problems deepen, it becomes clear that the
end of an era has come. At the same time, Loewy becomes more and more
aware that he is living in a dream of the past, and that he has actually
been dead for many years. The final blast that brings down the factory
and frees its resident ghosts is ultimately also a beginning. One ghost
is not freed, however: a so-called “pension loser,” a man
whose image haunts the production from its start. This man is typical
of those whose long years of labor went unrewarded, or relatively unappreciated,
at the Studebaker closing. This ghost's obstinate presence after the blast
represents persistent unresolved contradictions between corporate and
employee survival. Studebaker, a company whose reputation partly rested
on its familial “father-son” ethics, was nevertheless unable,
if not unwilling to provide for its family of workers at the time of its
demise.
Avanti's material is partly drawn from interviews with former
Studebaker workers. Using a large screen as backdrop, the performance
will also integrate archival photographs of the assembly line, corporate
functions, and Studebaker film and television advertising. The screen
will not only be used as a backdrop, however, but it will also play a
role in the drama itself. Screens make perfect vehicles for ghostly
appearances. A combination of scrims and 3D imaging is ideal for
showing Studebaker in a state of lingering half-presence—the image
of, for example, the ghostlike forms of workers, arriving for what they
don't realize is the last day on the job on a cold day in December 1963,
just before Christmas, or the shadowy images of a series of Studebaker
wagons and cars, perhaps culminating with a real '63 Avanti slowly rolling
onto the stage. Avanti will premiere in South Bend on September
23, 2004, with a subsequent tour to Chicago and New York, among other
cities.
Co-Produced by :
The University of Notre Dame's Department of Film, Television, and Theatre and
The Builders Association (New York City)
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