Director & Scenic Design: Dr. Erin Kaplan
Stage Manager: Isabella Castanon
Lighting Design: Priscilla Rodriguez
Costume Design: Alex Martinez
Properties: Stephanie Conrad
Photos by: Charr Crail
The Doctors & Sarah Bernhardt (Ethan Saveland, Andrea Rodriguez, Sadie Odell, Jarod Wiggins)
The Prison Guards (Candace Miller, Janet Ha, AJ Miller, Ethan Saveland, Andrea Rodriguez, Jarod Wiggins)
But it’s a MUSICAL! (Jarod Wiggins, Janet Ha, AJ Miller, Kahlan Gentry, Sadie Odell, Candace Miller, Andrea Rodrigues, Ethan Saveland, The Dummy)
Janet Ha as Jane Avil
Kahlan Gentry as The Joker
The Therapist (Jarod Wiggins) & Kim (GG Sario-Perez)
The Hysterics (Andrea Rodriguez, Janet Ha, Sadie Odell)
(Back: Jarod Wiggins, Aj Miller, Candace Miller, Andrea Rodriguez; Front: Janet Ha, Ethan Saveland)
(The Dummy & Jarod Wiggins)
The Joker (Kahlan Gentry) reading from the DSM V
It’s the late 18th century in Paris, La Belle Epoque, and life is pretty great… unless of course, you’re a woman ensconced in the The Salpêtrière, the hospital housing all the hysteric women of France!
This original Joker Play, devised with students at Sacramento State, brings back some of the key figures from the Salpêtrière to revisit and revision history and asks the audience to question: how far have we really come in the last 200 years when it comes to women and mental health?
As The Joker guides the audience, characters, and actors on this historical journey we discover that maybe the answer is… not very far at all…
This original devised play, "Joker Play" is written, directed, and starring Sac State students under the guidance of Dr. Erin Kaplan.
Over the course of 15 weeks, the company has researched topics of interest, written a script, cast, rehearsed, and will perform their original work.
"Joker Plays," are an oft neglected style of theatre first developed by Brazilian political theatre theorist Augusto Boal in the 1970s. It is a style of play "meant to be a spectacular discussion, something of a trial, in which diverse ideas and feelings about a historical character or event are presented, scrutinized, and revised" (Schutzman: 2019, 7).
To view a READ ONLY script of the play, click here