FAILURE:
A Love Story

A note from the Director

I first encountered this script my junior year of high school in my Advanced Acting class, and I immediately fell in love with it. The playwright, Philip Dawkins, wrote in the casting notes that you could really do whatever you wanted with this show. The cast could be as small as 5 or as large as 50. (We decided 6 cast members would fit us just fine.) The Fail Sisters could be played by one actress or 3 or 7,  if you would like. My personal favorite of his suggestions was,  “You want a trio of hear-no/see-no/speak-no evil monkeys narrating the story? Rock on.” This didn’t make it into our production, but I’d love to see one where it did. All that being said, I didn’t ever really think that I would get to direct this show.

I was in a rehearsal for another production in the Fall when it hit me that after I graduated, I really had no shows lined up for my Summer break. I started thinking of what I would like to do and who I would like to do it with. I re-read this play and decided it was perfect because I had finally met the people who could complete the puzzle.

This show takes place in what I like to call an “urban fantasy”. The city is the same as regular Chicago in the 1920’s, other than the talking animals and increasingly bizarre predicaments. It’s too strange a story to just call it historical fiction, though it has elements of that. It reminds me a lot of a book I read as a child: A Series of Unfortunate Events. They share similarities like precognitive narration, a family with exceptional children with varying skills, a great mix of comedy and tragedy, and a giant snake. 

Other influences to the story for me were the films of Wes Anderson; specifically The Royal Tenenbaums, which follows an equally quirky and exceptional family, and Anderson’s collection of short films based on Roald Dahl’s novel, The Wonderful Story of Henry Sugar and Six More’. 

If you imagine a 1920’s clock shop, the mind usually pictures rustic colors like brown, bronze, and silver. I, however, wanted as much color in our story as we could get. You'll notice every actor in the show has a color to correspond to their character. We wanted to try to replicate a technicolor world like you would see in The Wizard of Oz.

When I picked this show in the Fall, I had no idea that the next 4 years of my life would take me to Chicago, the very city this entire play centers around. It’s an incredibly full circle moment for me.  This production wouldn’t be what it is without my wonderful cast and crew. I’d like to thank them immensely for trusting me as a young, first-time director. What makes theatre amazing is the amount of collaboration it takes to create it, and I couldn’t have asked for better collaborators.

Thank you for taking time to read this and I hope you enjoy Failure: A Love Story!

Finn Anthony Matzek