When Lois first introduced me to the project, the goal was not to create a feature film. There had been several video recordings of her play from 2015, and I was brought on as an editor to see if I could cut and crop the single wide shot from the back of the room into something that was, as she put it, “watchable”- not just for herself, but for an audience. After a few months of meeting with Lois and working with the footage, it became clear that there was a singular fundamental problem that we couldn’t get around. In a play, the audience is expected to imagine with the actors- everyone’s “in the same room,” both literally and figuratively. In film, the audience needs to see the world through the eyes of the protagonist; or, at the very least, how we see a story on film is important, and needs to be considered. I felt that if the protagonist, as we see in the play, disappeared into another world, we, the audience, would need to travel with her. Otherwise, there would always be a disconnect- we would always be watching the trials and tribulations from afar. The same story would become exploitative or voyeuristic, and we’d never achieve the level of understanding that we wanted.

Lois and I began to talk about adding supplementary footage- shots and scenes to represent what our titular character was experiencing. That became maybe shooting a couple scenes, which led to maybe making some kind of free-form art thing.

We were both pretty opposed to having a script for a long time. At this point, I was very familiar with the play and had an attitude of, “I have a camera, let’s just make something.” It was very organic. Though, when we started getting other people involved, the first question was “when can I read the script?”

So I would write scenes, send them to Lois and we would talk about it. The biggest change from the start was removing the narrator; then we changed some songs and added a few characters (namely, The Goddess). The whole thing was written in a very unconventional way. I never really considered the usual structural elements of a film. Instead, I just followed what made sense to me emotionally- moving from one scene to the next- stopping along the way to make sure the route I was taking felt “true” to Lois. It needed to be exactly the same and at the same time entirely different from the play.

Artistically, I was always very interested in the idea of only having a handful of actors play many different roles in the film. In my opinion, this was a very successful choice that carried over from the play. The everpresence of The Father character throughout the life of Babs made the trauma feel inescapable- the same face with a different name.

This sentiment continued with the set itself, the door, the box and the chandeliers; consistent grammatical elements that make up the language of the film. These elements were never meant to be analogous, but instead symbolic- the distinction being that they are not intellectual, but evocative, ethereal and meant to be interpreted. Symbolism will always invite an audience to participate in a way not too dissimilar from a stage play. I feel that this participation is what contributes to the relatability of the film. The audience is not simply presented with a grab bag of analogous elements that they have to solve for in order to understand what’s going on. Rather, they are shaping their own narrative- finding themselves in a film about nobody else.