dedication
In 1970, at the Floridaland amusement park, a dolphin named Dolly courted and made love to a 20-year-old male photographer named Malcolm. The park shut down and was sold to be converted to a housing development, and Malcolm’s assignment ended and he left. Nine months later, Dolly stopped feeding, swam to the bottom of the pool, stopped breathing, and died. This play is for her.
In 1926 Gertrude Caroline Ederle became the first woman to swim across the English Channel with a time of 14 hours and 34 minutes. She beat the previous record holder by two hours. In the 12th hour of her swim, her family begged her to come out of the water. She looked up between strokes and said “what for?” This play is for her, too.
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playwrights note
A note on adaptation:
The first version of this play was a devised piece called “Here Lies the Water, Here Stands the Man.” It was a mashup of Shakespeare, Heiner Muller, ee cummings, Anthony Bourdain, lots of 60’s girls pop groups. It was, in my estimation, a beautiful mess.
The title of the original was pulled from a conversation between two gravediggers in Hamlet, spoken as they dug the grave that Ophelia was soon to be laid in. The discussion hinges on the nature of suicide- and goes like this:
GRAVEDIGGER: Give me leave. Here lies the water. Good. Here stands the man. Good. If the man go to this water and drown himself, it is, will he nill he, he goes. Mark you that. But if the water come to him and drown him, he drowns not himself. Argal, he that is not guilty of his own death shortens not his own life
Our original piece focused on the dichotomy between Hamlet's masculine (spoken, logical, active) madness, and Ophelia's feminine (passive, sensual, tragic) madness. Hamlet was our Man, Ophelia our water, and the two had to battle it out for significance. here comes the tide/ there goes the girl is less of a battle and more of a pure adaptation, a retelling of the story from a different perspective.
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It’s difficult to make a play that focuses entirely on Ophelia without falling into a couple of pitfalls. How do you give voice to a character whose function in the story it is to remain quiet? How do you get someone to talk to you, if the very structure of one of the greatest plots of all time hinges on her silence? What has she overheard and been a witness to that she never gets a chance to reveal? And how do you reveal it without making her a generic Feminist Heroine who suddenly has gained the ability to speak?
I hope this play begins to answer some of these questions. Or at least to reveal them as important questions that I hope all people staging the original version of this play begin to take more seriously.