SNOW WHITE

LUCY: It’s very American to take a European story and reappropriate it until it looks nothing like the original. Many American children only see Disney’s versions of the famous Grimm fairytales. I remember when I first read the Grimm brothers Schneewittchen – I was 18 and it blew my mind. I was shocked how different it was from the Disney.  I began to read many Grimm fairytales and was particularly struck by the way the stories would suddenly change course, or contain elements completely unnecessary to the advancement of the plot. The fairytales have a coy unpredictability. At the same time they utilize stock characters and stock situations. For instance, if you have a stepmother, she’s going to try to kill you.

 

JOEY: Our Snow White is a collage. It’s kind of like a work by the postmodern American visual artist Robert Rauschenberg. It doesn’t look like a Rauschenberg, but it’s this total collage of original and pre-existing elements juxtaposed, overlaid, and displacing one another.  It asks the question, ‘who is Snow White?’ This video clip is the end, the final scene of our Snow White. 

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It doesn’t correspond to any particular part of any other version of Snow White, however you will recognize the beginning of the Grimm’s Snow White, which you can see here.

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Throughout the entire play, we included the beginning of every Grimm story we could find in which the mother died in the first paragraph. This final scene of our adaptation we’d like to show you contains elements of Donald Barthelme’s novel Snow White, the Grimm brothers’ Schneewittchen, Brecht’s Saint Joan of the Stockyards, Disney’s Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, and a chess game.