Emilia

“I will never be at peace as long as I have no voice. I will not stop. I will not rest until I find words for all my daughters I will never know”

Emilia is a play that gives voice to an untold story. It explores Shakespeare’s “Dark Lady” and who she might have been. Along this journey, we meet three versions of Emilia, in which one is young, one is grown, and one is old. All three versions deal with challenges relating to race, gender, and class at every point in her life. While this play ultimately focuses on Emilia’s life and struggles, it is also a play that widens the lens and shows us the universally stifling and oppressive nature of being a women in a patriarchal society.

While this play starts as a more typical period piece, we expand and cross the line into something more contemporary, which is the stylistic foundation of the sound design. Sound will straddle a line between past and present as I want to introduce people to the 1600s but take them quickly away into the context of 2025 by transitioning to electronic pop focused sounds. Later on in the play we learn that Emilia was “from a musical family. Italian. Jewish probably but you hid it. And likely of North African descent.” Her roots are a big piece of contention in the play and keep her from finding a sense of belonging and acceptance in London, despite her being born within the city. I want to use sound to give Emilia that home she has been searching for. By using sounds that are a synthesis of Moroccan and European music, I aim to give Emilia a voice that she spends the play fighting so hard for.