P R O C E S S

Masquerade premiered as the culmination of Spann’s Artist in Residency at Richardson Auditorium on April 6, 2019. Produced through the Princeton University Players in collaboration with the Lewis Center for the Arts, the musical served as Spann’s Junior Project in the Music Department at Princeton. Additional support was provided by the Program in Gender and Sexuality Studies and the Undergraduate Student Project Board.

Through the project, Spann endeavored to bring together artists working in all genres and disciplines across campus to find new ways of addressing questions of authenticity and vulnerability. A turning point in her artistic journey, Spann cherished this process for its connectivity, messiness, and boundless potential.

P L O T

In a time that is both the Victorian Era but also now, and a place that is both vaguely Europe but also here, Masquerade throws us into the world of a Baroness and her three daughters, mourning (to varying degrees) the recent loss of the Baron. Their New Year’s Eve masquerade ball will be the prime opportunity to secure suitable matches to accommodate their newly unprotected status as fatherless and husbandless women. Throughout their preparation for the evening, we meet the guests of the ball and learn their varied hidden motivations for attending. Each guest arrives wearing more than one mask, and each quickly learns what the cost is—and, in some cases, how difficult it can be to take them off.

R E S E A R C H

Spann presented her work at TEDx Princeton in the Fall of 2018.

Anthropological and psychological research surrounding masking served as the foundation of the work. Masquerade uses masks as a rhetoric device to explore how humanity has used physical and figurative masks as coping mechanisms throughout history. The plot serves as the mask, representing the thriving, idealistic exterior. Every other element points to what props it up. From the double-masking of the characters to the waltz music, rich with modern dissonance, Masquerade strives to evoke the Freudian “unheimlich:” making the familiar unfamiliar. As the characters act as who they think they know themselves to be, the audience moves through what they think they know to be a conventional musical. Unease greets both sets as it becomes apparent that accepting a different reality from the one that is expected is not always a night at the ball.