through lily’s eyes: where you will be?

Production Notes

Through Lily’s Eyes: Where Will You Be is structured within the Ceremonial Theater framework and requires a performance environment capable of fluid transitions between domestic, natural, and mythic spaces. Scenic demands are minimal and rely primarily on lighting, sound, and performer movement to establish shifts in location and atmosphere. Azeban and the Spirit of the Eagle may be realized through live performers, masks, puppetry, or digital media, depending on available resources and the desired production scale. Simon is a mute character whose communication is entirely non‑verbal; the role requires an actor with strong physical expressiveness and the ability to convey emotional and narrative clarity without spoken dialogue. The script supports flexible casting configurations, including doubling, and is suitable for ensemble‑based work. The estimated run time is 45–60 minutes and is typically presented without an intermission.

Director’s Notes

Through Lily’s Eyes: Where Will You Be operates in a world where the physical and spirit realms are not separate but layered. These layers are always present; the difference lies in who can perceive them. Lily has grown up with access to this awareness. Her mother, Helen, carries only fragments of cultural knowledge — not because of uncertainty, but because so much was disrupted and erased through colonization. What she does know, she has passed on sincerely, and Lily’s ability to interact with these realities comes from that grounding.

Simon’s relationship is different. He was not raised with the same cultural access. Angel, Simon’s mother, carries her own trauma and disconnection, and the absence of cultural practice is a reflection of loss rather than rejection. Simon is mute, but not without voice; it’s just that his vision has been obscured because he has not been given the tools to recognize the world around him. His perception shifts after the smudging ceremony — not as a magical awakening, but as a reconnection to something that was always his.

Azeban and the Spirit of the Eagle should be approached as real beings within the world of the play. They are trickster and guardian archetypes and relations. Some audience members will understand their significance immediately; others may experience them without context. For the actors, these beings are not symbolic or metaphorical. They have agency, intention, and presence. Their interactions with Lily and Simon should be grounded in the logic of beings who exist alongside humans, not outside them.

The relationships between Helen and Angel form the intergenerational backbone of the story. Their friendship once held shared possibility, but their paths diverged as each navigated her own relationship to identity, survival, and cultural inheritance. Angel’s final choice — entrusting Simon to Helen — is rooted in her understanding of what she could not provide and what she hopes Simon can reclaim.

For the creative team, the guiding principle is this: the play does not shift between worlds. It reveals what is already there. The work is to honor the layered reality, the cultural grounding, and the emotional truth of two teenagers navigating identity, danger, and connection in a world that is larger and more alive than most people allow themselves to perceive.

Dramaturgical Note

Through Lily’s Eyes: Where Will You Be is grounded in a layered reality where the physical and spirit realms coexist. These realms are not symbolic; they are simultaneous and always present. The difference lies in who has the grounding or inheritance to perceive them.

Lily moves through this layered world with fluency because she was raised with cultural touchpoints passed down from her grandmother through Helen, her mother. As a character, Lily is grounded, intuitive, and emotionally present. She is confident without being hardened, perceptive without being cynical. Her ability to see Azeban and the Spirit of the Eagle is not a gift or a power — it is a natural extension of how she understands the world. She listens deeply, trusts her instincts, and moves through the play with a clarity and confidence that Simon is only beginning to discover. Lily’s perception reflects both this inheritance and Helen’s ongoing effort to reconnect.

Helen’s knowledge is partial not by choice, but because the community itself has lost access to much of its tradition — elders have passed, histories have been interrupted, and ceremonies have been obscured over generations. What Helen carries, she carries sincerely, and she continues to seek authentic knowledge where she can. Using what she knows, Helen becomes an Indigenously rooted guide who shares her knowledge freely, offering cultural grounding to both Lily and Simon.

Simon is mute and communicates through ASL, which becomes a limitation only because the world around him communicates differently than he does. His challenge is environmental, not internal. Simon is not disabled; he is enabled differently, expressing himself through presence, gesture, and embodied awareness rather than spoken language. He is perceptive, emotionally attuned, and deeply sensitive to the world around him — but he was not raised with cultural grounding.

Angel, his mother, carries a history shaped by trauma, survival, and addiction. These experiences led her toward apathy and disinterest in cultural practice, leaving little room for tradition or continuity. Angel loves Simon — fiercely, in her own way — but her personal choices and circumstances make her incapable of protecting him. This is why she becomes defensive with the police officers and why she speaks about Andrew’s abuse with a kind of obliviousness; she cannot fully grasp the danger Simon is in because she cannot fully face her own. Her disconnection is personal and circumstantial, distinct from the communal loss that shaped Helen’s experience. As a result, Simon grows up without the cultural access that might have helped him perceive the layered world around him. His awakening after the smudging ceremony is not a supernatural transformation but a reconnection to a part of himself that was always present but never nurtured.

Angel and Helen’s past friendship forms an important intergenerational thread. Their paths diverged as each navigated her own relationship to identity and inheritance — one shaped by partial knowledge and active seeking, the other by distance, survival, and the weight of addiction. Angel’s final choice to entrust Simon to Helen is both an act of surrender and her last, clearest expression of love: a recognition that Helen can offer Simon not only safety and stability, but a cultural identity she knows she cannot give him.

Azeban and the Spirit of the Eagle should be understood as real beings within the world of the play. They are trickster and guardian, archetype and relation — figures recognizable to those who know them, and compelling presences to those who do not. Their dramaturgical function is active rather than symbolic: they witness, intervene, disrupt, protect, and guide. They exist in the same world as the kitchen table, the bedroom door, and the stretch of Route 28.

At its core, the play explores identity carried, interrupted, and recovered; the ways perception is shaped by cultural grounding; and the quiet power of connection between two teenagers navigating danger, misunderstanding, and a world more layered and alive than most people are taught to perceive.