Theater department prepares for final set of plays this weekend
The theater department’s festival of student-produced one act plays rolled on into its third weekend April 27-28.
The theater department will wrap up the festival this weekend, May 3-4, with its last set of three plays.
The Problem
The third week of the student-produced one-act plays kept audiences laughing with its comedic offerings starting with The Problem, a play about a couple in 60’s-era America written by A. R. Gurney.
Starring Adam Granberry and Nicole Neely as husband and wife, The Problem is set in the couple’s home as the two begin to unravel the elaborate schemes they have each concocted in order to make each other happy and sustain their marriage.
The show opens with Granberry’s character obsessively preparing for his classes, nose buried deep in his notebook while his wife enters the stage garbed in bright-gold silk pajamas over her extremely pregnant belly. Then the wife presents her husband with the problem, “what are we going to do about this baby that probably isn’t yours?”
As director Wendi Wainscott mentioned in the program, The Problem is rife with wordplay, from the show’s dialogue all the way down to the its name—a reference to the husband’s job as a professor of mathematics.
Interestingly, The Problem tends to alienate its audience thanks to the unbelievable characters and their ridiculous schemes, but as the story unravels the audience sees that those farfetched schemes don’t seem so ridiculous at all when done in the name of love.
You Can’t Trust the Male
Continuing on the night’s theme of couple-based comedy, You Can’t Trust the Male, directed by Tim Green, stars Emma Brown as Laura Spivey and
Tim Tetreaux as Harvey Kessel, her mailman. Unlike the previous show, these two are only a couple in potentiality as Harvey attempts desperately to guide the course of fate.
You Can’t Trust the Male takes place on a Friday night in 1991 Brooklyn, New York in a night classroom. Harvey is the first to enter the classroom and takes this opportunity to prepare for Laura’s arrival by erasing the chalk board and planting a newspaper on the instructor’s desk. It becomes quite clear from his actions that Harvey has a plan.
Laura enters but she does not yet recognize Harvey as her mailman so she treats him like a stranger. This of course plays into Harvey’s plan to impress her however, as it becomes more clear that he signed up for this Spanish class just because he knew Laura was in it, and he only knew that by reading her mail.
Brown and Tetreaux both did a great job in making their characters as realistic as possible. Between Laura’s brash New Yorker attitude and Harvey’s apparent anxiety around her, it’s almost forgivable that he dishonored his sacred mail carrier vows (and federal law) to get closer to Laura.
Initially, Laura is seen as a normal person practically victimized by Harvey, the “weirdo” stalker for all intents and purposes. However we eventually come to see that Laura may not be as normal as we thought, and though he went to some drastic measures just to get a date, Harvey is not so different from any other person blinded by infatuation.
The First Fireworks
The next play on the bill was The First Fireworks written by Alex Broun and directed by Heather Berryhill. Starring Shandi Bowsher as Dawn, an ailing mother, and Rian Dillard as her daughter Helen, Fireworks was easily the least comedic show of the night, but what it lacked in humor it made up for in sincerity.
The show takes place on New Year’s Eve on a secluded stretch of a litter-strewn beach in Western California. The audience finds Dawn dressed in full hospital garb complete with a patient’s gown and non-skid hospital gripper socks. Whether from her sickly coughing or her lack of shoes, it’s clear that Dawn has snuck out of her hospital bed to be on her favorite bench on the beach.
Soon we see Helen enter the stage as she proclaims that she knew she would find her mother in this very spot, to which Dawn replies, “I wanted you to find me.” From this interaction alone we learn that Dawn and Helen share a special bond with each other, beyond even the typical mother-daughter bond.
Dawn shares the bench with her daughter as she recounts how she took Helen there to watch the fireworks when she was a child, a privilege Dawn only shared with her daughter. In this regard, Fireworks is a play about new beginnings as well as endings. This theme was also beautifully symbolized by the inevitable death of Dawn juxtaposed with upcoming birth of Helen’s child, whom she is sure to share this New Year’s tradition.
Fireworks was a huge success due to all of its components coming together to create a cohesive thesis on life, death and the special bond mothers share with their children.
The Mamet Woman
The final play was The Mamet Women written by Frederick Stoppel and directed by Whitney Lebow. Mamet starred Kaci Brown as Sally, an ambitious mother who will stop at nothing to make it in the high-stakes world of Tupperware sales, and Anna Spivey as her friend Polly.
The show takes place in Sally’s home in an average middle-American town during 1969, the height of Tupperware’s popularity. Sally receives a phone call from her baby sitter informing her that she has to cancel on watching Sally’s child.
Sally won’t let this stop her from making it to her Tupperware party however, and Polly sees this as an opportunity to “help” her friend while ultimately helping herself.
This of course leads to confusion as Sally sees this gesture as a friendly favor while Polly views it as an opportunity for personal gain. Thus begins a wonderful exploration into the give-and-take that occurs in a friendship with conflicting personal agendas.
Brown gave one of the most energetic performances of the night, and her and Spivey both showed excellent use of blocking as Sally almost always maintained a higher position over Polly despite their constant movement around the set.
Altogether, The Mamet Women was an excellent choice to end a night of examining relationship dynamics on a high note.