Life > October 18, 2007

By Caitlin Kenney | Editor in chief

Shakespeare said “what’s in a name?” and I would ask “what’s in a major?” Certainly more than meets the eye. A theatre major is not necessarily an actor, and this fall’s Studio Series showcased the direction of three such senior theatre majors – Sissie Strope, Amber Chapel and Tiffany Waddell, all with backgrounds in different aspects of theatre production.

click to enlarge

Sophomore Eric Bihl and freshman Hannah Newman portray reunited high school sweethearts in Glory in the Flowers, directed by senior Sissie Strope. (Andrew Imboden/Old Gold & Black)

After two weeks of intense rehearsals, the three one-acts played Oct. 15-16 in the Ring Theatre to a full house.

Strope’s background has been in set design and it showed through in her directorial debut, Glory in the Flowers, set in a Midwestern bar called “Paradise.”

Strope served as both director and scenic artist for playwright William Inge’s short piece that meditates on the passage of time and growing up.

The play follows the reunion of high school sweethearts, Bus and Jackie, played by sophomore Eric Bihl and freshman Hannah Newman.

It uses constant references to the “way things used to be” to warn against living too much in the past.

Newman was the standout performance, giving the sweet and earnest Jackie just enough vulnerability and spunk to make her endearing and all too real. Glory in the Flowers may be set in a country diner decades ago, but the message is still striking.

The second play of the series, Silence, represented a marked change from the first. Glory in the Flowers’ elaborate set, including a jukebox, dance floor and bar littered with liquor bottles, was replaced with three black boxes against a black curtain.

Director Chapel’s theatre background has included frequent work with lighting and she used it interestingly in Harold Pinter’s Silence to denote shifts in time and to highlight her three actors in this challenging play.

The play revolves around the monologues and occasional interactions of two men and a woman, who all seem to be involved in a love triangle. However, the play is so ambiguous that even this simple plot point is unclear.

One of the barriers to understanding this play was that the characters refer often to feeling old and left behind. However, when played by college actors, it was impossible to place the ages of the characters. Were they supposed to be in their 50s? 80s? 30s? There was no way of knowing.

The play may ultimately have been too obscure in meaning to be relatable. The text is meant to be fragmented in nature and perhaps one of the goals of the play is to leave you wondering.

Still, I was left wishing that something in the play – the set, the costumes, the blocking – would have given me a better frame of reference, some hint as to what was really going on. I felt as if the actors were saying something important … I just couldn’t figure out what it was.

The series finished with two brief vignettes from The Love’s Fire Collection, both loosely based on Shakespearean sonnets. These last two pieces served as a middle ground between the realism of the first play and the expressionism of the second. It would have been easy for the meaning of these short plays to get lost, but Waddell did an excellent job of molding these symbolist snippets into relatable vignettes.

Waddell crafted these two pieces beautifully, mixing music, movement and dance into the representations of two very different love stories. Her history in theatre has been in writing and directing, but she stretched her boundaries with plays that were both beautiful and impacting.

The first short play, 140, opens with a dance of infidelity, in which each of the characters passes a red scarf to represent a sexual liaison.

Though the play was short, the scenes were intense, as each character was interrogated by one lover and silently seduced by another. Senior Morgan Partin stood out as the wife, the first and last to speak, reciting the sonnet the play was based on.

The second short play, Hydraulics Phat Like Mean, involved the continuous motion of the female player around her would-be male lover, a dance of seduction. The female player, junior Gaby Ortiz, drew the eye throughout the entire scene, showcasing beautiful movements that lead her lover on.

This will be the only Studio Series of the semester, but look for two plays directed by senior theatre majors in the spring. The Series are always challenging, but offer a different flavor of drama than normally seen on the MainStage.