Witness Theater's second showcase of the semester had little of the first's light-heartedness. The melancholy was pumping from the start and did not relent until the last play. Some of the audience members were undoubtedly put off by this change of pace.
Needless to say, it took a bravely smiling crowd to laugh down some of the black humor that waxed throughout the show. But most found something to enjoy in the overriding moroseness.
I blame the evening's suffering entirely on sophomores Mitch Frank and Shaun Gould, a pair of unabashed bohemians and sorrow-junkies who wrote three of the four plays. Junior Lydia Fayal brought some relief with her single entry.
One of Frank's plays started the show and set the pattern for the night. You Need a Haircut, directed by freshman Alena Geffner-Mihlsten, starts lightly enough; Laura (played by freshman Aparna Desai) waits for Mike (played by Tom Hintze, also a freshman) to get out of the shower and holds his pants hostage in order to force him into an unwanted haircut. Even if some of the lines are a bit unnatural or implausible, the scene's uncanny awkwardness is enough to keep the audience interested.
The snappy dialogue comes with a directness that subtly belied the play's real tension, something that is not exactly resolved. After the pretense of a haircut wears thin, Laura confesses her feelings to Mike, who rejects her outright. Frank gives almost no time for denouement, and the play leaves one with a vague feeling of hopelessness.
For the audience, lately tuned to a love-story wrap-up, the end of the play is a bit difficult to swallow. It is unusual for stories to close with such an abrupt surfacing of truth; after such a turn it seems natural for the play to go into another act where the jealous party will seek revenge or take a new approach to the same problem. But since the audience knows it is a one act, the end is clear-cut, uncomfortable and devoid of sentiment.
The following play, Shaun Gould's Steve and Alex, directed by Mitch Frank with junior Michael Cox as Steve, picks up on this note of dissonance. The play is simply a slowly unfolding personal monologue. Steve is the living twin of Alex, two brothers who grew up under a Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead crisis of identity, made worse by an indiscriminate, alcoholic father.
The show might have smacked of something romantic had it been a full-fledged confession from one character to another, a therapy of sorts. But in Gould's framework, the narrator has no answers, no sympathy, nowhere new to turn. The final episode of Steve trying to get beat up by a retarded man delves into a moment of novel self-realization, but the audience is by no means left with a happy ending.
Following the intermission came Frank's second play Encyclopedia, directed by junior Sofija Korac and featuring Gould as the sole actor. Of the three sad plays, this one goes deepest into the themes of loneliness, detachment and darkness.
Gould plays a man living alone with an encyclopedic knowledge of cereal developers and temporomandibular joint disorder (when your jaw pops while you chew), as well as a terminal illness.
This play follows Frank's pattern of starting with something that could go either way -- we could be in for a delightful change of luck, or go the other way and discover something entirely disconcerting -- and then going for the latter without time for reflection or acceptance.
Encyclopedia is superior to its predecessors because of the power it draws from action. As a terminally ill man, Gould does everything from masturbating to headstands with an air that is at once bored, tragic and even slightly menacing. The audience laughs at the dry wit early on; it laughs a little less at the ironic lament of solitude; it laughs not at all when the man slips into talking about being terminally ill. Perhaps the first two plays put the audience in the proper mood for this climax of lonely terror, but I would say it stands alone and above.
The final play, Cocktails in Connecticut by Lydia Fayal, directed by junior Jason Maur, finally brings some really laughable humor to the stage. The play starts with a bit of an inversion from the first play's set-up--Louise (played by freshman Esther Bell), the eldest daughter of a wealthy upper-crust Connecticut family, reclines alone in just a bathing suit and quickly begins bickering with her brother Hunter (played by sophomore Peter Lipman) and flirting with his Spaniard friend Roberto (played by sophomore Paxson Trautman).
Following the first scene, the play becomes a competition between mother and daughter in trying to out-slut each other for a rich stock-trader. The competition is made even more intense by the fact that the mother is played by freshman Zoe Bell, Esther Bell's sister.
Things get more and more ludicrous, and the play ends with comic disappointments all around and Peter Lipman running drunkenly into the audience shouting to various ladies in attendance.
