Midway through Christopher Durang's absurdly funny Words, Words, Words, which features three monkeys forced by a cruel Dr. Rosenbaum to write Hamlet on typewriters through sheer luck alone, one disgruntled monkey turns to the other and asks about their master, "What's Hamlet to him, or he to Hamlet?" - a parody by complete chance of similar immortal words by the eponymous Hamlet himself. A play that has Infinite Monkey Theory and allusions to Shakespeare? Here is something that both computer science and Writing Seminars majors can enjoy. Welcome, budding freshman talent, to the world of Hopkins theater. Though the occasional bad apple slips by, for the most part the performances here are first-rate, and this fall's Freshman One-Acts were no exception.
In the first of the One-Acts, Time Flies, two happy-go-lucky and amorous mayflies, May and Horace (played by freshmen Emma Brodie and Pierce Delahunt), begin to worry that life has no real significance beyond mating and dying, after learning of their species' unfortunate single-day lifespan in a TV nature show. The play, directed by senior Joseph Micali, puts a ludicrous twist on every person's fears of their own impending mortality and questions about life's deeper significance. The acting was good (though one might get the impression that it would be funnier in more experienced actors' hands - the hilarious writing of David Ives is difficult to live up to, after all) and the costumes fittingly comical.
Funeral Parlor, written by Christopher Durang and directed by junior Sarah Feinmark, was arguably the best of the six One-Acts. The play boasted an excellent performance by freshman Max Dworin as Marcus, a socially inept funeral mourner who felt that talk of empty caskets, practical jokes, seances and Irish funeral keenings are perfectly acceptable topics of conversation with the deceased's widow, Susan (freshman Katie Osborn). Awkward as he may be, Marcus nevertheless had good intentions and drew the audience's sympathy in the end, prodding Susan to finally surrender her mask of artificial calm and give into the cathartic power of grief.
Nearly everyone has heard of the concept that a monkey, sitting at a typewriter and randomly hitting keys, would eventually produce the complete works of Shakespeare or, at the very least, Hamlet. Words, Words, Words by David Ives was an attempt to bring this humorous tale to life, featuring three monkeys, Kafka (freshman Giselle Chang), Milton (freshman Kristina Madarang) and Swift (freshman Alex Rozenshteyn) and their efforts to write Hamlet, despite having a complete lack of understand about what Hamlet is exactly. Just like Funeral Parlor, this play's dialogue was very funny, and the actors' monkey-isms - banana-eating, bar-climbing, box-jumping and all - certainly added a novel element.
Naomi in the Living Room (Christopher Durang), directed by sophomore Evelyn Clark, brought any audience member's attention still wandering from the intermission back into the second half of shows with a bang. Less of a bang, rather, than a full-on orgasm. The play featured Naomi, a psychotic mother (zealously played by freshman Sara Luterman) to whom her son (Pierce Delahunt) and wife (freshman Julie Abramowitz) decide to pay a visit. Naomi's obnoxious, badgering, and truly insane behavior, which ran the gambit from swearing (often) to ignoring the fact of the unfortunate deaths of the couple's five children (more than a few times) to orgasming on her own couch (just once), left the audience alternatively laughing at its ridiculousness and cringing at its awkwardness. Despite its entertainment, however, the play itself gave little justification in the characters' pasts for such ridiculous actions, which threatened any emotional or thematic core the play might have had. Fortunately, the acting was good, Luterman's especially excellent, and the directing well-done.
Every child who knows of Shel Silverstein grows up reading The Giving Tree, Where the Sidewalk Ends and The Missing Piece Meets the Big O. The fifth One-Act, Buy One, Get One Free, introduced many to Shel Silverstein's less well-known, dark and comically twisted take on more adult themes. The play features two hookers, Sherilee (freshman Jackie Huang) and Merilee (freshman Kelly McNamara), and their adventures in marketing. "Buy one, get one free," they say, "If you buy her, we'll throw in me." When a potential customer decides the two hookers are trying to rip him off by charging a "C" ($100), he confronts them, and the two become rather belligerent. The play's dialogue, in rhyme with the word "free" nearly the entire time, is a testament to Silverstein's genius. The performances by both Huang and McNamara were solid.
The One-Acts closed with Shrew You by Lewis Heniford. But where Words, Words, Words was able to conclude the first round of shows nicely with amusing absurdity and wit, Shrew You put a rather disconcerting end to an all-around good evening. The play centers around Shagsper (freshman Alina Pak) a.k.a. Shakespeare who, recently deceased, has come to a processing room in the spiritual afterlife. The attendant in the room, Mnemosyne (played by freshman Rebecca McGivney with the occasional flash of superb acting), explains to him that Zeus has decreed all men must lose their manhood in the afterlife and revert to a female. Shagspur, abhorred by the prospect, decides to call up a scene from his play Taming of the Shrew which illustrates his point that man is necessary. Petruchio (freshman Mike Alfieri) and Katharine (freshman Amanda Jean Boyles) perform their parts in his play dutifully and Shagspur decides to take the play to Zeus as evidence for his argument. Unfortunately the play's setting and plot were hard to follow, which was due more to the script than any fault of the actors. The play also seemed out of place from the others, as it was longer and required more props. Even a thespian-minded English major acquainted with the ins and outs of Shakespeare's Taming of the Shrew might have been hard-pressed to make complete sense out of the performance, and your average Hopkins undergraduate BME or political science student stood little chance.
In the end, the freshmen (and all the undergraduates that played a part through directing, producing, set design and tech) put on a good performance. Perhaps a more experienced group of actors could have added a little something more with a keener comedic sense of timing and experience, but that subject is not really what the debate should be about. The debate is whether it was the passionate, albeit brief, mayfly sex or the couch-induced orgasm that spurred more after-theater conversation; a debate that only good theater can provide.
