Witness debuts huge hit with JHUconfessions

Playwrights who are part of Witness Theater seem to be able to find subject material for their shows anywhere, from fruits pondering philosophy to crime-solving in outer space.

This time, though, they sought material from a very different source — the infamous, anonymous messageboard JHUconfessions — in a show appropriately titled JHUconfessions.

 JHUconfessions is an internet forum on which anyone with a Hopkins email address can post statements — confessions — anonymously.

The anonymity affords users the freedom to express their opinions and ask questions about whatever they want: recent topics include rush events, housing and the best place to buy stamps.

Witness Theater took particularly memorable posts and threads from JHUconfessions and morphed them into a surprisingly coherent show in which their goal was to “give voice, presence and weight to the range of attitudes expressed anonymously by members of the student body.” Every line in the show came straight from the text on the website.

The setup itself was simple; several tables, chairs and at one point a blackboard made up the sparse backdrop. Witness Theater meant for the content that constituted the heart of this show to truly shine, showing the diverse opinions and topics debated on JHUconfessions, instead of fancy props and backgrounds.

In twenty-three sketches, the show touched on many different issues that the writers found on the site.

The majority of the show was meant to be funny, echoing the crude, offbeat humor in the posts. For the most part, it achieved its goal.

While a large amount of the content was misogynistic, racist, or composed of internet in-jokes, this stemmed from the source material taken from the message board, and it was presented in such a satirical way that the audience couldn’t help but laugh at how ridiculous it really was.

The sketch that comes to mind, one of the best and most engaging comedy sketches of the evening, was “Classroom Politics.”

In this sketch, a group of people sat at a few desks and threw out judgmental remarks about quite possibly every race or ethnicity underneath the sun.

Asians, for example, were presented as socially awkward and only good at math.

White people, apparently, used slaves to cook Thanksgiving dinner.

The sheer ridiculousness of these offhand remarks, when taken in context, made it difficult to believe that someone had actually posted them on an internet forum with a true conviction in these beliefs, anonymous or otherwise.

This sketch garnered one of the highest number of laughs in the entire evening, likely because of how successfully the satire came through.

At other times, the show was funny because the things said were just absurd. In “Paper Marriage,” the character asked for someone to marry him in a “technical paper marriage” so that he could mark his annual income under $25,000 and therefore get a scholarship to attend Hopkins.

It was a short, simple monologue, but it was hilarious because someone had actually asked this.

The forum itself was the subject of much teasing, as well. Someone played the character of an actual troll (an online “troll” is someone who posts inflammatory messages meant only to inflame other users) running around and provoking the others.

Characters also tried to verbally convey emoticons that are usually used in chatspeak (such as :D or :P), which got a lot of laughter.

There were a few sketches, though, that made the audience stop and go, “Wait. What just happened?” and there was some nervous laughter during the sketches that didn’t seem to have a central plot.

In “Red Leader,” for instance, the cast stood in a line and shouted out random phrases under a red light that bathed the entire stage.

The length of the production was also an issue; towards the end of the show, the audience began to get a little restless, as it started to drag on a little bit too much for their tastes.

While most of the sketches in the show were meant to be funny, there were several that were serious. These serious scenes made up some of the best overall sketches in the whole show.

They were poignant, touching and made the audience think. The one that really stood out was “Fear,” where four people stood in a line and spoke their fears aloud. When they confessing their phobias, they would step forward, and when they weren’t, they would step back. The staging was beautifully simple, allowing the audience to focus on what was being said.