Carve a hole in your pagan festivities this weekend and pop by the Westco Café for a great production of “Heaven*,” a new play by Michael Steves ’13 with a quirky outlook on afterlife. The only student-written play of the semester, Heaven* focuses on Wilma Tumps (Leah Rosen ’14), a recently deceased disappointment of a human being who gets the chance to relive moments from past romances in a cosmic game run by shallow celestials. Steves gets the particulars of the premise out of the way quickly and jumps into all sorts of neat existential issues with gusto. In the opening moments, as soon as Angel Tiberius Goldberg (Solomon Billinkoff ’14) sardonically drawls, “Your death is our living,” you’ll know you’ve chosen the right way to spend an evening.
From there, we move at a quick but unhurried pace with lots of clever twists and multimedia surprises in store. All of the actors are comfortable in their roles, and the dialogue cracks with Stevesian tongue-in-cheek wit. For a rehearsal as rough as the one your humble reporter saw, where scenes were still being re-written, the timing of the jokes was suspiciously perfect. Everyone involved is a talent: Rosen is funny and a capable emotional anchor to boot, Paulie Lowther ’13 has a lot of fun with Frank Tumps, Wilma’s rapidly aging husband, and Michelle Agresti ’14 is hilariously hateable as the Blanche-esque villainess Scarlett J. Winter. The angels are just as well-cast, all smarming through ridiculous and sometimes-tragic characters who have lost all love of ordinary human life’s minutiae. I don’t know how Steves manages to get such skilled and charming people to owe him favors, but look out frosh talent: he could be gunning for you next semester.
A large part of “Heaven*” focuses on a climactic reality-TV-esque competition to get through the pearly gates, and this epic last act is likely what audiences will remember most. Steves includes reality television among his inspirations for the play.
“I don’t normally like reality TV, but I had to watch a lot of ‘American Idol’ and ‘Survivor’ to prepare for this,” Steves said. “I find the conventions funny and fascinating, how the hosts and judges and everybody act like they’re judging somebody to get into the afterlife.”
In addition to exploring the weird psychology behind the reality-TV circus, Steves has constructed a beautiful participatory mess, and I’m guessing it’ll be fun to be a part of it all. Without giving anything away, you yourself might yell embarrassing things, maybe when nobody else is making noise, and you’ll laugh at people who do the same. It’ll be a ball.
There’s a good chance that you know somebody (or know somebody who knows somebody) in this, and you will have a good time if you make the trip. If you’re into quantum physics, “The X-Factor,” friendship, or joviality, here is your semester’s bit of homegrown entertainment.