During my four years covering shows for The Argus, I’ve never ceased to be amazed by the vitality of our theater culture at Wesleyan, as well as impressed by the quality and the courage of the work seen on stages across campus, both academic and extra-curricular. The four student-written plays that opened this past weekend in Beckham Hall—“Opposable Plays,” as it was called—were a phenomenal example of Wesleyan theater at its finest: ambitious, heady, and striving for the best, if flawed at times.
“Opposable Plays” was a collection of short plays allegedly centered on the theme of fingers (although, for all the hype, I was a tad disappointed that there weren’t more digits involved). They ranged from witty to tragic, frequently employing the same pool of actors, and even involved a four-piece band.
Beckham was an excellent venue: a stage had been erected at one end of the hall in front of a red velvet curtain, and the playwrights and directors had assembled a simple but effective series of gauze curtains on wheeled poles to serve as walls and backdrops. The lighting design, by Alice Lee ’14 and Rachel Verner ’15, made good use of the gauze with a variety of colored washes to distinguish the plays and individual scenes from one another.
The opening play, “Ring Shop Regular,” was fairly standard fare from young playwright Coz Deicke ’15, whose previous Wesleyan credits include “About Face,” which debuted last week, and “Beauty Pageant Massacre” last fall. A silly short play about a brother-sister couple who run a ring shop and get scammed by an older couple selling a fake ring, it established the “fingers” theme and included some fine one-liners. For instance, the older man, after asking the brother whether he has a girlfriend and hearing a “no,” replied “Sorry, I forgot what century we’re in—any serious MEN in your life?”
It also gave me the pleasure of seeing Zach Stretten-Carlson ’15 on stage for the first time, as I was not present for his Wesleyan theater debut last fall in “This is Our Youth.” Stretten-Carlson played two roles that evening and proved himself a talented caricaturist. Amara Davila ’13 played Jenna Moriarty, the older woman to Stretten-Carlson’s Arthur MacArthur, and did her best to carry off some of the play’s weaker dialogue. (Her character was pretending to be a down-on-her-luck single mother and stripper.) Ali Goldberg ’15 and Conor Boughton ’15 were solid, static characters as the brother-sister couple, and though their incest gag at the end of the play felt rather gratuitous, the result was, overall, a pleasant mini-con comedy.
The second play, “Man Alone,” was the brainchild of Alice Lee ’14, Eleonore Finkelstein ’14, and Lindsay Schapiro ’14, who spearheaded the entire evening. “Man Alone” suffered somewhat from being more ambitious than the physical realities of the space would allow for: Scene changes were sometimes lengthy in comparison to the scenes, and one farce sequence (already entertaining) would have been a stitch with a proper, multi-door set to allow for overlapping entrances.
At its heart, though, the play was a fundamentally lighthearted romp through the unraveling lives of two men—one a new divorcé, the other a failed actor—as they retreat to a rental cabin in the woods and fail to encounter each other. Stretten-Carlson gave his second performance as the actor, and though the direction of his scene with a writer was rather ham-handed, his deadpan at such moments as discovering a recently killed rabbit in his kitchen was hilarious. Boughton played Stuart, the divorcé, with aplomb, displaying more range than he’d been allowed in the previous play. They were backed by a strong supporting cast, and the final moment of the play—with the two men speaking in overlapping, sometimes-synchronized monologue—was well staged, though it felt unclear as an ending.
“One by One,” penned by Verner, was the third and most disturbing play of the evening. A story of three little girls all killed by the same murderer (Boughton, in his third and final role for the evening), “One by One” made one of the best uses of the limited scenery and lighting, shifting the walls to create a claustrophobic backyard shed and plunging the stage into a crimson nightmare wash with the lights.
The three actresses playing the girls (Davila and Hanna Bahedry ’14 as already dead girls and Goldberg as a still-living one) all gave solid performances within the confines of the play, and Boughton was appropriately menacing. But despite (or perhaps because of) the high ick factor, the play as a whole felt overwrought, like a dire public service announcement, and profoundly unsubtle. While giving voice to the victims of abuse is a worthy goal, it’s important to remember that not every murderer/rapist is a black-clad, glove-wearing older man.
The final play, “Reflection Theory,” was Schapiro’s creation, and it tracked the mental dissolution of a teenage girl who “carries tension in her fingers” (bringing it back to the evening’s nominal theme). Schapiro proved herself a capable writer and even better composer: This was a musical, and Schapiro’s stage-rock tunes were excellent. If anything, the music left me wanting more, a superb contrast to other student-written musicals I’ve encountered, which seemed to adhere to some notion that songs must be five minutes each.
The play also featured strong leads: Davila returned as the girl’s mother, and Molly Balsam ’14 gave sturdy voice and engaging physical life to the teenaged “Girl,” slouching and wheedling about the set. Kara Wernick ’15 and Gabriel Elkind ’15 also gave solid performances as Girl’s illusive doctor and boyfriend, appearing in one haunting sequence behind the transparent gauze curtains that formed her bedroom walls. Although the staging was sometimes stagnant and the story became heavy fairly quickly near the end, “Reflection Theory” was a remarkably well-devised work all in all.
At the end of the evening, the entire cast of the four plays gathered for the curtain call, an extremely silly final ode to fingers in general. As hinted at by the lyrics, they were unprepared for the ode; they hadn’t even rehearsed the song. Despite their aversion to responsibility, “Opposable Plays” was an enjoyable evening of rough works from new playwrights, always some of the most important contributions to the Wesleyan theater scene. I hope Wesleyan can look forward to more from these writers in the future: musical, funny, tragic, and, of course, weird.