The actors gathered in a circle, slowly circling around beneath an eerie red light. One actress carried what appeared to be a headless body before gently placing it on the bed on the stage. Contrary to any initial assumptions about the nature of these ritualistic proceedings, this was, in fact, the transition between the two plays of the Barnstormers Intersession Showcase.
After rehearsing for a month over Intersession, the nine-person cast put on two mind-boggling one-acts, Christopher Durang’s The Actor’s Nightmare and Stephen Gregg’s The Wake Up Call. The plays were directed by the Barnstormers president, senior Raidizon Mercedes and produced by the Barnstormers vice president, senior Elizabeth Sylvester. Both plays balanced comedic lines with serious conversations about the nature of reality.
Durang’s 1981 one-act play, The Actor’s Nightmare, centers on the character George Spelvin, played by junior Neil Fendley. George, who believes he is an accountant, suddenly finds himself backstage when no-nonsense stage manager Meg (sophomore Esther Rodriguez) rushes in to inform him that will need to take the place of the normal lead, who has just been in a car accident. Panicked and confused, George wanders around backstage, as actresses Sarah (graduate student Vanessa Quinlivan-Repasi) and Ellen (freshman Natalie Wallington) wish him luck but tell him conflicting information when he asks which play they are about to perform.
George is pushed onto the stage along with Sarah, who quickly becomes irritated when George does not know the correct lines. Ellen then joins the duo on stage, along with Meg, who appears as the maid in order to hiss George’s lines into his ear. The awkward on-stage exchange leads to some entertaining moments of misunderstanding, which the actors performed with perfect deadpan.
The play seems to cycle rapidly through disjointed scenes from other plays, such as Private Lives, Hamlet, Checkmate and A Man for All Seasons. George struggles to keep up with the ever-changing scenes and is eventually forced to perform a soliloquy in which he draws famous lines from several Shakespeare plays and then speaks a bit about his own life, describing how he once considered entering a monastery.
This scene rapidly changes to the execution in A Man for All Seasons, in which the Executioner (sophomore Mehdi El-Hebil) appears wielding an ax in a frighteningly realistic manner. Even as the ax comes down,
George tries to convince himself that he’ll wake up as soon as he is killed. However, much to the surprise of the rest of the cast, George remains lifeless on the ground during the curtain call.
After a brief intermission, the actors gathered in a circle and circled around for the transition to the next play, The Wake Up Call, which starred freshman David Gumino as a high school student, Jim.
Jim is studying with his girlfriend, Rochelle (senior Michelle Pargament), when she abruptly asks if he’ll help her murder her father (sophomore Ian Stark). Falling back onto the bed in surprise, Jim suddenly wakes up in his own bed at home, still shaking from the dream when his mother (sophomore Elizabeth Winkelhoff) walks in.
Although in a comical fashion, his mother attempts to make sexual advances, causing him to fall backwards again onto his bed. He wakes up again in Rochelle’s room, even more confused. Unfortunately, not everything was a dream and Rochelle is still attempting to murder her father for the insurance money.
Jim continuously switches back and forth between the murder unfolding in Rochelle’s room and the increasing oddity of his own room, which includes the blue sun outside of his window, his mother’s refusal to believe in the word “milk,” his own private chorus (Natalie Wallington, Mehdi El-Hebil and Esther Rodriguez) that enter and continuously sing “Do Your Ears Hang Low?” and his mother sporting a green wig and a clock around her neck. He eventually gives up completely on trying to separate reality from his dreaming, ending the play by dramatically kissing his mother.
Despite themes involving murder, the play is ultimately comedic, with Jim’s confusion and the progressively stranger occurrences as the centerpiece of its hilarity. David Gumino, the actor who played Jim, drew from his own personal experiences with lucid dreaming to help convey his constant state of delirium. Although he noted that he had wanted to go even more over-the-top in his performance, Gumino explained the impact that the play would have on audiences.
“This play pushed boundaries and made people uncomfortable more than any play I have done,” he wrote in an email to The News-Letter.
Overall, both plays moved quickly and didn’t have any dead moments. The chemistry of the cast was evident in the well-timed jokes and interactions between characters. Both plays, comparable perhaps to the Twilight Zone television series, were a bit off the beaten path from traditional plays and made the audience question parts of their lives. With the great casting, lighting, costumes and directing, as well as unusual and exciting choices for the plays themselves, the Barnstormers’ Intersession Showcase really demonstrated the full extent of the talented students in all areas of the production.
