By Kerri Linsenbigler
Features Editor
The Garret Theater and Butler Basement workshop are once again a flurry of rehearsals, designing sets and costumes, and creating props. This can only mean one thing— SBU Theater is ready to perform again.
As a part of its 10th Anniversary celebration, SBU Theater will perform three plays this year. The second, a series of one-act plays, takes the stage after Thanksgiving Break in the Garret Theater.
According to Ed. Simone, chair of the theater department, the program originally planned to put on an interpretation of “A Christmas Carol” as its second performance. However, Simone and assistant professor of theater Becky Misenheimer decided to switch gears at the “Christmas Carol” auditions.
When we auditioned for ‘A Christmas Carol’ we had sufficient guys to do it, but we had all these women audition,” Simone said. “So we said, ‘you know what, this is kind of silly. We can always do ‘A Christmas Carol.’ We should change to do something that works with these women.’”
In order to better accommodate the large turnout of women, the department chose to put on a one-act festival, called “Knowing and Un-Knowing,” featuring strong female roles. Of the 12 students involved in the production (both cast and crew), eight of them are women, Simone said.
Students will perform the plays “Words, Words, Words” by David Ives, “National Smoke Signal Day” by Billy Finn, “The Role of Della” by John Wooten, “An Ongoing Examination of the True Meaning of Life” by S.W. Senek, “Be What you Wish to Seem” by Jonathan Spector and “The Winged Man” by Jose Rivera. Each one-act play will last 10 to 15 minutes.
“It’s a really interesting lineup,” Simone said. “Four of them are outright comedies and two of them are more serious than funny.”
Ives is one of Simone’s favorite playwrights, and his work is performed often at Bonaventure.
“David Ives is a very funny playwright,” Simone said. “We’ve done a number of his shows. In fact, I think we had at least one of his shows in every (One Act) festival we’ve done, except maybe one.”
According to Tori Lanzillo, a sophomore theater and journalism and mass communication major, playing a role in such a short amount of time is a new experience she has enjoyed.
“You don’t have a lot of time to get into a character and create a big, huge play,” Lanzillo, an actress in three of the plays, said. “You have 15 minutes to tell a story from beginning to end, and that is a really big challenge.”
Just as the plays proved difficult for the actors, designers were also faced with a challenge. Senior Emily West had to make tough decisions about the set and costume design for the festival as her senior theater capstone.
In order to adapt six different plays, West combined objects and elements from each act into the set design. To add another dimension, West said she made the floor a large photograph of grass and interspersed a nature backdrop with the plays’ objects.
“It’s sort of bizarre,” West, a theater and journalism and mass communication major, said. “It’s really a conglomeration of all of the worlds and then none of them at all.”
As for costumes, West said she wanted to keep them true to each play, since the set combines the acts.
“All of the costumes are designed for each play, but also to keep them grounded in the world that we built for them, everyone is barefoot,” West said. “They can never fully be in their world.”
According to Simone, however, directing a series of one-acts is much more manageable than directing a full-length play. Simone said when students prepare for a longer play, they can only focus on so much of the play’s content at once, and it runs the risk of being forgotten. Since each one-act play is so short, a lot of work can be done in a short amount of time.
“You can break the rehearsal periods up into very digestible chunks and work on two plays a night,” he said. “And you can work them and run them and work them and run them, and in an hour or an hour and a half, you’ve done them several times and worked on very specific beats.”
The show will be performed Friday Nov. 30 through Sunday Dec. 2 at 7:30 p.m., as well as 2 p.m. on Saturday. Free student rush tickets are available each evening in the Garret Theater Box Office an hour before the show.
“We’re very excited,” Simone said. “(The plays are) very interesting and very surprising. It’s going to be a fun evening.”
