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(10/16/13 10:46pm)
What does it mean to be an adult? At what age do you turn old? How are we supposed to deal with the passage of time? Twenty-three Middlebury first-year and sophomores spent the weekend exploring these questions in this year’s first-year show, “Life Under 30.”
This weekend’s performance marked the eighteenth annual first-year show. The show was designed to introduce new students to theater at the College; first-years do not have the opportunity to act in a faculty show their first semester because auditions for fall faculty shows are held the preceding spring. The first-year show creates a unique opportunity to put on a play with mostly freshmen actors — a perfect cast for a show about growing up.
The show consisted of seven 10-minute plays that explored the meaning of adulthood. The plots ranged from a young woman struggling with a job application that asked her about her “favorite childhood memory,” to a girl dealing with her changing identity after being raped, to two grocery store employees cleaning up the mess made when an old man fell in the aisle and cracked his skull. The cast was talented — highlights included the still intensity in Caitlyn Meagher’s ’17 performance of “Dancing With a Devil,” the banter between Oliver Wijayapala ’17 and Wenhao Yu ’17 in “Drive Angry,” and the communicative energy of the cast. One of the most memorable parts of the show was the ensemble work.
As the audience filtered in, the cast sat on the stage, talking over music reminiscent for millenials of early teenage years. The play began when a cast member entered slowly, carrying a sign that read “an adult.” She handed it off to another seated cast-mate and a game of hot potato began as each actor tried to foist the sign off onto someone else. Panic ensued and the cast scattered, going offstage and coming back with other written questions about adulthood, such as “Have you ever been in love?” and “What do you want to do with your life?” The director, Visiting Lecturer in Theatre Lisa Velten-Smith, said that the creation of this opening sequence was “last-minute,” but it didn’t feel that way. The energy of the cast and the use of written rather than spoken language set a powerful tone for the rest of the show.
The questions from the opening sequence were raised periodically throughout the show in video clips of interviews played during scene transitions. Velten-Smith explained that each cast member had gone out and interviewed someone about adulthood using questions the cast had discussed. One question was “What age do you turn old?” to which the interviewee in the video clip responded, “When you feel old?” and then, uncertainly, “25?”
“I think the theme of the show is so apt for us as college students figuring out who we are and what we want to do with our life,” said cast member Aashna Aggarwal ’16. “I also think that in today’s age, we as young adults have experienced a lot we weren’t exactly prepared for and the show highlights how we’re in the same boat. I definitely relate to it and I think the audience can too; whether it’s with just one play or all of them.”
Velten-Smith said that this is why she picked the play. She wanted both the actors and audience members to be able to relate to the theme. She stressed the importance of asking questions like “Why are we doing this play?” and “Who specifically in the audience will this speak to?”
“I am excited about this play because I feel that everyone is searching for their place in the world,” said Velten-Smith. “Where do I fit in? And that’s why you’re at college, you’re there to discover and reveal.”
Beyond its immediate relatability, “Life Under 30” touched on some important social issues. One of the plays, “Drive Angry,” was about a boy who had gotten cancer from a polluted environment. The video clip that came before this play featured a girl who was asked “What scares you about the future?” She replied, “It scares me that I might fail at saving the environment.”
“One of the strengths of theater is the fact that is raises social consciousness,” said Velten-Smith, “and one of the great things about this particular scene — ‘Drive Angry’ — is that that message is not delivered in a heavy-handed way. So it’s two-fold: you get an entertainment value out of it while also a really important message is being delivered. Theater is for social change, not just for pure entertainment, not just for yourself. Theater has existed for thousands of years for a reason.”
“Life Under 30” exemplifies a piece of theater that touches on issues close to the hearts of many different people.
“Every scene for me had something that spoke to someone in the audience,” said Velten-Smith. “For example, the guys in ‘Forty Minute Finish’ contemplating their own existence. Anyone in the audience could be going through an illness or a death. They could really benefit from looking at it through a different perspective. Or the girls in ‘Dancing With a Devil.’ It’s a very intense journey that the character goes through and she needs to go through it to make the discovery that she does at the end. There could be that girl out there in the audience that needs that hope in the end.”
(10/09/13 9:12pm)
Middlebury’s Town Hall Theater screened Othello last Thursday through the London National Theater’s program NTlive. The program broadcasts certain plays from the National Theater to theaters all around the world — over 1,000 people total were watching this version of Othello at the same time.
Doug Anderson, the executive director of Town Hall Theater, explained that he invested in special satellite dishes when the Metropolitan Opera began live broadcasting its productions about six years ago. Since then, the theater has been able to stream ballet, symphonies and plays from all over the world.
“But for us the most exciting development is that our system allows us to pick up the National Theater broadcasts,” Anderson said.
The Othello performance was recorded this summer and broadcast on October 3 in HD; it also included an interview with the director about the choices he made for this production, and an intermission video about the process of bringing the show to life. In the interview, the director explained that this version of Othello was set in a modern day cosmopolitan city, like London, and then moved to a foreign modern day army base. A war veteran who had been stationed in Iraq was involved in the production, helping the design team and actors make the setting feel real.
This year is the National’s fiftieth anniversary. For Anderson, who was a student in London in the early 1970s, that is “kind of a big deal.”
“I remember as a student going down to the Old Vic when it was just started and seeing Lawrence Olivier for seventy five cents,” he said.
Like the shows Anderson saw as a student, these video broadcasts from the National Theater are valuable opportunities for students of the College.
“The acting at the National is probably the finest in the English-speaking world,” said Anderson.
Professor of Theatre Cheryl Faraone agreed.
“Nothing compares to live theater,” she said. “But the NTlive program is as good a record as we’ll get. And an imperfect record of an extraordinary company’s work is better than a mediocre experience in the flesh.”
Seeing a play performed live gives the audience a fuller experience of the work than reading it on the page. Faraone was one of many professors to require a class to see Othello.
“Theater is meant to be three-dimensional,” said Faraone. “If you’re not seeing theater, you’re just looking at the blueprints.”
When an audience watches a piece of theater, the audience members receive the playwright’s message in the form the playwright intended. Faraone explained that going to plays provides her class with a specific “shared body of knowledge and ability to discuss it in a more immediate way.”
Professor of English and American Literature Timothy Billings also required his Shakespeare and Contexts class to attend Othello to experience the text in a theatrical setting.
“I assign some kind of performance for every play we read, if possible,” said Billings. “Although some scholars think that Shakespeare’s plays were meant for readers, undoubtedly most people experienced the plays as live productions starring popular actors. In some sense, the plays are not really complete until they are embodied by actors in the presence of an audience.”
“Since we are always experiencing the plays as modern audiences and readers whether we like it or not, “ he added, “I love to see productions that remind us of that in creative ways, and that challenge us to measure ourselves against Shakespeare’s art.”
Billings’ class had read Othello before seeing the production and many of his students were surprised by how different the play feels on the stage than on the page.
“Some [students] were surprised by how compelling and attractive the character of Othello was early in the play,” said Billings, “and some were surprised by how loathsome Rory Kinnear’s Iago was since they had admired the intelligence and cunning of his speeches on the page.”
Because it was a live performance seen through the eyes of a modern director, the production also served as a vehicle for discussion of contentious social topics. Joelle Mendoza-Etchart ’15, who was required to see the show for Faraone’s Theater History (THEA0208), connected the modern take on Othello to the portrayal of women in Elizabethan theater, a topic the class is currently discussing.
“The contemporary setting of the production helped to highlight the absurdity of some of the more sexist practices in Shakespeare’s time,” she said. “This choice of setting made the sexism all the more jarring.”
Billings asked his students to pay attention to a different social issue.
“In the case of Othello,” he said, “I have been taxing my students to distinguish the anti-racism from the racism in the play, which is not as easy as you might think; and having a modern production is the perfect vehicle through which to reflect on such serious questions.”
All students — not just theater students or those studying Shakespeare — can benefit from going to see theater.
“Anything that opens the door to various parts of the human condition is valuable … I can think of few things that are more applicable to life as we live it, however we live it, than theater,” said Faraone.
Upcoming National Theater broadcasts at the Town Hall Theater include Macbeth, A National Theater 50th Anniversary Celebration, which will be streamed live, Coriolanus and War Horse.
(11/29/12 1:56am)
“Celebrity is more than just fluff,” as Assistant Professor of Sociology and Athropology Rebecca Tiger put it. In fact, Tiger explained, “celebrity is an important identity in contemporary society; not a person or a thing, but a symbolic system we interact around.” Her class, aptly titled “Celebrity,” explores the definition and influence of celebrity in the U.S.
Students in Tiger’s class, which was taught last spring, were tasked with choosing a particular celebrity to follow throughout the term. Jordie Ricigliano ’12.5 picked Lana Del Rey; she followed the artist’s official Twitter and regularly checked relevant gossip blogs.
“By the end of the semester, I felt oddly close to Lizzy. I even called her by her real name, Elizabeth Grant.” Ricigliano confessed, “I found that over the course of the semester, I too was becoming obsessed.” Other students followed famous athletes or politicians; one chose a YouTube star.
This “celebrity stalking” helped students participate in as well as understand the phenomenon of celebrity surveillance and the importance of celebrity in American society. “All of us are affected by celebrity culture even when we say we don’t pay attention to it,” said Tiger, “It matters and is worthy of analytical and theoretical scrutiny.”
Tiger first discovered the power of celebrity when she studied drug-use in school celebrity gossip sites were her diversion. On blogs she visited, Tiger began to notice discussions of drugs and addiction — topics relevant to many young stars like Amy Winehouse and Lindsay Lohan.
“What happens is that [using these sites], people start to construct ideas about drugs and addiction that are different from what scientists give us,” explained Tiger, “If you just see celebrity as a matter of pop culture you’ll miss a lot of more important social issues.”
The class explored topics like the evolution of celebrity, and its debatable transformation into a quasi-religion. It is a common language that builds community. Students brought magazines into class and dissected them, looking for themes. They learned about creation of the “micro-celebrity” and discussed whether YouTube allowed for democratization of celebrity. The class skyped with a writer for Sports Illustrated who had covered the Tiger Woods sex scandal.
“I can never read People Magazine the same way again, nor watch a reality show without thinking, ‘am I watching this in order to feel collective effervescence within an alienated capitalistic hegemony?’” Ricigliano said. “It was one of those classes that you find yourself talking about over the dinner table with your friends and on the phone with family — one of those classes you just keep revisiting in other times in your life, probably because it is so relevant to your life.”