Fall Drama Production of Seven Short Plays Says Plenty

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"Drama," Alfred Hitchcock once said, "is life with the dull bits cut out."

In the seven short plays presented on November 2 - 5 by director David Sims' drama students, some of those "dull bits" were instead distilled onstage into a trenchant mixture of irony, comedy, and social commentary, ably acted by a large cast of Cavalier Players.



Although written by six different playwrights and chosen, according to Sims, "to match the talents of my students," together, the seven compact dramas delivered a potent, if humorous, message about the disconnects, insincerity, and absurdities of modern society.



In the plays, characters switch places, TV's watch their viewers,



and characters in a play finish off the professor who manipulates them in a lesson on the essentials of good playwriting.



In Sure Thing by David Ives, a couple meet at a restaurant and test every possible direction their conversation could take, restarting each time the waiter standing silently behind their table signals with a bell, until they arrive at a "happy ending."



Any theater-goer who has ever tangled with the DMV could take sympathetic delight in the plight of the character in DMV Tyrant by Christopher Durang. The tyrant in the title takes bureaucratic indifference to its limits, telling her customer, in the end, to "move to another state" if he wants his problem solved. "I hear Ohio is nice," she calls after him as he leaves, an utterly defeated man.



In the last and longest play of the evening, Interview by Jean Claude van Itallie, interviewers become applicants in a reversal of roles (after all, everyone is dressed identically in all black, and aren't people interchangeable in their roles?), and characters, such as the politician, spout smug insincerities.



The intimacy of the theater setting, a black box constructed on the stage of the auditorium seating no more than 80, served as ironic counterpoint to the depersonalization explored in some of the plays.

The evening proved both thought-provoking and fun in an edgy sort of way, thanks to the efforts of all onstage and off.



Special thanks are due in particular to parents Carl Sykes, Susan Scovil, Mary Freeman, and Susan Washburn, who assisted with the production.



And, of course, to all the Cavalier Players who participated: seniors Julie Buisson, Sarah Evert, Therlow Huntley, Alyssa Reichental, and Sarah White; juniors Katie Atkinson, Emily Cull, Caitlin Evins, Madelaine Hoptry, Jen Kotrady, Warren Moseley, Paige Schumaker, Smedes Scovil, and George Washburn; sophomores Thomas Freeman and Jonathan Pierce; and freshmen Alexis Aime, Cody Cobb, Kaylie Howard, Dexter Rogers, Reggie Titmas, and Chamani Vick.