Questions Existing: Play / The Meeting Reviewed

Friday night was the culmination of this year’s Freshers’ Plays. In total, four shows entirely acted, directed, and produced by new Mermaids went up over the course of the week. Friday night’s performances included the final two short plays, Play and The Meeting.

The evening began with a student written piece inspired by the works of the absurdist Samuel Beckett aptly titled, Play. Three well known characters: the Raven of Edgar Allen Poe’s same titled narrative poem, Fox in Socks from the Dr. Seuss book, and Alice from Alice in Wonderland take to the stage together, roaming a graveyard and chanting sections from their respective works. We find out as the story goes on, that this is merely a play within a play. The enthusiastic director from the beginning who introduced the play was merely another performer, a twist I did not see coming. The play switches back and forth from the characters being the characters to being disgruntled actors, falling into arguments with each other and their playwright/director.

The Barron space was used well with tombstones and props representing the characters eerily dispersed throughout the stage. The dramatic shifts in lighting did an excellent job in signifying the shifts between actors and director interacting in a “real” sense and returning to the more “absurd” side of things. However, the whispering sound cue played over the beginning at some points was a bit too loud and distracting and took away from the characters themselves. That being said, the opening section also could have achieved the same effect by being a little shorter. The recitation of each character’s literary sections seemed to drag.

The actors should be commended for the way they shifted between being in the two different phases of the play, embodying both the somewhat haunted classic literary characters and stage actors adeptly. The play itself was, in a word, absurd. If it was going for a short, strange, but ultimately interesting concept, it succeeded.

The second play of the evening, The Meeting, ultimately left me with a sense of confusion. This was not the same titled play about Malcolm X and Martin Luther King Jr (in case like me you tried to Google it after). Instead, it depicted a series of scenes detailing the somewhat shady meetings between a man with a variety of other people.

The actors played their roles skillfully, with special mention given to the gentleman who played an extremely realistic old men in addition to a significantly younger (what I can only assume was a) terrorist expertly. The set conveyed the transitions between places nicely and the subtle sound effects enhanced the overall experience. However, I truly did not understand (and I was not alone) the story. How did all these meetings connect? Was it just because they were meetings that they were linked? Did he find the buried treasure? Did he sleep with the one-breasted woman? Was that guy trying to get him to bomb the train? I was ultimately left with more questions than answers and I cannot tell if this was because of the complex script or some giant miscommunication between the performance and the audience.

On the whole, the new Mermaids do show promise. However, the overwhelming sense of confusion some of the audience was left with indicates that there is (as is the case for most student theatre) definitely room for improvement.

Photos by Katie Brennan