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Volume CXXXII, Number 22 |
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67 years of tradition in one act
HANNAH DEAN
STAFF WRITER
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| Students in Wish Theater performed in the 67th annual One Act Festival. All plays were written and directed by Bowdoin students. (Nancy Van Dyke, Bowdoin Orient) |
The plays ranged from tear-stained to irreverently flippant to bittersweet. Audience members were confronted with a range of emotions from melancholy to amusement.
The first play entailed the examination of three crestfallen characters, each locked in their own rooms-i.e. locked in their own psychologically disastrous life experiences. Written by Sam Cohan '05, Static addressed the walls and boundaries that we all must overcome in order to live well. As one character, whose wife had perished during childbirth, said, "you can't just sit around watching static on T.V., you have to get up…" and change the channel.
Cohan noted, "I think, somewhere, you'll find those character voices inside my head, bopping about." Indeed, none doubted that the characters were indeed bopping about in the young playwright's head. Consequently they bopped out of his head and onto stage.
It is true that the three characters began with fresh stories-a man who had lost his wife, a girl who had given birth at a prom and killed her progeny, and a youth whose father had drank himself to death. Kudos to the three fine actors who put their energies into the parts.
Odds Up, by Mike Harding '03, the second play presented, centered itself around the enormous energy that Chris McCabe '05 and James Nylund '06 were able to bring to their parts as sports betters. The storyline examined the mysticism and superstition that surround the phenomenon of sports bets-the lucky charms, the lucky gestures, and the lucky breaks. Harding commented that all the guys who bet on sports "have all this information about certain teams and it makes them think they can win easily." The play had a delightful mix of slapstick humor and male desperation that kept the energy high and the laughs plentiful.
Sophomore Scott Raker's play After Image also took the stage, lending somber, self-pitying, tones to what had so recently been a scene of harmless merriment. Raker based the play on the Bob Dylan album Blood on the Tracks. Raker examined the ways in which fragments of past love remain reflected in the memory. Playing with representations of love-from the sounds of lip-smacks to the memory of touch-Raker attempted to recount one man's journey in and out of love. The man's history revealed that he had only run into "sparks" and never the full-fledged explosion of love. Like a lost mole searching for the light at the end of the tunnel, the man ultimately found himself still in the dark.
The last play, Disconnect, by Cohan, was the crown jewel of the night. Bittersweet and with a delightful mix of comedy and cutting wit, Disconnect was blessed with savvy actors and a practically flawless script. Ben Botwick '06, who played the narrator James, carried the show with a conglomeration of flippancy and subtle melancholy that was utterly endearing. By recounting the adventures of a typical college weekend outing, Cohan examined the idea that students tend to substitute single nights of pleasure for love. Unfortunately, as Cohan notes in the play, the pleasure hardly lasts until morning and ultimately amounts to a cumbersome form of masturbation. The repercussions are hardly worth the trouble.
The one acts were written and performed by Bowdoin students and were sponsored by Masque and Gown. This year marked the 67th annual performance of the student written one act festival.
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