Behind the Curtain:

Winter term has started, and while the campus as a whole may be relatively quiet, Warner Center is busy as ever, with many shows starting rehearsals, as well as a number of intensives and master classes!

Here’s what’s coming up in Oberlin College Theater:

Bait, written and directed by Shauna Siggelkow, ‘11.
Little Theater, February 2-6

Eurydice, by Sarah Ruhl. Directed by Barney O’Hanlon.
Hall Auditorium, February 10-12

The Hothouse, by Harold Pinter. Directed by Ben Ferber, ‘11.
Little Theater, Feburary 16-20.

This Is Our Youth, by Kenneth Lonergan. Directed by Philip Waller, ‘11.
Little Theater, March 2-5.

Plus student productions sponsored by OSTA and OMTA!

I was trying to figure out last night why this play’s so dear to me, why I really care about letting people around campus know they want to be there to see it.

The easy answer is self-promotion.

But the river runs deeper than that for me. Why does campus feel dry to me, in terms of activism, the arts, and general participation in the shared community? It’s not that those things don’t exist at Oberlin; everything has its place here. But that’s precisely the problem: people find their nook, their co-op, their department, and they surround themselves with a world tailored to their niche.

There’s the LGBTQ/environmentalist/Harkness crowd, and then there’s the hipster crowd; there are the Con students, and there are those who never leave their dorm common rooms; there are program house students, and there are ‘Sco fiends; creative writing, dance, theater, film, comparative American studies, not to mention all the language arts - each department can get incestuous and even cliquey in its own way. And where do neuro and the other sciences fit in in this schema? I couldn’t really tell you - I’m more of a “humanities kid” (case in point). I don’t mean to generalize here: there are certainly interdisciplinary overlaps, especially in TiMARA. But personally, though everywhere on campus people are studying amazing things, engaging in important projects, and thinking (and working) pretty hard in the process, I still find myself lazing about, stoned, and second-guessing whether I want to attend this lecture on conflict resolution or that TiMARA performance. How can we share our passions with the rest of campus if even just saying hello to a passing stranger in Stevie can threaten us with social anxieties? If Obietalk continues to slander our easy targets?

It’s the result of a natural process of self-segregation that we need to do our best to counter. We’re young, we’re beautiful, and we’re lazy (or at the very least, I’m lazy). But we’re LUCKY to have this school, lucky to have the luxury of the art building, warner, hall, and the illustrious science center. Let’s find the interweb of human interaction that ties these sometimes disparate elements of campus together.

I have a deeply personal connection with my character and the story of this play, and I want to let the public in on it - not just the theater department, not just other actors. That means I’m personally ready to commit to forcing myself to engage in bubbles of activity outside of my humanities milieu, areas that may feel foreign or random to me - whether that means seeing conservatory performances or attending lectures on computer programming.

Oberlin is a niche in itself, narrowed and isolated in its own right; we don’t need much more compartmentalization. We’re in the same little boat; all, hopefully, learning how to make ourselves useful. So let’s not forget that campus can be a shared nucleus for art, social justice, and education. Don’t forget that we have a lot to learn from each other, within our department or social circle, or without.

We have a zeitgeist, Oberlin. Let’s fucking use it.

Love,

Linus

On Friday April 23rd, the Oberlin Theater and Dance program’s production of Beautiful Thing, by Jonathan Harvey and directed by Professor Matthew Wright, will be a benefit performance for PFLAG: Parents, Families and Friends of Lesbians and Gays. PFLAG is a national non-profit organization which promotes the health and well-being of lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender persons, and their families and friends. They offer support, to cope with the adversity in society, education, to enlighten an ill-informed public, and advocacy, to end discrimination and to secure equal civil rights. PFLAG provides opportunity for dialogue about sexual orientation and gender identity, and acts to create a society that is healthy and respectful of human diversity. Before and after the Friday night performance, donations will be collected to support this important organization.

Hey all, Laura here. As I write this on Saturday night, we’re two days into tech for our show. Tech is the point at which my job  changes rather a lot. 

Up until tech week, my job is (relatively) intimate and actor-centered. I worry about/take care of/keep an eye on all the technical aspects of the show that aren’t incorporated yet (both liaising with tech people and providing information/reminders at rehearsals), but I spend a lot of my time taking blocking, giving line notes, and generally helping keep rehearsal running smoothly for Matt (our wonderful director) and all the actors. It’s just me, my assistant stage manager Liz, Matt, and the five actors. Doing a show like Beautiful Thing, which is hilarious and emotionally charged, creates a relationship between everyone involved in that rehearsal process. I’m not saying it guarantees that everyone in the room is best friends forever, or anything, but you can’t help but feel a connection when you’ve spent weeks in the same room as these people, sharing so much. 

And there has definitely been sharing. One of the great things about Matt is that he’s ready to put it all out there. He shares the good and bad of his life because it invariably relates to either something happening in the play, something happening for the actor onstage, or something happening in someone’s life. That kind of openness seems to have spurred the same in many of us, and I say this as not even one of the actors but as the person whose job, in theory, is less about the art and emotion and more about the organization and paperwork. The great thing about my job is that I DO get both sides. I flex my organizational muscles, as well as taking part in a creative and emotional process. For this show in particular I really value that, because as a queer girl who didn’t find her teen years to be that easy (though who did?), this play hits close to home. And even moreso, what Matt wants from this show hits close to home. I believe that theater can do social good AND provide a touching and amusing couple hours of entertainment. It can and should. 

Anyway, point is, I’ve spent many many weeks now with Matt, Liz, Linus, David, Hannah, Hallie, and Gombas. Now that we’ve started tech, it’s time for me to switch into a different gear. Because instead of that intimate rehearsal experience, we’re now in the theater working with tech. We have at least twice as many people around, and a whole lot more to pay attention to. This isn’t a negative transition by any means, nor has it been all that jarring to our production process; instead of running the show under florescent lights, with me and Liz jumping up to go drag a fake bed into place, we now have light and sound designs, and a rolling platform, and the people to run all of these things. Which means instead of taking line notes and searching for stand-in props for the actors, I’m on headset calling cues. My point of focus shifts somewhat, and I become much more about the tech side of my job. 

This transition is always an interesting one for me, because regardless of the show, it always feels like a step out, a widening of the lens. There’s always a moment of slight sadness, because my relationship to the show is about to change somewhat. But quickly that moment gets chased away by nervousness and excitement. Because when you first start tech, no matter how many things go wrong (like lamps shattering or music coming from the wrong side of the stage), there’s always that thrill at seeing the show FOR REAL. Seeing the set and lights and sound really take an already fantastic play to the next level. 

I felt that last night and this afternoon, and I think everyone else did too. We open in 5 days. It’s go time. 

(…so I’m going to go have some bonding time with my script and a plethora of multicolored post-it tabs.)

Production Notes

by Moze Halperin ‘12

One of the quirkiest and most enjoyable aspects of Beautiful Thing is the character’s fandom of Mama Cass, a 1960’s iconoclast/singer/songwriter who met her untimely end choking on a ham sandwich. But while Beautiful Thing is gilded in the musical flourishes of a bygone era and a bygone icon, it is a realist contemporary portrait of the queer struggle. This lighthearted dramedy very rightly illustrates that despite claims of first world social modernization– supported by the popularity of Queer Eye, “I Kissed a Girl” and words like heteronormativity– “queer self-discovery undoubtedly remains a struggle.”

When describing Beautiful Thing, director Matt Wright is keen on using the word ‘real’ and its myriad variations: “hyper-realism,” “photographic realism,” “cinematic realism,” “extreme realism.” If there’s one aspect he’s absolutely adamant about in this play, it’s under-dramatization. “Coming out is not a tragedy, it is an issue, and will be a contemporary issue until the formality of ‘coming out’ becomes unnecessary. With Beautiful Thing, Jonathon Harvey’s intention is to show real people in the real world dealing with a real issue,” proclaims director Matt Wright.

Though the play was written and takes place in 1995, Wright plans to subtly contemporize it; setting it in the ‘90’s might suggest that Jamie’s is a problem that has since been resolved, and Wright has thus decided to set it in 2010. “Normally speaking,” says Wright, “it doesn’t even enter the average mother’s consciousness that her son may be gay until she’s faced with it as a blatant fact. The reaction is thus very rarely unfazed. And sadly cultural ideas about gayness have barely changed in our American culture since the ‘90’s. The story of Jamie and his mother, in dealing with his sexuality, is still very true to life.”

Explains Wright, “Beautiful Thing is set in southeast London, which is its own world– there’s a whole portion of the Southeast that was co-opted mid-century by the government and there are huge developments of what are called council flats, or government subsidized housing. This area houses a diverse range of people, all of whom have the one thing in common- very little money. This play tells story of 3 families living next door to each other; in each household, there’s an adolescent. Beautiful Thing explores the possibility of how one vast evolution in these teens’ relationships– two of the boys falling in love with each other– impacts every family member.” However, Harvey’s optimism shows that, even when engulfed in a gargantuan cement structure in a neighborhood of uniform cement structures, even when met by stony confusion, fists, and initial disapproval, an unconventional love can prevail.

Gombas, I’m glad Linus is on his way because I surely won’t be helping you outta that damn closet. 

BUT if you ever get out of there, I’ll have you remember that it’s Haas, not Hass. And, I know, although this separates me from the delicious avocado variety of the latter name, I’ve got the coveted double a. German. 

I’ll give one truth to you, though, which is that I will not be portraying a velociraptor. I will, however, be donning the front half of a water buffalo costume. David Ohana will embody the back end.

With love,

Hallie M. K. Haas