You can’t say the Five College theater programs aren’t eclectic. So far this season we’ve seen everything from Shakespeare to Williams to Ruhl to experiments with future forms. And this weekend, shows on two campuses come at us from opposite ends of the spectrum: a frothy 18th-century comedy and a searing 21st-century drama.
She Stoops to Conquer is a classic comedy of manners – perhaps the classic of the genre. The mainspring of its farcical mistaken-identity plot is timeless: upper-class city slickers who disdain and exploit the lower classes are given their comeuppance through a practical joke played by a lady in servant’s garb. Equally timeless, says director Noah Tuleja, are some of the satirical targets the playwright, Oliver Goldsmith, wove into the plot: “hypocrisy, classism, and obsession with the new.”
That said, the show was programmed specifically because of its glossy, mannered period style, in order to “introduce our students to certain acting techniques they might not otherwise be exposed to.” And for that reason, Tuleja says, this is no modern-dress take on a classic text, but an exercise in high style that is “as true to the period as possible, in both acting and design areas.”
By contrast, Quiara Alegria Hudes’ Water by the Spoonful, which premiered at Hartford Stage in 2012 and won that year’s Pulitzer Prize for Drama, represents “a refreshingly new form of storytelling,” according to its director, J. Mehr Kaur. It’s a mode of storytelling informed, indeed formed, by the advent of cybernetic social media. The play’s two intersecting storylines focus on a quartet of ex-crack addicts using an online chatroom as a support group and an Iraq war veteran struggling with the ghosts of his war experience, and cellphones figure prominently in both.
For Kaur, the rap that social media takes for separating people from actual human interaction doesn’t apply here — just the opposite. “The people in this play are separated by geography, class, culture, and the boundaries of cyberspace, and still they are fighting to keep each other alive.”
This is the middle play of a trilogy by Hudes that follows the Iraq veteran Elliot Ortiz after his return from the battlefield. That through-line is counterpointed, literally, by music, which appears not as background but as a structural component in each play. In Spoonful it’s the jazz of John Coltrane, specifically his harsh and haunting concept album, A Love Supreme.
The play, Kaur explains, mirrors the music and vice versa. “We experience a theme that is then improvised in ways we would have never imagined. This mirroring of music made me really curious to discover the different ways in which people find melody in a dissonant world.”•
She Stoops to Conquer: April 16-19, Rooke Theatre, Mount Holyoke College, $3-$5, reservations 538-2406 or rookeboxoffice@gmail.com, info at mtholyoke.edu/acad/theatre.
Water by the Spoonful: April 17-18, 23-25, Theatre 14, Smith College, $5-$10, 585-3220 or smith.edu/smitharts.
Amelia Fitch photo
Chris Rohmann is at StageStruck@crocker.com
