Like a twisted rendition of campers telling horror stories by the campfire, the curtain to Samuel Beckett's rhetorically titled play, "Play," opened with three heads seemingly suspended above trash cans and lit only by flashlights from beneath.
Huge, looming shadows flickering on the back wall of the stage and across the actors' faces reduced the scene to a simple contrast between light and dark.
This contrast was, however, perhaps the only concrete component of the production. In typical Beckett fashion, the boundaries among everything else were blurred beyond recognition.
"Play," directed by Tercelin Kirtley '98 and assistant directed by Dan Pollock '01, opened to an audience of over 100 students in the Warner Bentley Theater yesterday afternoon and will shown again, today at 4:30.
The by-all-definitions unconventional lighting and unidentifiable high-pitched whining sound at the start of the production combined to create an atmosphere of chaos. For many audience members, the uncertainty remained throughout the play.
The loosely defined plot centered around Man (Daniel E. Dalseth '97), his wife, Woman 1 (Kristina Hagstrom '98), and the character with whom he is having an affair, Woman 2 (Kathryn A. Sullivan '00).
The three actors, who spoke in near monotone, took turns telling the story from their individual perspectives. The lighting accentuated the minimalist feel of the play, pinpointing only the actor speaking. It isolated the actor in an otherwise darkened theater.
Each actor, perched in his or her own trash can, stared straight ahead. Although their monologues wove together into a somewhat coherent story, they spoke as if unaware of the others.
Woman 1 discovers her husband is having an affair with Woman 2 because "he stinks of bitch." Although he denies it at first, he eventually confesses, and Woman 1 confronts Woman 2.
Man initially agrees to "make a clean breast of it" and give up Woman 2, because Woman 1 threatens to commit suicide. However, he eventually leaves Woman 1. Woman 2 ends up leaving Man, and the play degenerates into barely-coherent monologues.
Although Beckett's stage directions called for the actors to maintain "impassive" faces and "toneless" voices and that they be confined in "urns," Hagstrom, Sullivan and Dalseth did manage to convey the personality and emotions of their respective characters well. Hagstrom and Sullivan, as the jealous wife and lover, respectively, hissed, spat and fought -- if only through their text and occasional facial expressions.
Each character had his or her distinguishing trait. Dalseth, as Man, hiccupped at inopportune moments; Sullivan, as Woman 2, made occasional sour faces; and Hagstrom drew laughs from the audience with her compulsive nose-twitching.
Absurdist playwright Beckett is best known for his acclaimed work, "Waiting for Godot." Although many audience members knew enough about Beckett's work to expect the unexpected, many still left the production appearing somewhat dazed.
"Weird. Very weird," commented one audience member.
And, perhaps, this sentiment is understandable. "Play" never directly "tells" the audience anything, leaving everything -- even many elements of the plot -- open to the audience's own interpretation.
"[Are we] looking for sense where, perhaps, there is none?" Woman 2 asked plaintively at one point. Beckett leaves us to ponder.
